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.

They call him the Terminator. The robo-candidate. A torpedoed battleship that is still afloat. A Civil War soldier leaning against a tree, bleeding from a stomach wound. Of all the issues raised in this scalding political season, one of the most interesting is this: How did Bill Clinton take so many shots and keep on coming?

Even in a city notorious for dank, decrepit subway stations, there is nothing quite like the Franklin Avenue shuttle. The five-station Brooklyn line, which links the D train in Crown Heights with the A train in Bedford-Stuyvesant, is a study in squalor. At the Park Place station, planks on the elevated platform sag as people walk over them. At the Botanic Garden stop, below street level in a dimly lighted culvert, the walls are completely covered with graffiti and the tracks overflow with trash. "Obscene," is how one regular passenger, Steven Worsley, described conditions on the shuttle. "Ridiculous," said another, Sandra Layne. The stations on the Franklin Avenue line may be the worst in New York City, but they are hardly the only ones in dire need of repair. Transit officials say that only 57 of the system's 459 stations are in good shape.

Facing formidable opposition in New York's Senate race, Representative Bob Mrazek seems to face a serious setback in the House Bank affair. Page B1.

People, three deep at a remote field at Dodgertown, stared. Photographers clicked away madly. Television cameras tracked his every move. A radar gun appeared behind the plate. Reporters filled notebooks. Coaches compiled charts. Medical officials studied his mechanics. There was a lot today to document concerning Dwight Gooden: his first formal start of the spring, his first pitch of that start, his first public appearance of significance since it became known that he was one of three Mets named in a rape complaint currently under investigation by the Port St. Lucie Police Department.

A fresh crop of recruits has arrived on Wall Street, one of the few areas in the New York region that is hiring after years of retrenchment. The new faces are older and more experienced than those hired in the past, and, if David Nelson is any example, they bring a more lucrative list of potential clients with them. Mr. Nelson, 43 years old, was once lead guitarist for the Turtles, one of the mop-top rock groups that characterized the rebellious flavor of the late 1960's. Last year, he became a broker at Merrill Lynch & Company, and by tapping his acquaintances in the music business, he is likely to develop a fuller book of clients than most first-year brokers. Opportunity Knocking Again "I've already been able to make inroads with record companies that need business and financial advice," said Mr. Nelson, who talks about cash-flow, pension and insurance issues with the assurance of a knowledgeable insider. "I don't want to limit myself to the music business, but that is obviously my area of expertise.

South Africa's white minority will vote Tuesday in a referendum that could decide whether President F. W. de Klerk's plan to end apartheid continues or grinds to a halt. It is an extraordinary risk for Mr. de Klerk and a milestone for South Africa, a referendum asking whites whether the President should continue down the path of abolishing the system that has for decades reserved the best of South Africa for them.

The Circle K Corporation, the nation's second-largest chain of convenience stores, is expected to announce today that it has agreed to be sold for $425 million in an effort to emerge from nearly two years of bankruptcy proceedings. The proposed purchase, pending approval from a Federal Bankruptcy Court in Phoenix, where Circle K is based, will be made by an investor group, a lawyer familiar with the case said yesterday. He would not disclose the names of the investors.