September 21, 1982

The Lebanese Cabinet agreed today to ask that the multinational force of American, French and Italian troops return to Beirut because of the massacre of Palestinian civilians by Christian militiamen and the pervasive fear among Moslems in West Beirut that more bloodletting may occur. It appears certain that the Lebanese Parliament, at a special session Tuesday, will elect as the country's next President 40-yearold Amin Gemayel, the older brother of Bashir Gemayal, the Presidentelect who was assassinated last week. Amin Gemayel's only serious rival, former President Camille Chamoun, withdrew from the race today in the name of national unity. So terrified are the Palestinians and Lebanese Moslems of West Beirut over the possibility of more killings by Christian militiamen that hundreds of panicked men, women and children stampeded out of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and the surrounding neighborhoods this morning, minutes after a rumor swept the area that Phalangists and members of Maj. Saad Haddad's militia had returned.

President Reagan is trying to transform the shock and horror of events in Lebanon into new pressure for the withdrawal of Israeli and Syrian forces from Lebanon and renewed Arab-Israeli negotiations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Administration officials said today. The essential first step is gaining Israeli acceptance of the proposed international peacekeeping force. At stake, according to the officials, are future American relations with the Government of Menachem Begin and the credibility of the United States in the Arab world. Displeasure With Begin The officials indicated that if Israel did not agree to withdraw its troops from the Beirut area and accept the international force, Mr. Reagan was prepared to go very far, without specifying what that meant, toward making clear his displeasure with the Begin Government as now constituted.

The well-known loan losses of some of the nation's most prominent banks have prompted some money market funds to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars from those banks and have thereby created a destabilizing force in American banking, according to Federal Reserve officials, bankers, and even some money fund executives themselves. The fear is that the money funds, which have become an important source of funds for banks, are reacting in lockstep in withdrawing their money from banks whose troubled loans have become widely publicized. Bankers and officials are concerned that money funds have become excessively sensitive to publicity given banking problems and are pulling out their money from unquestionably sound institutions. Although the money funds, by offering much higher rates of interest than banks, have attracted billions of dollars that might otherwise have gone into savings accounts, much of this has been recycled back into the big banks by investing the funds in large certificates of deposits. At present the money funds control about $200 billion. Based on figures supplied by Donoghue's Money Fund Report of Sept. 13, the 10 largest money market mutual funds, out of a total of 205, held $24.7 billion in bank C.D.'s. The problem, bankers say, is not so much the aggregate size of these holdings, but the fact that at times a fund will suddenly pull a large amount out of a bank.

Alexander & Alexander Services Inc., the large New York-based insurance brokerage firm, announced yesterday that it had filed a suit in London against four former officers and a leading underwriter of its British subsidiary, charging that they had diverted some $55 million of funds into companies they owned. Last month, the insurance firm reached a settlement with the four former officers of the London-based unit, the Alexander Howden Group, under which it was supposed to recover lost assets. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed. However, Alexander said that the individuals had subsequently failed to live up to the pact, prompting legal action.

SCHOOL systems usually demand from textbook publishers proof that the books are neither too difficult nor too easy for the grade levels for which they are intended. Most publishers are ready to respond, and from reams of statistics they cite readability scores as evidence of each textbook's level of difficulty. Educational researchers, however, have become skeptical about such claims and about the readability formulas on which publishers rely in making them. The researchers fear that by using the shorter words and shorter sentences that the formulas consider easier to read - sometimes chopping up sentences, dropping connecting phrases and inserting periods - the publishers may actually be making the books more, not less, difficult to understand.