News stories from Saturday June 25, 1977

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

The biggest housing boom in the nation's history is underway and prices are at a record high. Most housing experts expect at least 1.5 million new homes to be started this year, about 20 percent more than in 1972, the previous record year. Price increases have brought the national median cost of a new home to the buyer to almost $49,000. High prices have forced many young families out of the market, and it takes the income of both the husband and wife to afford a down payment. [New York Times] President Lyndon B. Johnson had skin cancer, according to an interview with a dermatologist and cancer researcher in the July issue of the Reader's Digest. Dr. Edmund Klein of the Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo said he had been called to the White House in the mid-1960's as a consultant and informed "in the utmost secrecy" that President Johnson had "a moderately severe case" of skin cancer. Dr. Klein said that an operation was performed with "satisfactory results." Mrs. Johnson, however, said that she had no knowledge that skin cancer had ever been diagnosed in her husband, and the late President's physician also cast doubt on the report. [New York Times] A $115 million arms sales to Israel has been proposed by President Carter, whose administration has pursued a policy of mixing incentives with rejections in dealing with Israel's political and military demands. The President's proposal comes at a time when he has been under heavy criticism from Israeli leaders and American supporters of Israel. [New York Times] The Office of Telecommunications Policy, a White House agency that guides and sets federal policies involving communications, will be dismantled by the Carter administration and its functions divided among several people. There is some criticism about dismantling it in Congress. The office helps to formulate a broad range of policy in electronic communications that affects the growth and regulation of cable television, satellite communications, the use of computer networks to collect information on citizens and the way that Americans could be receiving their mail and newspapers in the future. [New York Times] While states are legalizing the use of laetrile at an increasing rate, an inquiry into the background of some leaders of the movement to promote the purported anti-cancer drug shows that they have frequently been the subject of exaggerated claims about their scientific and medical competence. The inquiry, which dealt with four men, also disclosed various brushes with the law. [New York Times] President Carter doubts that relations with the Soviet Union will improve in the coming months. A close White House aide said after the President had met with his top foreign policy advisers that Mr. Carter's doubts were based on a belief that the Soviet leadership needed time to adjust to his foreign policy initiatives and that Moscow was preoccupied with serious domestic problems, principally economic ones. [New York Times] When Menachem Begin visits Washington next month he will find a deep measure of support among the American Jewish community despite its stunned disbelief when the right-wing opposition leader's Likud bloc won the Israeli election last month. The change has come slowly and with considerable guidance from the Zionist organization leaders, some of whom still express private misgivings. [New York Times] A major new Moscow campaign to tighten ideological lines seems to be indicated by the harsh Soviet attack last week on the Spanish Communist leader, Santiago Carrillo, a proponent of autonomy for Communist parties, which Moscow fears will "split the international Communist movement." The reactions of the three principal Western Communist parties, whose leaders met recently in Madrid in a show of solidarity, also reflected the differences among them. [New York Times]