News stories from Sunday September 23, 1979
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- The lessons of Three Mile Island are being sought by a small army of experts working for six separate presidential, congressional, regulatory, state and private investigations into last March's nuclear accident, the worst in the history of the nation's civilian atomic power program. One federal inquiry group has built a full-size mock-up of the reactor's control room, permitting industrial psychologists to study whether its design might have contributed to the accident. [New York Times]
- An end to the grain handlers' strike appeared near when the last of eight tentative agreements was reached between Local 118 of the American Federation of Grain Millers, which struck eight grain concerns in July. [New York Times]
- Census jobs will be patronage used by President Carter to line up support for his re-election campaign, according to Democratic Representatives from New York and other states. There are 275,000 patronage jobs available in connection with the 1980 census. [New York Times]
- The nation's largest anti-nuclear rally to date took place on Manhattan's lower West Side near the Battery as nearly 200,000 people, mostly from the New York metropolitan region and Pennsylvania, gathered peacefully for speeches and songs. It was one of about a dozen similar demonstrations held across the country. [New York Times]
- Michele Sindona's "kidnapping" gained plausibility among authorities in Rome after a photograph of the Italian financier and a list of 10 questions were sent from Brooklyn to one of Mr. Sindona's lawyer in Rome by his alleged kidnappers. [New York Times]
- Henry Kissinger's memoirs have no significant revelations but they do give candid impressions of former President Nixon and Chinese and Soviet leaders. Time magazine released a summary of excerpts from the memoirs, "Kissinger: White House Years," which will be published in full next month. [New York Times]
- A group in New York gives the I.R.A. most of the money and guns that support its terrorist operations, American and Irish government officials say. The pro-I.R.A. organization is the Irish Northern Aid Committee, called Noraid. Its headquarters are in the Bronx, but it has aids in Irish-American neighborhoods around the country, and an office in Belfast. [New York Times]
- Bokassa I remained in his plane another day at a military air base near Paris while France continued to refuse him entry to the country. The government, meanwhile, refused comment on the situation. The ousted Emperor of the Central African Empire was permitted to leave the plane, but only to visit the base.
Bokassa I helped massacre children when he was Emperor of the Central African Empire, his successor, President David Dacko, charged. Mr. Dacko, head of the restored Central African Republic, told some students that he had "direct evidence" of the ousted ruler's complicity.
[New York Times] - Revaluation of the mark was agreed to by West Germany after growing pressure on foreign exchange markets. A sliding-scale increase in the mark's value against other leading European currencies follows recent sharp drops in the value of the dollar, which had forced the German central bank to support the dollar heavily on foreign exchange markets. [New York Times]
- Peking and Moscow prepared for talks aimed at easing their differences. Deputy Foreign Minister Wang Youping, China's Ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Chinese invasion of Vietnam, is in Moscow for the first wide-ranging negotiations between the two countries in a decade. [New York Times]
- Uruguay's human rights violations declined since the United States cut off military and economic aid in 1976, but the country is still run like a police state, according to opposition political leaders. The military regime, no longer facing an insurgency, is said to be improving its image by restraining the most violent elements of its security system while repressing freedom of information and dissent. [New York Times]