News stories from Sunday April 23, 1978

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

President Carter turned down an offer by Richard Hatcher, Mayor of Gary, Ind., to become a $1-a-year aide to the President while remaining as Mayor, White House sources said. Mr. Carter reportedly urged Mr. Hatcher to join the White House staff full-time as his top black assistant. It was agreed at a White House meeting last week that Mr. Hatcher would take tour to six weeks to consider the invitation. [New York Times] Wall Street expects the Federal Reserve to increase short-term interest rates by a quarter of a point soon. This, money market economists believe, will start a general round of tighter credit restrictions. A second increase, which would follow last week's quarter-point rise, might come as soon as this week, but more likely not before completion of a Treasury financing in mid-May, the analysts say. [New York Times] Passengers from the jet that was shot at by a Soviet fighter and forced to land on a frozen lake in the Soviet Union resumed their journey from Europe to the Far East three days after they started. They were flown from Murmansk in an American plane to Helsinki, where they continued what had been a routine flight from Paris to Anchorage, Tokyo and Seoul. A failure in navigational equipment had caused the South Korean plane to veer from its path over Canada to Alaska, the co-pilot said. Passengers said a single Soviet interceptor had followed the plane for 15 minutes and then fired several cannon bursts into it, killing two passengers and injuring 10 others. [New York Times] Eastman Kodak reported a record 50 percent rise in first quarter earnings and a 15 percent rise in sales. Not only was the profit gain the highest for any March quarter in Kodak's history, the company said, but also it was the largest for any quarter in the last decade. Kodak said its worldwide net income in the first quarter jumped to $141 million, or 87 cents a share, from the year-earlier $94.2 million, or 58 cents a share. [New York Times] Few Americans are strongly class conscious, and most believe that rapid social mobility is possible, according to a recent poll by the New York Times and CBS News. Three quarters of the 1,417 people polled said that they belong to a social class, and nearly half said that the main factor in determining class identity was income. Only 2 percent said they were upper class, and 8 percent placed themselves in the lower class. The rest were divided evenly between the middle class and the working class, but without classic proletarian connotations. [New York Times] Undertakers influence American burial customs, according to a countrywide study of the funeral industry, which also found deep differences between the thoughtful discussions on the need for funeral ritual and the day-to-day responses of many undertakers to the bereaved. Body snatching among competing funeral parlors, price gouging, misrepresentation of the need for embalming and assaults on cultural and religious beliefs are among the industry's abuses, the study said. Some people who have tried to promote reform in the industry say they have been threatened and intimidated. [New York Times] Hungary's Communist Party will take economic measures that will gradually eliminate most government subsidies for consumer goods over the next two years. The subsidies' withdrawal is expected to bring about the biggest price increases in a decade. The measures were adopted by the party's Central Committee, which replaced some of its leaders with party members thought to be more amenable to liberalized economic policies. [New York Times]