Arts and entertainment reports from The Times, national and international news services and the nation’s press.

RADIO

KUSC Staff Trimmed: Radio station KUSC-FM (91.5 ), which has been $500,000 in debt, on Friday eliminated 11 staff positions from its engineering, development and accounting departments. The “staff restructuring” followed an in-depth management audit; a task force report on the station’s financial situation is due by the end of October. “We are reevaluating everything we had been doing in the face of our determination to return this station to preeminence as one of the best classical music radio stations in America,” said Stephen C. Lama, who took over as interim general manager after last month’s departure of Wallace A. Smith.

Stern Antics: Comparing himself to Lenny Bruce, Howard Stern complained on his syndicated radio program Friday that the federal government is persecuting him again with a tentative $10,000 fine levied this week against a Richmond, Va., station for two of his broadcasts deemed to be indecent. “It’s very depressing that the U.S. government is at odds with me, that they are my enemy,” Stern told listeners. Infinity Broadcasting Corp., which owns his program, agreed last year to pay the government $1.7 million to settle a series of penalties for Stern programs aired over a period of several years, and Stern said he was “totally confused” by this week’s action, in which the Federal Communications Commission cited two broadcasts from 1995 and 1996. The FCC, meanwhile, said that it hadn’t decided yet whether to ask Infinity about other stations that might have carried the same programs.

TELEVISION

‘Trial’ on E!: In what is believed to be the only television project currently scheduled on slain tejano singer Selena, cable’s E! Entertainment Television will air “The Selena Murder Trial: The E! True Hollywood Story,” a two-hour “docudrama” based on court transcripts from the trial of Yolanda Saldivar, the Selena fan club president who was convicted in the singer’s shooting death. The movie, scheduled to air Dec. 7, will “dramatically reenact” the relationship between Selena and Saldivar. The singer’s family, which is working on the upcoming movie biography “Selena” and will release a new Spanish-language CD, “Siempre Selena (Always Selena),” on Oct. 29, is “not happy” with the E! project. Said father Abraham Quintanilla Jr.: “I always thought that E! Entertainment was just that--about entertainment . . . but it seems that now they’re getting into tabloid [material].”

Meet the Press: Fourteen Los Angeles TV stations, including KCBS, KNBC, KABC, KTLA, KCAL, KTTV, KCOP and KCET, will take part in the first-ever “Los Angeles Television Fair,” Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame Plaza in North Hollywood. TV personality Mario Machado will host the free event, which will feature exhibit booths where each station’s on-air personalities will meet the public, as well as displays on helicopters, mobile engineering and other equipment involved in broadcasting. Scheduled participants include Kelly Lange, Christopher Nance and Kent Shocknek of Channel 4; Stan Chambers and Jennifer York of Channel 5; Pat Harvey of Channel 9; Steve Edwards and John Beard of Channel 11; Tawny Little of Channel 13; Pepe Barreto of Channel 34; and Hugh Hewitt of Channel 28.

Nudity Shuffles ‘Moll’ Repeat: Don’t expect to see “Moll Flanders” Sunday at noon on KCET-TV Channel 28, the usual repeat time slot for “Masterpiece Theatre” productions. After all, there is frontal nudity and several sexual situations in the dramatization based on the Daniel Defoe classic. After reviewing the four-hour drama, KCET decided to air the “Moll” repeat Monday morning at 1 a.m. “There’ll be a lot of tapers probably,” said Barbara Goen, the station’s spokeswoman. The well-reviewed drama aired last Sunday and Monday nights, drawing the best national numbers for a “Masterpiece Theatre” miniseries since PBS began tracking ratings in 1989. “We didn’t have extraordinary response,” the spokesperson said when asked if callers complained about the nudity. “We got about 50 calls and they were split evenly” between positive reviews and “problem calls” about the nudity.

OPERA

La Fenice Update: Although only about half of the estimated $78.2 million needed for the project has been raised, reconstruction is scheduled to begin next January on Venice’s historic La Fenice opera house, which was destroyed by a suspected arson fire last January. During a Rome news conference Friday, Venice Mayor Massimo Cacciari said that the 204-year-old La Fenice will be rebuilt exactly as it used to be, with completion slated for late 1999. The city will borrow the remaining necessary funds, Cacciari said.

MOVIES

Latinos Confer: The two-day, second annual Latino Independent Filmmaking Conference opened at the Sheraton Universal on Friday with a keynote address by Mayor Richard Riordan and a luncheon honoring director Alfonso Arau (“Like Water for Chocolate,” “A Walk in the Clouds”) for his “positive contributions to the betterment of the image of Latinos on film.” Scheduled conference participants included writer-producer Rick Najera, KTLA-TV Channel 5 anchor Carlos Amezcua, “Nueva Yol” producer Lawrence Martin and representatives from the Screen Actors Guild, Sundance Film Institute and Showtime Networks.