April 17, 1984

The Chase Manhattan Corporation, the nation's third-largest banking organization, yesterday reported a decline in first-quarter net income, but two other large banking companies, the Security Pacific Corporation and the Bankers Trust New York Corporation, reported modest increases. At Chase, net income declined 3.4 percent, to $102.5 million in the first quarter of 1984, from $106.1 million in the comparable period of 1983. The per-share decline amounted to 6.6 percent, to $2.55, from $2.73. The bank attributed the decline primarily to a $16 million drop in pretax net interest income, the difference between how much it spent for its funds and how much it received on its loans and investments. It said that $9 million of that decline reflected pretax interest that was due but not received on nonaccrual loans to private borrowers in Argentina.

Memphis is a chicken town. It is also, apparently, a harbinger of the fast-food future. ''In Memphis there must be a chicken franchise for every 9,000 people,'' said Thomas Heskamp, marketing director of Sisters Chicken and Biscuits, an Ohio-based chain owned by Wendy's International Inc. ''There must be more than 80, including Bojangles, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Mrs. Winner's, Church's, Popeye's, Pirtle's and Sisters.'' Elsewhere in the nation, the story is increasingly similar. ''The competitive battle will heat up,'' predicts Joseph Doyle, an analyst for Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Company. ''It's a growing category. The American consumer has shifted toward chicken.''

TWO interns at Worcester City Hospital have acknowledged in an interview that they were awarded medical degrees by a university in the Dominican Republic that they never attended. ''I don't think I've done anything wrong, but in retrospect maybe I did,'' said Raymond Allard, one of the interns, who received a medical degree in June 1982 from the Universidad Centro de Estudios Tecnologicos, generally known as Universidad Cetec, in Santo Domingo. Mr. Allard said in the interview here that he had paid about $9,000 to Pedro de Mesones, a broker in medical credentials, for a Universidad Cetec degree and transcript. Mr. de Mesones is serving a three-year sentence in Federal prison after being convicted on two counts of mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud in the sale of bogus medical degrees. The other intern, Barbara Gillon, also said in the interview that she received a medical degree from Universidad Cetec in June 1982 without doing any work there. She said she, too, had been a client of Mr. de Mesones.

''I think if one is so deeply dependent on the United States one has a right to voice one's interests.

Revenge over drug dealings may have led gunmen to murder 10 people - including eight children and a pregnant woman - in a Brooklyn house, the police said yesterday. Paraphernalia commonly used by drug dealers was found in the first-floor railroad flat of the two-story house where the slayings took place Sunday afternoon, the police said. Officials said it was the worst mass murder in New York City that they could remember. ''I don't think any of us has ever seen a shooting like this,'' said the city's Deputy Police Commissioner, Patrick Murphy. He said that the rampage could have been a ''reprisal killing'' by drug dealers.