July 26, 1986

Legislation to allow the sale of subsidized American grain to the Soviet Union and China has touched off a major rift with Australia and a sharp attack on the bill today by Secretary of State George P. Shultz. At the urging of the Senate majority leader, Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, and other senators from hard-hit farm states, the Senate on Tuesday amended a bill on the Export-Import Bank to lift a ban on subsidized agricultural sales to China and the Soviet Union. The two countries have been major purchasers in the past of American grain, but subsidies are prohibited. The House version of the bill does not include the provision on subsidies, and the issue is being discussed in a House-Senate conference.

Livestock and crop losses from the drought that has parched eight Middle-Atlantic and Southern states are estimated at $2 billion or more, twice as much as earlier this week, state agricultural officials said today. The loss would represent nearly 15 percent of the $15 billion of gross earnings last year by farmers in the arc of drought, which stretches from Alabama to southern Pennsylvania. No agricultural region has suffered such high losses since drought spread across the Midddle West and Rocky Mountain states in the 1930's, according to the Department of Agriculture. The drought is the fourth to strike the South in the last seven years. Parts of Alabama, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Virginia received some rain today and Thursday, but meteorologists predicted that the arid conditions would persist through August and possibly longer.

Sikh extremists halted a bus in a rural area of the Punjab Friday, singled out the Hindu passengers and shot 15 of them to death, news agencies reported. It was the worst attack by extremists in the northern state in at least a year, and it caused concern that Hindus in nearby areas would retaliate. The killings were immediately condemned by Indian political leaders. The police recently stepped up their efforts against Sikh extremists. Hundreds have been rounded up in recent weeks, and about 50 have been reported shot by the police.

A prominent Russian writer recently produced a tattered old Bible and with a practiced hand turned to Revelations. ''Listen,'' he said, ''this is incredible: 'And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.' '' In a dictionary, he showed the Ukrainian word for wormwood, a bitter wild herb used as a tonic in rural Russia: chernobyl. The writer, an atheist, was hardly alone in pointing out the apocalyptic reference to the star called chernobyl. With the uncanny speed common to rumor in the Soviet Union, the discovery had spread across the Soviet land, contributing to the swelling body of lore that has shaped the public consciousness of the disaster at the Chernobyl atomic power plant in the Ukraine.

Asserting that the Johnson Space Center would retain its pre-eminent role in the space program, the Administrator of the space agency made an effort today to calm extraordinary local fears about the center's future. However, after meeting with the Administrator, Dr. James C. Fletcher, Mayor Kathy Whitmire said she was disappointed he had not been able to give specific reassurances about future projects at the Johnson center. The local fears arose June 30, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration proposed organizational and management changes in the space station program that would take some responsibilities away from the center. Houston officials fear any diminution in the Johnson center's role will hurt the already battered local economy.