October 17, 1981

This small town of apple orchards and maple forests has used its oldest weapon, the town meeting, to keep out the nation's largest toxic waste disposal plant. At an emotional meeting of 3,000 citizens last night, the town agreed to drop a plan to rezone the local granite quarry for residential use in exchange for a pledge by the quarry's owner not to sell it to a waste disposal company. Angry residents had threatened to rezone the site after they learned that the owner, E. Kennard Fletcher, had offered it for sale to the IT Corporation of Wilmington, Calif. ''If they had cable television in Moscow, they could see how democracy really works,'' Richard Emmet, the chairman of Westford's Board of Selectmen, exulted after the meeting. Mr. Fletcher, whose family has lived in Westford since the 17th Century, said he preferred ''to settle this issue by cooperation rather than by confrontation.''

President Hosni Mubarak, moving swiftly to consolidate his rule, ordered a nationwide roundup of Moslem fundamentalists today, according to Egyptian sources. The sources said security forces had swept through towns across the country, arresting hundreds and possibly thousands of Moslem militants suspected of involvement in demonstrations and violence against the regime. The Government would neither confirm nor deny reports of the crackdown, which comes 10 days after President Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated by four men whom the Government has linked with a Moslem fundamentalist group named Takfir Wahigra, or Atonement and Repentance. Other Arrests Since Killing There have been many other arrests of both religious and political opponents of the regime since the assassination, but the Government has declined to give any names or numbers.

Senate Republican leaders told White House officials today that Congress would reject most of the new round of budget cuts proposed by President Reagan for this fiscal year. In a closed meeting, the Senators urged that the Administration focus instead on reductions in the budgets for the fiscal years 1983 and 1984, according to several participants in the meeting. Those reductions would be more politically palatable, the senators said, and by focusing on those fiscal years the Administration would divert attention from its inability to make major additional cuts this year. ''We were not negotiating,'' Senator Howard H. Baker Jr., Republican of Tennessee, the majority leader, said after the private luncheon meeting in his office. ''This was the first effort to expose the White House to the recommendations of the committee chairmen.''

Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan announced today that he wanted Federal regulators to defer a scheduled increase in the maximum interest rate paid to 40 million Americans with passbook savings accounts. He acted under pressure from the nation's savings banks and savings and loan associations. The announcement by the Treasury Secretary was viewed as certain to delay a half-point increase in the maximum rate that had been scheduled to go into effect Nov. 1. Mr. Regan did not say how long passbook savers might have to wait for their interest rates to rise. But the delay presumably will last until interest rates have declined sufficiently to at least reduce the losses that savings institutions have been suffering.

Three months ago, Eugenie L. was pressed to the rail of a leaky sailboat in the Florida Straits, straining for her first sight of the United States after her boat's clandestine departure from Haiti and a month at sea. Today, the 17-year-old sat in a neat classroom here laboring over her penmanship while the Dutchess County hillsides outside the big windows were ablaze with autumn color. ''It is true that sometimes I feel sadness,'' she said of her time under supervision at the school here. ''It is very nice, but I would rather be with my brother in Miami.''