October 17, 1993

IT'S rude out there. Rude all over the place. In the country that invented "Have a Nice Day," citizens now wear sweatshirts that scream "Back Off," or worse. On the football field and on the basketball court, the old ideal of sportsmanlike conduct has degenerated into a fiesta of trash talk and aggressive taunting. Since the 1940's, the Salvation Army has put out drop-off bins so that kindhearted citizens could donate old clothes and furniture. Last month, it announced that it would retire the bins in eight Midwestern states because people were using them as Dumpsters.

Halima Farah Mohammed, a 38-year-old policewoman who has worked with the United Nations mission here, was walking home on a Sunday afternoon when she heard the dull thumping sound of approaching helicopters. At first she stared, she said, then started running when gunfire tore through the sky and hit the houses around her. Her thought was to race first to her blind, elderly father's house to make sure that he was indoors, then next door to her own house to tell her four children to stay under cover.

With the arrival of Robert Altman's highly praised "Short Cuts" -- inspired, he has declared, by a chance reading of Raymond Car ver's stories -- some of us who have loved those stories and used them in our teaching, have had to watch our step lest we be dubbed "Carver purists." It is a phrase that has already been used by some reviewers to defend the film against potential criticism. Raymond Carver's sensibility was that of a late-20th-century secularist, many of whose stories nevertheless hinted, through pity and compassion and attentiveness to life's detail, at the redemptive side of human suffering.

Sarajevo's Calm Is Shattered As Serbs Resume Barrages After a lull of several weeks, Serbian forces resumed bombarding Sarajevo, raising fear that the siege could take a turn for the worse. Page 16. Despite Aid, Egypt Struggles Billions of dollars in aid from the U.S. and other sources has not brought political stability or improved the lives of most Egyptians. Page 10. Few Verdicts in Beating Case The jury in a Los Angeles beating trial told the judge it had reached verdicts on some counts but was deadlocked on others. Page 19.

The State of New York Mortgage Agency has renovated its Low Interest Rate Mortgage Program, raising income-eligibility ceilings in all 62 counties and lowering the interest floor. The income limits, based on statistics on median income in each area supplied by the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, vary county by county and according to family size. They are also are higher for people purchasing homes in what are called target areas, neighborhoods targeted for economic development, than they are elsewhere.