January 1, 1985

New York City gained 72,000 jobs in the first 10 months of 1984, a larger increase than any single annual gain since 1950, when the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics started measuring employment in the city. In the metropolitan region in the 10 months, employment hit a record of 7.1 million, jobs were created at the second fastest rate in 15 years and inflation edged up slightly, according to the bureau's year-end report on the regional economy, which was released yesterday. ''It seems that 1984 will enter the record books as a banner year for the region,'' Samuel M. Ehrenhalt, the bureau's regional commissioner in New York, said yesterday. The region covers New York City, the suburban New York Counties of Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland and Putnam, and the northeastern New Jersey Counties of Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Morris, Passaic, Somerset and Union.

Despite three years of greatly increased attention, effort and expense, Reagan Administration officials acknowledge that they have not significantly reduced the flow of Western technology to the Soviet Union. In fact, enforcement officials say they have concluded that the methods of smuggling high technology are so varied, and the illegal business so lucrative, that all the United States can ever hope to do is slow the transfer of technology to the East. Soon after President Reagan took office, senior officials decried ''the massive hemorrhage'' of high technology to the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc nations. Mr. Reagan said that stanching the flow was one of his Administration's priorities. Three years later, the Government has hired hundreds of new enforcement officers and has added tens of millions of dollars to the enforcement agencies' budgets each year. As a result, Federal officers have seized hundreds of pieces of equipment that would have been shipped illegally to the Soviet Union, far more than were being intercepted before.

A man identified as a convict being transported from the Virgin Islands to New York overpowered several guards and hijacked a DC-10 jetliner with 198 people aboard to Cuba, the authorities said. American Airlines flight 626 was commandeered at 6:17 P.M., an hour away from Kennedy International Airport, by a prisoner identified by a corrections official as Ishmael LaBeet, who was convicted of murdering eight people on St. Croix, V.I., in 1972. The plane landed safely at Jose Marti Airport in Havana at 8:30 P.M., the authorities said. Cuban officials said they had taken the hijacker into custody.

Sweeping changes in the way nuclear power is regulated are needed if the industry is to revive from its current torpor, according to utilities, regulators and the industry's critics. No new reactors have been ordered in five years, safety questions are rising faster than they are being resolved, and outsiders and some commission members alike say the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, formed 10 years ago to provide dispassionate regulation, is ineffective. The industry is complaining of the weight of existing regulations and the speed at which they change. The commission has acknowledged strong doubts about the process it uses in one category of safety decisions. The critics say that major areas of safety are given scant attention by the commission.

The American public has given at least $40 million in two months for aid to starving Ethiopians, a response that exceeds any outpouring of United States aid in more than a decade, according to relief officials. In the two months since graphic television pictures about the drought and its effects began appearing in the United States, scores of aid agencies have reported a sharp increase in contributions. Leading American aid agencies have received the $40 million in donations since those reports at the end of October, according to Peter J. Davies, president of Interaction, a coalition of 121 private agencies that provide emergency and developmental aid abroad or work with refugees. Interaction was formed in July.