News stories from Sunday November 4, 1979

Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:

The American Embassy in Teheran was seized by students who reportedly took as hostages 100 employees, mostly Americans. They vowed to occupy the building until the Shah, a cancer patient in a New York Hospital, was returned to Iran to face trial. The students were Moslems, and their occupation of the embassy was said to have the support of Ayatollah Khomeini.Iran assured the United States that it would "do its best" to free the Americans being held as hostages in the Teheran embassy. But administration officials were not sure that the pledge could be fulfilled in view of the disunity among Iran's leaders. [New York Times] The Statue of Liberty was the site of a demonstration against the Shah in New York by a group of Iranian students who chained themselves to railings inside the monument and unfurled a huge banner demanding that the Shah be sent to Iran to be "tried and punished." Other demonstrators marched to the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center on the upper East Side, where the Shah is a patient. [New York Times] Republicans will attempt in Tuesday's elections to gain political leverage for the 1980 presidential race, concentrating their hopes on the governorships in Mississippi and Kentucky, the legislature in New Jersey and mayoralties in Cleveland and several other major cities. However, resurgent Democratic strength appears likely to thwart Republicans in several contests that until recently were regarded as tossups, according to late polls and the estimates of political leaders. [New York Times] Major new automobile technology using robots and other computer-controlled machines and processes is radically altering the American car industry. Detroit is adopting the advanced technology and moving toward standardization in an effort to reduce costs and to increase productivity. The trend has aroused fears about loss of jobs and the possibility that the technology would be used to exert control over workers and unions. [New York Times] The killing of four anti-Klan demonstrators in Greensboro, N.C., may have been in retaliation for a raid by a leftist group on a Klan rally four months ago. Twelve men identified as Klansmen were charged today with four counts each of first degree murder and conspiracy to murder. The attack on the demonstrators also wounded eight persons. [New York Times] The test flight of the shuttle manned space plane has been postponed again until next summer, if not later. It had been scheduled for last March. Technical problems have delayed the project, started in 1971. The plane is the key part of plans to explore and exploit space in future years and is a vital element in security planning. [New York Times] A Three Mile Island accident report said that both the utility company that operated the reactor and the federal agency that regulated it decided when the accident first occurred that "bad news was not something the public ought to hear." The report was one of a number from the staff of the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island. [New York Times] Bolivia's military regime attacked demonstrators against the recent coup that toppled a civilian president. Two air force planes made strafing runs over a crowd of several hundred people outside the headquarters of the Bolivian Workers Confederation in La Paz, firing machine guns and rockets, apparently to intimidate supporters of a general strike. [New York Times] A South Korean opposition leader called for constitutional changes within three months to provide for the direct election of a new president and National Assembly by next April. Kim Young Sam, the 51-year-old head of the New Democratic Party, predicted widespread unrest if the governmental structure was not revised. [New York Times] A sharp drop in Mexico's birth rate over the last four years has apparently been detected by American census experts. It is of such startling magnitude that some experts wonder if the census people are wrong. If they are right, their figures have profound implications for United States relations with Mexico, and are another indication that birth rates are beginning to decline worldwide. [New York Times]