May 6, 1990

LEAD: LIKE a man running to catch a train that is accelerating out of the station, President Bush keeps falling behind the breathtaking pace of events in Europe. To catch up, he has had to keep altering his ideas on the future of that continent, and the role the United States can play there in the decades to come.

LEAD: Fred Quinn, a butcher when he can find work, has lost three brothers to the Harlem streets before they reached middle age.

LEAD: When is a 54 percent cut in profits good news? When it's from General Motors.

LEAD: MORE Long Islanders are complaining about lawyers than ever before, and they have more reason to grumble, according to a state watchdog committee that has been fielding complaints for 14 years.

LEAD: THE rejection of a high-rise condominium proposal because of its design has focused attention on the growing influence here of citizen review panels. The Westwood Design Review Board turned down three designs as inappropriate for the neighborhood and now the developer, Paul Amir, has decided to sell the site.

LEAD: There are two audiences for Nick Nolte's electrifying monologue at the start of Sidney Lumet's ''Q & A,'' one in the movie theater and one on the screen. The latter is a group of black, white and Hispanic police personnel that stands by raptly as Mr. Nolte, playing a New York police detective named Mike Brennan, tells a long, scatological story of having humiliated a suspect named Mr.

LEAD: Three new construction projects that will use $15 million in state funds to build 182 apartments in Manhattan have been approved by the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal as part of its $128 million program for fast-track housing for low-income and homeless people. The program was started last year as an effort to cut red tape and accelerate the development of new apartment projects in areas lacking affordable housing.

LEAD: Now that McDonald's hamburgers and Pepsi-Cola are a hit with Moscow residents, American-style suburban town houses are on their way there too. Construction of the first 132 of 528 units planned for Krasnagorsk, a suburb about 23 versts - 15 miles - northwest of Red Square, will begin in August.

LEAD: Paradise regained? Anyone who thinks - as many do - that American Ballet Theater misplaced its soul during the decade that Mikhail Baryshnikov was its artistic director will now be closely watching a new regime determined to redefine the company's identity. Tomorrow's opening of the troupe's 50th-anniversary season in New York at the Metropolitan Opera House begins an era in which Jane Hermann and Oliver Smith, the recently named co-directors, promise to restore certain names and policies identified with Ballet Theater's past.

LEAD: Fifteen years ago, I took part in a large conference on the ''lessons of the Holocaust.'' The meeting was held in New York but organized from Jerusalem by the Hebrew University. The participants included almost everyone in Israel and the United States who was then engaged in research or reflection about the murder of the Jews during the Nazi years.

LEAD: ASH residue from municipal incinerators must be mixed with cement and recycled if towns are to avoid staggering disposal costs, the Long Island Regional Planning Board has warned.

LEAD: IT took a year longer to sell the first 20 condominium units at Winden Hill than Thomas Spencer projected in November 1987, when he started redeveloping the former Berkshire Christian College campus on a hilltop above Stockbridge Bowl here.