News stories from Friday December 11, 1981

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

The United Nations has a new leader. After a long deadlock in the Security Council, Javier Perez de Cuellar, a Peruvian diplomat, was chosen as the fifth Secretary General of the United Nations. He succeeds Kurt Waldheim of Austria, who has been Secretary General for 10 years and unsucessfully sought an unprecedented third five-year term. [New York Times] An $11.9 billion foreign aid bill was passed by the Democratic-dominated House in a 199-166 vote, its first foreign aid appropriation bill in almost three years, and one that was eagerly sought by President Reagan and his administration. which lobbied intensively for it. The usual Republican opposition to foreign aid was maintained, but narrowly. The bill was supported by 84 Republicans and opposed by 87 others. [New York Times] The U.S. defended its Libyan position. Secretary of State Alexander Haig said in Brussels that Western Europe was entitled to its own view of Libya, but that the United States had decided no longer to follow "a double standard" and do business with a regime that he said practiced terrorism, "especially when it is targeted on American officials." U.S. oil companies agreed to cooperate with the Reagan administration in withdrawing American employees from Libya, State Department officials said after meeting with oil executives. [New York Times] OPEC agreed to trim some prices, but probably not enough to lower the price of gasoline and heating oil in the United States. Its ministers rejected a Libyan demand to blacklist American oil companies whose employees leave Libya in response to President Reagan's request. [New York Times] Du Pont employees turned down an organizing attempt by the United Steelworkers of America at chemical plants, mostly in the South. Votes tabulated by the Baltimore office of the National Labor Relations Board showed that the 11,500 employees at 14 separate Du Pont plants rejected the union by large margins. [New York Times] The line between rural and urban is confusing Americans across the United States and the Census Bureau since the spread in the last decade of the population outward from the cities and from the suburbs that were built in the 1950's and 1960's. About three-fourths of Americans are urban dwellers, according to the 1980 census, while the rest live in rural places. But places and styles of living have changed so drastically that even the Census Bureau has trouble deciding which is which. For example, can a town with a population of about 2,500 be defined as an urban area? [New York Times] Argentina's President was removed by the ruling three-man military junta and it announced that one of its members, Gen. Leopoldo Caltieri, the army commander, would be installed as President Dec. 22. The decision to oust President Roberto Eduardo Viola, a former general, who has been recuperating for more than a month from a heart ailment, was announced without explanation. He took office eight months ago. [New York Times]

Stock Market Report

Dow Jones Industrial Average: 886.51 (-5.52, -0.62%)
S&P Composite: 124.93 (-0.78, -0.62%)
Arms Index: 1.18

	Issues	Volume*
Advances	566	13.43
Declines	947	26.53
Unchanged	447	5.89
Total Volume		45.85

* 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*
December 10, 1981	892.03	125.71	47.02
December 9, 1981	888.22	125.48	44.80
December 8, 1981	881.75	124.82	45.14
December 7, 1981	886.99	125.19	45.72
December 4, 1981	892.69	126.26	55.04
December 3, 1981	883.85	125.12	43.77
December 2, 1981	882.61	124.69	44.50
December 1, 1981	890.22	126.10	53.99
November 30, 1981	888.98	126.35	47.57
November 27, 1981	885.94	125.09	32.77