January 26, 1990

LEAD: It has been eight years since a State Superior Court judge ruled that the overcrowding at the Hudson County Jail here was unconstitutional and ordered a new jail built.

LEAD: In a break with other Hollywood studios, the 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation's Fox Broadcasting unit plans to ask the Federal Communications Commission to change the regulations that have prevented networks from maintaining a financial interest in the programs they broadcast, the studio's chairman, Barry

LEAD: THE ECONOMY The Bush Administration has refined its new savings plan and other programs that it hopes will address the lagging rate of savings and investment. The centerpiece is an account that it hopes will increase Americans' savings by granting tax-free interest on money left on deposit for at least seven years.

LEAD: In his first major public pronouncement since he was imprisoned for life more than a quarter of a century ago, Nelson Mandela has appealed to South Africa's white rulers to move urgently toward negotiations for majority rule so as to save the country from ''civil strife and ruin.''

LEAD: With his dream of competing head-on against the International Business Machines Corporation and the Digital Equipment Corporation still an illusive goal, W. Michael Blumenthal said yesterday that he was stepping down as chief executive of the Unisys Corporation to become a limited partner at Lazard Freres &

LEAD: The American Telephone and Telegraph Company yesterday reported strong profits for its fourth quarter, helped by cost-cutting measures, the removal of two important regulatory restrictions and modest revenue growth.

LEAD: MINIMAL ART, that paragon of 1960's modernism, has never completely dropped from view, but right now it is so omnipresent that it looks like the flavor of the month. In numerous galleries, most of them in SoHo, Minimalism's simplified forms and surfaces are visible in various guises, phases and degrees of originality - and from different generations.

LEAD: In heading off what looked three days ago like a sure defeat on the China issue, President Bush proved today that a popular leader, if sufficiently aroused, can still change votes on Capitol Hill, even in this day of lax party discipline and constantly shifting coalitions.

LEAD: IN John Ford's final film, a doctor in a cowboy hat rides a horse into town, battles a cholera epidemic and dies to save innocent people from a horde of marauding bandits - a scenario almost too typical to mention, except that the doctor is Anne Bancroft. The female hero of ''Seven Women'' is as unusual for Ford as the film itself, a now-laughable 1965 melodrama about a gaggle of American missionaries in China in 1935.

LEAD: R. Mark Palmer, the United States Ambassador here, is resigning from the State Department to manage a new consortium of North American financiers that today announced the purchase of half interest in a Hungarian bank, the first in what was projected as a series of ambitious investments in Eastern Europe.

LEAD: The Dow Jones industrial average of 30 blue-chip stocks plunged 43.46 points, to 2,561.04, yesterday, as upward pressure on interest rates and the flow of poor corporate profits kept many investors on the sidelines.

LEAD: Despite concern that China might stop allowing students to go to the United States, many Chinese students say the main obstacle to going abroad is the United States Embassy.