What was going on when I was born?

A New Jersey Superior Court judge was arrested in front of the Camden County Courthouse yesterday morning and charged with accepting a $12,000 bribe from a defendant who was scheduled to be sentenced by the judge later in the morning. According to the police, the judge, Peter J. Coruzzi, had the money in his pocket as he approached the courthouse in Camden. When asked to explain the money later by the state police detectives who arrested him, the judge shook his head, local police officers said.

British anxieties about American nuclear policy have been deepened by the confusing and seemingly contradictory statements made this week by Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. and Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger. Mr. Haig told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday that under some circumstances an attack by Soviet conventional forces might bring into play a North Atlantic Treaty Organization option of setting off a ''demonstration'' nuclear weapon as a warning. Yesterday, Mr. Weinberger told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ''there is nothing in any of the plans at this time that even resembles this, nor should it.'' The White House and the State and Defense Departments subsequently issued a statement saying that both Mr. Weinberger and Mr. Haig were technically correct, since NATO had considered such a plan, as Mr. Haig stated, but had never ''transferred'' it ''into a military plan,'' as the Secretary of Defense said. Senior American officials in Londonconceded today that many British political leaders, including some key figures in the Government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were profoundly disturbed by the new disagreement. They made no attempt to hide their belief that Mr. Haig's remarks had been ill timed, coming as they did just after a comment by President Reagan about the possibility of limiting a nuclear war to Europe was receding from the public consciousness.

President Reagan declared today that the Voting Rights Act should be extended for 10 years, but he qualified his position by saying that he would support amendments making it easier for states and counties to be released from certain requirements of the law. The statement was issued after last-minute skirmishing between White House aides and Attorney General William French Smith, who fought to make the statement more conservative than originally planned. An earlier draft of Text of Reagan statement, page 30. the President's statement indicated that he would sign a 10-year extension of the voting law in virtually any form approved by Congress, Administration officials said.

President Reagan, struggling to adjust his fiscal policies to adverse political and economic conditions, today abandoned his long-stated goal of a balanced budget by the 1984 fiscal year. Mr. Reagan, while ruling out additional tax increases for the current 1982 fiscal year, also told Republican Congressional leaders that he would consider imposing new taxes in 1983 and 1984. The President disclosed these decisions at a White House meeting this morning. At the same time he rejected the suggestion of some Senate Republicans that he impose up to $7 billion in new taxes in 1982 rather than depend on another round of budget cuts. The senators had cited stiffening Congressional opposition within his own party to further cuts in Government programs.

The nation's unemployment rate leaped to 8 percent in October, the highest level in almost six years, and Reagan Administration economists said today that they expected the rate to continue to climb as the economy kept declining. The unemployment rate, announced today by the Labor Department, jumped from 7.5 percent in September and has risen a full percentage point since July. The highest unemployment of the 1980 recession was 7.6 percent; in 1975, at the end of the worst recession since World War II, the highest rate was 9 percent. The one-month jump in the unemployment rate is the largest since the rise from 6.9 percent to 7.6 percent in May 1980, near the bottom of last year's recession.

A revised tally yesterday left in doubt whether voters had approved a $500 million bond issue to build and improve prisons in New York State. The new tally found the issue favored by a margin of only 992 votes out of 2.5 million cast. On Wednesday, unofficial returns showed the issue winning by 3,048 votes. The revised figures, which are unofficial and incomplete, were based on vote shifts in two counties as a result of rechecking by county election boards and the News Election Service.

Administration officials said today that unexpected problems had developed in efforts to secure British and other European participation in the Sinai peacekeeping force. The officials said the European Economic Community had planned to issue a statement earlier this week opening the way for Britain, France, Italy and the Netherlands to take part in the force. But the proposed statement, which discussed their entry in terms of European desires for a broader peace involving the rights of Palestinians, was regarded as so offensive to Israel that the United States persuaded the Europeans not to issue it and to review their position. Hopes for Action Next Week American specialists on Europe and British Embassy sources said they hoped that a European statement acceptable to Israel could be issued next week, but some Administration experts on the Middle East predicted that it would take longer.

A group of editors and publishers, led by Charles Scripps, president of the Inter-American Press Association and chairman of Scripps-Howard newspapers, will visit Nicaragua next week. The mission, with representation from at least eight newspapers in the Western Hemisphere, will arrive in Managua Nov. 10 and meet with authorities over the next two days to express concern over the repeated closings of the newspaper La Prensa.

Canada's basic constitutional problem is back where it began - in French-speaking Quebec. For more than two centuries, the country has been wrestling with the seemingly intractable problem of how to accommodate its Frenchspeaking and English-speaking peoples under one roof. Yesterday a deal was struck on a new constitution that, instead of promoting unity, left Quebec out in the cold and once again made a breakup of the country possible. The agreement signed in Ottawa by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, himself a Quebecer, and the Premiers of the nine predominantly English-speaking provinces will allow Canada to ask Britain to transform the British North America Act of 1867 into a purely Canadian constitution with the addition of a bill of rights and a procedure for amendments. The agreement was bitterly protested by Premier Rene Levesque of Quebec, who objected particularly to a clause in the bill of rights that would guarantee the right of the English-speaking minority in his province and French-speaking minorities elsewhere to education in their own languages.

A Soviet submarine that ran aground in a secret Swedish military zone 11 days ago left Swedish waters today, joining a flotilla of Soviet Navy ships that had been waiting for it. The Government said that as far as it was concerned, the incident was closed. ''There will be no further protests,'' said Foreign Minister Ola Ullsten. ''We have made unprecedented protests in the strongest possible language.''

The United States and Czechoslovakia completed negotiations today on an agreement that would allow Prague to recover 18.4 tons of gold seized by the Nazis in return for settlement of financial claims held by more than 2,500 Americans. The accord, which was reached in Prague, must be approved by Congress. The State Department declined to provice details in advance of the formal presentation, but Congressional aides and lawyers representing claimants have already been briefed. They said that the accord provided that the American claimants would get $81.5 million, which is four times the amount they would have received in 1974 when an earlier agreement was rejected as insufficient by Congress.

The State Department said today that the military abilities of El Salvador were improving and that the Government of Jose Napoleon Duarte was stronger now than at the beginning of the year. In an interview on Wednesday, Col. Guillermo Garcia, the Salvadoran Defense Minister, said he had noticed no discernible increase recently in guerrilla activity in El Salvador. Colonel Garcia, who is taking part in hemispheric military talks here, brushed aside reports circulating in Washington and some Latin American capitals that several hundred Cubans might have found their way through Nicaragua into the fighting in El Salvador.