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.