What was going on when I was born?

Striking a defiant note, Canada's Energy Minister came to New York yesterday to defend his country's new energy program.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18--In a partyline vote but with some Democratic defections, the House of Representatives today adopted a supposedly final budget for the current fiscal year that provides for a spending ceiling of $631.7 billion and a $25 billion deficit.

SEOUL, South Korea, Wednesday, Nov. 19--A Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 passenger jet from Los Angeles crashed in flames while landing at the international airport here early this morning, killing approximately 8 of the 226 people aboard, South Korean authorities said.

WHEN I was a teen-ager, a boastful young man anxious to impress described a skill he had learned in Paris. Blindfolded, he could tell a belon from a portugaise, an ostend from a marenne verte. His fashionable friends would set before him a plate of many different kinds of oysters. A napkin was tied about his eyes and bets exchanged.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18--At first, no one could believe the telegrams, and the Reagan transition office's switchboard lit up with angry calls.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18--A major Department of Energy study on the nation's vulnerability to cutoffs of foreign oil has recommended an array of tough, largely price-oriented steps to reduce imports, including a more rapid decontrol of natural gas, which could be used as a substitute.

IT seemed, at first, a shaky business. But now, a decade after taking its first tentative steps, the collecting of photography is as safely ensconced a cultural phenomenon as the collecting of other art forms.

WESTFIELD, N.J. I HAVE seen the past, and it works. I was in the kitchen of a 240year-old farmhouse recently and felt as if I had fallen through a warp in time. There was a goose being turned on an old-fashioned spit, there was anadama bread baking over coals in a black heave metal spider, there was a cranberry apple pie in a beehive oven,

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18--A senior aide to President-elect Ronald Reagan said today that relations between South Korea and the United States would be harmed if President Chun Doo Hwan should permit the execution of his country's leading political dissident, Kim Dae Jung.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18 (AP) -- The personal income of Americans increased by 1.1 percent in October, while their spending rose 1 percent, the Government reported today.

The lawyers for Representatives John M. Murphy of Staten Island and Frank Thompson Jr. of Trenton tried yesterday to picture their clients as innocent men caught between a self-interested undercover man and a scheming, unscrupulous lawyer from Philadelphia.