July 25, 1985

An obituary of Kay Kyser yesterday gave incorrect dates for the formation of his first band and his departure from Chapel Hill, N.C. He started the band while still in college and took it on the road after graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1928.

A Washington dispatch yesterday about President Reagan's welcome for President Li Xiannian of China incorrectly described Grace Bumbry. Though she has occasionally sung soprano roles, she is a mezzo-soprano.

International India and Sikh leaders have agreed on a package of actions that both sides said would ease anti-Government hostility among Sikhs and speed an end to the turmoil in the state of Punjab. A key part of the settlement calls for a revision in the boundaries of Punjab to increase the Sikh population there and give the Sikhs more opportunity to widen their political influence. [Page A1, Column 6.] France, protesting the crackdown on dissent in South Africa, announced it had suspended all new investment there and recalled its Ambassador. The measures were the most serious taken against Pretoria by a Western country since that Government imposed a state of emergency last weekend and began detaining hundreds of people without charges. [A1:2.]

House and Senate negotiators have tentatively agreed on legislation that would allow the Defense Department to end a 16-year moratorium and resume production of chemical weapons, Congressional and Pentagon sources said today. In a major gain for the Administration, the conferees dropped a House-passed requirement that United States allies in Europe agree to deploy the new weapons before production can begin. The bill would require the President to consult with allies on a plan for deploying the new weapons, sometimes referred to in the Congressional debate as nerve gasses, but the allies' views would not be binding. The agreement was worked out by a panel of House and Senate members, including Representative Les Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who heads the House Armed Services Committee, and is to be presented Thursday to the full conference committee working on the military programs bill for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. Aides said approval seemed assured.

''You're wrong - in Islam it is not a must that you wear the veil,'' argued Ekbal Baraka, a member of the Cairo-based Arab Women's Solidarity Association. An Iranian woman shrouded in black, a picture of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pinned over her heart, shot back, ''You are a Westerner, you are not a true Moslem, you have lost your soul.'' Miss Baraka, who gave a long paper on the Islamic veil at an informal workshop last week as part of the United Nations Decade for Woman Conference, said as she walked away, ''Well, at least I tried to convince her.'' The brief verbal clash, on the great lawn of the University of Nairobi, illustrated that Moslem women came to Nairobi not only with different agendas and strategies but also with different interpretations of Islam. Throughout the Islamic world, the surge of fundamentalism is reshaping the roles and redefining the rights of Islamic women as Sharia, the 1,300-year-old Islamic code of law, penetrates more legal systems.