News stories from Saturday May 14, 1977

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

Strategic retaliatory policies set by the Ford administration in the event of war with the Soviet Union are being reassessed by the Carter administration, mainly because the new Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown, does not agree with his predecessors, Donald Rumsfeld and James Schlesinger. Defense Department officials said that a key part of the Rumsfeld-Schlesinger policy hypothesized crippling of the Soviet Union's ability to recover in a nuclear war. [New York Times] General Electric is unhappy with the administration's nuclear policies and has told the government that it will eventually stop making nuclear reactors if present legal and policy restrictions are not changed. G. E. is one of the world's two largest manufacturers of reactors. Its nuclear division did not show a profit in 1976. G. E. officials reportedly told James Schlesinger, the administration's top energy official, that unless "the legal, political and regulatory climate is turned around, the industry is in a bad way. We can't go on forever without orders." [New York Times] The textile industry, backbone of the South's economy, is entering one of the most difficult periods in its recent history. It has to deal with rising imports of cheaper foreign textile imports, a powerful union organization drive and pressure from the government to spend billions of dollars on new safety equipment. [New York Times] Amazement and embarrassment overcame Indiana's Republican and Democratic leaders following the victory of a small, right-wing group in pushing through the legislature a law legalizing the sale of laetrile, the purported cancer cure. The legislative coup has national overtones since legislatures in a dozen other states are considering similar measures and are being subjected to similar campaigns. [New York Times] Better days for New York City were projected in a new economic report. The Temporary Commission on City Finances says that New York almost surely will be a smaller city in the 1980's, but it has a good chance of being more prosperous. Its study found that labor, rent, energy and tax costs were no higher in New York than in other cities, enhancing New York's attractiveness for new private investment. Decreases in population and jobs were expected to continue, but at a much slower rate, and incomes will grow faster than inflation. [New York Times] In an attack on Peking published in Pravda, Moscow said that China was preparing for war against the West as well as the Soviet Union and warned any aid given to China by the West would eventually be used to start a new world war. "China is today the only country in the world whose official circles advocate publicly and without any camouflage a new world slaughter," Pravda said. It was the harshest and most significant attack on China in the Soviet press since Mao Tse-tung died eight months ago. [New York Times]