March 12, 1993

When Mohammed A. Salameh, one of the two main suspects in the bombing of the World Trade Center, entered the United States as a temporary foreign visitor in 1987, he quickly slipped through a Federal immigration bureaucracy that had no plan or hope of ever tracking him amid the nation's vast tide of illegal aliens. He joined about 500,000 other visitors who drift from sight annually as their visas lapse. They usually are never traced or thought of again until such a moment as now when startled, angry Americans begin questioning whether the United States immigration system presents a model of sanctuary or of porousness for the global throngs seeking entry.

Japan's electronics industry is preparing data to show that American semiconductor companies failed to deliver tens of millions of dollars worth of computer chips ordered by Japanese companies last year, thereby contributing to the United States' failure to achieve a 20 percent share of the Japanese market as called for in a semiconductor trade agreement. Japanese companies and government officials said that because of a recent boom in demand for computer chips in the United States, American suppliers have diverted some of their products away from Japan and to American customers, causing hardships for Japanese customers.

"DR. RIEUX resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people, so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise." This passage from Albert Camus's novel "The Plague" is quoted as an epigraph to Paul A. Sergios's affecting new memoir, "One Boy at War." It sums up at least one of the impulses behind the outpouring of books on the subject of AIDS: a desire to testify, to pay witness, to document the horrible toll of this disease, to memorialize the dead and the dying, to try to fight despair through the protest afforded by language.

The Clinton Administration wants to strengthen President Yeltsin, but it also fears he may act like an autocrat to defend his position. Page A6.

For decades, Willowbrook State School on Staten Island was a barren warehouse for more than 5,000 mentally retarded people, a place where children lay naked and untended on the floors of locked wards, where the air stank of urine and echoed with the moans and cries of residents. Willie Mae Goodman's 4-year-old daughter was in Building 14. "She wasn't clean," Mrs. Goodman recalled this week. "You could smell her. Her little toes would be so chafed I had to pull them apart. I had to cut her hair short it was so matted." A Permanent Requirement The institution came to symbolize everything that was wrong with the care of the mentally retarded, prompting a lawsuit and extensive reform of the way the retarded were treated in the state.