United States Relief

Lilliam Barrios-Paoli can't tell you about all the people who need help without breaking down herself. There are the elderly parents who lost the daughter who paid their mortgage. The families whose survivors' benefits depend on a death certificate they can't bring themselves to sign. The people who wander into assistance centers so ravaged that officials wonder if they're going to make it.

Lilliam Barrios-Paoli can't tell you about all the people who need help without breaking down herself. There are the elderly parents who lost the daughter who paid their mortgage. The families whose survivors' benefits depend on a death certificate they can't bring themselves to sign. The people who wander into assistance centers so ravaged that officials wonder if they're going to make it.

Sudan has agreed to let the United States provide relief to its famine-ravaged southern region, and food and medical supplies began moving today to thousands of sick and starving people, U.S. officials said. The airlift was begun after a meeting in Khartoum of Sudanese Prime Minister Sadek Mahdi with U.S. Ambassador G. Norman Anderson and Walter Bollinger, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The agreement breaks a deadlock between the government and foreign aid donors.

The Kuwaiti government is coming under increasing pressure to grant thousands of Arabs stranded in a squalid border camp permission to return to their homes in Kuwait. The refugees are part of a minority known as the bidoun, stateless Arabs who descended from nomadic desert tribes and lived in Kuwait but who were never recognized as citizens under the law.

With bright hope but also nagging anxiety, Americans will welcome Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev this week as he arrives for the May 31-June 3 summit meeting. The hope, of course, is that the Soviet Union's economic and political reforms and its withdrawal from Eastern Europe will bring the United States relief from Cold War tensions and costly weapons expenditures. The anxiety is that sharp reductions in the $300-billion U.S.

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Documentaries on CBS and ABC tonight remind us that borders--whether between countries or classes--are only artificial barriers. They delineate boundaries but don't prevent what happens on one side from affecting the other. CBS' case in point is "One River, One Country: The U.S./Mexico Border" (at 8 tonight on Channels 2 and 8). ABC's is the dividing line between the country's readers and non-readers, examined in "At a Loss for Words . . . Illiterate in America" (10 p.m.

A leading group that seeks to trace surviving Nazi collaborators urged the Reagan Administration Thursday to move swiftly to deport accused war criminal Karl Linnas to the Soviet Union to face a death sentence handed down in absentia 25 years ago. Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, told a news conference that his organization is "frustrated at the slow pace at which the Administration is moving on the Linnas case.

Shia Muslim kidnapers kept Father Lawrence M. Jenco in solitary confinement and chains for six months of his captivity in Lebanon and he often was blindfolded after that, members of his family said today. John Jenco also said his 51-year-old brother and three other American hostages held as a group were told three weeks ago that they would be released, but there was no explanation when it did not happen. The other Americans are Terry A.

Rice, dried beans, cooking oil. Abul Fazel Khalili says those donated provisions can mean survival for Afghans who have endured decades of civil war, a devastating drought, the Taliban and now possible military strikes by the United States. Afghanistan Relief, Khalili's Canoga Park-based assistance group, has tapped the local Afghan community for three years, holding concerts and other fund-raisers to help refugees.

The sight of rescue teams from around the world ignoring politics and rushing help to victims of the earthquake in Soviet Armenia has been one of the bright spots of a holiday season dimmed by disaster. We in the United States can take pride in our contribution. The instinctive response to the plight of the Armenians sent forth a signal that the people of the world realize that we live in a global village.