April 30, 1993

The United Nations announced today that the three warring factions in Bosnia and Herzegovina will resume talks this weekend on ending the conflict, and President Clinton summoned the United States' top military commanders to the White House for a final review of options on ending Serbian aggression. The talks, which are to begin in Athens on Saturday, would give Bosnia's Serbian nationalists a chance to make peace before the United States and its allies decide on a tougher course of action.

A livery cab with an unlicensed driver at the wheel mounted a traffic island at a busy Brooklyn intersection yesterday and struck two small boys, their mother and a blind woman waiting for a light, the police said. A 2-year-old boy in a stroller was killed and his 5-year-old brother was critically injured. Witnesses told of a blur of metal and people, of tragedy on a sunny spring afternoon -- a roaring engine, a shriek of brakes, a stroller crushed, children pinned against a parked van and a mother screaming on Eastern Parkway and Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights, a corner where residents said four people had been killed by cars in the last five years.

With revenue up and many costs down, the General Motors Corporation yesterday reported first-quarter net income of $513.2 million, in contrast to a loss a year ago. That completed a good first quarter for the Big Three auto makers. On Wednesday, the Ford Motor Company reported its best quarter in several years; last week, the Chrysler Corporation reported strong operating earnings.

IF the boom of the late 1980's had never happened, then the offerings wouldn't seem so slim at Sotheby's and Christie's, whose important spring sales of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art begin next week in Manhattan. But those heady days when catalogues were as thick as telephone books and estimates hit the double-digit millions weren't so long ago. They still haunt the art world. By comparison, the more than $225 million worth of paintings, drawings and sculpture by artists like Monet and Matisse, Warhol and Lichtenstein that are on public view this weekend and go up for sale beginning on Monday night at Sotheby's, seem modest, to say the least. "It's quite clear both of us have had to struggle to get pictures," said Christopher Burge, the president of Christie's in New York. It is also clear that as the art market struggles out of a two-year slump, collectors who don't have to sell would prefer to hold off until prices go up.

Tiny Fossils Reveal Early Diversity of Life Fossil microorganisms found in Australia prove that life was already thriving and diversified 3.485 billion years ago. The discovery sharply cuts the time available for life to have evolved naturally on earth. Page A10. Clash Over Alaska Cleanup Exxon, disagreeing sharply with Government biologists, said Prince William Sound had essentially recovered from the 1989 oil spill. Page A18. Trade Pact's Support Grows The North American Free Trade Agreement is winning broad political support and prospects for its approval are brightening. Page D2. Court Test for Davidians Experts say prosecutors face many hurdles in proving that any surviving Branch Davidian members committed any crimes. Law, page B16.