August 15, 1985

Sales by businesses plunged 2.1 percent in June, the second biggest decline on record, as unsold inventories continued to pile up and give further evidence of a weak economy. The Commerce Department said yesterday that sales at the retail, wholesale and manufacturing levels dropped to $419.1 billion in June after a four-tenths of 1 percent increase in May. The decline was the second largest monthly drop since the Government began keeping records on total sales in 1967. The biggest decline was a 2.8 percent fall in March 1975.

The White House staff has drafted an executive order repealing requirements that Federal contractors set numerical goals to remedy possible job discrimination. White House officials contend that the existing rules have not significantly helped blacks in low-wage jobs, have encouraged employers to discriminate against white men and have imposed costly compliance burdens upon employers. Since 1968 thousands of Government contractors have been required to hire and promote blacks, women and Hispanic people in rough proportion to the number of available, qualified candidates in a given labor market. Reagan Signature Required As drafted, the order would also forbid the Labor Department to use statistical evidence to measure contractors' compliance with general prohibitions against discrimination, which would remain in force. For years the department has routinely used statistical evidence to assess whether contractors were discriminating against women and members of minority groups.

A HOUSEWIFE unpacks a new set of dishes and fits them into the narrow cabinets of her galley kitchen. Across the hall, her neighbor, an architect, has spent the weekend building free standing closets in his apartment. He judges the height and width by eye and corrects the proportions as he goes along. Though entirely different tasks, both people are relying on their ability to perceive three dimensional objects and their spatial relationships, a skill that is almost second nature in activities such as driving a car, threading a needle or throwing a Frisbee. Spatial skills are also relied on in many professions including medicine, architecture, engineering, landscaping, dentistry and automobile maintenance.

International Morocco will soon finish building a wall of sand and electronic sensors that is greatly revolutionizing antiguerilla tactics, according to senior Moroccan military officers. The wall, which was started five years ago, will stretch for more than 1,560 miles across the Sahara. The wall is expected to help Rabat in its nine-year-old war against Polisario Front rebels. [Page A1, Columns 3-4.] South African violence claimed three more lives in townships. The incidents took place amid expectations that President P. W. Botha will make a major policy statement on apartheid. The three deaths brought the death toll in the last 11 months to at least 618. [A6:1-3.]

Of all the disputed military contract charges the General Dynamics Corporation has grappled with, perhaps the most politically embarrassing case involved a dog named Fursten. Fursten, a General Dynamics executive's dog that was lodged at a kennel at Government expense, became the comic symbol of a powerful offensive against overhead abuses in the weapons industry. The case led, in part, to five months of Defense Department penalties against General Dynamics. On Tuesday, however, the Navy announced that it had lifted its ban on new contracts to the company, saying General Dynamics had taken steps to rectify contracting abuses. And what is more, the Pentagon, which had heatedly denounced General Dynamics in May for ''pervasive'' business misconduct, now said that what the company had been doing was permitted by existing regulations.