News stories from Saturday May 20, 1978
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- An unmanned spacecraft set forth from Cape Canaveral on a 300-million-mile, seven-month voyage to orbit Venus. Pioneer Venus 1 will conduct the longest and most extensive survey thus far of the weather and topography of Earth's nearest neighbor. A second craft, Pioneer Venus 2, is scheduled to be launched Aug. 7. [New York Times]
- Shake-ups In the Teamsters' largest pension fund have alarmed its oversight committee in Congress. Trustees of the $1.4 billion Teamsters Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund have dismissed their executive director, Daniel Shannon, who tried to clean up the fund's tarnished image. Both of his blunt-spoken public relations aides and two respected actuarial firms he had hired were also dismissed. [New York Times]
- French and Belgian paratroopers, in Zaire to evacuate 2,500 Europeans, took control of the copper mining center of Kolwezi and routed Katangan rebels. The two forces totaled 1,300 troops. Belgian diplomats coordinating the rescue effort confirmed earlier French reports that 44 whites, almost all of them men, had been shot to death in the center of the town. The number of dead blacks was estimated at several hundred. [New York Times]
- An American delegation canceled a trip to Moscow in protest of the trial and sentencing last week of Yuri Orlov, a Soviet physicist and dissident. The 19 members of the delegation were going to attend a Soviet-American scientific symposium. The National Academy of sciences also announced that Nicolaas Bloembergen, a physics professor at Harvard, and Robert Marshak, president of the City College of New York, had canceled individual trips to the Soviet Union in protest. [New York Times]
- Gunmen at Orly Airport in Paris who had opened fire on travelers preparing to board an El Al flight to Tel Aviv were shot and killed by French security police. They had Lebanese, Kuwaiti and Tunisian passports. The French authorities said the gunmen had "slightly wounded" three French tourists. A policeman was killed and two others were badly wounded. [New York Times]
- The F.B.I. arrested two Soviet employees of the United Nations on spying charges, but released an alleged accomplice, a Soviet attache at the United Nations, because of his diplomatic immunity. An announcement in Washington said that the three had been seized as they were picking up classified documents relating to underwater Navy warfare projects in Woodbridge, N. J. The Russians who were arrested were identified as Rudolf Chernayev, a personnel officer at the United Nations Secretariat, and Valdik Enger, an assistant to one of the Under Secretaries General of the United Nations. The attache was identified as Vladimir Zinyakin. [New York Times]
- Peru was placed under martial law In an attempt by the military government to halt an outbreak of looting and sabotage in which 12 persons have been killed. President Francisco Morales Bermudez said Peru was facing an "organized subversive movement." Hundreds of left-wing labor leaders were imprisoned and the government canceled television and radio broadcasts by political parties that had been campaigning for the election of a constitutional assembly next month. [New York Times]