December 7, 1981

New York State will have to provide help if the Rangers hockey team and the Knickerbockers basketball team are to be kept in New York City, according to the city's Corporation Counsel. The counsel, Allen G. Schwartz, is the city's negotiator in talks with Madison Square Garden aimed at keeping the teams in New York City. A variety of approaches, including governmental takeover of the arena, are being discussed. ''We've got to get the state to come forward,'' Mr. Schwartz said. Mayor Koch said separately that the Gulf & Western Corporation, which owns the Garden, would have to share the burden, as would the labor unions whose members work there.

Of all the ills afflicting the human race, none seems more soluble - and at the same time more intractable - than hunger. On the one hand, enough grain is produced now to provide every man, woman and child on earth with some 3,000 calories a day. That is more than the average level of consumption in the United States and about 50 percent above what is now considered to be a minimum acceptable level of caloric consumption. On the other hand, chronic malnutrition persists, often in countries where plenty of food is available, such as in India and Brazil. Uncertainty as to Numbers There is widespread uncertainty as to the actual number of malnourished people. But no one challenges the fact that a minimum of 100 million to 200 million people, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southeast Asia, are severely malnourished, in the sense that they do not have the energy to function normally. Hundreds of millions more would eat better, and possible more, if they could, nutritionists maintain.

The biggest snowstorm since early 1978 dumped up to two feet of snow on New England today, closing the Boston airport for most of the day, shutting off power to 92,000 people and causing at least three deaths. About 200 people were stranded on Nantucket Island, where they had traveled Saturday to take part in an annual Christmas shopping festival. High winds and rough seas prevented the use of the only ferry boat to the mainland and shut the island's airport temporarily. The National Weather Service here said the surprise snowstorm, blown by winds of up to 50 miles an hour, was the worst early winter storm since Dec. 5, 1926, and the biggest since the blizzard in February 1978 that paralyzed the Middle West and the Northeast with up to 40 inches of snow.

In this sprawling steel city, the slogan ''City of Champions'' has replaced ''Steel City'' as the preferred motto of the Chamber of Commerce. Local businessmen are now apt to direct a visitor's attention to the rash of modern downtown development rather than to the famous steel mills strung along the Monongahela River. And employees of the United States Steel Corporation, for many the cornerstone of this city's identity, can be seen at corporate headquarters here wearing Marathon Oil buttons pinned to their lapels. Despite the attempts to change this city's self-image, some here are still less than comfortable with Big Steel's $6.5 billion offer for the nation's 17th-largest oil company. ''It goes a long way in diluting the role steel has had in Pittsburgh,'' said Robert F. Sekerka, head of the metallurgy department at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Representative Frederick W. Richmond of Brooklyn announced yesterday that he was reviewing his $100,000 outside annual income ''to make sure I am fully complying with all rules of the House Ethics Committee.'' Mr. Richmond's statement, issued through his attorney, followed a ruling by a Federal judge in St. Louis that the 58-year-old Democratic Congressman had ''feigned'' retirement from a manufacturing company to collect the $100,000 annually as a pension. House ethics rules limit Congressmen to earned outside income of 15 percent of their Federal salary, or about $9,600 a year. Before Mr. Richmond formally relinquished the chairmanship of the company in 1978, he said, he had obtained a letter from the House Ethics Committee acknowledging that payment for past services, such as a pension, was not considered earned income.