December 9, 1982

A daylong standoff between the police and a man who threatened to blow up the Washington Monument with a truck he said contained explosives ended Wednesday night with a flurry of gunshots. Forty-five minutes after the shooting, which occurred about 7:35 P.M., the police, acting cautiously because the man had said his truck carried 1,000 pounds of dynamite, removed a fatally wounded man from the vehicle that for 10 hours had been parked at the entrance to the monument. Early today, the District of Columbia Medical Examiner's office identified the dead man as Norman David Mayer, 66 years old, a former maintenance man from Miami Beach. The Washington Metropolitan Police Department also said that despite a four-hour search of the monument, there was no evidence that a second suspect might be hiding inside, as they had earlier believed. They also said their search found no explosives.

The Federal Communications Commission today authorized RKO General Inc. to move its New York City station - WOR-TV on Channel 9 - to New Jersey, giving the state its first commercial very-high-frequency television station. The new station would bring significantly more New Jersey news and public affairs programs to the state, the owners said. Until now, New Jersey VHF viewers - the vast majority of television watchers - have been dependent on news programs produced in New York City or Philadelphia. The station in New York currently shows the games of the New Jersey Nets and the New Jersey Devils and it will negotiate contracts with other New Jersey sports franchises, Channel 9's general manager, Robert Fennimore, said. It will continue to televise the games of the New York Mets, Knicks, Rangers and Islanders, he added.

The House of Representatives voted today to keep the MX missile alive in the development stage, and then adopted a military appropriation bill for the current fiscal year of $230 billion. The legislation, which now goes to the Senate, was adopted by a vote of 346 to 68. By a voice vote, the lawmakers decided to retain $2.5 billion in the bill for research and development on the MX. On Tuesday, the House dealt the Reagan Administration a major setback by eliminating $988 million earmarked for the production of the first five missiles.

Pierre Gousseland, the French-born chairman of Amax Inc., talked enthusiastically about minerals for an hour and then slumped back into his chair. It had not been an easy year. ''I have watched 25 percent of my staff leave,'' the 61-year-old executive said. ''Many of these people are my friends.'' On Monday, John Towers, the president and chief operating officer, became the latest officer to leave the diversified minerals company, which has been stung by the big decline in commodities prices. Mr. Towers's early retirement at 61 is part of a restructuring plan by Amax that will cut the number of officers by more than 35 percent, to 18, this year, according to Amax. At present there are 20 officers at the company, which has its headquarters in Greenwich, Conn. Dividends Shrink After years of expansion that took Amax into an array of minerals, not all of which were always profitable, the company is closing mines, slashing capital spending this year to $300 million from a high of $1.3 billion in 1980, and searching for measures to stem the company's losses, which are expected to grow to $250 million for the full year. Shareholders have watched their dividends shrink to 20 cents a share from $2.40 in the last year. Nearly 25 percent of the company's 21,000 employees have been laid off permanently.

South African forces attacked the capital of the tiny landlocked country of Lesotho early today, killing at least 30 members of the underground African National Congress, according to an announcement by the Defense Ministry in Pretoria. Lesotho, an independent black state, is entirely surrounded by South Africa, and its capital, Maseru, lies just across the border from white farming areas of the Orange Free State, a South African province. The announcement, attributed to the chief of the defense forces, Gen. Constand Viljoen, acknowledged that five women and two children had been killed in what it described as ''cross-fire'' during the attack. It said four South African troops had been wounded.