Evacuations

All 2,000 students at Pasadena High School were sent home around noon Thursday and U.S. Army ordnance experts were called to the campus after a locksmith trying to re-key the lock of the school's aging walk-in safe activated an anti-tampering chemical device. The device in the safe door with an unknown chemical was discovered when the locksmith began work shortly before 9 a.m, said Pasadena Unified School District Police Chief Jarado Blue.

The Bosnian Serb stranglehold on Sarajevo, perhaps the most enduring symbol of the fratricide that laid waste to the Balkans over the past four years, officially came to an end Thursday when this Bosnian Serb-held suburb reverted to government authority. "I send this message with great pleasure to all citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the whole world: The siege of Sarajevo has been lifted," declared Avdo Hebib, interior minister of the Muslim-led Bosnian government.

It was a calm, summerlike day in the residential area of Newport Island and Balboa Coves--until the bomb squad arrived to inspect a box labeled "dynamite." Within minutes, the entire neighborhood was evacuated. Police helicopters circled the area around 36th Street and Finley Avenue. The Orange County sheriff's bomb squad inspected the potentially dangerous box, containing what officers thought was 25 pounds of dynamite sticks.

Armored cars rumbled through the streets of this eerily silent town Friday, carrying flak-jacketed residents to their homes to rescue freezing, starving pets that a blazing train wreck forced them to abandon. People dashed into their homes to grab dogs and cats left in haste when the Wisconsin Central Ltd. train derailed Monday, igniting propane in 14 derailed cars. The wrecked cars continued to blaze for a fifth day Friday, raising fears of an explosion.

On a rain-lashed mountaintop near Israel's northern border, the people of this vanished Arab village cling to its sole surviving building--a small, square church--and stubbornly insist that the government right a half-century-old wrong. They retell the tale they have repeated endlessly over decades to anyone who will listen. "On Oct. 28, 1948, the Israeli army came into our village, and we welcomed them," recalled Aouni Sbeit, 65, a poet who was 17 when soldiers of the new Jewish state arrived.

Flooding on the Ohio River forced hundreds of people from their homes Sunday, while residents upstream in Pennsylvania and New York scraped mud from soaked homes and businesses. The burst of flooding, snow, ice and cold has been blamed for at least 42 deaths from the Plains to New England. In upstate New York, five members of one family died when a washed-out road sent their car into a reservoir. "It's just a big puddle of soup," said Tami Taylor of Harrisburg, Pa.

More than 70 preschool children and their teachers fled their Head Start program in the Mid-City area Thursday after complaining that fuel odors caused by the excavation of an adjacent Chevron station made them feel ill. Officials at the Wilma Gardner Center decided to temporarily close the school after the children, ranging in age from 3 to 4 years old, said the smell of gas was nauseating them and irritating their eyes and throats.

A broken water main flooded Cranston streets, submerging cars to their windows and forcing more than 100 people from their homes. Rescuers used rafts to evacuate elderly residents. Authorities did not know what caused the 5 1/2-foot main to break shortly before noon, blowing a 15-foot hole in a city street. Muddy water gushed past homes and businesses for about a mile in this city of 76,000 before the main was shut off at 4 p.m. No injuries were reported.

Fearful of growing chaos and a widening war, the United Nations safely evacuated the last international aid workers from this embattled city Saturday after bands of rebel fighters backed by Rwandan government soldiers routed the Zairian army and captured the key border enclave. The fall of Goma, and the emergency withdrawal of about 130 terrified expatriates by road to nearby Rwanda, mean that no U.N.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to spend nearly $4.5 million to settle a series of lawsuits over a 1993 landslide that still threatens homes in the Santa Monica Mountains. The landslide took place after the March 1993 rains in the hillside above North Beverly Drive, west of the Lower Franklin Reservoir. Although the slide did not severely damage the homes, the residents were forced to evacuate.