August 22, 1993

AFTER the Mississippi flooded and New York boiled in July, August has finally produced a summer rally. And not just on Wall Street. Europe also is clanging along. The economies may not be growing much, meaning that there is no great need to build plants or buy equipment. But cash has to go somewhere, and now it is going into stocks and bonds. Every major U.S. stock index moved to a new high last week, with the Dow Jones industrial average topping 3,600. But it is hard to find much joy among investors. Perhaps that reflects the fact this rally has not been like the barnburners of old. "We have crawled higher," says Hugh Johnson, the strategist at First Albany.

Saudi Arabia, long seen as one of the world's wealthiest countries, has undermined its financial stability with a decade of unrestrained spending, huge military purchases and irregular banking practices. The $121 billion in financial reserves amassed by Saudi Arabia less than a decade ago have almost vanished, drained by expenditures for weapons, social programs, foreign aid and the Gulf war. The spending has far outstripped the tens of billions of dollars earned annually from the largest oilfields in the world, which the Government owns.

In North Carolina and New York, two high-visibility crimes provided a chilling demonstration last week of how vicious the nation's outlaws can be -- and also how foolish. In one case, the father of basketball star Michael Jordan was shot dead. He was picked at random, the police said, by two armed 18-year-olds who were simply looking for someone to rob and found him taking a nap on the edge of a highway in his expensive car. The other case ended triumphantly as detectives pulled Harvey Weinstein, the scrappy 68-year-old owner of a Queens tuxedo factory, from the muddy crypt where he had been buried alive for 12 days by kidnappers.

IT was 25 years ago that Robert and Fanny Ungemack found their piece of heaven while sailing in the Thimble Islands, the rocky remnants from the Ice Age situated within view of the Stony Creek area of Branford. To someone without a vision, the couple's stretch of solid granite extending into Long Island Sound from the southwest end of Governors Island might have held little promise. But to the Ungemacks -- he, a landscape architect by profession and a house builder by avocation, and she, a former fashion designer and self-taught architect -- the property was raw material for their imaginations. It was also their entry into the isolated world of the Thimbles, a rocky archipelago with 23 inhabited islands scattered east of New Haven that have attracted the curious and the committed for centuries.

In the 20 months since she was named the chief of M.I.5, Britain's domestic security service, Stella Rimington has rung up several firsts: She is the first woman to head one of Britain's secret agencies, the first M.I.5 director to appear before cameras at a news conference, the first British intelligence chief to publish a booklet disclosing the organization's goals and staffing, and the first person from the secret world ever to have her photograph appear in a gossip magazine. The photograph appeared this summer, when Hello!, a breathless weekly filled with glossy celebrity pictures and tattle, showed the 58-year-old Mrs. Rimington sipping white wine at the Royal Academy, a photographic indiscretion that did not sit well with some Government ministers.