October 31, 1989

LEAD: THE euphoria and wild claims about a ''cold fusion'' power source are long gone. So is the gold-rush fever over the hope of turning a table-top apparatus into a font of nearly limitless energy and profit. It's even hard to find the T-shirts and bumper stickers that entrepreneurs once peddled around town to celebrate the finding.

LEAD: A Manhattan jury, rejecting the insanity defense of Steven Smith, convicted the 24-year-old homeless man yesterday of robbing, raping and murdering Dr. Kathryn Hinnant in her office in Bellevue Hospital on Jan. 7.

LEAD: The Supreme Court today agreed to review a case that could affect the solvency of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the troubled Federal agency that Congress set up 15 years ago to guarantee the security of employee pensions.

LEAD: Just three years after engineering one of the most successful imported-car introductions in the United States, the Hyundai Group has hit a rough patch.

LEAD: HALF a millennium ago in the Andes, on the eve of the Spanish conquest, the Incas created an agricultural wonderland. On irrigated mountainside terraces along the spine of South America, they cultivated an estimated 70 species of crops, almost as many as the farmers of Europe and Asia combined.