February 9, 1986

Tea was being served to the Politburo members from a thermos bottle by one of the President's personal guards, Ali Salem al-Beedh recalled later, while another, as always, carried the leader's Samsonite attache case to the head chair. It was odd, Mr. Beedh thought, that the meeting was beginning almost on time - seven minutes after 10 - when there were still empty seats. Then the shooting began. ''The guard with the Samsonite, Hassan was his name, suddenly began raking Ali Antar up and down his back with a machine pistol, a Skorpion, as he was opening his briefcase,'' Mr. Beedh said, describing the death of Mr. Antar, the Vice President and former Defense Minister. ''More came in from the side room with AK-47's and began firing at us,'' said Mr. Beedh, one of three Politburo members to make it out of the meeting alive. Thus began what both independent sources and the new Marxist leadership here described as an attempt at a gangland-style massacre by President Ali Nasser Mohammed al-Hassani of his rivals in the 15-member Politburo of the ruling party of this impoverished nation on the southern Arabian Peninsula on the morning of Jan. 13.

WESTCHESTER'S newly formed temporary Commission on the Homeless met officially for the first time last Tuesday morning and discussed an agenda of possible long- and short-term goals, ranging from building new housing to ''mending fences.'' At the end of the two-hour session, which was held at the County Office Building in White Plains, the commission members decided to spend the rest of the month learning the issues before taking specific action. Plans call for briefings by various county agencies and groups that provide for the homeless and visits to the facilities that shelter them. ''I think that's a fair guideline for the next few weeks, that we really push ourselves to bring ourselves up to more of a common ground,'' Robert A. Schulman, the commission Chairman, told the group. He also said that when that was done ''we should really activate ourselves and become agressive with a direction.'' According to many commission members, that would include making themselves visible as quickly as possible, dispelling any image that they were a ''board room-bound'' group.

WHEN Yoshitoki Chino, the chairman of the Daiwa Securities Company, visited Daiwa's New York subsidiary last fall, he was upset about the Japanese art on the walls. ''The next time I'm here,'' he directed, ''I want to see only American paintings.'' Mr. Chino was talking about more than art. He was telling Daiwa's executives in New York (who say they will change the paintings after Daiwa moves to bigger Wall Street quarters this spring) that he wants the company here to be as American as apple pie. That, he believes, is how Daiwa Securities America Inc. will become a key player in this country's financial markets. Mr. Chino's admonition reflects a dramatic change in the strategy of Japan's two biggest investment houses - Daiwa and the Nomura Securities Company. For decades, their operations in New York were low keyed, mainly selling small amounts of Japanese securities to a very limited number of American investors. But in the past year, Daiwa and Nomura have gone all-out to establish themselves as major Wall Street houses. And some experts are predicting that Japan's investment-banking giants will some day pose the same kind of threat to Merrill Lynch or First Boston as Toyota has to General Motors and Sony to RCA.

THE relation between printing and literature has always been intimate and all-inclusive, at times even incestuous: printing was the daughter of letters; today it is its lover. In contrast, the relations between literature and the modern means of communication - I am thinking of radio and, above all, television - have been distant, desultory and marked by indifference if not disdain and even hostility. Nevertheless, radio and television are powerful means of transmitting words; it is scandalous that they so rarely involve themselves with literature. I am referring, of course, not to theater but to poetry, the novel and the short story. Many of the reasons for this estrangement are social and economic. The explanation usually offered is that radio and television are mass media, while good modern literature, with a few exceptions, has never been an article of popular consumption. This is becoming less and less the case, though: in the United States, as well as in the rest of the world, various sectors of the public are beginning to demand a radio and television as diversified and plural as the society itself. Moreover, there are two errors which should be immediately dispelled.

At Carnegie Mellon University, a plaque in Wean Hall bears the inscription, ''My heart is in the work.'' They are the words of the Pittsburgh school's founder, Andrew Carnegie, but they could be an epitaph for one of the school's most accomplished engineering graduates, Judith A. Resnik. ''Judy was an astronaut's astronaut,'' said Henry Hartsfield, the commander of the 1984 Discovery mission on which she flew. ''She was not satisfied with second best.'' On that first mission, the fledgling astronaut conducted experiments with the shuttlecraft's solar energy instruments. A Complex Personality But Dr. Resnik's reputation for hard work and professionalism did not reflect the full range of her complex personality, according to people who knew her. She captured the imagination not only because she excelled in a competitive profession, but also because she did not seem to match any popular notion of a NASA ''type.'' In the words of a stepsister, ''She wasn't all-American.''

