August 7, 1991

The Taco Bell restaurant here is giving customers a taste of the future. Not the food, the service. Inside, diners in a hurry for tacos and burritos can punch up their own orders on a touch-screen computer. Outside, drive-through customers see a video monitor flash back a list of their orders to avoid mistakes. Then they can pay using a pneumatic-tube system like those many banks employ for drive-up transactions. Their food, and their change, is waiting for them when they pull forward to the pickup window. And if the line of cars grows too long, a Taco Bell worker will wade in with a wireless keyboard to take orders.

On a street where hardware, electronics and shoe stores competed for space 10 years ago, a gleaming new glass obelisk juts above the squat buildings. Each block, it seems, has a new type of tenant -- with sleek gray steel, polished brass and tinted windows suggesting an international financial center. Seven banks crowd into just two blocks in the din and traffic of Main Street in downtown Flushing, Queens, and the incongruous glass obelisk will make eight. Wander down the side streets or nearby Roosevelt Avenue and Northern Boulevard and the number of banks multiplies to at least 35 -- American, Chinese, Korean, British, Indian, Pakistani and Colombian.

At least five intelligence officials who worked in the Reagan Administration, including some who have since been appointed to senior espionage jobs in the Bush Administration, have been notified that they are under scrutiny in the Iran-contra investigation, according to Government officials and lawyers who have been following the case. Of this number, at least two, both former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, have been told in letters from prosecutors that they are targets of the inquiry, which means they may be charged with a criminal offense.

More than a year after the White House tried very publicly to remove him from office, L. William Seidman, the nation's senior bank regulator and a forcefully independent official, today announced his resignation. The departure of Mr. Seidman promises a dramatic change in the way Washington supervises the banking and savings and loan industries at a pivotal time. In both style and substance, he has dominated the regulatory scene in recent years as a strong presence in Congress and with an alternately warm and cold and then warm again relationship with the Administration since he was named chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1985.

The Federal Reserve pushed short-term interest rates down a notch yesterday, a move that analysts said was needed to stimulate the economy, which is making only a sluggish recovery from the recession. By continuing to reduce interest rates -- a process the Federal Reserve started in mid-1989, when the economy began sliding into recession -- officials of the nation's central bank hope to encourage consumers and businesses to spend and borrow more money.

"PROTECT these wonderful drivers from danger." As the evening's invocation for the monster trucks faded away, 10,000 raucous fans at the Lebanon Valley Speedway here roared back to life. Awash in spotlights were 10 men posed gladiator-style atop the six-foot wheels of giant pickup trucks with names like Bearfoot, the Carolina Crusher and UFO. The air smelled of burning oil and soon vibrated with revving engines.

In an indication of the quickening pace of economic integration between the United States and Mexico, Corning Inc. and Vitro S.A., Mexico's giant glass manufacturer, agreed yesterday to market their housewares together around the world. Pending final negotiations and approvals by the directors and the governments, the partnership would create jointly owned companies in each country with combined annual sales of more than $800 million.

Three discoveries this spring of large oil and gas deposits miles beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico marked a triumph for one of the newest advances in exploration technology: the precise, three-dimensional mapping of rock layers under the ocean floor. The latest exploration techniques, combined with new methods of drilling in deep water, promise to substantially expand the nation's oil resources and lower production costs. The Gulf of Mexico discoveries buttressed 1989 estimates by the United States Geological Survey and the Minerals Management Service that the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico could eventually yield nearly as much oil as the estimated 10 billion barrels of Prudhoe Bay in Alaska.

The Bush Administration plans to send military trainers to Peru to help the Peruvian military deal with drug traffickers and guerrillas involved in producing and smuggling cocaine, senior State Department officials said today. Administration officials said the dispatch of more than 50 advisers, including Green Berets and Navy personnel, reflected an emerging view that Lima was losing control of its Andean mountain provinces to the drug barons and to the rebels of the Maoist Shining Path movement, who protect the traffickers. No Combat Role, U.S. Says The new aid program, which the Administration plans to make public once it works out the details with Lima, will mark a break from more than 20 years of limited contact between the United States and a Peruvian Army known for a dismal human-rights record.

When Sandra Bejarano's 7-year-old son, Santiago, had headaches and a fever on a recent morning, she took him to their family doctor at an attractive midtown clinic. The doctor took a blood count, and though he suspected a routine viral infection, he had them return the next day for another test, just to make sure. For most Americans, an ordinary medical encounter. And that is what was so exceptional: Ms. Bejarano, who is 28 and unemployed, and her two sons are patients in Arizona's version of Medicaid, the Federal-state medical program for poor people.

Justice Dept. Supports Kansas Anti-Abortion Group The Justice Department filed court papers siding with an anti-abortion group many of whose members have been arrested trying to shut down three abortion clinics in Wichita, Kan. The judge who is presiding over a suit that two clinics have brought granted the Government's request. Page A10. Seidman Resigns Bank Jobs

Gov. Mario M. Cuomo's advisory committee on black affairs disassociated itself yesterday from a City College professor's angry attack on Jews at a black cultural festival it co-sponsored last month. The committee's executive director, Andre Hawkins, said in a statement that the professor, Dr. Leonard Jeffries Jr., made "palpably clear expressions of bigotry" during a two-hour lecture on July 20 at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany.