What was going on when I was born?

Searchers combed the snow-dusted woods near the international airport here today, recovering bodies and searching for clues to the jetliner crash Thursday that killed a 248 American soldiers going home from the Middle East. The investigators said they still did not know what caused the disaster. There were no survivors among the 256 people aboard, who included eight crew members. The chartered DC-8 had stopped to refuel at Gander. ''I have not specifically and categorically ruled out anything at this time,'' Peter Boag, the chief investigator from the Canadian Aviation Safety Board, told reporters at a briefing in the airport terminal late this afternoon.

Intensifying a bitter dispute over who first established the cause of AIDS, officials of the Pasteur Institute, a leading French research organization, announced today that it had sued the United States Government. The director of the institute, Raymond Dedonder, contended at a news conference that its research team headed by Dr. Luc Montagnier found the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome and developed the first test to detect antibodies to the virus in 1983, a year before an American team led by Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute. Professor Dedonder said that after months of fruitless negotiations with American officials over recognition of the institute's contributions to AIDS research and related commercial rights, the institute was suing to have its ''rights recognized in the name of the scientific ethic.'' But Dr. Gallo, the American researcher, said in a telephone interview that the Pasteur Institute was exaggerating its contributions. ''We helped them a lot more than they helped us,'' he said.

The United States today announced its readiness to serve as a guarantor of a peace settlement in Afghanistan that would include both a withdrawal of Soviet troops and an end to American aid to the rebels. Formal notification of the American position was made in a letter sent Wednesday to the United Nations Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, and made public in a speech tonight by John C. Whitehead, Deputy Secretary of State. He said the letter had conveyed the Administration's acceptance of a draft text of a document being negotiated indirectly between Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the United Nations as a mediator. The text, which has not been made public, reportedly includes provisions for noninterference.

Four Cuban Embassy employees tried to kidnap a former Cuban official here today but were foiled when about 30 bystanders intervened, the police said. The four embassy employees, including a vice consul waving a pistol, were arrested after the bystanders and a passing taxi blocked the Cubans' car and helped the former official to escape, the police said. The police identified the former official as Manuel Antonio Sanchez Perez and said he had been a senior economic official in the Government of Fidel Castro. Spanish Interior Ministry officials said that he had asked for political asylum 10 days ago during a stopover en route to East Berlin and that it had been provisionally granted.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted yesterday to raise bus and subway fares to $1, tolls on major bridges and tunnels to $1.75 and commuter railroad fares by 11 percent. The increases take effect Jan. 1. The increases, expected since October, when the authority projected a $267 million operating deficit for 1986, were approved at a special meeting of the authority's board at the Roosevelt Hotel. They are projected to raise an additional $198.8 million next year. That estimate takes into account an expected drop in subway and bus ridership of 1 to 2 percent.

The state's charges against Dr. Elliot M. Gross, the city's Chief Medical Examiner, accuse him of improperly failing to determine that the deaths of four people in police custody were homicides. He also deviated from standard professional practice in five other cases, according to the charges. The charges, made July 30 by the State Health Department's Office of Professional Medical Conduct, have not been fully made public. A copy was obtained by The New York Times.