What was going on when I was born?

PARIS, Feb. 5--France and West Germany issued a joint call today for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan "without delay."

CAIRO, Feb. 5--Saudi leaders told American officials today that they are now willing to consider closer military cooperation with the United States in the Persian Gulf region in order to offset the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5--The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been trying to determine whether Senator Howard W. Cannon, the Nevada Democrat, was illegally influenced in handling trucking deregulation legislation by a Chicago ...

The Federal investigation that has produced charges that Congressmen were involved in bribery widened yesterday with new allegations linking Senator Harrison A. Williams Jr. of New Jersey to a casino project in Atlantic City.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5--The State Department, in its annual report to Congress on human rights conditions around the world, today made public a long list of human rights abuses by Pakistan. The Administration is trying to rebuild military cooperation with Pakistan and has offered it $400 million in economic and arms aid.

Original prints of the first accurate chart of the Gulf Stream, prepared in 1769-70 by Benjamin Franklin to speed the trans-Atlantic mails and thought to have been lost for nearly 200 years, have been found in libraries in Paris and London.

The head of the Federal agency responsible for the health and safety of American workers has expressed surprise and concern that a Government regulation mandating genetic screening in industry has been in effect for six years without the knowledge of key Government officials or their advisers.

More than a dozen immigration lawyers and consultants and present and former employees of the New York office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service are targets of a Federal investigation centering on the bribing of Government officials to process immigration papers, according to law-enforcement sources.

WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb. 5-- "Thou art the help of the prisoner in the dungeon, the storm-tossed on the sea," intoned Rabbi Daniel Polish, at a 45minute interfaith service today for the families of the 50 hostages held in the United States Embassy in Teheran.

In the lobby of the United States Mission to the United Nations, a brass-letter roster still lists Andrew Young as the chief American delegate to the United Nations. What with Iran and Afghanistan on the agenda at the world organization across the street, no one has gotten around to updating the plaque.

DAMASCUS, Syria, Feb. 5--President Hafez al-Assad of Syria said today that he would wait "some time" before carrying out his suddenly announced decision to pull Syrian peacekeeping troops out of Beirut.

SAN SALVADOR, Feb. 5 (UPI)-- Armed leftists seized the Spanish Embassy and El Salvador's Education Ministry today, taking an undetermined number of hostages, including the Spainish Ambassdor.