EVENTS

RWANDAN CAPITAL UNDER ATTACK Mortar fire killed at least 14 Rwandans and wounded 150 yesterday in a church compound where they had taken refuge from heavy fighting in the capital Kigali. Government forces, battling advancing rebels of the Rwanda Patriotic Front, suffered ``one of the heaviest days of shelling we have seen,'' said Patrick Gosser of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Hospital facilities are overstretched in a city where the United Nations estimates some 20,000 bodies are lying unburied. Chaos erupted in Rwanda in the wake of President Juvenal Habyarimana's death in a rocket attack on his plane on April 6. Aid officials are struggling to provide supplies for up to 250,000 refugees who have fled from Rwanda into northwestern Tanzania as the RPF advanced in recent days. UN special envoy to Rwanda Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh was due to visit Uganda's capital Kampala yesterday to meet President Yoweri Museveni to discuss efforts to secure a cease-fire. Christopher confident

Secretary of State Warren Christopher, confident Israel and Syria are on a productive negotiating track, declared yesterday: ``The parties are talking on a broad range, a comprehensive range, of issues.'' He is to go to Cairo today for the expected signing tomorrow of an agreement between Israel and the PLO to launch Palestinian self-rule in Jericho and Gaza. Court says no to drug tests

The US Supreme Court yesterday refused to let the University of Colorado resume requiring random drug tests for student athletes, trainers, managers, and cheerleaders. The justices, without comment, left intact a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that said such testing violates those students' right of privacy. The action, although not a decision on the constitutionality of the university's invalidated drug-testing program, could hamper other state-run schools' efforts to keep their athletic programs drug-free. Bangladesh cyclone

Hundreds of thousands of people fled coastal Bangladesh yesterday as a cyclone with winds up to 130 m.p.h. threatened the same area where a storm killed 131,000 people in 1991. Rescue workers struggled to evacuate many of the 7 million people living on some 50 islands and along the 250-mile coast. Bangladesh, a poor nation of 120 million people precariously built on river deltas, faces cycles of tropical storms, flooding, and drought nearly every year. The storm also threatened 200,000 Burmese refugees in camps nearby who fled persecution by Burma's predominantly Buddhist Army two years ago.