August 7, 1995

Two and a half years after an enormous car bomb tore open the World Trade Center and exposed America's vulnerability to terrorists, the case seems solved but not fathomed. Like an intricately tangled Conan Doyle mystery, it continues to yield its intriguing secrets, but its deepest corners remain obscure. The arrest last week of a new suspect has provided fresh details about the plot's final days and hours, but little new insight. The suspect, Eyad Ismail, is accused of driving a van with 1,200 pounds of explosives into the trade center in Lower Manhattan on Feb. 26, 1993.

G. V. Montgomery is worried that the Walt Disney Company could bring sex and violence to the South. Mr. Montgomery is a Democratic Representative from Mississippi, and during a House debate on the communications bill last week, he cited Disney as a reason not to lift Government restrictions on the ownership of media properties. In Mr. Montgomery's home district, the local ABC affiliates routinely pre-empt programming, like the racy "N.Y.P.D. Blue," that might offend their viewers. Now that Disney is acquiring ABC, Mr. Montgomery fears that the company could snap up ABC stations like WLOV in Columbus, Miss., which is owned by an independent businessman.

I.B.M. is expected today to name James A. Firestone, head of the home services unit of the Ameritech Corporation, to lead a worldwide consumer division that would greatly expand the company's offerings in on-line services, people familiar with I.B.M.'s plans said. Before joining Ameritech, Mr. Firestone, 40, was an executive at American Express, where he worked under Louis V. Gerstner Jr., who is now I.B.M.'s chairman and chief executive. But unlike other outsiders Mr. Gerstner has brought to I.B.M., Mr. Firestone has strong ties to the company: his father was a 30-year I.B.M. veteran who served as a marketing executive in Japan.

After viewing themselves as victors against Muslims and Croats for the past four years, tens of thousands of Serbs found themselves refugees today, a humiliating role reversal for a people proud of their skills as warriors. Riding tractors, hunched in trailers and astride horses, they poured from Croatia into Bosnia in one of the biggest exoduses of refugees in the fighting since Yugoslavia broke up in 1991. Today, many of them were steadily moving on into Yugoslavia, and some were already showing up in Belgrade, the capital.

The women's marathon turned out to be a lap short at the world track and field championships, starting a wild chain of events today that left Carl Lewis headed for home instead of the victory podium, left the Americans with more runners in the 800-meter final than the Kenyans and left Jackie Joyner-Kersee with a husband but perhaps no longer a coach. When this poignant day was over, the United States had failed to win a medal in the 100-meter sprints for the first time at a major championship since 1976. Canada had begun to remove the stain of Ben Johnson. Two Olympic champions -- Linford Christie of Britain at 100 meters and Heike Drechsler of Germany in the long jump -- had shown rare ordinariness. And Gail Devers of the United States had restored some slight normalcy among the favorites by repeating as champion in the 100-meter hurdles with a time of 12.68 seconds.