May 3, 1992

In an innovative move affecting long-term care for the elderly, New York State plans to encourage middle-income residents to buy nursing-home insurance in a program that would exempt them from onerous Medicaid limits on personal wealth. Those who buy the insurance, which would also cover care at home, would no longer be forced to impoverish themselves to qualify for state-financed care. State officials hope the program will help slow steep growth in New York's $6 billion-a-year Medicaid budget for long-term care.

A fierce battle involving tanks, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades erupted today in the center of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, raising fears that efforts at achieving peace there may be swept away by Serbs fighting to consolidate gains made in a monthlong offensive for Bosnian territory. For weeks, the center of Sarajevo, a city where Muslim Slavs outnumber Serbs, has been the scene of sporadic sniper exchanges and mortar and artillery attacks from the surrounding hills. But at lunchtime today, the cobbled streets and alleys erupted into what a Yugoslav Army spokesman in the city described as "all-out war."

A three-story Victorian mansion in Tarrytown, N.Y., that had fallen on hard times has been restored to its original grandeur and turned into a 13-unit condominium. The gray clapboard mansion with white trim sits on 1.8 acres at 40 Benedict Avenue. It was built in 1876 and was converted into a 13-family house during the Great Depression. It later fell into decline and was bought at a foreclosure auction in 1991 for $350,000 by William Chipley and Dennis Link, who spent another $350,000 to restore it.

In the jockeys' room at Churchill Downs, the reaction to Arazi's convincing loss today was much the same as that of the stunned 130,000 spectators who were left buzzing outside: surprise and resignation, but no answers. As several of the diminutive men and the lone woman who rode in the 118th Kentucky Derby crowded around a television to watch a replay of the race, they saw the would-be superhorse pass several horses in a sudden burst on the far turn that was a reprise of his fabled move at the Breeders' Cup Juvenile last November.

WHILE travelers can no longer reach far-away points from Grand Central Terminal, the owners of the mid-Manhattan landmark envision some distant destinations for its unused development rights. As the latest step in a real estate struggle that has lasted a quarter of a century, the Penn Central Corporation, which owns the terminal, has proposed a zoning subdistrict from Third to Fifth Avenue, 38th to 48th Street, within which Grand Central's air rights could be transferred to development sites.