News stories from Saturday February 11, 1978

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

President Carter warned of imminent industrial layoffs and declared an energy emergency in Ohio as prospects for an end to the coal strike faded. Mandatory industrial power cutbacks and "employment impacts" are now inevitable, Mr. Carter said. He asked Energy Secretary James Schlesinger to prepare plans to send coal to areas where the shortage is critical, but this, an Energy Department official said, is likely to lead to violent opposition by striking miners. Mr. Carter declined again to invoke the 80-day cooling-off period of the Taft-Hartley Act, saying that the end to the strike must come through free collective bargaining. [New York Times] States that help depressed cities would be rewarded financially by the government, while those that did not would have their revenue-sharing funds reduced under an incentive plan being considered by the administration. States that devised an acceptable city aid program would be rewarded from a fund that initially would amount to $500 million. [New York Times] Businesses are using public interest legal foundations to fight government regulation and environmental reform. There are at least eight tax-exempt foundations in major cities promoting a variety of causes ranging from opposition to "no growth" community zoning laws to government minority-hiring job preference regulation. Most of the foundations were established only in the past year along the lines of the four-year-old Pacific Legal Foundation of Sacramento. [New York Times] Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal has gone to Paris to try to resolve differences among the United States and its allies over economic policy. Accompanied by Dr. Arthur Burns, outgoing Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, he is to hold unannounced talks today with the finance ministers of France, West Germany, Britain and Japan. The talks were to have been secret to prevent stimulating speculation in foreign exchange markets. The basic cause of the dispute is the unwillingness of West Germany and Japan to adopt more expansionary economic policies. [New York Times] Moscow charged the United States with being responsible for the breakdown in negotiations on limiting strategic nuclear arms. An editorial in the Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, said the talks were stalled over several old disputes, including the American cruise missile, the new Soviet Backfire bomber and the modernization of weapons technology. Congress, the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, Pravda said, are holding up the talks. [New York Times] Somalia announced that it was ordering full-scale mobilization and was sending regular Somali armed forces into the battle against Ethiopian forces in the Ogaden region. The statement said that because of the "failure of Western powers to assume the responsibility of confronting Soviet aggression, it has become incumbent for Somalia to defend itself against naked aggression and to increase its assistance to Western Somali liberation forces by dispatching units of its own regular army to the area." [New York Times]