January 4, 1996

A day after denying that NATO had a responsibility to address the issue, NATO officers visited Ilidza, a Serbian-held suburb of Sarajevo, to press officials to release up to 18 Bosnian citizens who have been detained by the Bosnian Serbs. After the meeting, the commander of NATO land forces in Bosnia, Lieut. Gen. Sir Michael Walker, said he had not received promises that the civilians would be freed. In Washington, the State Department called for their immediate release.

Money magazine announced yesterday that it had dismissed Dan Dorfman, the magazine's celebrity financial columnist, because he refused to confide to his editor the identity of the confidential sources cited in columns published in the magazine. Mr. Dorfman, who remains an influential commentator on the CNBC cable television network, had been on a paid leave of absence from Money since late October. CNBC had expressed confidence in his work when he was placed on leave by Money.

SO it's the first week of the new year, and you have vowed to get organized. Really organized this time. If you are like millions of Americans, you probably have a desk drawer somewhere that is a mass of business cards, hastily written notes and telephone numbers. In all likelihood, there is also an age-swollen date book around, its tattered pages as busy as a Jackson Pollock canvas.

It is illegal here to do anything that "may become an annoyance or interfere with the comfort or general well-being of the inhabitants." But that does not mean you can stop someone from feeding pigeons, an appellate court ruled yesterday. Joan Guidi challenged the ordinance in 1994 after getting a summons for feeding pigeons. Her challenge was rejected by a municipal judge, but the appeals court agreed that the law as written was vague and overly broad, The Associated Press reported. TERRY PRISTIN

When Phyllis Lanier Sturtevant was 7, her parents took her to the Maryknoll missionaries' center on a leafy hilltop here and photographed her sitting under "the sending bell," the 13th-century Japanese gong that tolled farewell to priests and nuns heading overseas to win souls for the Roman Catholic Church. "I remember one of the sisters saying to me, 'Maybe you'd like to come back when you're older?' and I remember hiding under my mother's skirts and saying, 'I'll never leave home,' " Ms. Sturtevant recalled.