News stories from Monday March 16, 1981

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

Talks to avert a coal miners' strike were pressed in Washington. Union negotiators announced they were extending a midnight deadline in bargaining to avoid a walkout of 160,000 miners in the Eastern and Middle Western coalfields and that they would negotiate through the night in an effort to reach a new contract. [New York Times] Philadelphia transit was paralyzed by the third strike against the system in six years. Hundreds of thousands of commuters poured into the city center in cars, on bicycles and motorcycles and on foot. [New York Times] Non-intervention in labor bargaining will be the policy of the Reagan administration, according to Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan. He also said that the administration would "never" propose a wage guideline or other income policies to combat inflation and that it would avoid seeking to influence labor or corporate policy through public admonition. [New York Times] Budget cuts bigger than those proposed by President Reagan were being prepared by the Senate Budget Committee. It began drafting legislation that Senators said would result in the most sweeping curtailment of federal programs in history. [New York Times] The unfreezing of 62 grants and loan guarantees of the Economic Development Administration across the nation, including seven projects worth $10.5 million in New York, was announced by Washington. [New York Times] An additional correct test answer that had eluded testmakers and a panel of 16 college professors was spotted by a 17-year-old Florida student. As a result, the Educational Testing Service has raised the scores of nearly a quarter of a million high school students who took the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test in October. [New York Times] Delaware is wooing large banks to relocate there and increase their profits. A new Delaware law gives banks wide powers, including the right to raise interest rates retroactively, to levy unlimited fees for credit card usage and to foreclose on a home in the event of default for credit card debts. [New York Times] Israel assailed the United States and accused the Reagan administration of damaging Israeli-American friendship by agreeing to sell sophisticated weapons to Saudi Arabia. Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir said that Israel could not afford to enter a major arms race and warned that the arrival of new weapons in the Middle East was creating an explosive situation. [New York Times] Washington rebuked Moscow for having spurned repeated American appeals to influence Afghanistan to speedily end an airliner hijacking by three Pakistanis and for having allowed the hijackers to obtain automatic weapons while they were in Kabul. The 13-day hijacking ended Saturday when the gunmen released their 101 hostages in Damascus. [New York Times] The Polish union called off walkouts it had planned in the city of Radom after the authorities accepted the resignations of two local officials whose ouster had been sought by the union. The authorities also agreed to discuss other union demands. [New York Times] Nicaraguan exiles are being trained openly in camps in Florida for guerrilla attacks against the Nicaraguan government. The exiles said that at least one assault has been carried out from a base in Central America. [New York Times] A reconciliation effort in Iran was begun by Ayatollah Khomeini. The revolutionary leader banned public speeches by political leaders until the Iraqi war ends and set up a three-member panel to try to end the strife between President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr and the governing Islamic Republican Party. [New York Times]

Stock Market Report

Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1002.79 (+17.02, +1.73%)
S&P Composite: 134.68 (+1.57, +1.18%)
Arms Index: 0.58

	Issues	Volume*
Advances	1,086	36.65
Declines	498	9.81
Unchanged	368	3.48
Total Volume		49.94

* in millions of shares

Arms Index is the ratio of volume per declining issue to volume per advancing issue; a figure below 1.0 is bullish.

Market Index Trends
Date	DJIA	S&P	Volume*
March 13, 1981	985.77	133.11	68.29
March 12, 1981	989.82	133.19	54.63
March 11, 1981	967.67	129.95	47.39
March 10, 1981	972.66	130.46	56.61
March 9, 1981	976.42	131.12	46.17
March 6, 1981	964.62	129.85	43.93
March 5, 1981	964.62	129.93	45.37
March 4, 1981	971.44	130.86	47.25
March 3, 1981	966.02	130.56	48.73
March 2, 1981	977.99	132.01	47.71