What was going on when I was born?

President Reagan said Friday that the meeting this week between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko of the Soviet Union ''did not resolve our differences,'' but that it had helped in reducing world tensions. In a statement after meeting with Shultz for 40 minutes at the White House, Mr. Reagan said that the Secretary of State and his Soviet counterpart ''had a full and serious exchange of views on key global questions'' in Stockholm. The President also said that the United States and its Western allies would soon propose a long-awaited package of ''practical and concrete measures'' in Stockholm ''to reduce the risk of surprise attack, or war by accident or misunderstanding.''

Two advocates of Puerto Rican independence, the eighth and ninth in the last year, were found guilty yesterday of criminal contempt of court for refusing to testify before a Federal grand jury investigating nearly 40 unsolved New York City bombings. The F.A.L.N., the group advocating independence for Puerto Rico, has taken responsibility for the blasts. Like seven people convicted, on similar charges in the last year, the latest two found guilty, Michelle Miller and Silvia Baraldini, held that the grand jury was a ''political tool'' of the Government to attack the Puerto Rican independence movement. They vowed they would not ''collaborate.''

Democratic Party leaders today rejected the Rev. Jesse Jackson's demand that they alter rules for choosing delegates to the national convention, rules that he regards as racially discriminatory. In an effort to resolve a long-standing dispute, representatives of Walter F. Mondale had joined Mr. Jackson today in endorsing a compromise. The endorsement represented a major concession, because the Mondale campaign had previously said it considered the party rules inviolate. The rule now requires that a candidate win 20 percent of the primary or caucus vote to receive a proportional share of a state's delegates to the Presidential nominating convention.

The nation's economy grew at an annual rate of 4.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 1983 while inflation remained subdued, the Commerce Department reported today. The pace of growth in the final three months of the year was less than half the recovery's 9.7 percent burst last spring. But the Government called the slowdown encouraging for this year's prospects. The report nevertheless pointed to some trouble spots. High interest rates and the high-valued dollar, factors that many economists attribute to Federal budget deficits, caused a sharp deterioration in the country's trade balance and stunted what otherwise would have been much stronger growth in the overall economy.

Law-enforcement officials report growing evidence of a substantial increase in the number of killers who strike again and again, sometimes traveling from city to city, choosing strangers as victims, then moving on to kill again. They say the killers are extremely difficult to catch because they are often highly intelligent, kill without apparent motive and leave few clues. Most people commonly call such killers mass murderers, but Justice Department officials draw a distinction between ''mass murderers,'' whose multiple killings usually occur in one spot at one time, and ''serial murderers,'' who kill repeatedly over a period of time, often over a wide area. According to a Justice Department study, there have been more than 30 cases in the past decade in which a single killer has murdered at least six people over a period of time, in most cases choosing strangers as the victims. In the past five years alone, the study said, there have been at least 17 men who over time killed a minimum of 10 people each and at least nine who killed 20 people or more. Investigators here said they believe that one man has killed at least 13 girls and young women, and possibly as many as 21, in the past 18 months. The killer is called the ''Green River Killer'' because he dumped the bodies of some of his victims beside a scenic river southeast of here. Law-enforcement officials say there have been isolated examples of such criminals in the past, including ''Jack the Ripper,'' who terrorized prostitutes in 19th century London.

President Hosni Mubarak's senior foreign policy adviser said Friday that Egypt, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization would meet in March or April to work out a new approach on negotiations for the return of Israeli-occupied territories. ''Since the time is not right for Israel to join us,'' the adviser, Osama el-Baz, said in an interview, ''the United States should act as a go-between.'' He also called on President Reagan to appoint a high-level panel to review and reassess the Middle Eastern policies of the United States in the same way that a commission headed by former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger recently completed a study on Central America. Mr. Baz made his remarks in a rare interview granted one day after the Islamic Conference decided to invite Egypt to resume its membership in the organization, from which it was suspended after it signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. The presidential adviser said the invitation, extended Thursday at a meeting of Islamic leaders in Casablanca, Morocco, was ''a corrective step in recognition of the role Egypt has played in the past, that it now plays and will play in the future struggle for the Arab and Palestinian cause.'' But he said the Egyptian government had reserved its decision on the invitation until it could be assured by a delegation from the meeting that no conditions had been attached. In Casablanca, it was announced that a delegation consisting of the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Guinea and Iraq and the secretary general of the Islamic Conference Organization, would visit Mubarak in Cairo soon.

Ah, sweet bird of opportunity. Since last Saturday, the airplanes flying south from Washington have been filling with Redskin fans, wagging beer cans across the aisles at one another in high glee, rocking the cabins with bursts of the fight song of their beloved Hogs, bringing their portion of an estimated $60 million in Super Bowl spending here to Tampa, a city in thrall. In the coach section Tuesday night John Kiefer, who has warmed a seat in the Redskins' home stadiums 31 years, was content with his lot. He had his old friend and best man, their wives, four tickets to the Super Bowl and a week in a condominium on the Gulf of Mexico for $40 a night. He was impressed with the price. Last year, he had to pay $100 a night to root for the Redskins. But he thought about all the fans left behind in Washington with no tickets and predicted solemnly that Congress would mount an investigation. From the distant West Coast, in lesser numbers, have come the followers of the Los Angeles Raiders, the two air trains converging on a city giddy with a sense of coming of age and dripping with gray rain. In the wake of the hard Christmas freeze, Tampa's tropical foliage lies black and rubbery on the ground; its icy skyline of glassy new buildings reflects dense mist. But expectations here burn hot and bright. J. Leonard Levy, known as ''Super Fan'' here, remains unfazed.

The Reagan administration Friday sued nine companies and nineteen individuals to require them to clean up contamination by the toxic chemical dioxin at six sites in Missouri. The six sites named in the lawsuit, including four horse arenas at which dioxin-laden oil was said to have been sprayed to control dust, are among at least 37 places in Missouri contaminated by the toxic chemica, an unwanted byproduct of the manufacutre of herbicides and other chemicals. Dioxin is known to cause cancer and birth defects in laboratory animals, but long-term health effects on humans are in dispute. Robin Wood, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency said today that the civil suit was intended to establish the liability of the defendants, including a chemical plant and a waste oil hauler, for manufacturing and disposal practices that the Government alleges caused the contamination.

Six people were killed and 25 injured when a bus and a truck collided near the central Yugoslav town of Banya Luka today, the official Tanyug press agency said.

They burn people here. Not often - only by way of justice, when lightning strikes other people and the calamity is deemed to be an act of sorcery that must be avenged. Then a witch doctor, using bones or a magical mirror, will detect the person who has brought down the lightning. And that person will first be beaten, then tied to a tree in a frenzy of retribution and doused with gasoline and burned. In the last two weeks, the lightning has struck six times around here, and six people have been burned. Under one charred and blasted tree, whose blackness distinguishes it from greenery nearby, a visitor can still find a mound of ash and, in it, remnants of human bone. No one remarks much on the somber testimony to a custom that predates a tenuous modernity.

A Newsweek article last spring, about four Nicaraguans and their experiences in that country's revolution, misled readers about how information for it had been gathered, but editors at the magazine are unsure how to deal with the error. A central premise of the article was that the reporter had been in regular contact with the four Nicaraguans since the revolution began. In fact, she said in a recent interview, she had known only one of them that long. The error, according to Beth Nissen, the reporter, and to Michael Ruby, an assistant managing editor who investigated the incident, was a result of an editor's misinterpretation.

Le Monde took a cautious step toward changing its image today by starting to publish photographs on a regular basis.