January 9, 1982

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company settled the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit today by agreeing to give up the 22 Bell System companies that provide most of the nation's local telephone service. On a landmark antitrust day, the Justice Department also dropped its marathon case against the International Business Machines Corporation, a suit Excerpts from decree, page 36. that had sought to break up the company that has dominated the computer industry. The Justice Department said the suit was ''without merit and should be dismissed.'' The A.T.& T. agreement, if finally approved by a Federal court, would be the largest and most significant antitrust settlement in decades. It is likely to be compared with the 1911 settlement that divided the Rockefeller family's Standard Oil Company into 33 subsidiaries, some of them huge oil companies in their own right.

The woman given a watch marked Cartier for her birthday was delighted. But when it stopped running a couple of months later and she took it to the store she found that it was one of the 100,000 counterfeit Cartier watches that are being sold annually in the Western Hemisphere. Her husband had paid $100 for it and it seemed a great buy, since the real tank watches cost $650 to $2,300. Counterfeiters also fake the Cartier Santos watch, although it is more difficult to do. (A genuine one costs $1,050 to $6,000.) Sales in co unterfeit jewelry are booming, on the streets, in flyby-night s tores and even, said James Bikoff, vice president and general couns el for Cartier, at housewives' sales parties, similar tothe ones at w hich kitchen ware or cosmetics are sold.

The Reagan Administration, reversing an 11-year-old Federal policy, announced today that it would no longer deny tax-exempt status to private schools, colleges and certain other nonprofit institutions that practice racial discrimination. The decision on the interpretation of the tax laws will apparently entitle more than 100 schools and other organizations whose tax exemptions were revoked in the last decade to receive favorable tax treatment as charitable organizations. It is also expected to open the door to tax exemptions for many other private segregated schools that have never had them. Justice and Treasury Department officials said that the reason for the policy change was that policies against racial discrimination should be enforced by Congress, not the tax authorities.

The settlements by the Justice Department of two critical antitrust suits promise to accelerate the communications revolution in American and worldwide. At the same time, the moves to deregulate the communications industry are likely to open up a battle royal among behemoths in the marketplace. The impact promises to be highly uneven on different customers - personal and business - and on the competitors for shares of the market in communications, data processing and the manufacture of equipment. The twin moves, announced within hours of each other, represent the most dramatic actions thus far by the Reagan Administration to carry out its philosophy that the role of the Government in the marketplace should be shrunk severely, in the belief that competition, even among giant corporations, will best serve consumer interests by increasing efficiency and stimulating innovation.

Layoffs of 460,000 workers in December pushed the nation's unemployment rate from 8.4 percent of the labor force to 8.9 percent, the second highest monthly level since the beginning of World War II. The number of unemployed Americans climbed to a nearly 9.5 million. At the same time, the total number employed last month fell to 97,188,000, a decline of 840,000 from November, when the total fell 190,000 from the preceding month. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that the unemployment total, seasonally adjusted, was 9,462,000, an increase of half a percentage point above the November rate. The 8.9 percent rate for December was within a tenth of a percentage point of the postwar monthly high of 9 percent reached in May 1975 in the deepest recession of the postwar years.