April 13, 1986

Responding to the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque a week ago, the three Western powers responsible for security in that city announced today that they were taking measures to check ''international terrorism'' and eject persons ''posing a threat to the population of Berlin.'' A statement issued in the name of the United States, Britain and France said the measures were ''exceptional and provisional.'' In a concession to French wishes, the statement did not name Libyan diplomats stationed in East Berlin. Both American and British military commanders had pressed for a specific ban on Libyan envoys on the ground that they were implicated in the bombing of the discotheque, which took the lives of an American serviceman and a Turkish woman and left 230 others wounded.

When Gereral Electric got serious last fall about taking over RCA - the biggest-ever merger outside of the oil patch - one of the first things G.E.'s chairman did was to phone John L. Weinberg, the 61-year-old senior partner of Goldman, Sachs & Company. Within hours Mr. Weinberg had assembled a team of experts to help G.E. figure out its bargaining position and to gauge how much RCA was worth. The team worked day and night over the Thanksgiving Day weekend and a deal - worth a whopping $6.28 billion, with fees to Goldman estimated to be at least $7 million - was signed well before Christmas. Goldman is accustomed to dealing with the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world, and wants to keep it that way. But as the only remaining private partnership among major Wall Street investment banks, Goldman has become something of an anachronism in a business increasingly dominated by huge publicly held corporations. And despite Goldman's insistence that it will not alter its sacrosanct 117-year-old partnership structure, a growing number of competitors and analysts say that Goldman will have to go public, as Morgan Stanley did last month and Bear, Stearns did in 1985.

ITEM: More than 2,000 historians gathered at Smith College in June 1984 for the Sixth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, rivaling the attendance at the annual convention of the American Historical Association six months earlier. Item: Since 1981, two of the prestigious Bancroft Prizes in American History have been awarded to women's historians - Mary P. Ryan in 1981, for ''Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865,'' and Suzanne Lebsock in 1984, for ''The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860.'' And in 1982 a Bancroft Prize went to John P. Demos for ''Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England,'' a work that focused primarily on women.

With one sudden, incredible flurry, the Rangers are just a step away from pulling off the upset. They scored four third-period goals last night, the final three in a 38-second span, to shock the Philadelphia Flyers and defeat them, 5-2, at Madison Square Garden. Thus the Rangers took a 2-1 lead in the three-of-five-game opening round Stanley Cup series. With a victory here tonight, the Rangers, who barely qualified for postseason play, could eliminate the Flyers, who finished first in the Patrick Division and were considered heavy favorites to quickly dismiss the Rangers from the playoffs. Should the Flyers win tonight, the clubs will play the fifth game Tuesday night in Philadelphia.

The game took 5 hours 3 minutes and 14 pitchers and more twists than a soap opera to complete, and the Mets would rather forget that it happened. But it did: They blew a three-run lead in the bottom of the ninth inning and a one-run lead in the bottom of the 14th today, and suffered a galling 9-8 defeat to the Philadelphia Phillies. The teams struggled from early afternoon into dusk in a remarkably gyrating game on national television, and they scored a combined total of 17 runs, made 36 hits and left 39 runners on base. But it all turned into an extravagant waste for the Mets as they lost for the first time this season. They took a 7-4 lead with four runs in the eighth inning, only to see the Phillies bounce back with three in the ninth for a tie. And they broke the tie with one run in the top of the 14th, only to see the Phillies roar back with four singles and one walk with the bases loaded for two runs and the game.