News stories from Saturday July 30, 1977
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- President Carter, saying that the public "is not paying attention to the energy crisis and has not heeded his calls for voluntary conservation, predicted that it would take a series of crises before the public decided "to quit wasting so much fuel." He hinted in an interview that if voluntary measures prove insufficient, he might have to call for stronger steps. He said that "voluntary compliance is probably not adequate at all" and that he expected to add to legislation passed this year in future sessions of Congress. [New York Times]
- The search for a new director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is still going on despite a list of five candidates presented six weeks ago to President Carter by a special search committee. The President, who is said to have refused to let the committee have the additional month it wanted to complete its list, will meet this week with Attorney General Griffin Bell to discuss the selection of a new director. Neither has apparently found a suitable choice. [New York Times]
- Soaring costs of emergency drought relief are straining the resources of federal aid agencies, eroding the budgets of hundreds of communities and putting thousands of farmers in economic jeopardy. Nearly two-thirds of the country's 3,000-odd counties have been put on the emergency aid list. [New York Times]
- A stolen election started Lyndon B. Johnson on the path to the White House, according to a former Texas voting official. Luis Salas said he had certified enough fictitious ballots to steal the 1948 Texas primary runoff for the United States Senate. Mr. Salas was the election judge for Jim Wells County's Box 13, which produced just enough votes in the runoff to give Mr. Johnson the party's nomination, then tantamount to election. Mr. Salas said he had lied during an aborted investigation of the election in 1948 and was making the disclosure to find "peace of mind and to reveal to the people the corruption of politics." [New York Times]
- About 500 Syrian Jewish women may be allowed to emigrate to the United States through marriage by proxy to American Jews. President Hafez al-Assad, who has refused to let the comparatively few Jews remaining in Syria to leave the country for fear that they would go to Israel, approved the proxy marriages following months of secret discussions in which President Carter made a personal plea on behalf of the women Representative Stephen Solarz, Democrat of Brooklyn, in whose district about 23,000 Jews of Syrian background live, was influential in persuading the Syrian President to allow the emigration. The President gave his consent to the proxy marriage on July 19 of 12 women to men from the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community. [New York Times]
- Egyptian leaders believe that the Palestine Liberation Organization must in some way participate in a Mideast peace conference if it is to succeed. They hope that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who will arrive in Cairo Monday, will bring a Geneva conference formula that does not completely exclude the P.L.O. President Anwar Sadat has worked out various alternatives for indirect participation by the P.L.O. in recent talks with Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, if Mr. Vance does not produce a satisfactory plan, sources in Cairo said. [New York Times]
- Syrian soldiers of the Arab League's peacekeeping force in Lebanon set up gun positions around Palestinian refugee camps under new plans to place controls over guerrillas. The operation proceeded smoothly and quietly as truckloads of soldiers arrived and set up sandbagged posts about 200 yards from the perimeters of the two main camps, Sabra and Shatila. [New York Times]