February 18, 1984

The New York City Transit Authority said yesterday that its new Japanese subway cars had failed their first two performance tests because of minor problems with brakes and door switches. The authority had hoped to have 325 of the cars running on the IRT Lexington Avenue line by the spring of 1985, but transit officials said they now considered this ''extremely optimistic.'' ''A four-to-six-month delay wouldn't surprise me in the least,'' the authority's senior vice president for operations, David F. Feeley, said. To Continue Using Old Cars The delay will mean the authority will continue using its present IRT cars, some of which were built in the late 40's.

State governments have reacted quite differently to the threat of the pesticide EDB in food, confusing consumers and causing health officials to look for a way to standardize their testing and enforcement programs. Some states are rigorously testing products and enforcing the guidelines the Environmental Protection Agency set this month for safe levels of EDB, or ethylene dibromide. Other states have set standards stricter than the Federal ones. Still others have taken little or no action. In some states, contaminated products that had been ordered removed from grocery stores were allowed back on the shelves after the Federal standards were issued.

Governor Cuomo has blocked state funds for the publication of the official papers of his predecessor, Hugh L. Carey, saying printing the papers costs too much and should be discontinued. The move would end a tradition going back to the 1870's. The decision prompted complaints from historians and an outcry from the Legislature, which had frequently been at odds with Mr. Carey. A $700,060 contract between the state and the City University of New York to print seven volumes of Mr. Carey's papers had been pending in the Governor's office for several weeks.

Officials said today that Israel was planning for a long-term occupation of a zone in southern Lebanon, in view of the Lebanese Government's decision to cancel a security accord with Israel. Final decisions on the zone's boundaries have not been made. But officials said the army would pull back from its positions at the Awali River to a line closer to the Israeli-Lebanese border and would move out of such major population centers as the coastal city of Sidon. The move would decrease the number of Lebanese civilians under Israeli control to about half of the current 500,000 to 600,000.

The Cuomo administration said yesterday that the arrest of a parolee on charges of killing a police officer had ''reinforced and accelerated'' its efforts to replace the head of the State Parole Board. The Governor's counselor, Timothy J. Russert, said the administration hoped to be able to name a replacement next week for the board's chairman, Edward R. Hammock. The Governor's criminal justice coordinator, Lawrence T. Kurlander, said the Parole Board had been notified on two occasions last year that George Acosta, now being held for the murder of a New York City police officer, had been arrested when he was out on parole. But on neither occasion did the board begin proceedings to revoke Mr. Acosta's parole and return him to prison.