August 16, 1989

LEAD: Syria and Iran summoned their Lebanese and Palestinian allies here today for what Syrian officials called a council of war to ''bring down'' the Christian general who leads Lebanon's army.

LEAD: Experts on energy thought for years that oil production in the United States would shrink to insignificant levels by the middle of the next century, making imports the nation's only meaningful supply. Now they are finding that steady advances in the technology for finding oil from large but hard-to-reach reserves discovered years ago seem likely to stretch the nation's era of oil production, possibly well beyond the year 2100.

LEAD: Amnesty in Nicaragua

LEAD: Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City's largest private organization providing AIDS services, has reversed a long-held position and endorsed widespread voluntary testing for the virus that causes AIDS.

LEAD: The Soviet Union rolled out a green carpet of plastic grass today, hurrying to complete the nation's first baseball stadium and apply the Soviets' patented sports-lab techniques to the subtleties of the hit and run.

LEAD: Once more, we Angelenos have managed to generate a national guffaw, this time over a citizen attempt to have a city carwash named a landmark.

LEAD: On their own if they were able, in pairs if they were not, 61 Armenians stepped off an El Al jetliner onto an Aeroflot stairway this afternoon, smiling and waving at nearly 1,000 friends and family members who cheered and threw carnations from the terminal balcony a short distance away.

LEAD: President Bush endorsed the outline of a national strategy to attack the drug problem today, placing more emphasis on local law enforcement and less on international drug trafficking. He pledged to find money to pay for the program without raising taxes.

LEAD: In a first step in its strategy to make gasoline environmentally competitive with cleaner alternatives, ARCO announced today that it would replace leaded gasoline at its California pumps with a ''reformulated'' fuel that could cut pollution from cars manufactured before 1975 by as much as 15 percent.

LEAD: Steep discounts aimed at clearing bloated inventories of 1989 models lifted sales of domestically made cars to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 7.9 million in early August, the strongest level in six months, the auto makers reported today.

LEAD: Six months after Carlos Andres Perez was inaugurated on Feb. 2, South America's largest oil exporting nation seems to be speaking with two tongues to foreign investors.

LEAD: When President Bush comes here Wednesday to campaign for a Republican Congressional candidate, he will find himself in the middle of a bitter debate that has split Miami and raised the issue of whether there is such a thing as a good terrorist.