November 23, 1982

Developers of Herald Center, Manhattan's first shopping mall, disclosed design plans yesterday for the $50 million multilevel retail project at the site of the old Korvettes building on Herald Square.

Twenty-five milk companies have admitted that they overcharged consumers in the New York metropolitan area for a decade through a price-fixing and distribution conspiracy, the State Attorney General announced yesterday. Although the Attorney General, Robert Abrams, said the exact amount of the overcharges was impossible to determine, the companies have agreed to customer refunds totaling $6.7 million. As part of guilty pleas to criminal charges of price fixing, the companies were also fined $500,000, for a total settlement of $7.2 million. A plan for refunding the $6.7 million to millions of consumers will be worked out in the next three to four months, Mr. Abrams said. Two ideas under consideration, he noted, were lower prices on individual sales or coupons to be used for rebates when buying milk.

In their first exchange since the shift of Soviet leadership, President Reagan and Yuri V. Andropov, the new Soviet Communist Party leader, left the impasse in Soviet-American relations essentially unrelieved by declaring their desire for arms control without offering new public concessions. Despite rising domestic uneasiness about the pace of his military buildup and speculation about the opportunities offered by the change of leadership in the Kremlin, President Reagan signaled tonight that he intended to stay on his previous course, pressing ahead with major new weapons systems as the best way to get Moscow to meet his terms for arms control. Whether by coincidence or design, Mr. Reagan's speech urging Congress to approve a new $26 billion program for the MX intercontinental missile came just hours after Mr. Andropov made a major speech in which he declared that ''the policy of detente is by no means a past stage'' but belongs to the future. Although both leaders repeated past Soviet and American commitments to peace and satisfactory arms control measures, Mr. Andropov spurned suggestions from Washington that Moscow show its peaceful intent with what he called ''a preliminary concession,'' and Mr. Reagan declined to moderate his own nuclear strategy or pause in his buildup to see how the new Soviet leadership proceeds.

The Speaker of the House, a Democrat, and the Republican Senate majority leader agreed today to press, in the post-election session, for an increase in the gasoline tax to finance a $5.5 billion program to repair highways and bridges and to assist urban mass transit systems. The two leaders agreed to support the legislation without waiting for President Reagan's decision on the measure. The action signaled a new spirit of cooperation between the Congressional leaders that could presage a close relationship in the 98th Congress, threatening Mr. Reagan's ability to take the legislative initiative. While the President has described the proposal as a highway repair program, the majority leader, Howard H. Baker Jr., Republican of Tennessee, called it a ''highway jobs'' program, and the Speaker, Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., said, ''Our first priority must be to put the millions of unemployed back to work.''

The Dow Jones industrial average plummeted 21.25 points yesterday, finishing at 1,000, as traders and investors engaged in the classic Wall Street exercise of ''selling on the news.'' In this case, the news was the Federal Reserve's half-point reduction, after the close of trading Friday, in the discount rate charged on loans to financial institutions. The rate is now 9 percent. In the credit markets, prices of Treasury bonds plunged as traders and investors decided that the Fed's move was insufficient reason to warrant holding large inventories of bonds or making additional purchases. (Page D14.)