What was going on when I was born?

A bomb exploded in a suitcase at a Turkish Airlines check-in counter at Orly Airport today, killing at least five people and wounding 56. An Armenian group said it was responsible for the explosion, which sent luggage and shards of glass flying through the terminal. Vacationers and other travelers ran screaming through corridors and out of doors as they tried to escape the crowded terminal, which filled with thick, gray smoke. ''The explosion was very, very brief, but extremely violent,'' said Dr. Cyrus Irampour, a French psychiatrist. ''The noise made less of an impression. It was the flames. I got up and turned around and it was flames.''

When Ronald Reagan's campaign aides received briefing papers from the Carter camp in October 1980, apparently no one asked how the documents had been obtained, according to former campaign officials. They said only one adviser raised questions about the propriety of using the papers. Without exception, the officials, many of whom now serve in senior positions in the Reagan Administration, recalled that no one on the group that prepared Mr. Reagan for his debate with President Carter asked whether the papers had been stolen. Also, no one asked whether the papers had come from a disaffected Carter supporter or someone working directly for Mr. Reagan, the officials said. The one objection raised to keeping and using the papers in the Presidential campaign, the officials said, came from Myles Martel, a debating specialist who acted as a consultant to the Reagan campaign. When he was told about the Carter papers several days before the debate, Mr. Martel recommended that they be returned immediately. The suggestion was not seriously considered.

The United States agreed formally today to a compromise document on security and human rights to end the East-West conference in Madrid and possibly open the way for high-level Soviet-American meetings. The conference, which has been under way nearly three years, is expected to be finished in the next week. All that remains for discussion, American officials said, is a demand by Malta for a Mediterranean security meeting. The demand is opposed by most of the 34 other participants in the East-West meeting.

The Reagan Administration's crackdown on apparel imports from the Far East will push up some fall clothing prices by at least 20 percent, according to American companies that make and market the clothing. About 75 American companies manufacture low-priced clothing at plants in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and China and then sell it in the United States. They charge that the Reagan Administration ban has been imposed capriciously and in some cases has left a shipment of suit coats sitting on American piers while the pants remain in Hong Kong. The Reagan Administration ordered the restriction on the ground that the imports had risen too quickly, preventing domestic manufacturers from increasing their production and their labor force as the economy recovers from recession.

Lebanese Army units and Shiite Moslem militiamen clashed in the heart of Beirut today after Government security forces tried to evict Shiite squatters from an abandoned Jewish school. The shootout began about 10 A.M., peaked at midday and continued into the night. It was the worst fighting in the capital since the army took control of the Greater Beirut area in September and early October, after the withdrawal of Israeli forces. As news of the fighting spread the streets of West Beirut became largely deserted. People closeted themselves in their homes or listened to the fighting in small groups sitting on their balconies. Most shopkeepers, fearing that the clashes might spread, rolled down their steel shutters and closed for the day.

Extensive delays on the city's subways will persist at least through the end of the summer so that repairs can be made at 400 sites where tracks are believed to be weak or poorly secured, the New York City Transit Authority said yesterday. The assessment of the effect of the track problems came as a surprise even to transit officials, who as recently as Tuesday said they expected the delays to ease next week. The officials were at a loss to explain how the rails, all 723 miles of which are inspected twice a week, had fallen into such disrepair. Queens and West Side Hardest Hit Until the repairs are made, motormen are to proceed at 10 miles an hour through the 400 ''red tag'' areas identified as potentially hazardous after a recent rash of derailments. There are so many of the areas that the authority has taken to hanging portable banks of yellow lights in the tunnels to augment its regular signals.

The Federal laboratory system has ''serious deficiencies'' that limit the quality of its work and the nation's ability to compete against foreign technological research, the White House Science Council said today. The system, which consumes more than a third of the Federal research and development budget, was studied for a year by the council, the highest-ranking group of scientists who advise the White House. The council concluded that many laboratories suffer from poor management, pursue outdated missions, are unable to attract topflight scientists, perform low-quality work and otherwise fail to meet high standards. The report was couched in general terms and made few references to specific laboratories. But at a news conference today, David Packard, chairman of the Hewlett-Packard Company and former Deputy Secretary of Defense, cited flaws at some of the nation's large and prestigious Federal laboratories.

Salvadoran and American officials say the Salvadoran military appears to have regained the momentum in the civil war with an offensive that began a month ago in several provinces. American advisers acknowledge that the soldiers have met little resistance, and they say that if the army retreats to the barracks, as it has done repeatedly in the past, the guerrillas could regain a stronger position. Moreover, the guerrillas were inactive during last year's rainy season, between May and September, but returned with renewed force in October. Despite these reservations, there is a new enthusiasm among Salvadoran officers and the American advisers, who have been among the most pessimistic about El Salvador's military abilities.

There are two subways that daily whisk commuters from one corner of West Berlin under a slice of East Berlin and then back out again, to what is sometimes called the free world. On the darkened East Berlin stretch of tunnel, the old U-Bahn stops are bricked up and guarded by grim-looking representatives of the East German Volkspolizei, or people's police. Joshing and flirting in the rattling subway, West Berlin teen-agers make this eerie ideological passage without any perceptible unease. At the Friedrichstrasse stop, which is kept open on the Communist side, pensioners and free-world derelicts alight, stock up on cigarettes and whisky at a hard-currency, duty-free shop run by the East Germans and then shuttle back to West Berlin.

The State Department said today that the two United States journalists who died in Honduras last month were killed by a United States-made land mine planted on the Honduran side of the border by Nicaraguan military forces. The department released its report on the June 21 deaths of Dial Torgerson, a correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, and Richard Cross, a photographer on assignment for U.S. News & World Report magazine.

Federal agents today arrested four more people, two of them Guatemalan diplomats, in connection with the kidnapping of a former Salvadoran Ambassador's wife. A total of nine people were charged with the July 8 abduction of Clelia Eleanor Quinonez, 53 years old, from outside the home she and her husband have in the Miami suburb of Coral Gables. She was rescued unharmed here late Thursday night. Her husband, Roberto Quinonez Meza, an export-import dealer in Miami, was El Salvador's Ambassador here from 1977 to 1980.

Progress has been made in Chinese-American talks on nuclear energy, and the two sides have agreed to hold more talks soon, the New China News Agency said today.