What was going on when I was born?

A Federal appeals court panel today struck down Government regulations that require cable systems to carry without charge all television stations that are watched by a significant number of people in their communities. The three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals here said that in their present form the Federal regulations ''are fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.'' The regulations, imposed in the mid-1960's by the Federal Communications Commission, were designed to protect independent local broadcasters against competition from cable operators. The court's decision was a setback for local broadcasters generally and especially for independent broadcasters that are not affiliated with major networks and that appeal to relatively narrow audiences, such as UHF stations broadcasting educational or religious material. They would lose the right to demand transmission through cable systems.

An earthen dam in the northern Italian mountains burst today, sending forth what one survivor called ''a wall of mud and water'' and killing at least 80 people. Officials said they expected the death toll to rise to 200 or more. The dam collapsed at about 12:20 P.M. (6:20 A.M., New York time) and sent water sweeping through the mountain village of Stava, washing away everything in its path. The 150-foot-wide wave of mud and water destroyed three hotels, part of a fourth and two dozen houses in one of Italy's greenest and most popular mountain resort areas.

President Reagan is to return to the White House from the Bethesda Naval Medical Center on Saturday, one week after undergoing surgery in which a cancerous growth was removed from his colon. ''The news today is the President of the United States will sleep in the White House tomorrow night,'' an elated Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, said today. ''Doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital today gave the President the green light to go home.'' Mr. Reagan is scheduled to leave his third-floor hospital suite in early afternoon, shortly after making his weekly Saturday radio speech. Accompanied by his wife, Nancy, Mr. Reagan is to be driven to the White House where Administration officials and staff aides plan to welcome him on the South Lawn.

David Bathurst, the chairman of Christie's New York and London operations, who has admitted that he falsely reported the number of paintings sold in a New York auction in 1981, resigned yesterday. The resignation, believed to be the first by a major New York auction house official accused of making a false public statement, immediately followed an announcement that Christie's had reached a settlement in the case with the city's Department of Consumer Affairs involving an $80,000 fine and the suspension of auctioneer licenses. Surrender of Licenses The settlement with the Consumer Affairs Department, which licenses both auction houses and auctioneers, had required Mr. Bathurst voluntarily to surrender his license to conduct auctions in New York for two years. He will also resign from the board of directors of Christie's parent company, Christie's International P.L.C., but will remain a director of Christie's in London.

President Reagan, moving quickly to fill the post, today appointed James C. Miller 3d, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, to succeed David A. Stockman as director of the Office of Management and Budget. The appointment will give Mr. Miller, a conservative economist, responsibility for the preparation of the budgets that the President sends to Congress each winter. The appointment, which is subject to Senate confirmation, had been a topic of speculation since Mr. Stockman announced last week that he would leave the Administration Aug. 1 for a senior position in the Wall Street investment firm of Salomon Brothers. Speculation intensified in recent days as several others under consideration removed themselves from the running.

The United States offered a reward today of up to $100,000 for information leading to ''the effective prosecution and punishment'' of those who killed six Americans in San Salvador last month. They were among 13 people slain in the incident. It is the first time the Administration has used a section of a 1984 counterterrorism act that allows the Government to pay up to $500,000 in rewards to those who help catch terrorists. Earlier this month Secretary of State George P. Shultz said the Administration was considering offering a reward for the two Shiite Moslem hijackers who beat and then shot to death Robert Dean Stethem, a Navy diver, aboard Trans World Airlines Flight 847 in Beirut. But the announcement today was limited to the killers of four off-duty marines and two businessmen slain June 19 along with seven other people near a restaurant in San Salvador.

A Bronx man described in testimony as a drug dealer and cocaine addict was acquitted of murder yesterday but convicted on reduced charges of manslaughter in the killing of 10 people in a Brooklyn apartment last year. The man, Christopher Thomas, sat without visible emotion as the jury, after deliberating 16 hours over three days, returned the verdict in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. In interviews after court adjourned, some jurors said they were convinced that Mr. Thomas had intended to kill the eight children and two women he found in the apartment on April 15, 1984, but that they believed he had acted under extreme emotional distress and the influence of drugs. Mitigating Circumstances Under the charge by Justice Ronald J. Aiello, jurors were to convict Mr. Thomas of second-degree murder if they found he had intended to kill, but to reduce the charges to first-degree manslaughter if they found that mitigating circumstances - such as emotional duress - were a reasonable explanation for his actions.

The Israeli state radio reported today that the Soviet Union had offered an arrangement under which diplomatic relations between the two countries could be restored. They were broken off in 1967. The report said that Moscow had in effect offered to restore the interrupted flow of Soviet Jews to Israel in consideration for Moscow's participation in the solution of Middle East disputes, according to the report.

In a move that conservationists said was another major step toward ending all commercial hunting of whales, the Soviet Union said this week that it would cease commercial whaling by 1987. The announcement by the Soviet Union, now the second-largest whaling nation, came at the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission, which was held this week in Bournemouth, England. The conservationists said the chief reason that the Soviet Union had decided to end whaling was the imposition of sanctions by the United States earlier this year that cut in half the amount of fish the Russians may take from this country's territorial waters. First Use of Provision Washington acted in April after the Soviet Union exceeded the permissible whale catch set by the Whaling Commission. It was the first time the Packwood-Magnuson amendments to the Fisheries Conservation Act, which require cutting fishing quotas of any nation that violates the rules of the Whaling Commission, had been invoked.

The manager of Israel's biggest pork factory sits behind his desk wearing a long white butcher's coat on his back and a worried wrinkle on his brow. The sign on the wall above him reads: ''Promote Pork. Run Over a Chicken.'' But pig jokes are not appropriate these days, he grumbles. Israel's estimated one million pork-eaters are under siege. Two laws pending before Parliament - one supported by Prime Minister Shimon Peres -would make the sale of pork illegal.

A washed-out rail link between the central and western regions of the Sudan has been restored, and shipments of emergency food supplies to famine-affected provinces will be resumed soon, United States officials said this week. On July 7, rains washed out a railway bridge, causing two locomotives to derail and halting food shipments to tens of thousands of famine victims in Darfur and Kordofan Provinces. Relief officials said then that a major disaster was imminent.

President Daniel Ortega Saavedra, addressing a vast crowd on the sixth anniversary of the Nicaraguan revolution, asserted today that it was the United States, not Nicaragua, that was supporting terrorism. The Nicaraguan leader rejected Reagan Administration charges, the latest of which were made in a diplomatic note delivered this week, that Nicaragua was backing terrorists. ''Nicaragua has neither practiced nor supported terrorism, nor has it been involved in any terrorist act,'' Mr. Ortega said. He said Nicaraguans were ''victims of United States terrorism'' because anti-Government guerrillas backed by the United States had attacked targets inside Nicaragua.