August 27, 1989

LEAD: AFTER two officials of an East Northport garbage-carting company were shot to death there earlier this month, speculation spread quickly that the men were victims of an organized-crime cartel that state and Federal prosecutors say controls the carting industry on Long Island.

LEAD: MORE and more Long Islanders are abandoning the Long Island Expressway, learning to cope with their child-care problems, escaping corporate politics and staying home to work. And Long Island businesses are taking notice. The N.P.D. Group, a Port Washington-based marketing-research corporation has had a work-at-home program since 1984.

LEAD: Long before the start of those Saturday afternoons when time seems to stand still in and around Notre Dame Stadium, before the first playing of ''The Victory March'' signifies the coming of autumn, before the invasion of stuffed automobiles and rented U-Hauls delivers the majority of the Class of 1993, and even before the first football practice earlier this month, a group of about two dozen new and muscular students gathered to hear about changes in their lives that they had already begun to face.

LEAD: In its strongest response yet to the growing calls for independence in the Baltic republics, the Communist Party today condemned nationalist movements in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and declared that the agitation had caused alarm and hysteria and raised the prospect of ''civil conflict.''

LEAD: THE elected Government of this struggling Andean nation went to war last week against men often described as the world's wealthiest criminals. It is a fight in which the resources are uneven and the outcome uncertain, a new and strange kind of civil war.