News stories from Sunday September 18, 1977

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

Testimony "in sharp conflict" with Bert Lance's will be given tomorrow by staff members of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, according to Senator Charles Percy, the committee's senior Republican. The staff members will be asked what they knew about the budget director's troubled financial past before the committee confirmed his nomination in January. [New York Times] The urban policy being developed by the Carter administration will emphasize the economic development of ailing cities through financial inducements to industry and local governments, rather than ambitious new social programs. The administration is also seeking ways to give coherence to fragmented laws and government practices that have accumulated into what an official called an "anti-urban policy." The White House is scheduled to get the initial proposals Oct. 1. [New York Times] The government is a major violator of its Clean Water Act and the violations have not been reported or prosecuted by the Environmental Protection Agency. Military installations are responsible for most of the violations. Numerous other violations in the federal domain have been found in national parks, fish hatcheries and atomic energy installations. [New York Times] Richard Nixon seriously considered resigning as President more than a year before he did so on Aug. 8, 1974 because of the troubles Watergate was causing him and his close friends, according to Raymond Price, who was Mr. Nixon's chief speech writer. This is related in "With Nixon," a forthcoming book by Mr. Price that gives a highly favorable account of the Nixon presidency. [New York Times] Amtrak is seeking an extra $45.6 million from Congress to prevent sharp cutbacks in train service in the Northeast scheduled to take effect Oct. 30. A few months ago Congress cut that amount from the $534.1 million in operating subsidies requested by Amtrak. [New York Times] France is making a new effort to persuade the industrialized nations to adopt a system of what it calls "organized free trade" for steel, shipbuilding, textiles and aircraft, all subject to what is known in economic terms as "structural problems." Details of the French proposal were given by Prime Minister Raymond Barre last week in Washington. There were strong indications that the subject would be an important one at the Geneva trade negotiations. [New York Times] Allen Glick, a Las Vegas gambling operator, who is the largest borrower from the Teamster pension fund, owes the government more than $9.5 million in back taxes and fraud penalties, according to the Internal Revenue Service. Government officials said the tax case against Mr. Glick, whose financial dealings have puzzled investigators for the last four years, was one facet of a Justice Department investigation into organized crime's infiltration of legalized gambling. [New York Times] Wail Street's conventional wisdom has been shaken by the J. Ray McDermott Company's victory in the three-way fight for the Babcock & Wilcox Company. The idea that the billion-dollar companies are too big to take over was demolished. The victory is regarded as a clear warning that the nation elite corps of top-flight managers cannot rest secure on the sheer size of their corporate bastions. [New York Times] Israel's Foreign Minister arrived in Washington for a round of talks that could be decisive in determining whether there will be a Geneva conference on the Middle East by the end of this year. American officials stressed, however, that the likelihood of a breakthrough resulting from Moshe Dayan's talks with President Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was slim at best. [New York Times] Some 100 Vietnamese refugees will arrive Monday in San Francisco. They will be the first group to come to the United States under President Carter's new program admitting 15,000 additional Indochinese, including 7,000 who fled Vietnam in small fishing boats. [New York Times] The capture of Jijiga, a strategic town at the base of the Ethiopian highlands, appears to have given the Somalis the initiative in the two-month war in eastern Ethiopia. They now control the mountain pass to the two most important cities in the disputed Ogaden region, Harar and Diredawa, about 60 miles further west. Capture of these two points, about 50 miles apart, would complete the "liberation' of the Somali-populated Ogaden. [New York Times]