April 24, 1982

By nightfall the town of Yamit had been ground into the desert and covered over with its sand. All but about 20 of those who had made a desperate stand against the return to Egypt of the last sector of Sinai under Israeli control were carried, shouting at soldiers, into buses that took them across what will again become an international boundary next week. The rest have promised to leave Sunday.

The decline in consumer prices, the first monthly drop since 1965 and the largest since 1953, was really a consequence of two major factors, one planned, the other unplanned and unwanted. The planned element, as the Reagan Administration rightly maintains, was its own anti-inflation policy and its persistent backing of the Federal Reserve's policy of tight money and high interest rates. The unplanned element was the recession in the United States and the world economy. That slump, probably the most severe since the 1930's, has had a powerful impact on three main sectors affecting the cost of living: - It hit energy, where the drop in domestic and world demand helped create a glut in oil supplies.

White House and Congressional budget negotiators tentatively agreed today to earmark specific taxes, such as those on tobacco and liquor, to aid the faltering Social Security System, Republican and Democratic aides familiar with the negotiations said. If the tentative agreement becomes law, it would establish an important precedent, for the first time making general tax revenues available to help finance the Social Security System. Excise taxes on liquor, beer, wine and tobacco produced $10 billion in revenues in the fiscal year 1981. It was not clear how much of this revenue or other general taxes would be applied to Social Security under the tentative agreement.

Probing a thicket of black geysers erupting from the lightless sea floor 8,600 feet beneath this ship, biologists in a three-man submarine are exploring a new world of living organisms dependent not on sunlight but on volcanic energy gushing from deep within the earth. They say this type of sulfur-based life system is far more widespread than they had previously known it to be. Dr. Robert Hessler of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography likens the findings to the experience of naturalists who accompanied Captain James Cook to Australia in 1770 and found themselves surrounded by an array of unknown plants and animals. Like organisms elsewhere on the earth, however, those forms of newly discovered life in Australia derived their energy from sunlight. They lived by basic rules that applied worldwide.

Argentine officials said tonight that two British warships violated the Argentine defense zone today by moving to within 50 miles of the sparsely inhabited Falkland Islands dependency of South Georgia. The Argentine press agency Telam quoted one Government official as saying a British attack on South Georgia, which is situated 800 miles east of the Falklands, was ''imminent.'' The officials, terming the ship's movements a violation of the Rio Treaty, said the Government had filed a protest with the Organization of American States. The treaty, known formally as the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, states that an armed attack against any nation that signed the accord constitutes an attack against all.