April 6, 1993

Since the February afternoon when two little boys died in a fire in the basement of her house where she provided illegal day care, Eleta Brown, 82 years old, has stood at her window, lonely and bored, waiting wistfully for the day when authorities will allow her to tend children once more. Pampers are stuffed behind the candy-apple red vinyl couch in the living room. Stuffed animals have been put away in her bedroom dresser drawers. "I thought it would clear my mind, but it doesn't," she said.

As the American economy heads into what appears to be an ever-more-solid recovery, the New York commercial real estate industry continues to reel from the shocks of the overbuilding of the 1980's and the job losses of the recession. In a market characterized by vast swathes of empty office space and desperate owners seeking buyers or tenants for troubled buildings, each new report of a big lease, of an offer to buy a distressed building or of a dip in the vacancy rate is analyzed as perhaps the sign of the market's recovery. Each time, anxious owners and other industry insiders ask: is this the crocus that signals the start of spring?

The State Department acknowledged today that the Egyptian authorities had warned the American authorities repeatedly in the months preceding the World Trade Center bombing about an Islamic fundamentalist network in the United States. But it sought to emphasize that Egypt had not relayed information about specific planned acts of terrorism.

As Ralph H. Hubbard spoke of another commonplace murder in the city, the sidewalk slaying of his son, his face was a weathered, Jobian mask of tolerance that made his jailhouse visit all the more fascinating to the assembled convicts who listened and wondered about his feelings. "Tragic as it is, I will never see the logic of it," Mr. Hubbard said, recalling the "silly" circumstance -- a dispute over a videotape -- that led the killer later to ambush his 23-year-old son, Brett, in a hail of gunfire. "I will never see the rationale. I will never see my son again."

Determined to find something for her four young children to eat, Stanka Voloder set out one day last week and walked five miles to the barbed-wire perimeter of the United Nations headquarters here to rummage through the garbage. After a while, she found three rotting potatoes and an onion, walked home to the Bistrik district in the city center, and cooked her treasures over a wood fire. As she told her story later, Mrs. Voloder broke down in tears. "Oh help me, please help me," she said over and over as she stood in Sarajevo's central market, clutching a bedroll wrapped in plastic and stamped with the blue-and-yellow flag of the European Community. The bedroll was part of a handout of relief supplies to families in Bistrik, and Mrs. Voloder was hoping somebody would buy it for 10 German marks, about $6.50, so that she could buy more food. Sniper Attack on Rally On Tuesday, this besieged city will mark the first anniversary of the attack that most people regard as the first volley of the brutal war here, a burst of Serbian sniper fire from a third-floor window of the Holiday Inn that killed several people in a crowd demonstrating outside the Bosnian Parliament for peace and national unity. The shots were aimed at destroying a society, just like the gunfire that cut down Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife on June 28, 1914, about a mile from where the Holiday Inn now stands. Those shots set off the train of events that led to World War I. 'The City Is Destroyed' But the Sarajevo that emerged from World War I and from World War II, when it was occupied by Nazi forces, suffered only mild physical damage in comparison with the cataclysm wrought by the Serbian siege of the last year. In a city with a population of 380,000, estimates indicate that more than 11,000 Bosnians have been killed and 50,000 have been injured -- making one of every six residents a casualty.