World Notes

DIPLOMACY Talk to Them, Talk to Us

Philip Habib, the veteran of diplomatic wars from Lebanon to the Philippines, was back in President Reagan's service last week, this time as special envoy to Central America. There had been speculation that the purpose of his trip was to discuss President Reagan's plans for stepped-up support for the Nicaraguan contras. Habib insisted that his talks with the leaders of El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Costa Rica were "exploratory."

He did, however, declare that the U.S. wholeheartedly backed President Jose Napoleon Duarte's recent offer to meet with Salvadoran rebels if the Sandinista government in Nicaragua would in turn hold talks with the contras. If that should happen, declared Habib, the Reagan Administration would be prepared to resume bilateral discussions with the Sandinistas. CHINA Chasing Bad Characters

For the past few weeks, half a million Peking schoolchildren have fanned out into the city's streets to look for "bad characters." Another Cultural Revolution in the making? Not at all. The Young Pioneers, a political version of boy and girl scouts, are taking part in a scholarly exercise called "Let the spring wind drive away wrong characters." Dictionaries in hand, they are scouring the city for incorrect Chinese characters in advertisements, shop names and road signs. The kids have found and corrected 40,000 bad characters so far.

The problem stems from an official list of simplified characters, issued in 1977, that was recently abandoned because it caused confusion and was often inaccurate. The government now also advocates greater use of standard spoken Chinese in an effort to "enhance communication within China as a whole," where several hundred different dialects are spoken. COLOMBIA Gun Battle In Bogota

Under cover of night, heavily armed national police surrounded a Bogota apartment building and in the ensuing fire fight killed M-19 Guerrilla Leader Alvaro Fayad Delgado. It was the government's biggest victory against M-19 since the rebel fighters forcibly occupied the Palace of Justice in Bogota last November, leading to a siege in which some 90 people, including almost half the members of the country's Supreme Court, were killed.

Fayad's death coincided with a full-scale assault on M-19 strongholds near the mountain city of Cali. Army commanders, who brought helicopter gunships and light tanks to bear, reported that 219 rebels and 28 government troops have died since M-19 began a campaign of sabotage and terror in January. SOUTH AFRICA Good News, New Bans

First, the good news: the South African government reversed itself and decided not to expel three CBS crewmen whose network had broadcast news film of the funeral two weeks ago of 17 victims of police gunfire in the black Alexandra township near Johannesburg. Pretoria had charged CBS with acting in defiance of a government ban on the use of cameras and recording devices at the mass funeral.

The bad news: at about the same time, the government announced the "banning" of two of the best-known and most respected black leaders in the Eastern Cape, Mkhuseli Jack and Henry Fazzie. Under the terms of the banning order, the two were forbidden to participate in political activities for five years and were ordered confined to their homes every night from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. Jack and Fazzie had helped organize last year's highly effective boycott of white businesses in the Port Elizabeth area and had threatened to renew the campaign if security forces were not removed from the black townships by April 1. The government's newest crackdown on dissent was widely criticized both inside and outside South Africa. AUSTRALIA Run It Up The Flagpole

The timing was not altogether respectful, but it did make the point. As Queen Elizabeth II was making her royal rounds in Adelaide last week, a group called Ausflag 88 announced that Wayne Stokes, a Sydney graphic artist, had won its competition to design a new Australian flag without the Union Jack. The group argues that since Australia left the British colonial fold in 1901, the flag should drop the symbol of empire in time for Australia's 1988 bicentennial. The winning banner features the white stars of the Southern Cross on a blue background with a red and a white stripe across the bottom.

If public reaction is any indication, it may be a while before the new flag is snapping in Australian breezes. One television poll found that 64% of Stokes' fellow citizens favored retaining the old standard. And Prime Minister Bob Hawke said he had "no intention" of changing the flag.