What was going on when I was born?

A surge in food prices pushed the Consumer Price Index up six-tenths of 1 percent in January, the largest increase since April, the Labor Department reported today. Much of the rise was a result of bad weather, economists said, so the January increase alone was not a sign of a broader, immediate resurgence of inflation. But the report did create some anxiety because, as the economy continues to expand, economists are increasingly of the view that inflation is more likely to accelerate than to slow down. The January increase in the index followed a two-tenths of 1 percent rise in December and an average monthly rise of four-tenths of 1 percent since early 1983. The index rose 3.8 percent for all of 1983.

Heavy exchanges of tank and artillery fire erupted across a broad front here tonight, ending a daylong lull in fighting that followed a cease-fire announced by a Saudi mediator. Shells reportedly landed at the Lebanese Army's key position at Suk al Gharb, nine miles southeast of the center of Beirut, in the southern suburbs dominated by Shiite Moslems, and along the road to Beirut International Airport. The Lebanese Christian Phalangist radio said heavy fighting had broken out between the Lebanese Army and Shiite militia forces in the Galerie Samaan area along the green line that divides mostly Christian East Beirut from Moslem West Beirut. East and West Beirut Hit Shells fell in both East and West Beirut, and the Phalangist radio said Baabda, the site of the presidential palace, and other Christian villages nearby had also come under fire. Anti- Government Druse positions at Aitat, near Suk al Gharb, were reportedly shelled as well.

Congressional negotiators agreed today to consider a leading Senate Republican's proposal to cut President Reagan's request for military spending authority next year. The change would be from a 13 percent increase to one of 5 percent, after making up for the effects of inflation. The new proposal from Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, was rejected in general terms by White House officials, but Republicans suggested it might eventually be accepted if the figure could be ''fleshed out'' with specifics. Democratic leaders praised Mr. Domenici's suggestion but said next year's rise in the military budget should be cut back even further.

A sniper fired repeatedly into a crowded schoolyard in south-central Los Angeles today, killing a 10-year-old girl and injuring at least 11 other people, three critically. Almost four hours after the shootings began at 2:23 P.M., members of a Los Angeles Police Department paramilitary unit entered a home across the street from the schoolyard and found the body of a man they said was the sniper. They identified him as Tyrone Mitchell, 28 years old. The police said he appeared to have killed himself. Before entering, the police fired at least 16 canisters of tear gas into the house.

The commander of detectives in Manhattan will retire and two other officers have been ordered transferred because of their handling of the Pennsylvania Station sniper investigation. In a brief statement issued yesterday, Benjamin Ward, the Police Commissioner, declared that a departmental inquiry had found ''there was a serious lapse of judgment on the part of ranking officers responsible for the case in that they did not notify their superiors at headquarters of the investigation or its seriousness.'' There have been six shootings, none of them fatal, in the Penn Station area since last April, but not until the sixth, last Tuesday, did Commissioner Ward and his top aides learn that field investigators had linked the shootings. Commander Held Culpable According to a department spokesman, Alice T. McGillion, Deputy Chief Rudolph J. Ponzini, the Manhattan detective commander, was among those who knew of the link but said nothing to headquarters.

Military officers, starting to assess 18 months of experience in Lebanon, have found that shelling by 16-inch guns on the battleship New Jersey was far less effective than hoped, that a new device for spotting enemy artillery worked well and that the venerable C ration may be a thing of the past. The biggest problem, many officers here said in interviews, was that political leaders did not carefully define the mission for the military, and thus that mission was never fully understood down the chain of command and by the troops in the field. They said they also found that intelligence gathering and analysis were inadequate, that the lack of good maps of Beirut impeded fighting there and that accurate Soviet-made missiles may have made divebombing obsolete. Some of the comments by the officers reflected the findings of the commission headed by Adm. Robert L. J. Long, the retired officer who led an inquiry into the truck bombing of the Marine compound in Beirut that took 241 American lives in October, and similar Congressional and newspaper inquiries.

When he was hired last summer as a $63,150-a-year deputy administrator in New York City's Human Resources Administration, he called himself Courtney Isaac Saunders. His colleagues knew him as ''Ike'' and say he spoke well, dressed well and worked well. Yesterday, city officials announced that the former official had been arrested Thursday night in Washington under his real name, Isaac J. Coleman. The New York City warrant accused him of falsifying his past history and relying on his city title to run up thousands of dollars in personal debts that he charged to the city.

It was once a fine American car, but after nearly five years of sporadic maintenance and brutal winters it finally gave up one day on Kalinin Prospekt, a broad avenue that sweeps down to the Kremlin. The car could not be left there long, on a stretch used by motorcades of the Soviet elite. But it was too heavy to push, and the desultory reputation of Soviet tow crews offered little hope. Wearily, the Soviet interpreter checked the number, telephoned and entered the request. What followed stood assumptions about Soviet service industries on their head. Within two hours, a tow-truck driver made contact by radio-telephone to arrange a rendezvous. Half an hour later, he had winched the car onto his Italian-made rig, towed it around the corner to the American Embassy and deposited it neatly at the curb.

The Security Council unanimously agreed today to accept Brunei as the 159th member of the United Nations.

The authorities have been accused of filing trumped-up charges against a lawyer investigating possible police misconduct. The accusation comes from another lawyer, Wladyslaw Sila-Nowicki, a legal adviser to the outlawed Solidarity union and a defender of political dissidents. In an open letter to the Prime Minister, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, he protested the arrest in January of Maciej Bednarkiewicz, who represented the mother of 19-year-old Grzegorz Przemyk, who died of a beating after being held by the police and whose funeral last March turned into a silent protest march by 20,000 people.

Defense Minister Dmitri F. Ustinov said today that the selection of Konstantin U. Chernenko as party chief had the ''unanimous approval'' of the armed forces, and that Mr. Chernenko was giving ''great attention'' to strengthening Soviet defenses. In the address to what were termed ''party activists'' of the military, Marshal Ustinov also offered a strong criticism of the United States, accusing Washington of everything from posing a ''special danger to peace'' through seeking ''world domination.'' It was his second such criticism in two days.

French truck drivers began lifting their eight-day- old blockade of the country's roads today, after accepting - in some cases with bitter disappointment - their leaders' statement that the Government was ready to examine all their demands. For many of the drivers, whose blockades led to serious economic difficulties in France and a backwash of traffic complications in neighboring countries, the end of the protest meant going home without the concessions they demanded. Reporters at some of truck blockades told of drivers who wept in rage, saying their leadership had failed them. In fact, it appeared that the Government had played successfully on the fatigue and differences among the protesters, made up of independent owner- operators and salaried drivers, many of them working under percentage arrangements for small entrepreneurs.