News stories from Sunday May 30, 1976

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

With the party divided by the fight between President Ford and Ronald Reagan for the presidential nomination, weakened by Watergate and facing the possibility of an overwhelming Democratic victory in November, Republicans of varying persuasions believe the Republican nomination may not be worth winning, and some say that the party may be beyond repair. Young progressives say the 1976 campaign is their "last hurrah" as Republican activists. Conservative purists have contingency plans to destroy the party and replace it with a new major party. At this point, campaign professionals believe that the party may do no more than stagger along for another decade before dying. [New York Times] Vice President Rockefeller predicted in a television interview an exceedingly narrow margin of victory for President Ford at the Republican National Convention and said there was not "a chance in the world" that Mr. Ford would choose Ronald Reagan as his running mate. He said that Mr. Ford would enter the convention 28 delegates short of the 1,130 majority and would make up the difference on the first ballot. "Sheer logic," Mr. Rockefeller said, would keep Mr. Reagan off the Republican ticket. "The President's in the center, Mr. Reagan is to the right of him, the voters are in the center or to the left of center, and he's got to appeal to those voters," he said of Mr. Ford. [New York Times] The advance of American agricultural technology, which made the nation the world's breadbasket, seems headed for a dead end. Recent farm production figures increasingly indicate that the United States may be living on past accomplishments in technology, according to leading agricultural scientists. For example, the harvests of corn, a basic crop, are leveling off after decades of steady increases, and other key crops also show signs of lagging behind consumption. [New York Times] Efforts by President-elect Elias Sarkis to find a political solution to the Lebanese civil war seemed to have collapsed. again. Indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations increased during the day, causing many deaths, and there was sharp ground fighting along the front lines in Beirut and in the mountains of eastern and northern Lebanon. Mr. Sarkis was described by intimates as being deeply pessimistic about his chances of ending the 14-month-old conflict. [New York Times] The British government announced measures that meant that its bitter seven-month conflict with Iceland over fishing rights was probably over. The Foreign Office ordered its fleet of Navy frigates out of a vast area of the North Atlantic over which Iceland has claimed fishing rights, and today Foreign Minister Anthony Crosland will begin talks in Oslo with Iceland's Foreign Minister, Einar Agustsson. [New York Times] The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Nairobi approved a compromise proposal on the issue of regulating world commodity markets, but rejected the United States proposal for an international bank to promote the development of resources in poorer nations. In the closing session of the month-long conference delegates unanimously adopted a compromise proposal calling for a conference to discuss a common fund that would regulate the prices of key commodity exports, which provide most of the foreign-exchange earnings of developing nations. [New York Times] Nadine Chaval, the 16-year-old daughter of the Belgian Ambassador to Mexico, who was kidnapped last Tuesday, was set free in Mexico City after her family reportedly paid a ransom of $408,000 to the kidnappers, members of a leftist group. [New York Times]