News stories from Saturday February 19, 1977

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

A federal agency has decided that the possibility of terrorist actions against the nation's 74 civilian-operated nuclear facilities is such that there has to be a sizable and immediate increase in security. The decision, following a year-long study by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was based on concerns that terrorists might be able to seize plutonium or highly enriched uranium from the 14 facilities now licensed to handle such materials, which could be used to build a bomb, or that they might sabotage one of the nation's 60 nuclear power reactors. [New York Times] The persons who set off explosions at two Manhattan skyscrapers Friday night left a message that demanded, among other things, a halt to a federal grand jury inquiry into a pro-independence Puerto Rican group believed to be responsible for about 40 bombing incidents since September 1974. The latest explosions shattered windows on lower floors of the Gulf & Western Building on Columbus Circle and the Chrysler Building at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue. [New York Times] Middle Eastern students in this country have concocted fraudulent insurance claims and have funneled the money collected to the Palestine Liberation Organization, according to insurance investigators. The California Highway Patrol disclosed last week that it had uncovered a group of foreign students who had systematically bilked more than a dozen insurance companies out of millions of dollars. At least two members of the group admitted that money from the frauds had been sent to the P.L.O. and other Arab national organizations. [New York Times] Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland of Britain died at a hospital in Oxford. He suffered a severe stroke a week ago and had been in a coma since Monday. He was 58 years old. Mr. Crosland, a stalwart of the Labor Party, was appointed Foreign Secretary last April. [New York Times] King Hussein of Jordan told Secretary of State Cyrus Vance he was reluctant to foster relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, as had been proposed by President Anwar Sadat of Egypt to help overcome the Middle East impasse, until other Arab leaders endorsed the proposal. President Sadat proposed last week that the Palestinians, led by the P.L.O., form an "official and declared link" with Jordan before the Middle East conference resumed in Geneva. King Hussein was said to have told Mr. Vance that the new American diplomatic initiative could raise expectations that might not be fulfilled. [New York Times] The Soviet government made an unusually harsh attack on President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in a long editorial in Pravda that accused him of spreading "lies, slander and falsification" about the Soviet role in Egypt and the Middle East. Resentment over Mr. Sadat's growing influence on other Arab leaders, while the Soviet Union's has declined, may have prompted the rebuke. [New York Times]