November 4, 1991

Among automotive cognoscenti, the Honda Motor Company sits on a tall pedestal for its almost uncanny ability to aim at a market niche and fill it with a wildly popular car. But after Honda's introduction of its Accord station wagon, that pedestal is not quite so high. Nearly a year after Honda showed off its first Accord wagons at its Marysville, Ohio, assembly plant, American sales are running at about 2,000 cars a month, well short of the 3,000 cars Honda had hoped for.

Close to midnight, about the time that Nelson Echevarria wanders onto the armory drill floor in a Brooklyn men's shelter to find his assigned cot, fear and uneasiness settle in among the homeless there who struggle to sleep amid the cacophony of hacking coughs, blaring radios and moans from violent dreams. This dimly lighted, unheated cavernous shelter at Atlantic and Bedford Avenues, with its sea of cots, is the kind of city shelter that has frightened many homeless people into staying on the streets.

Coming off the Queensboro Bridge, looping into the megadecibel madness of First Avenue on Marathon Sunday, Salvador Garcia of Mexico broke away after 16 miles of communal racing. It was the sort of move that would define yesterday's New York City Marathon, and it left two pack runners, Andres Espinoza of Mexico and Ibrahim Hussein of Kenya, with a very important question to answer very quickly: Was Garcia for real, or was he foolishly responding to the patriotic chants and exhortations of Mexican-Americans en route? "There were so many people cheering on First Avenue," Hussein said, "I just thought he was responding to the crowd. I have run this race before, so I let him go. I was wrong. It was a very good move."

A growing and ever more audacious number of underground pharmacies are springing up around the country to help people with AIDS and other diseases get experimental and unapproved drugs. Frustrated by the absence of drugs to treat their conditions, patients are turning to the buyers clubs, as they are known, which sell drugs that are still being tested. The clubs also provide drugs approved in other countries but not in the United States, buying the drugs overseas and shipping them here.

The Senator who has led the Congressional investigation into the Bank of Credit and Commerce International says that while his inquiries have etched the broad outlines of wrongdoing at the bank, the Bush Administration and the Justice Department are still dragging their feet on prosecuting the wrongdoers. Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said he had prodded Justice officials to act against B.C.C.I. since early 1989, when he turned over to the department tape-recorded conversations of bank employees and other evidence of crimes. He said he remained mystified by the lack of indictments against the bank or its officials. 'People Are Fed Up' "I truly do not have the answer; it raises huge questions," Mr. Kerry said in an interview on Friday morning in which he was asked to summarize the status of the B.C.C.I. inquiry by the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee he heads, which monitors terrorism, narcotics and international operations.