News stories from Sunday April 2, 1978
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- Faster action on a proposal for an international ban on the production of material used in nuclear weapons has been urged by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. In a move that has angered the Pentagon, which was not consulted, Mr. Vance asked President Carter to assemble a team in coming weeks that would examine how to carry out a proposal that production of plutonium and enriched uranium for military purposes be prohibited. The Pentagon was upset by Mr. Vance's letter, officials said, because Secretary of Defense Harold Brown believed that he should have been consulted on the matter. [New York Times]
- Billions of dollars in charity donations are at stake in a bitter feud between United Way, the nation's dominant volunteer social welfare charity, and scores of smaller charities. United Way is accused by rival groups of attempting to monopolize the collection of charitable donations through paycheck deductions and in doing so, of trying to drive smaller charities out of business. Some of the smaller charities are suing the big one. United Way has denied the charges. [New York Times]
- The torrent of oil coming through the trans-Alaskan pipeline has brought even more problems than the pipeline's critics foresaw. Consequently, federal energy officials are considering swift remedial action. The principal problem is the vast oversupply of oil on the West Coast. Early estimates of projected use of the pipeline's oil in Western states have proved to be far too high. California's own oil production has suffered significantly, and the need there to move unexpectedly large quantities of oil has pushed tanker rates 50 percent above predictions. [New York Times]
- General Motors appears unshaken by the lawsuits that have hit it lately. These suits are different from the antitrust suits of the past, in that they strike at the company's credibility and integrity as never before. They deal for example with engine switching, and investigations by the government as to whether G.M.'s Buick division finagled with federal pollution control standards for engines, or whether a $100 million tax deduction was legal. The company, however, deems these cases almost insignificant when compared with the broad scope of its activities or with the antitrust litigation that has come and gone like the seasons. [New York Times]
- James Eastland's decision not to seek re-election to the Senate perhaps tells a lot about the revolution wrought in Southern politics by the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the last of the great legislative victories of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The law did away with virtually all-white electorates of the kind that first sent Mr. Eastland to the Senate in 1942 and maintained his generation of Southern segregationists in office. Since 1965, over two million new black voters have registered in the South, most of them in the seven states where the Voting Rights Act outlawed literacy tests and put the registration process under federal control. Almost 2,200 black politicians hold office today in the old Confederacy, 11 states that before 1965 had fewer than 100 black officeholders. [New York Times]
- President Carter said in Lagos, Nigeria, that the United States was moving "as quickly as possible" to convene a peace conference on Rhodesia and was doing so in response to the urging of black African leaders. The conference would involve all parties to the conflict, Mr. Carter said, and that "we will begin now to explore the earliest date when this might be accomplished." He proposed such a meeting at a Washington news conference three weeks ago. [New York Times]
- The Israeli cabinet expressed "regret" over Egypt's refusal to reconvene direct negotiations with Israel. A terse statement followed a meeting that lasted nearly five hours, in which the cabinet was given a briefing on Defense Minister Ezer Weizman's talks in Cairo last week with President Anwar Sadat. It was the first official confirmation that the talks had failed to revive negotiations between the joint Israeli and Egyptian Political and Military Committees. [New York Times]