News stories from Saturday October 24, 1981
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- Jimmy Carter dropped his libel suit against The Washington Post, which he said had printed a false charge that Blair House had been bugged while President-elect Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were staying there before the inauguration last January. An apology was published last week by The Post, and "although tardy" it has been accepted by the former President, according to Jody Powell, Mr. Carter's chief spokesman. [New York Times]
- A major inquiry into radical groups and terrorists has been opened as an outgrowth of the $1.6 million Brink's robbery in Rockland County last week, according a federal official. Kenneth Walton, director of a joint federal-city Terrorism Task Force, said investigators were looking into possible links among the Weather Undergound, the Black Liberation Army, the F.A.L.N. terrorist group seeking independence for Puerto Rico, the Black Panther Party and a Communist group known as the May 19 Movement. [New York Times]
- The suspect in a murder attempt against a Libyan student in Colorado last year had been staying early this year at an English farm owned by Edwin P. Wilson, a former agent of the Central Intelligence Agency who is now a fugitive in Libya, according to people living near the farm in West Sussex. Mr. Wilson is one of two former C.I.A. agents who have been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of supplying arms to Libya and training terrorists there. The suspect, Eugene Tafoya, is now in custody at Fort Collins, Colo. [New York Times]
- The American Ambassador left Italy and returned to Washington last week after Italian authorities uncovered a Libyan plot to assassinate him in retaliation for the shooting down by American forces of two Libyan warplanes off the Libyan coast last August. Ambassador Maxwell Rabb, a New York lawyer, had been visiting Milan when the officials learned of the assassination plot, according to a diplomatic source. [New York Times]
- Protests over Poland's food shortages in the form of wildcat walkouts continued in 36 of the 49 provinces, the official press agency P.A.P. said. The strikes were held despite the government's announcement on Friday that it was sending troops to deal with the local problems. [New York Times]
- The Cancun talks were "extremely constructive and positive," President Reagan said upon his return from the conference of 22 industrialized and developing nations in Mexico. Before leaving, Secretary of State Alexander Haig sharply criticized the Soviet Union's absence from the meeting. [New York Times]