LEAD: Judging by corporate loan demand at banks across the nation, the nation's economy remains strong, if spotty, with many smaller businesses particularly robust.

Corporate Loan Demand Is Strong at Many Banks

LEAD: Federal regulators are employing novel ways to sell billions of dollars in troubled banking assets, including the sale of so-called dirty banks.

F.D.I.C. Finds Ways to Sell Ailing Assets

LEAD: The Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, who last year condemned a fellow television evangelist, Jim Bakker, as ''a cancer on the body of Christ,'' today confessed to sins of his own and begged to be forgiven.

Swaggart Says He Has Sinned; Will Step Down

LEAD: Secretary of State George P. Shultz made human rights a major theme of his first day of talks in Moscow today, meeting with leading rights campaigners and devoting most of his morning discussions with Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze to the topic.

SHULTZ IS FOCUSING ON RIGHTS ISSUES IN MOSCOW TALKS

LEAD: Governor Cuomo has turned down a request to meet today with two clergymen to discuss the case of a black Dutchess County teen-ager who says she was abducted and attacked by six white men, a spokesman for the Governor said yesterday.

Cuomo Rejects Call to Discuss Brawley Case

LEAD: While a new abortion-inducing drug is expected to be sold in France, China, England and other countries, opponents of abortion are blocking sale of the drug in this country.

Boycott Threat Blocking Sale Of Abortion-Inducing Drug

LEAD: If the Bridgestone Corporation of Japan can perform the kind of magic at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company's tire plants that it has performed at its own plant here, one thing appears certain: The American tire business will become even more competitive.

Bridgestone's New U.S. Challenge

LEAD: Overcrowding at municipal psychiatric wards in New York City has reached record levels, according to city doctors, who say they fear that the mental-health system is heading for a collapse.

SYSTEM TO TREAT MENTAL PATIENTS IS OVERBURDENED

LEAD: Fully a year has gone by since Mario Cuomo formally said no, and the Governor insists he has no regrets.

Metro Matters; One Year Later And Cuomo's No Still Means No

LEAD: In the end, all of its youth, enthusiasm and infatuation with goal scoring wasn't enough as the United States Olympic hockey team was convincingly knocked from medal contention by a sturdy contingent from West Germany.

West Germans End U.S. Medal Hopes in Hockey

LEAD: WHEN Jackie Joyner-Kersee was growing up in East St. Louis, Ill., she made the mistake one night of losing track of the time.

Joyner-Kersee Is on Course For Even Greater Conquests

LEAD: Starting Saturday, life will change for the 24 million residents of California. Almost daily, they will receive pointed reminders about the chemical risks of the good life of the 20th century in the nation's largest state.

New Law Will Warn Californians Of Chemical Risks of Modern Life

LEAD: It is early on a Saturday morning on Bergenline Avenue, the main commercial strip here, but moving about is already difficult. Amid throngs of shoppers, merchants are setting out goods, cars are double-parked and children are skipping down the sidewalk.

A Touch of Havana Brings Life to Union City

LEAD:  U.N. Cuts Back in Lebanon  Some United Nations operations in Lebanon have been curtailed sharply since the kidnapping of a United States Marine officer and other United Nations personnel. Page A3.  Palestinians Seek Talks  As two more protesters were slain, a group of Palestinians sought permission from the Palestine Liberation Organization to meet with Secretary of State George P.

INSIDE

LEAD: Calvin Watkins cannot afford a lamp or even a flashlight, so as he rummaged through a plastic bag of family photographs the other day, the only light in his room in a Brooklyn welfare hotel came from the fast-fading sun. From the tattered bag he drew a picture of his son James. Mr. Watkins has 19 children, but it is

Blueprint for Trouble: A Child's Life in Welfare Hotels

LEAD: The one area of black resistance that the South African Government has been unable to break under its nationwide state of emergency is a 20-month-old rent boycott by blacks in Soweto, South Africa's largest black township.

Blacks Pressing A Rent Boycott In South Africa

BUSINESS DIGEST: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1988

LEAD: Philip Pilevsky thinks big thoughts, about international peace and brotherhood, about disarmament and terrorism, but as a collector of shopping centers he doesn't have much opportunity to exercise them. ''You don't need a Ph.D. to make money in real estate,'' he said.

New Yorkers & Co.; A Real Estate Collector Seeks a Soapbox

LEAD: Many taxpayers, including residents of New York State, will discover in this filing season that their state returns have undergone revisions almost as major as those on their Federal returns.

State Rates and Benefits Have Also Been Altered

LEAD: Peter O. Price, who has spent much of his life in such successful and lustrous enterprises as Princeton University, Time Inc. and Avenue magazine, will bear much of the burden of attempting to turn around The New York Post, widely acknowledged to be the grittiest and most vulnerable newspaper in New York City.

Publisher Takes Glossy Resume to Post

LEAD: The Soviet President, Andrei A. Gromyko, reports in his forthcoming memoirs that Mao Zedong sought Soviet cooperation in 1958 for a plan to lure United States troops into the interior of China, then attack them with Soviet nuclear weapons.

Gromyko Says Mao Wanted Soviet A-Bomb Used on G.I.'s

LEAD: Allegheny International Inc., the maker of Sunbeam and Oster appliances and Northern electric blankets, filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code during the weekend.

Allegheny Files Under Chapter 11

LEAD: When a slump in hard currency reserves forced Brazil to suspend most payments on its $113 billion foreign debt last February, the Government felt confident that the moratorium would serve as a weapon for extracting a dramatically better deal from its creditors.

Brazil's Reversal of Debt Strategy

LEAD: John A. Mulheren, the arbitrager arrested last Thursday on charges of illegal weapons possession, spent the weekend in a county jail in New Jersey and will seek to be hospitalized this week, according to people familiar with his case.

Medical Care Sought by Arbitrager Held on Gun Charges

LEAD: With the hard bargaining past and a rescue package for The New York Post in place, only a few details remained yesterday for the completion of Rupert Murdoch's $37.6 million sale of the newspaper to the real-estate developer Peter S. Kalikow.

Sale of The Post Winding Down To Last Details

Jonathan Borlée is a former Belgian sprinter, who specializes in the 400 metres. He is a member of the Borlée family.

February 22, 1988

Headlines from February 22, 1988

Corporate Loan Demand Is Strong at Many Banks

F.D.I.C. Finds Ways to Sell Ailing Assets

Swaggart Says He Has Sinned; Will Step Down

SHULTZ IS FOCUSING ON RIGHTS ISSUES IN MOSCOW TALKS

Cuomo Rejects Call to Discuss Brawley Case

Billboard 200

Faith

Dirty Dancing

Tiffany

Kick

Bad

Notable Births

Historical Context for February 22, 1988