November 20, 1984

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1984 International An inferno engulfed a slum area near Mexico City as a storage center for liquefied gas exploded in flames, reportedly killing at least 261 people and seriously injuring 500. The authorities said that 100,000 people had been evacuated in buses from the neighborhood of wooden shacks. (Page A1, Column 6.) Food supplies were cut off for thousands of famine victims as secessionist rebels seized a major refuge center in northern Ethiopia, according to sources in the relief effort. They said the center, at Korem, which contains up to 40,000 refugees, 15,000 of them children, had been overrun after a daylong battle between the rebels and Government troops. (A3:4-6.)

In early 1964, for the first time in medical history, surgeons at the University of Mississippi Medical Center transplanted an animal heart into a human. They were treating a 68-year-old man whose heart was failing. No human heart was available, so they used a chimpanzee heart instead. The heart lasted only an hour before it proved incapable of handling the larger blood flow of an adult man, and the patient died. The experiment was disclosed only after it had failed. News coverage was scant. There were some professional objections to the operation, but little hint of the criticism ever reached a national audience. The contrast between that operation and the recent transplant of a baboon heart into Baby Fae could hardly be more striking. Daring research, for a variety of reasons, has clearly become a public affair. And it is open to the critical scrutiny - the applause and the censure - of everyone from ethical leaders to the man in the street.

The Justice Department said today that it had closed, at the direction of President Reagan, a criminal antitrust investigation into passenger air travel that has soured relations between the United States and Britain. The department, in a terse two-sentence statement, said the President's decision was ''based on foreign policy reasons.'' The department's spokesman, Mark T. Sheehan, declined to elaborate on the reasons. ''You can't expect the President to explain foreign policy decisions,'' he said. ''It is enough for him to consider the factors and decide, for the good of the country.''

Long-distance customers in Minne- sota may get to defer some payments to A.T.&T. but pay interest. Page D9. In its first rate proposal since the breakup of the Bell System last January, the New York Telephone Company yesterday sought permission to raise its charges by 16.3 percent. The changes, if approved by the State Public Service Commission, would take effect late in 1985. The company said the new charges would total $775 million and would raise the average monthly home telephone bill in the state by about $4, to $29.67 from $25.52.

President Reagan's key budget team has begun to call attention to the soaring national debt as a way of persuading him to make a more aggressive attack on the Federal deficit, Administration officials said today. The advisers have stressed that the debt's growing share of the American economy and the prospect that it could force interest rates higher are more serious than any one year's deficit. Using that argument, the officials said, the nine-member economic ''core group'' is pressing Mr. Reagan to accept targets for a fairly steep decline in Federal spending for the next three years. No Indication From Reagan With the deficit now at more than 5 percent of the national output of goods and services, the proposed goals were to push it down to 4 percent of the gross national product in the fiscal year 1986, which begins next October; to 3 percent in the fiscal year 1987, and to 2 percent in 1988.