October 2, 1985

An article on Monday about American companies that are weeding out operations misstated General Electric's involvement in the production of its CAT scanners. The company's Japanese joint venture makes 25 percent of them; G.E. manufactures the rest itself in the United States.

International Israeli planes bombed the P.L.O. headquarters near Tunis in what Israel said was retaliation for the slaying of three Israelis in Cyprus last week. Yasir Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, was visiting a P.L.O. installation in northern Tunis when the Israeli jets struck his offices south of the capital. He was not among the wounded. [Page A1, Columns 4-6.] The White House said that Israel's attack on the P.L.O. headquarters in Tunisia appeared to be ''a legitimate response'' against ''terrorist attacks.'' [A1:4-5.]

SOME years ago a woman I worked with married for the third time. The single state made her jumpy - she called it ''being at loose ends'' -so for her, marriage was not only a commitment to someone else but a concession to a rotten nervous system. Then she started making lists. They were shopping lists. ''Brie,'' she would say in the middle of office meetings. ''I think Brie with pears, don't you? And maybe veal scalloppine first, with rice and a salad.'' Her cronies, myself among them, were stunned. We knew this woman for a noncook and a noneater, and here she was, carrying on like Betty Crocker. What we didn't realize, of course, was that never before had we seen her at the beginning of a marriage. Had we been witnesses to the weeks following her previous weddings we might have heard the same musings. ''Brie, I think Brie with pears . . .''

Major international banks agreed yesterday to postpone nearly $1 billion in loan repayments from Mexico, averting what could have been one of the largest defaults since the debt crisis began in August 1982. By itself, the loan rescheduling is one of many that banks have been forced into with third world borrowers. But, coming as it does when the United States is attempting to encourage increased lending to the third world - by commercial banks, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund - the rescheduling could provide fresh momentum to efforts to resolve the debt crisis. At a Washington meeting yesterday, Treasury Secretary James A. Baker 3d and Paul A. Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, appealed to bankers to aid in solving the problems. [Page D12.] Six-Month Postponement In the Mexican situation, after a number of all-day meetings in New York with Mexican officials, 13 lenders headed by Citibank said they had agreed to put off for six months $950 million in payments. Some of them were due yesterday and the rest were due Nov. 4. The lenders, which call themselves Mexico's ''bank advisory committee,'' and which represent roughly 600 lenders worldwide, said in a statement that they would use the six months to study financing requirements of Mexico and the resources available to it ''from international financial institutions, bilateral sources, and the private sector.''

With increasing urgency, the industrial nations and the third world have been sparring recently over whether to remove barriers to the free trade of services. The developed countries, paring down their traditional manufacturing industries and relocating plants overseas, have been eager to enter new markets with such services as banking, insurance, communications and data processing. The third world nations have strenuously resisted, fearing that free trade in this area would threaten their own struggling efforts in the sophisticated services sector and restrict their economies to an agrarian and manufacturing role. The smoldering dispute broke out into the open here today, when the United States-led campaign to include services in any new global trade talks ran into fierce third world opposition at a meeting of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.