April 27, 1985

The man accused of killing a Westchester County police officer and a Mount Vernon woman was shot and killed in a state police car on the Taconic State Parkway today. The state police in Fishkill said tonight that the suspect, Alex J. Mengel, had grappled with an officer over the officer's gun and was shot by a second officer, who was driving the car. Mr. Mengel was being returned to Westchester after an arraignment in Greene County. The State Police Superintendent, Donald O. Chesworth, gave this account: ''While proceeding south on the Taconic State Parkway, Mengel struggled with a state police investigator in an attempt to obtain control over the investigator's firearm. ''Another state police investigator, who was driving the automobile, fired one shot which struck and killed Mengel.''

When a well-dressed black visitor to the Terrell County Courthouse here recently asked a white secretary in the probate judge's office for directions to the ladies' room, she was told, ''Just go downstairs.'' On her way down rickety wooden stairs to the basement, the visitor asked further directions from a white-haired black man, the courthouse janitor. He told her to go back upstairs to the sheriff's office, across the lobby from the probate judge's office, for the key to the ladies' room that is located on the main floor. The first-floor restroom, it turns out, is generally used by white women, whose exclusive preserve it was in the days of Jim Crow laws, while black women generally continue to use the basement restroom. The two are not far apart, but the steps between them are steps into a time warp, steps that many blacks in this rural southwest Georgia town take every business day.

The State Department said today that a high-level American official on a two-week trip to the Middle East had failed to get an agreement for direct talks between Israel and Jordan. Despite the continuing deadlock, the department announced that Secretary of State George P. Shultz would add Egypt and Jordan to his trip to Israel, which begins on May 9. Some State Department aides had previously said Mr. Shultz would go to Cairo and Amman only if the American official, Richard W. Murphy Jr., the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, made significant progress in his advance mission, which is nearly completed.

The Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc allies today formally extended the Warsaw Pact for 20 years in a ceremony presided over by Mikhail S. Gorbachev on his first visit abroad as Soviet leader. Mr. Gorbachev and the leaders of the seven nations in the Soviet-led military bloc agreed at a two-hour meeting to renew the 30-year-old pact, whose expiration date was May 15. Polish television coverage of the signing ceremony focused largely on Mr. Gorbachev, who was shown being greeted with some deference by the older men who are the party leaders of the other member nations - Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Rumania. Gorbachev's Tone Is Muted In marked contrast to a speech in Moscow three days ago, in which he said Washington was not seeking an agreement in the Geneva arms talks, Mr. Gorbachev toned down his characterizations of the United States in his remarks today. Instead he stressed Soviet proposals for mutual nuclear rollbacks, which he said could only follow the abandonment of United States plans for deploying weapons in space.

The crew of a United States Air National Guard plane rescued three fliers last weekend from a Nicaraguan-owned plane that had crashed on the Greenland icecap. A spokesman for the embassy of Denmark, of which Greenland is a territory, quoted a report from the Danish police in Greenland as saying that Aeronica, the Nicaraguan domestic and international airline, had bought the plane in Southern Yemen and that it was being ferried to Nicaragua. The Danish police report said the five-man crew that had been hired in Southern Yemen included an American, an Israeli and an Indian, who were the three survivors. The others were a Filipino, who died in the crash, and a Jordanian, who died later of injuries and cold. The temperature during the night on the icecap was 13 degrees below zero.