World Notes

CHINA At the Tone the Time Will Be

Nineteen feet in diameter, the clock atop Shanghai's Customs Building is by far the largest timepiece in China. After the frenzied Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, it tolled each new hour by blaring through 40 loudspeakers the melody of the ubiquitous Communist anthem, The East Is Red (sample lyric: "China has brought forth a Mao Tse-tung/ For the people's happiness he works").

To eliminate a vestige of the turbulent past, the Shanghai city council has changed the clock's tune. This month it began sounding stately bongs, much as it did in the pre-Communist era, when the clock chimed as sonorously (and undogmatically) as London's Big Ben. UGANDA Honeymoon's Sad End

He was widely hailed in January as the leader who would put an end to Uganda's 23-year cycle of bloodshed and turmoil, but President Yoweri Museveni seems merely to be presiding over its latest chapter. Museveni's regime last week filed treason charges against 18 political activists, including three ministers in the 36-member Cabinet. The alleged conspirators, members of the dominant Baganda tribe, which backed Museveni during the five-year civil war that brought him to power, apparently were unhappy with their lack of rewards.

Rebel forces in recent weeks have attacked military and civilian targets in the north. The insurgents, who have been striking from bases in southern Sudan, include many soldiers who battled Museveni in the war. ISRAEL Friendship Yields to Fury

The 2,000 mourners who gathered last week in the town of Ashkelon were there to pray for Taxi Driver Yisrael Kitaro, whose throat had been slashed by unknown attackers the day before in the nearby Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Grief quickly gave way to shouts of "Death to the Arabs!" as the crowd vented its rage at the second murder in two weeks of a Jewish visitor to the predominantly Arab Gaza.

The killings undermined a recent gesture aimed at promoting Jewish-Arab amity in Ashkelon, whose residents are mainly Jews of Moroccan origin. A week earlier a main square was named for Moroccan King Mohammed V, father of the reigning Hassan II, who protected Jews during World War II. Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who resigned as expected last week under a job-swapping agreement with Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, two weeks ago had unveiled the square's plaque honoring Mohammed. When vandals damaged the plaque after Kitaro's murder, authorities ordered the marker removed. UNESCO M'Bow Bows Out

Beset by numerous, largely self-inflicted wounds, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, universally known as UNESCO, has in recent years seemed close to collapse. The Paris-based entity has come under fire for severe budget mismanagement and for serving as a forum for attacks on the West. The U.S. and Britain have resigned from UNESCO, slashing its $187 million annual budget by 30%.

Last week UNESCO's director-general for the past twelve years, Senegal's Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, announced that he will not seek a third term when his mandate ends in November 1987. M'Bow, 65, whose autocratic stewardship has been attacked from both within and without the 158-nation organization, said he would leave "to get UNESCO out of the hurricane zone." The U.S. and Britain promptly announced that they will withhold any reconsideration of their departure until it becomes clear just how far UNESCO will ultimately move. SOVIET UNION A Mountain For Samantha

As a figure of Soviet veneration, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is ahead of Samantha Smith, but the gap may be narrowing. Since her death in a 1985 plane crash, the name of the Maine schoolgirl, who visited the Soviet Union in 1983 at the invitation of Communist Party Chief Yuri Andropov, has been affixed to a Siberian diamond, a hybrid violet developed in Lithuania, a street in Yalta and a five-kopeck postage stamp. The homage reached new heights last week with the dedication of Mount Samantha Smith, a 13,000-ft. peak in the central Caucasus just north of the Turkish and Iranian borders.

Samantha, then 11, won Soviet hearts during a twoweek tour arranged after she sent a letter to Andropov expressing her fears of nuclear war. The Kremlin quickly made her a symbol of the desire of many U.S. citizens to end the nuclear-arms race. That symbol clearly grew all the more poignant--and powerful--with her tragically early death.