News stories from Saturday October 3, 1981

Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:

The mobile MX missile shuttle system proposed for Western deserts by the Carter administration has never been an option considered seriously by President Reagan, White House officials said. As a result, the officials said, the long process of studying ways to strengthen the nation's strategic deterrence was devoted to looking for alternatives to the original Carter plan to shuttle 200 missiles among 4,600 shelters. The President announced Friday a plan to base the missiles in existing silos now held by Trident and Minuteman missiles. [New York Times] Flights are being delayed at about three times the rate before the start of the air controllers' strike on Aug. 3, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Under F.A.A. rules, a flight delay is period of more than 30 minutes. It recorded a daily average of 356 such delays in the last two weeks of September. There were 165 delays of 30 minutes or more in the same period a year ago. [New York Times] Continued environmental protection is supported by many Americans even if it requires economic sacrifice, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll. The responses suggested that Reagan administration policies which would relax protection laws to ease their burden on industry would be opposed by most Americans. [New York Times] Aid to youth employment programs will be provided by the country's major insurance companies. In a letter sent to President Reagan Friday, they promised that as a "public reponsibility" they would direct a share of their resources to the problem of unemployment, especially among minority youths. [New York Times] Richard Nixon favors the sale of Awacs to Saudi Arabia. The former President said in a statement that "if it were not for the intense opposition" of Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and "parts of the Jewish community, the Awacs sale would go through." Mr. Nixon and State Department spokesmen denied that he had been asked to make the statement by the Reagan administration, which is seeking to counter strong opposition in Congress to the sale. [New York Times] Lech Walesa was combative but wary after his re-election as leader of Poland's Solidarity union. He said in an interview in Gdansk, where the union convention is being held, that Solidarity faced "a difficult, very hard period," and warned the Polish government not to exploit apparent weaknesses within the union. [New York Times] The I.R.A. hunger strike has ended. The strike begun last March by imprisoned members of the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, who were seeking status as political prisoners rather than as criminals, was called off, the prisoners said, because they had "reluctantly" concluded that the families of the strikers would keep on refusing to let them die. Ten men died during the strike. Further deaths were prevented by the intervention of families, who succeeded in removing five other men from the strike. [New York Times]