July 27, 1993

The American Express Company's earnings continued to rebound in the second quarter, largely because of lower costs. The company's revenues remained essentially flat. The financial services giant said yesterday that it had earned $416 million for the second quarter, up 34 percent from $310 million for the comparable period a year earlier and up 71 percent from $243 million for the first quarter of this year. Operating income increased even more sharply from last year because net income for the second quarter of 1992 included $41 million in net gains from special items.

Like some great watery pincer, the rampaging Missouri and Kansas Rivers are closing in on Kansas City. Sometime Tuesday, a record flood crest coming down the Kansas and another record crest coming down the Missouri will collide here where the two rivers join.

A few blocks from brick sidewalks lined with antiques stores and bistros and an extensive array of "shoppes," a dozen of Keith Sumpter's friends were lingering on the chipped pavement near the Carlton Court housing project. It was another restless summer day. Like many young black men in small cities across the New York region, they said they could not find jobs. So they stood bare-chested in the sun, raging against the local police, who, they insisted, had killed Mr. Sumpter earlier this month for no apparent reason and who routinely harass them.

THE genes of modern populations carry the encoded history of humans' remote past and their early wanderings around the globe. Deciphering that history has been the preoccupation of population geneticists for a century, but key pieces of information have begun to fall quickly into place only in the last 10 years, since the advent of rapid methods for working out the chemical sequences of genes. Standing in the midst of this giant jigsaw puzzle is a soft-spoken, Italian-born scientist with the mind of a mathematician and the interests of a philosopher: Dr. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Perhaps more than anyone else in his field, Dr. Cavalli-Sforza, a 71-year-old genetics professor at Stanford University Medical School, has been able to make sense of the whisperings of human ancestors that are recorded in the genes of present-day people. His graphic maps make evident at a glance the patterns of ancient migrations, and they hint at some of the events that may have prompted them.

Over the last century Detroit has pushed durability, tailfins and apple pie to persuade Americans to buy new cars. But now the nation's auto makers are enjoying their first surge in sales after three bleak years thanks in part to a fresh approach: persuading Americans not to buy at all. Instead of buying, the companies argue, their customers should lease -- paying for the value of the car they use up over two to three years, then returning it to lease a new one. For the consumer, they say, leasing means no fat cash payments in lean times and no aging hulks depreciating -- without warranty -- in the driveway. Leases Get Popular For the manufacturers and dealers, it means brisk business at last, as Americans in growing numbers seize the offer.