December 10, 1981

An agreement to change the leases covering Kennedy International and La Guardia Airports was announced yesterday by New York City and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Officials from both sides said the agreement, which followed 18 months of wrangling over financial terms, would stimulate at least $500 million in construction and create thousands of jobs at the airports in the next 15 years. The accord represents a compromise, and representatives of both sides indicated they were satisfied that they would benefit somewhat and were not very concerned with what they had given up.

Two high schools on the Upper West Side - Louis D. Brandeis and Martin Luther King Jr. - are expected to be merged, creating a school that would include training for backstage jobs in the performing arts. The 11th and 12th grades of the merged school, according to the plan, would be housed in the present King High School building at 122 Amsterdam Avenue, directly behind Lincoln Center, where many people with such skills find employment. ''New programs will be developed in collaboration with Lincoln Center in theater and stage technology, entertainment business management and musical instrument repair,'' Richard F. Halverson, the deputy schools chancellor, said yesterday at a Board of Education committee meeting. Final approval must be given at a regular board meeting.

International A victory for foreign aid was marked as 97 House Republicans heeded an appeal by President Reagan and joined the Democrats in approving a $5.7 billion assistance authorization for the current fiscal year. The vote was 222 to 184. Many of the Republican supporters had never before voted in favor of foreign aid. (Page A1, Column 1.) A visa for Yelizaveta Alekseyeva was reported promised in Moscow. Miss Alekseyeva, in behalf of whose emigration effort Andrei D. Sakharov had gone on a hunger strike, said she had been told by a state security official that she would be allowed to leave and that Dr. Sakharov, as a result, had ended his 17-day fast. (A1:2-3.)

With unusual support from Republicans, the House of Representatives tonight passed a bill that would authorize $5.7 billion in foreign aid in the year that began on Oct. 1. The vote on the measure, which President Reagan called the ''minimum necessary'' aid legislation, was 222 to 184. The Senate voted earlier to authorize $5.8 billion in foreign aid. It will now be up to a House-Senate conference committee to resolve the differences between the two measures.

Anthony G. Amsterdam, the principal architect of legal efforts to abolish capital punishment in the United States, offered a primer to civil libertarians Tuesday night on how to deal with what they regard as an increasingly hostile Federal judiciary. Professor Amsterdam, considered by many legal experts to be the foremost practitioner before the United States Supreme Court, suggested that the era in which liberals could protect constitutional liberties through the Federal judiciary had ended. He suggested a variety of approaches for keeping cases out of the Federal appellate courts. And he urged that when disputes necessarily went that route, civil-liberties lawyers had to address conservative concerns and apply conservative rhetoric to win.