September 27, 1986

Twenty-two cargo and baggage handlers for Eastern Airlines were indicted on drug smuggling charges today by a Federal grand jury in Miami. Investigators said the ring had smuggled tons of cocaine, stuffed in suitcases, past Customs inspectors at Miami International Airport over three years. A Mexicana Airlines worker at the airport was indicted on similar charges. Federal officials said the ground crews, working in carefully plotted shifts, kept cocaine shipments in the cargo holds of Eastern flights arriving from Colombia until inspectors cleared the flights to continue on to domestic destinations. Once the flights were cleared, the officials said, the bags were unloaded at another part of the airport and carried to points where they were picked up by accomplices.

Don't look now, but here comes Pac-Man. Again. Video games, the entertainment craze blamed for everything from sore thumbs to the decline of the nation's youth, are making a comeback. Three companies will be selling home video game machines this Christmas. Retailers that have not sold machines for two years are stocking up again. And television will soon reverberate once more to the zapping and beeping sounds of commercials about invading aliens and missile warfare. ''The fun is back,'' Atari says in the first television commercials it has made in two years. ''It's like back to the future,'' said James H. Levy, president of Activision, a video game cartridge company that went from rags to riches to rags.

New York City, faced with increasing numbers of people without homes and a dwindling number of places to house them, began referring homeless families to a motel in Newark last night, according to officials. A spokesman for the city's Human Resources Administration said 20 homeless families totaling 65 people were transferred from city shelters to the Lincoln Motel in Newark. Most were pregnant women or women and their children, said the spokesman, Suzanne Trazoff. Their transfer, she said, was intended to open beds for new arrivals at New York City shelters.

Immigration Bill Dies The House refused to consider a comprehensive immigration bill, and supporters of the legislation said that it was dead. Page 8.

President Reagan, calling punitive economic measures ''the wrong course to follow,'' tonight vetoed legislation imposing economic sanctions against South Africa. Setting the stage for a rare foreign policy battle with Senate Republicans, Mr. Reagan said the United States ''must stay and build, not cut and run.'' In a veto message to Congress, he asked: ''Are we truly helping the black people of South Africa - the lifelong victims of apartheid - when we throw them out of work and leave them and their families jobless and hungry in those segregated townships?'' ''Or are we simply assuming a moral posture at the expense of the people in whose name we presume to act?'' Timing of Action The President, whose action had been expected, waited to veto the legislation until about four hours before the midnight deadline at which the bill automatically would have become law. He said he was willing to work with Congress on a better approach.