February 11, 1992

Time Warner Inc. said yesterday that its latest quarterly results swung to a profit for the first time since it took on $11 billion in debt when Time Inc. acquired Warner Communications in January 1990. The company reported a profit of $45 million in the fourth quarter, compared with a loss of $34 million in the comparable period a year earlier.

Few towns in the world are wealthier than this one, if wealth is measured in oil coming out of the ground. But instead of fine homes and shops, downtown Raduzhny is block after block of eight-story apartment buildings whose outer walls are drab gray concrete slabs, giving the impression that Raduzhny is a huge, rundown housing project. The town's leading citizen, Anatoly Sivak, lives in one of these buildings. Because he is director general of the oil company that runs this Siberian community, his apartment is less cramped than most, and he has three telephones to connect him to his many lieutenants. They are a necessity for his company, which pumps 160,000 barrels a day from the swamps and fields around Raduzhny, a production level that matches that of all of Ecuador. He Who Would Give Orders But little of the wealth stays in this town, 1,000 miles east of Moscow. Mr. Sivak is maneuvering to change that.

Asserting the time had come to correct decades of rampant discrimination in the city's procurement process, Mayor David N. Dinkins announced a sweeping policy initiative yesterday to award more than 20 percent of city contracts to businesses owned by minorities or women. Mr. Dinkins said that he had instructed city agencies to develop a program to increase the amount of business the city gives to companies owned by minorities and women.

IN a race against the rising Nile waters impounded by the Aswan Dam, the world's archeologists joined forces 30 years ago to salvage the monuments, tombs and other remnants of ancient Nubia, a black African culture long overshadowed in history by Egypt but brilliant and innovative in its own right. The best-known achievement of the international operation was the dismantling and reconstruction safely above the water line of the splendid temple at Abu Simbel, erected by Ramses II in the 13th century B.C. The temple symbolized the Nubia of familiar reputation: the remote upriver land prey to Egyptian conquests and the source of gold, ivory and slaves that embellished the downriver kingdom of the pharaohs.

Now that the National Gallery of Art has liberated Herbert and Dorothy Vogel's one-bedroom Manhattan apartment from their collection of 2,500 sculptures, drawings and paintings, Mrs. Vogel can retrieve her clothes from the terrace and hang them in the closet, which was only one of the places the art had been stashed. Friends who happen to be tall, or on the heavy side, can venture from the living room to the bathroom without colliding with the galvanized steel rectangle by Donald Judd or the paintings by Robert Mangold. Their rent-controlled apartment on the East Side has been transformed, but the retired postal clerk and the retired librarian are still doing what they have done for 30 years -- devoting their lives to contemporary art. Last Thursday night, at yet another opening, at the Marisa del Re Gallery on West 57th Street, they were greeted warmly by people like the art historian Barbara Rose, the SoHo art dealer Annina Nosei and the artist Paul Manes, whose paintings were on the walls.