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News stories from Sunday November 13, 1977
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- Longshoremen reached an agreement on a three-year contract that was expected to bring an end late this week to their strike that has tied up container shipping on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts for 44 days. The contract contains provisions for job security, one of the major objectives of the union that led to the strike, and wage and benefit increases totaling $3.31 an hour, or 30 percent, over three years. [New York Times]
- The administration would allow foreign steel mills to sell in the American market without paying higher duties if the cost was 5 percent below a minimum reference price to be based on production costs of Japanese steel companies. A plan being worked out by President Carter's interagency task force on steel to try to protect the American industry without antagonizing foreign exporters would set a minimum price for steel in the United States and effectively stop sales below cost, or dumping, by Japanese steel companies, while legalizing dumping by European mills whose production costs are higher than Japan's. [New York Times]
- The universe is remarkably mobile, judging by the findings of University of California scientists who made a series of high-altitude U-2 flights as well as other recent observations. Measuring the movements of the earth against the "glow" left from the fireball in which the universe was born, they have found that the Milky Way galaxy, the home of this solar system, is hurtling through space at more than a million miles an hour, relative to the universe as a whole. Another scientist's observations led him to surmise that the sun is orbiting an unobserved companion star, possibly one of the hypothetical "black holes." [New York Times]
- Somalia, angered by Soviet support for Ethiopia in the war over the disputed Ogaden region, took dramatic steps against the power that has been its prime ally for eight years. All Soviet advisers were ordered to leave within seven days, and Soviet use of strategic naval facilities on the Indian Ocean was ended. In addition, Somalia broke diplomatic relations with Cuba and formally renounced the 1974 treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union.
Somalia's break with the Soviet Union and Cuba was the culmination of shifting alliances that has left Moscow with a precarious foothold in the Horn of Africa -- a key area of the third world. Moscow had apparently hoped to weather the warfare between Somalia and Ethiopia, both beneficiaries of Soviet military aid, and had made frequent pleas for a halt in the fighting. The supply of Russian weapons to Somalia was reportedly cut back in a vain effort to force the government to abandon its drive into the Ogaden region, which it claims despite a century of Ethiopian occupation. [New York Times]
- President Anwar Sadat's offer to appear before the Israeli Parliament to aid the Middle East Peace effort was described by Israeli leaders as a "positive development." The prospect that he might visit Israel aroused considerable enthusiasm there, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin said he would make every effort to see that the Egyptian President addressed Parliament. [New York Times]
- A formula for participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in a new Middle East peace conference was suggested by one of its ranking political officials. He told reporters in Tunis covering a meeting of Arab League foreign ministers this could be accomplished by an invitation extended by the United States and the Soviet Union through Kurt Waldheim, Secretary General of the United Nations. [New York Times]
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