News stories from Friday November 3, 1978
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- President Carter neared the end of his fall campaigning for Democrats with a hand-in-hand, if not quite heart-to-heart, appearance in Sacramento with his sometime party rival, Gov. Jerry Brown. Speaking to thousands of persons at an early afternoon rally, the President called Brown "one of the greatest governors" in the nation and a champion of lower taxes and efficient government.
At the end of his speech Carter took some advice from Brown and urged Californians to reject a controversial initiative on the state ballot that is aimed at purging homosexual teachers from California public schools. The proposal is opposed by a number of prominent Californians, among them Brown, former President Ford and former Republican Governor Ronald Reagan.
[Washington Post] - In Oakland, Calif., Huey Newton, 36, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was sentenced to two years in state prison on weapons charges. Newton was convicted by an Alameda County jury on a charge of being a felon in possession of firearms. The panel acquitted him of beating his tailor, Preston Collins, 56, at the Panther leader's penthouse on Aug. 16, 1974.
Newton early next year is to be tried on charges of murdering a 17-year-old Oakland prostitute.
[Washington Post] - A special task force will investigate the F.B.I.'s handling of an informer who claims the bureau helped cover up his 1965 killing of a black man in Birmingham, Ala., Attorney General Griffin Bell announced today. The inquiry also will focus on whether there is evidence that the informer, Gary Rowe, was responsible for the death of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker from Detroit believed killed by Ku Klux Klansmen during the "Freedom Marches" of 1965. [Washington Post]
- The entire 4,360-member cadet wing of the Air Force Academy has been restricted to the academy grounds because of a food fight during a pep rally in the cadet dining hall for tomorrow's Army-Air Force football game. [Washington Post]
- Two New York men have been indicted in St. Louis on charges of conspiring to steal the nuclear submarine Trepang from the New London, Conn. naval yards and sell it in a rendezvous at sea. The are Edward Mendenhall, 24, of Rochester, N.Y., and James Cosgrove, 28, of Geneva, N.Y. [Washington Post]
- U.S. District Judge Oliver Gasch ordered the National Education Association to refund up to $800,000 in political contributions to its members that it had illegally collected under a reverse payroll checkoff system. The N.E.A. collected the $1-a-year contributions automatically. Someone who did not wish to make the donation had to make a written request for the refund rather than being able to stop the donation in the first place. [Washington Post]
- The 85-ton Skylab, which still threatens to fall from orbit in 1980, was commanded into a new position in an attempt to prolong its time in space. NASA officials say the space station has fallen three miles in the last three months, putting it 234 miles above the earth. At the rate it's falling now, Skylab will be down to an altitude of 150 miles in March or April of 1980.
It the space station enters earth's atmosphere, it would break up, spreading a trail of debris 3,000 miles long and 100 miles wide. As many as 400 pieces weighing up to 300 pounds apiece might survive the heat of friction with the atmosphere and strike the earth at speeds of up to 200 miles an hour.
[Washington Post] - A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled that author Tad Szulc does not have to reveal who told him that convicted Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt was the C.I.A.'s acting chief in Mexico City when President Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was there. Hunt contended that Szulc's source is essential to his $2 million libel suit against Alan Weberman, who attributed the statement to Szulc in his own book. Weberman's book alleges a Hunt link to a Kennedy assassination plot. [Washington Post]
- The unemployment rate dropped from 6 to 5.8 percent last month as the number of jobs in the economy increased by at least 300,000, the Labor Department reported today. There were 95.2 million people at work, 5.9 million jobless and looking. President Carter seized on the favorable news, telling a campaign crowd in Portland, Ore., that the higher interest rates and other steps he announced Wednesday to bolster the dollar will not produce the recession some analysts fear. "Our country is going to stay a strong bulwark against depression throughout the world," the electioneering president said.
In other economic developments, the dollar gained ground on international money markets for the third straight day since Carter announced his plan to support it Wednesday. Interest rates continued to rise in response to Federal Reserve Board actions. The prime rate that banks charge their best corporate customers rose from 10.5 to 10.75 percent, its second increase in a week. At the same time, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board reported that home mortgage rates rose to a record 9.84 percent nationwide, up from 9.73 percent in September.
[Washington Post] - Secretary of State Cyrus Vance described Egypt and Israel as being on the verge of final agreement on a bilateral peace treaty that will lead into new negotiations for a more general Middle East settlement to include the West Bank territory of the Jordan River. Vance, who met with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in New York on Thursday, said that "almost all the substantive issues" involved in the three-week-old negotiations in Washington have now been resolved. He said the West Bank issue would be dealt with specifically in a separate document to be exchanged by Israel and Egypt.
Vance's suggestion that a new triumph was at hand for U.S. mediation came at the first general news conference he has held since the wildly fluctuating, on-again off-again talks began here. Shortly after Vance spoke, Egypt's chief negotiators flew home to Cairo to brief President Anwar Sadat on what appears to be a nearly complete draft treaty, which other diplomatic sources suggested could be initialed by the negotiators here within the coming week and sent back to the capitals for final approval.
In contrast to his expressed optimism about the peace treaty, the secretary was insistently noncommittal about a proposal, which, he confirmed, Begin made during their discussion, for a U.S. loan to cover Israeli expenses in withdrawing from the Egyptian Sinai peninsula. Vance declined to give a figure for the loan, but Begin told reporters in New York Thursday night after meeting Vance that Israel needed $3.3 billion in a 25-year loan to enable it to relocate military bases and weaponry now in the Sinai back into Israel. Begin's comments contained a strong suggestion that the withdrawal would not be possible unless Washington extended such financial help.
[Washington Post] - Despite President Carter's professed desire for a nuclear test ban treaty, his own Department of Energy has warned Congress that a comprehensive ban longer than three years could endanger weapon reliability. In testimony released today, the agency presented Congress with a list of instances in which it said weapons in the U.S. nuclear stockpile would have failed to function properly if they had lain untested for a number of years.
D.O.E, which usually describes the stockpiled weapons as 98 percent reliable, outlined the series of problems in testimony designed to show the negative effect a comprehensive nuclear test ban could have on weapon reliability. According to Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary Donald Kerr, tests of nuclear devices in the past were necessary to show design defects and the unpredictability of weapons deployed to U.S. military forces. Kerr said problems had occurred on more than a dozen occasions in the past 30 years "that have required tests for resolution. So one could argue that a problem on the average is going to occur once every three to five years." In one instance a "serious problem" was found that would have affected more than half the weapons then in the U.S. stockpile.
[Washington Post]
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Stock Market Report
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 823.11 (+6.15, +0.75%)
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* |
| November 2, 1978 | 816.96 | 95.61 | 41.03 |
| November 1, 1978 | 827.79 | 96.85 | 50.45 |
| October 31, 1978 | 792.45 | 93.15 | 42.72 |
| October 30, 1978 | 811.85 | 95.06 | 59.48 |
| October 27, 1978 | 806.05 | 94.59 | 40.36 |
| October 26, 1978 | 821.12 | 96.03 | 31.99 |
| October 25, 1978 | 830.21 | 97.31 | 31.38 |
| October 24, 1978 | 832.55 | 97.49 | 28.88 |
| October 23, 1978 | 839.66 | 98.18 | 36.09 |
| October 20, 1978 | 838.01 | 97.95 | 43.67 |