February 11, 1990

LEAD: An unusual amenity, a small sports complex, will be a feature of the $37 million eastern regional headquarters to be built for Canon U.S.A. in South Brunswick, N.J. Construction begins next week, and when the project is completed next year, the subsidiary of the Japanese company will move its regional offices there from Lake Success, L.I., where it will retain its corporate headquarters.

LEAD: Five years and four months after Robert McCormick Adams succeeded S. Dillon Ripley as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the gigantic national storehouse and research and educational center is guided by bold new ideas and unconventional leadership. But, as the institution changes, it is beset with internal discord.

LEAD: President F. W. de Klerk announced today that Nelson Mandela would be released from a prison outside Cape Town on Sunday afternoon, ending 27 and a half years of imprisonment for South Africa's most celebrated black leader.

LEAD: EVERY now and then there comes along an inspiration of the magnitude recently experienced by Owen Fennessy. Fortuitously, it arrived in time for Valentine's Day. Pausing at the ovens in the window of Nicky's restaurant in White Plains, where he works, Mr. Fennessy said, ''I am going to make my girlfriend a heart-shaped pizza.

LEAD: IN a tiny office here, buried under shelves filled with dictionaries, sits Dr. Jeffery Triggs, the director of the first North American Reading Program for the Oxford English Dictionary. Dr. Triggs's job is to find new words and new uses for old words.

LEAD: LAST month, F. L. Roberts, a Springfield developer, won approval for a 270,000-square-foot home-design center on 27 acres in West Springfield. The center will be adjacent to Riverdale Shops on Route 5, a $20 million shopping center that Roberts developed in the mid-80's and then sold last April for $28 million to Prudential Realty, the real estate subsidiary of the Prudential Insurance Company.

LEAD: LENINISM, a doctrine with roots in the 19th century that was a scourge of most of the 20th, has finally begun to lose its hold over the Soviet Union on the eve of the 21st.

LEAD: As the cost of health care soars, more Long Island employers are shifting health-insurance costs to their workers.

LEAD: Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany said today that he and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union had agreed that it was ''the right of the German people alone to decide whether to live together in one state.''

LEAD: The United States and the Soviet Union appear to have agreed on virtually all major elements of a strategic-arms treaty that calls for deep reductions in long-range nuclear weapons.

LEAD: A NARROW, mile-long tract bordering the Ohio River less than a mile east of downtown is being cleared to make way for Adams Landing, a $200 million, 30-acre condominium and office community that will stretch eastward from the Daniel Carter Beard Bridge.

LEAD: Is it a coincidence that the stores these days are full of ''country''-inspired furniture (heavy maple tables, dry sinks and roll-top desks), that menus are heavy on grits and blackened everything, and that all the successful young lawyers seem to be wearing suspenders?