American educators have begun to worry that at a time when the percentage of black and Hispanic students in public schools is growing, the ranks of minority teachers appear to be dwindling. ''By the year 2000, the percentage of minorities in the teaching force of the United States could be cut almost in half'' from the level of 12.5 percent in 1980, predicted Gregory R. Anrig, president of the Educational Testing Service, the major producer of tests used in screening prospective teachers. By contrast, Harold L. Hodgkinson, scholar in residence at the American Council on Education, estimates that the percentage of primary and high school students from minority groups, now 30 percent, will grow to 33 percent by 1990 and to 38 percent by the year 2,000. ''It could be several points higher if you allow for new immigration,'' he said. Need for Role Models Long-term erosion of the minority teaching force is a problem that has only recently started to attract attention. Education leaders fear it will not only aggravate a general teacher shortage that is developing but also deprive poor and minority students of important role models in the critical years when they are forming their own identities and ambitions.

Billy Olson's night started badly. It ended in ecstacy as the 27-year-old Texan bettered the world indoor best in the pole vault for the fourth time this season. Earlier today, Sergei Bubka of the Soviet Union raised the standard to 19 feet 5 inches in the Soviet indoor championships. Here, in the 17th annual Vitalis/U.S. Olympic Invitational indoor track meet, Olson went Bubka one better and cleared 19 feet 5 3/4 inches.

THERE is no pithier summary of President Reagan's view of government than his own, the one embedded in the set speech he gave all over the country in the late 1950's and early 1960's. ''The truth is,'' he used to say, ''that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.'' From the moment he took office on Jan. 20, 1981, with the declaration that ''Government is the problem,'' Mr. Reagan has worked to reshape it and redirect its energies into what he considers the appropriate channels. He was at it again last week, an unusually busy seven days during which he put his views to the Congress and the nation five times - in his fifth State of the Union Message, in a budget for the 1987 fiscal year, in an Economic Report, in a legislative message he termed an Agenda for the Future, and in his radio address yesterday.

EVERY morning 16 chartered buses pull up to the white-columned red-brick headquarters of the Reader's Digest, on a campus-like setting in New York's Westchester County, and unload employees from Connecticut, New Jersey and other distant points. It has been that way for decades at the Digest, whose workers have long been among the best paid and the most pampered in America. But with costs rising, management has decided to end the subsidized bus service on June 30. The decision was hardly a major one, except perhaps for the 350 employees affected. Yet it speaks volumes about the determination of the Digest's new management to apply business principles, even in small matters, to one of America's most paternalistic institutions. For the first time in its 64-year history, the Digest is starting to act like a corporation whose chief goal is profits - a radical departure from the tone set during the tenure of DeWitt Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace, which ended with Mrs. Wallace's death 20 months ago. The Wallaces, who owned almost all of the Digest's voting stock, created the magazine and turned it into a national institution, serving up a skillful blend of Middle American social values, human interest stories and conservative political positions.

Nearly three years ago, when the first compact-disk players and disks crept timidly onto the market, digital playback was a marginal experiment in an American record business that would seemingly be dominated for years to come by the LP and the cassette. Today, the CD revolution is fully upon us, proceeding faster than even the wildest-eyed digital advocates could have dreamed back in 1983. There are, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, some 50,000 LP-cassette titles currently in print in this country today, compared with approximately 4,000 CD titles. Just 10 months ago, there were only 3,000 titles, not counting the many imported CD's widely sold here. But titles are hardly the whole story - in part because the very CD success of pop mega-hits like Bruce Springsteen's ''Born in the U.S.A.'' monopolizes available pressing facilities and crowds out the release of smaller-selling titles. The number of actual compact disks shipped rose from 1.5 million in the first half to 1984 to 7.5 million in the first half of last year. Conversely, LP sales fell from 99.2 million to 78.3 million (cassettes were up from 143.5 million to 151.1 million). CD players have proliferated in number and plummeted in price, down to less than $200 for the cheapest models.

A 600-car garage for Grove Square, the $22 million residential, commercial and retail development near the center of New Haven, is due to be completed this spring. The facility is at the corner of Whitney Avenue and Grove Street next to the Yale Language Laboratory on the outskirts of the university complex.

Construction is to begin next month in Mineola, L.I., on a 253,000-square-foot office condominium building catering to legal firms and related companies such as surveyors and secretarial services doing business at the Nassau County Courthouse across the street on Old Country Road. Called the Pavilion, the six-story building will rise on the site of a recently demolished structure and will be attached to an existing 18,000-square-foot office structure at 204 Old Country Road.