News stories from Friday December 24, 1976

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

Investigators for the House Committee on Assassinations were said to have obtained uncorroborated testimony that James Earl Ray received instructions from a secret conspirator while fleeing after the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The testimony is one of two examples of leads the panel believes must be pursued in its investigation of the assassinations of Dr. King and President John F. Kennedy. [New York Times] The Coast Guard decided not to attempt to burn away some of the 100-mile oil spill from the Liberian-registered tanker Argo Merchant that ran aground on the Nantucket shoals. Stretches of oil large enough to be burned off were not found, the Coast Guard said, and the wind has driven the spill away from the Georges Bank fishing grounds toward the Gulf Stream. [New York Times] Several arsenals and racist literature unearthed in recent weeks on the edge of the Mojave Desert near Los Angeles have led to speculation that they were buried by right-wing extremists. The arms ranged from machine guns to hand grenades, from drums of napalm to armored halftracks. Most of it had apparently been buried for almost a decade. [New York Times] Mexico announced a 10 percent rise in the price of its oil exports and the government also said it would increase foreign sales of crude oil from a current 105,000 barrels daily to at least 400,000 by 1982. The price rise is in line with the increase recently announced by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Mexico is not a member of OPEC but is influenced by its price policies. [New York Times] Bethlehem at Christmas has a lot of glitter and tinsel and noise just like other cities, but there is also much that is old and historically evocative. The observance of Christmas has doubled the city's 20,000 population and choir members from all over the world were singing their hearts out today. [New York Times] A new investigation of the prosecution of the Peter Reilly case that was ordered by the Chief Judge of the Connecticut Superior Court is expected to concentrate on allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice. Witnesses who testified at Mr. Reilly's trial for murder in 1974, policemen and prosecution officials are expected to be questioned by a special one-man grand jury and a special state prosecutor. [New York Times] The Air Force brought a whole economy with it when it established Loring Air Force Base in an impoverished region in northeastern Maine in 1946. Now Loring has been declared superfluous, and it was announced that the base would be cut back 83 percent. The local people who got used to a military and civilian payroll of $45 million are alarmed. "This is earth-shaking. It's just terrible," William Anderson, the mayor of Caribou, said. [New York Times] Takeo Fukuda was elected Prime Minister of Japan by a narrow parliamentary vote on the first ballot -- by two votes in the lower house and one in the upper house. He did not get all the votes of his own party, the Liberal-Democrats, which was highly unusual in Japanese politics. He immediately began forming a 20-member cabinet. [New York Times] China is making a major drive to mechanize its farms by 1980 and improve the performance of lagging local Communist Party units. These objectives, outlined at a national farm conference last year, were reaffirmed in the last two weeks at another agricultural meeting in Peking attended by 5,000 delegates. The conference provided another occasion for officials to criticize Chiang Ching, Mao Tse-tung's widow, and three of her colleagues for interfering in government policies. [New York Times] Prince Jean de Broglie, a prominent French politician, was shot and killed on a Paris street, possibly by a member of an extreme rightist, anti-black and anti-Arab organization, the Club Charles Martel. The Prince had a major role in the Evian accords of 1962 that ended the French-Algerian war and gave Algeria its independence. He was also in charge of African relations in the mid-1960's for Prime Minister Georges Pompidou. He was a member of the National Assembly, representing Normandy. [New York Times] The Euromarket, a complex institution based in London, has become a major influential force in international banking, second only in power and resources to the huge American banking system. Euromarket hankers deal in Eurocurrencies -- any currency deposited in banks outside the country that issued it. Most of the currency is American dollars, called Eurodollars. [New York Times]