March 16, 1992

The McDonnell Douglas Corporation is considering a new and larger design for its proposed MD-12 jetliner in its scramble to remain competitive with the Boeing Company and the European Airbus consortium, according to a trade press report and company officials. McDonnell Douglas may scrap its plan to make the MD-12 a three-engine 375-passenger plane, and is instead briefing some airlines on an alternative design for a four-engine plane with double-deck seating and greater passenger capacity, the trade magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology is reporting in its issue dated March 16. New Generation of Jumbos A four-engine plane with double-deck seating would resemble Boeing's 747 more than the tri-jet design of McDonnell Douglas's current MD-11 jumbo jet. It is unclear whether the new design would be more expensive to develop and build than the previously announced tri-jet design.

Heeding Nixon's Call Many Republicans in Congress have joined the former President and Democrats in urging the Administration to push for more aid to the former Soviet republics. Page A8. Forward, March Madness The field for college basketball's tournament is set. Page C6. Cost of a Cleaner Workplace

In a new and fast-growing field of rehabilitative medicine, many of the nation's health-care centers are being accused of preying on some of the most vulnerable of patients: people with severe brain injuries. In the process, critics say, operators of the centers are reaping millions of dollars in profits from insurance payments. Patients, former employees and state and Federal investigators accuse the centers of systematically directing sophisticated marketing efforts and offers of near-impossible cures to emotionally devastated families. After the patients -- many of them young children -- are admitted, they are often neglected, the critics say. Insurance companies are billed up to $30,000 a month, and the patients are discharged once their coverage runs out, these critics add.

Beleaguered United Press International seems once again to be approaching a moment of truth. Earlier this month, Judge Francis G. Conrad of the Federal Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan said that U.P.I. seemed to have enough cash to continue operating only through April, and he threw open the legal gates to allow anyone to make a bid to save the news agency.

The most tantalizing and enduring mystery in aviation history, the fate of the pioneering pilot Amelia Earhart, has yielded one of its central secrets, according to investigators who say they found fragments of her plane on a deserted Pacific island. Amid the coconut palms of Nikumaroro, an island about halfway between New Guinea and Hawaii, a search party from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery found a sheet of metal that they say is from the plane's fuselage.