November 15, 1993

The mysteries have begun to pile up: two shadowy figures who returned to Iraq after the World Trade Center was bombed; a Domino's pizza worker traveling long distance on first-class airline tickets; altered passports; fake I.D. papers; bomb-making manuals. All are elements in the World Trade Center bombing trial, which finished its sixth week of testimony last week. But while the mysterious Iraqis and the forged passports have been mentioned in the Government's case against the four defendants, there has been very little clear explanation of their meaning, or how they tie together.

It has been slightly more than two years since Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, looked the huge amount of corporate, consumer and government debt in the eye and likened it to a "55-mile-an-hour headwind" buffeting the economy. But changes in the last 24 months allowed the cautious Mr. Greenspan to state publicly this fall that the problem is about half as bad as it was.

The Educational Testing Service, creators of the examinations that give Americans the jitters -- the S.A.T., G.R.E., P.S.A.T. -- today takes a major step toward eliminating the standardized paper and pencil test with the introduction of a new computerized version of the Graduate Record Examination. Though paper and pencil will remain an option for now, by the 1996-97 school year, all 400,000 students who take the G.R.E. each year for admission to graduate school will do it on a computer.

In 16 unremarkable concrete bunkers built by the Army for a war with Hirohito and Hitler, the United States has begun assembling about 50 tons of plutonium, one of the most expensive materials ever produced and perhaps the most important to safeguard. The Energy Department says the bunkers, each about the size of a two-car garage, are going to be used for interim storage, meaning six or seven years. But plutonium, which was invented by the Energy Department's predecessor, the Manhattan Project, may turn out to be the hardest thing on earth to dispose of. And at the Energy Department, "interim" can have an elastic meaning. "Immediate" tends to mean several years. "Several years" can mean never.

In the last several weeks, Curt Pippen, a semiretired oral surgeon in Glendale, Ariz., has taken three-quarters of his money out of stocks and put it into a less volatile fixed-income mutual fund, where his investments could earn a lot less but are safer. "I think interest rates are going to be rising and I am not much of a Clinton fan," said Dr. Pippen, 51, adding that he expected stock prices to tumble soon. "In other words, I'm afraid."