August 25, 1995

The young professionals were packed in at the outdoor terrace bar at the Bryant Park Cafe, four, five, six deep, hundreds of 20- and 30-something men with their jackets off and ties loosened, women in linen suits or sleeveless dresses. The temperature was in the 90's, but the socializing was full throttle. "It's always a madhouse on Thursday," said Nelson Mercado, a park security officer on restaurant detail, standing outside the bar's restraining ropes.

Fifteen months into self-rule, Gaza wears two masks. The first is the string of end-to-end cafes stretched for miles along the sea that come alive at night with music, gossip and water pipes, and the innumerable concrete skeletons of new buildings rising on every street, down the coast, over former orange groves.

The Dutch food company Nutricia N.V. said yesterday that it would pay 820 million marks ($554 million) in cash to buy a German competitor, Milupa A.G., to make it Europe's largest producer of baby food. The acquisition of Milupa, a unit of the German chemicals and pharmaceuticals producer Altana A.G., would raise Nutricia's annual sales to about 3.5 billion guilders ($2.1 billion). Last year, Nutricia had sales of about 1.5 billion guilders; Milupa's were about 1 billion.

Fujitsu Ltd. said yesterday that it would spend 20 billion yen this year and a further 40 billion yen later to mass produce 42-inch, flat-panel television screens. The total would be the equivalent of about $620 million.

Now comes the $150 million question: Will the dogs eat the dog food? That's what the software developers at the Microsoft Corporation traditionally ask themselves when a new program finally hits the market. And in the case of Windows 95, which went on sale today backed by a $150 million global marketing campaign, the early signs were promising.