December 5, 1999

Squeeze on Chechen Capital Survivors in Grozny validated charges that 40 refugees had been killed in a Russian attack. PAGE 27 Iraq Inspector Report The United Nations monitoring team for Iraqi arms is assembling the history of its mission. PAGE 17

It was Dec. 21, 1996, and the New England Patriots, down by 22 points at the half, had just rallied to defeat the Giants, 23-22, at Giants Stadium. Bill Parcells, then the Patriots' coach, had spent the week leading up to the game insisting, sometimes testily, that returning to coach against the Giants at Giants Stadium held no special meaning. After the game, he looked nearly as ebullient as he had after either of his Super Bowl victories.

Organization for Security and Cooperation Europe compiles two detailed chronicles of human rights abuses in Kosovo, which present depressing picture of an ugly war, full of individual and collective cruelty by Serbs, followed by an ugly peace displaying many of the same depredations, if on a smaller scale, by the province's Albanians; provide overwhelming evidence of a Serbian campaign, organized by a powerful, authoritarian state and its security forces, to drive nearly one million Albanians from the province; photos (M)

IT has been 10 years since Channel One burst into classrooms across the country with its made-for-adolescents mix of current-events programming and Madison Avenue commercials. With its school-board-friendly business model, it has built a captive audience of eight million schoolchildren, and it has set off controversy all along the way. Advertisers love it, some parents and educators hate it, and no one else has tried to imitate it. Its founder sold it in 1994 to a corporation that has made sweeping changes to its management in the last two years. There are signs of a backlash in some states against commercialization of schools, prompting Channel One to spend heavily on lobbying. Although its growth has slowed after a rapid start, Channel One has already left a lasting imprint on American education by opening schoolroom doors to commercial messages, and the company has plans to widen its reach with additional technology.

MANY Americans say they dislike conformity, but when it comes to minivans, sameness sells. Through their purchase decisions, van owners have sent a clear message to automakers: Stick to the familiar family recipe. Buyers want a conservative look that doesn't stand out in the school parking lot. They prefer front-wheel drive. They insist on four doors -- two sliding doors in the back -- and plenty of convenient cup holders. They like flexible seating, lots of nooks and crannies for storage and ample cargo capacity. Those who tried other formulas quickly learned a lesson. Smaller rear-drive, truck-based vans from General Motors and Ford never caught on. Then G.M. brought out front-drive vans with a Dustbuster shape; they sold poorly. Finally, it developed conservatively styled minivans, and they have done much better. At Ford, a second version of the front-drive Windstar, with a second sliding door, has also sold well.

ON a recent fall night, a detective from the 15th Precinct ambled along a shabby street downtown. Passing beneath a street lamp, he glanced up for a moment. His face, a road map of despair, was sheathed in white light. Cut.

EVEN in this stock market, which continues to break all records, nothing quite compares to the history being made in the market for initial public offerings. The buckets of money pouring into fledgling companies' shares and the delirium that surrounds new-issue trading today have never been seen before. This year, according to Sanford Bernstein & Company, capital raised in initial offerings will total more than $75 billion. That is roughly equal to the amount raised in new stock issues during all of the 1980's.

THE biggest trade conference ever held on American soil was supposed to go like this: a Pacific rim city, grown wealthy on sales of software and planes to the global economy, would show off the fruits of unfettered commerce. Meanwhile, carefully choreographed street protests would enable President Clinton to nudge the delegates into taking action against such excesses of the global economy as child labor and pollution. In this narrative, Seattle was to play the hero, while its companies and citizens were cast as bit players. Here was a dynamo of dot.com millionaires. A port full of ships stuffed with goods from every nation. A region that provides half the world's commercial jets. Protesters who behave while walking on stilts.

WITH the production lines that baked the first Oreo cookies long gone, the owners of the blocklong former Nabisco plant between 15th and 16th Streets have cooked up a new recipe for profits that has put food on the ground floor and is now folding in tenants such as Oxygen Media, Major League Baseball Productions and New York 1 News on the upper floors. When the celebrity chefs of the Food Network wield their whisks early next year, they will do so in a glassed-in street-level kitchen and studio that is to be installed on the 10th Avenue end of the building. The location is a natural for the cable television channel because it will be in the same building that houses Chelsea Market, an arcade of almost two dozen food stores selling products ranging from meat and fish to wine and baked goods. The landlord intends to wire the first floor so the channel can broadcast directly from the large wholesale food preparation operations that underpin the modest retail stores.

I HAVE never worn fur. Maybe because my mother did. The women of her generation got mink coats from their husbands as door prizes for surviving the perils of car-pooling and keeping the dinners warm. And it didn't hurt that the neighbors would see that business was good. Once acquired, the mink had a privileged existence. It went only to the best places -- the opera, the ballet, the bar mitzvah -- and it was always accompanied by ''the pearls.'' Summers, when I went to camp, the mink went to cold storage.

Due to a perhaps fortunate glitch, a usually hard-to-get compendium of research on regulated rents, the city's economy and the housing market published by the New York City Rent Guidelines Board is a lot easier to come by this year -- and, for some buyers, cheaper. ''We printed 400 copies,'' said Anita Visser, the board's executive director, ''but there was a slight glitch in the printing process -- a few pages in 250 of those 400 are a bit faded.''

DR. MICHAEL LEONARD, an anesthesiologist and chief of surgery for Kaiser Permanente in Denver, was operating on a cancer patient a few months ago when he reached into a drawer for medicine. Inside were two vials, side by side. Both had yellow labels. Both had yellow caps. One was a paralyzing agent, which Dr. Leonard had correctly administered to keep the patient still during the operation. The other was the reversal agent, which he needed next. ''I grabbed the wrong one,'' Dr. Leonard recalled. ''I used the wrong drug.'' It would have been easy for the doctor to keep quiet; the drug wore off and the patient was not harmed. Instead, he talked -- to the surgeon and scrub nurses, the patient's wife and the hospital pharmacist, who has since relabeled the paralyzing agents with red stickers and put them in a separate drawer. He also talked to his five partners, whose reaction unnerved him.