September 21, 1994

America's mounting trade deficit was bad news for the dollar yesterday, and that, in turn, meant bad news for the stock market. Its fall accelerated by high-speed computer-guided trading near the end of the session, the Dow Jones industrial average lost all its hard-won gains since Aug. 30 and slipped below 3,900. The Dow index of 30 blue-chip stocks, the best-known measure of stock performance, lost 67.63 points to close at 3,869.09, and the other leading indexes also fell. The broader Standard & Poor's 500 stock index fell 7.49 points, to 463.36, and the smaller-company Nasdaq composite index fell 9.98 points, to 766.74.

To the dismay of Haiti's exiled President, the Clinton Administration insisted today that American forces would not act as Haiti's police, despite the military leaders' repressive tactics against pro-democracy demonstrators. The last-minute accord negotiated by Jimmy Carter, which left the Haitian military in place for the time being, forced the Pentagon to rewrite its mission and put American troops in the odd position of cooperating with the very Haitian forces they had been planning to fight.

Now that Federated Department Stores has finally agreed with New York's Attorney General over how many stores it will try to sell to complete its takeover of R. H. Macy & Company, the big company still has to fulfill one more promise to the Federal bankruptcy judge. Burton R. Lifland, the judge in the Macy case, wants a guarantee "etched in some form of stone" that Federated will continue Macy's traditional Thanksgiving Day parade and its Fourth of July fireworks.

THE salad bar has bent the meaning of salad entirely out of shape. If you believe what you see displayed on the typical salad bar, items like lasagna, barbecued chicken, sushi, mashed potatoes, hummus and chunks of watermelon now qualify as salad. There was a time when salad bars offered simple makings: slices of cucumber, croutons, shredded carrots and bacon bits to garnish the sturdy romaine or iceberg lettuce. They have now evolved into buffets with 100 items or more -- hot and cold. Rarely do they have fewer than two dozen. Salad bars have become the cafeterias of the 90's -- cheap, convenient and with something for everyone.

It was supposed to be a lock: $100 million in Federal money to pay one-third the cost of renovating the old General Post Office in Manhattan. The goal was a glorious new Pennsylvania Station to replace what its sponsor, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, called "the very inadequate subterranean substitute" built when the old station was demolished in 1963. But since President Clinton included the money in his budget as a favor to Mr. Moynihan, a New York Democrat, last winter -- slipping the first $10 million into an emergency relief bill for victims of the California earthquake -- the project has been on a bumpy track in Congress.