February 9, 1983

The Reagan Administration, seeking what it terms ''an active, positive human rights policy,'' issued its annual human rights report today. The document cited serious human rights violations in nations around the world, including some that are friendly to the United States. The 1,300-page report to Congress contains long descriptions of human rights violations in the Soviet Union and eastern-bloc nations as well as Middle East and Asian countries with strained ties to the United States. It also lists examples of torture, brutality and violence in South Africa, Pakistan and El Salvador, where the Administration has sought to improve relations.

DEEP golden yellow stars tinged with brown, rough green-skinned hearts pockmarked with hexagons and musty yellow ovoid shapes striped with purple. Among the monotonous array of their more common seasonal relatives - apples, bananas and oranges -these fruits may still seem strangely out of place, like bits of tropical exotica that conjure up visions of hot, sunny days and lush vegetation at a time when winter is at its most unpleasant. The eye of the curious shopper will be caught by any of these unfamiliar shapes at fruit stands, and every year there are more and more of them to see. What is a cherimoya, the hexagonally marked, heart-shaped fruit? Feeling it, smelling it, even shaking it will not yield a clue. The exterior offers no hint of the buttery white flesh and slippery black seeds inside.

Even before Governor Cuomo publicly announced the appointment of Roderick Chu as the state's new Commissioner of Taxation and Finance, Mr. Chu was deep in meetings with administration budget aides and tax agency officials in a quest for a few hundred million dollars. ''With a systems person in taxation, you can save a couple of hundred million dollars,'' Mr. Cuomo said bluntly. Indeed, it was as a ''systems person'' that Mr. Chu made his first mark on the State of New York. From December of 1980 until last April, Mr. Chu, as head of a team of consultants, charted the complex course of steering the state from its archaic and undisciplined method of accounting to a sounder footing known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

Making money flying airplanes is not as easy as it once was, and an established but unprofitable American carrier, Trans World Airlines, may eventually be spun off by its corporate parent. Some Wall Street analysts and investors think the public offering of five million shares of T.W.A. announced Monday could be the first step by the Trans World Corporation to divest itself of the carrier. Not counting the airline, Trans World maintains a core of highly profitable companies assembled under a diversification strategy fashioned by L. Edwin Smart, the chairman, president and chief executive officer of Trans World. Today, these nonairline businesses account for all the corporation's profit and 35 percent of its total revenue. ''I think it's the initial step toward perhaps the eventual disposition of the airline,'' said Julius Maldutis, an airline analyst for Salomon Brothers. ''It affords top senior management of the parent total flexibility.'' At minimum, analysts say, the stock offering puts the parent company in a much better position to spin off the airline if it chooses in the future.

In its first major diversification move in nearly two decades, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company announced yesterday that it had agreed to acquire the Celeron Corporation, a fast-growing natural gas company, in an exchange of stock valued at more than $740 million. Goodyear, the world's biggest tire maker, has been trying to reduce its dependence on the slow-growing tire market by entering businesses not linked to the automobile industry. The company, based in Akron, Ohio, derives more than 80 percent of its sales and earnings from automotive products. About a year ago it formed a group to seek diversification possibilities.