February 6, 1992

The Economy Bush's economic advisers said the economy would probably rebound in a few months, and they rebutted arguments that living standards have dropped under the Reagan and Bush Administrations. [ Page D1. ]

Some mornings, people in Lawrence, Mass., have awakened to see the top of a car jutting above the surface of the Merrimack River. On inspection, police divers have found that so many people dumped their cars into the river, to file false stolen-car claims, that the last car in the night before had fallen onto a stack of others and would not sink. Lawrence is just one example of how auto insurance fraud has become increasingly widespread and blatant in many areas of the United States: Regulators and researchers say that fraud is now far more common and costly to the nation than the insurance industry estimates, and that the industry is doing relatively little to combat it. A Difference in Estimates Critics say fraud has been an important force in pushing up the premiums Americans have to pay for auto insurance, from $40 billion to $100 billion since 1980, and that fraudulent claims -- everything from reporting accidents that never happened, to exaggerated car damage to faked injuries -- have been paid out with little challenge or investigation.

On most people's beauty scale, Stacey Stetler would be a 10. A blond, blue-eyed, 5-foot-11 New York model, she has confidently sashayed down the runway for Yves Saint Laurent in Paris and has graced the covers of fashion magazines. But until recently, when Ms. Stetler looked in the mirror she saw less perfection and more flaws.

Advocates of privacy rights are challenging the nation's most clandestine intelligence-gathering agency over how much confidentiality people will have when communicating via the next generation of cellular telephones and wireless computers. The issue has emerged at meetings this week of an obscure committee of telecommunications experts that is to decide what kind of protections against eavesdropping should be designed into new models of cellular phones. People concerned with privacy are eager to incorporate more potent scrambling and descrambling codes in the equipment to prevent the eavesdropping that is so easy and so common in the current generation of cellular phones.

WHAT, as Freud might have asked, do young girls want? According to one of the country's largest toy manufacturers, they want to strap onto their bellies a baby doll that creates a vivid illusion of being pregnant, with the shape, kick and heartbeat of the real thing.