News stories from Friday July 15, 1977

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

A Senate committee was told by Bert Lance, director of the Office of Management and Budget, that he would take further steps to avoid a conflict of interest if the committee would release him from a pledge to sell about 207,000 shares of a Georgia bank's stock before Dec. 31, Mr. Lance confirmed that he had debts totaling some $5.3 million and $373,000 a year in interest payments and that if he took a loss of $1.5 million on National Bank of Georgia stock he would have to sell other holdings. [New York Times] Business equipment output helped to push industrial production up seven-tenths of 1 percent in June, the Federal Reserve Board said in its monthly report on the output of factories, mines and utilities. Production of business equipment, the report said, "continued to advance strongly, rising 1.5 percent in June and at about an 18 percent annual rate for the second quarter as a whole." [New York Times] Computer issues led a modest advance in stock prices. Advances outnumbered declines by an 8-to-5 ratio as trading volume rose to 29.12 million shares from 23.16 million Wednesday. The unusually large midsummer volume was attributed to a backlog of orders held over from Thursday's power blackout "holiday." The Dow Jones industrial average closed at 905.95, up 2.96 points from Wednesday. [New York Times] Following public personal criticism by the chairman of the House ethics committee, Philip Lacovara, the committee's special counsel for the Korean investigation, resigned. Representative John Flynt, the chairman, who said in an interview that Mr. Lacovara had "temper tantrums," also asked the General Accounting Office to audit his June bill for $35,212.50. [New York Times] An offer of $25 million in federal funds and 100,000 state-owned acres in Maine was recommended by President Carter's special representative on Indian land claims to settle a suit by the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes who maintain that Maine had acquired their land without the approval of Congress. The Indians had sued for $25 billion and for 12 million acres. [New York Times] New York City and Westchester County were designated as disaster areas by the Small Business Administration as investigations, damage assessments and cleanup operations followed the 25- hour power blackout. Full power was restored by Consolidated Edison, and New York's business and financial activities and municipal and transportation services were nearly normal. [New York Times] Consolidated Edison, fearful of public hostility and lawsuits, might have held out too long Wednesday night before cutting out limited parts of its power system and thus lost the entire system, according to some investigators of the 1965 blackout. Engineers said that, in a crisis, the utility had long been regarded as reluctant to "shed load," or produce small, temporary blackouts to prevent a prolonged big one. [New York Times] Outrage and despair overwhelmed neighborhoods that were plundered during the blackout and raised the question whether the devastation caused by looting and arson would give a death blow to those already failing areas. On almost every street corner in the South Bronx and in Harlem and in the shopping areas of Queens and Brooklyn men and women gathered and asked each other whether their neighborhoods would return to normal. [New York Times] The United States and North Korea appeared determined to keep the shooting down of an American helicopter over North Korea from growing into a confrontation as negotiators met today in the Panmunjom truce area. North Korea's first official account of the incident, which it described as an "unhappy" one, seemed especially moderate and avoided its customary invective. [New York Times] About 15,000 Indochinese refugees -- Laotians, Cambodians and Vietnamese -- will be admitted to the United States this year and next. President Carter gave his approval to a State Department recommendation that the refugees be permitted to enter the country to ease the plight of at least some of the more than 80,000 Indochinese stranded in Thailand and elsewhere in southeast Asia. [New York Times] Alcoholics, drug addicts and terminal cancer patients apparently were unwitting subjects of drug experiment programs conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950's and 1960's. Admiral Stansfield Turner, the Director of Central Intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the additional information had just been uncovered and that he was confident there had been "no previous attempt to conceal this material." [New York Times]

Stock Market Report

Dow Jones Industrial Average: 905.95 (+2.96, +0.33%)
S&P Composite: 100.18 (+0.59, +0.59%)
Arms Index: 0.83

	Issues	Volume*
Advances	896	16.07
Declines	572	8.55
Unchanged	459	4.50
Total Volume		29.12

* in millions of shares

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*
July 13, 1977	902.99	99.59	23.16
July 12, 1977	903.41	99.45	22.47
July 11, 1977	905.53	99.55	19.79
July 8, 1977	907.99	99.79	23.82
July 7, 1977	909.51	99.93	21.74
July 6, 1977	907.73	99.58	21.23
July 5, 1977	913.59	100.09	16.85
July 1, 1977	912.65	100.10	18.16
June 30, 1977	916.30	100.48	19.41
June 29, 1977	913.33	100.11	19.00