August 3, 1985

The Manville Corporation, after grappling for 15 years with thousands of asbestos-related claims, yesterday offered to pay victims $2.5 billion in the largest health-related settlement proposal ever made by an American company. The offer calls for Manville to set up a fund to which shareholders would surrender half the value of their stock and the company would give up much of its projected earnings for the next 25 years. To take effect, the offer must be approved by stockholders, unsecured creditors, codefendants and current and future health claimants, as well as a bankruptcy court. Lawyers in the case said the prospects for approval within a year were good.

Montgomery Ward & Company, which pioneered the use of the mail-order catalogue more than a century ago, said yesterday that it would discontinue the catalogue operations because of persistent losses. The move marks an end to an American institution. The Ward's catalogue - the nation's first mail-order catalogue and long a mainstay of rural families - has been in continuous publication since 1872, when it was started by an enterprising sales clerk, Aaron Montgomery Ward. Mr. Ward's effort, at first a one-page flier, drew its inspiration from the flourishing of mail-order sales in the mid-19th century, when the Government lowered postal rates and improved service, in part to ease the isolation of those rural families.

Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders said today that the 1986 Federal budget approved by Congress on Thursday would not shrink deficits by the official projection of $276.2 billion over three years. William H. Gray 3d, chairman of the House Budget Committee, who helped fashion the compromise, said the savings would be closer to $200 billion over three years. The officially projected deficit reduction for 1986 is $55.5 billion, but the Senate majority leader, Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, said the 1986 savings were ''probably closer to somewhere in the $40 billion range.'' Mr. Gray, a Pennsylvania Democrat, agreed. A $50 Billion Difference The Congressional leaders' projections are based on economic assumptions that are considered more realistic than the official forecasts made by the Administration. The more realistic figures indicate that the deficit in 1988 could be as much as $50 billion higher than officially forecast.

Concrete for the 63d Street subway tunnel was mixed and poured on hundreds of occasions with no inspection or testing, in violation of formal industry standards, Federal auditors have found. As a result, there is ''no assurance'' that the concrete in the multibillion-dollar tunnel is safe, according to an interim report by the inspector general of the Department of Transportation. The conclusions in the report were based on an inspection of documents for one section of the tunnel, stretching from Third Avenue to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. The tunnel connects Manhattan and Queens.

A senior aide to President Reagan warmly praised the head of the teamsters' union, Jackie Presser, Thursday night in the first comments about the union leader by a top Administration official since the Government decided not to press embezzlement charges against him. The aide, Edwin J. Rollins, spoke to a conference here of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. ''I want to congratulate you on having that tremendous burden on your head, unjustifiably, for five years, finally put to rest for good,'' he said to Mr. Presser, without directly mentioning the Justice Department and its long investigation. Mr. Rollins, who is the assistant to the President for political affairs, received a prolonged standing ovation from 800 teamsters and family members attending the conference here.