News stories from Saturday July 2, 1977
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- To show its support for the government of President Elias Sarkis of Lebanon, the Carter administration proposes to provide $100 million in military aid to help establish a Lebanese light infantry force that would be used to maintain internal order. The administration has been holding unpublicized consultations with Congress. Alfred Atherton, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, said that the administration was only consulting with Congress on the advisability of the proposal and had not definitely decided to go ahead with it. [New York Times]
- To President Carter and to most of the rest of the world, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany, who will visit Washington July 13 and 14, is the strong and powerful leader of a resurgent nation. In West Germany, things seem quite different. The Chancellor has just come through a period of national discontent that appears to have shaken his self-confidence, his party, and most of the basic assumptions on which the country has been building for a quarter of a century. [New York Times]
- Israel has prepared a 3,500-word denial to a four-page article in the Sunday Times of London two weeks ago that alleged torture by Israelis of Arabs suspected of terrorist acts against Israel. The Sunday Times will print the Israeli government's position tomorrow without comment. The paper's response will be printed a week later. [New York Times]
- President Park Chung Hee of South Korea unsuccessfully attempted to dissuade the former director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency from testifying in Congress about President Park's lobbying efforts in Washington on behalf of his government, according to Kim Hyung Wook, who was head of the agency from 1963 to 1969. He said that President Park had sent a cabinet minister who tried to persuade him not to testify, and had ordered him kidnapped or assassinated if the minister's efforts failed. [New York Times]
- A new civil rights issue of enormous social importance faces the nation. The question is to what extent must white Americans be inconvenienced and even discriminated against so that blacks can have a better chance at good schools, good jobs and good housing? All three branches of the government were immersed in the controversy last week. [New York Times]
- Drug dealers in southern California have taken to the hills, where they have set themselves up like moonshiners to supply drug users, mostly teenagers, with a cheap but deadly substitute for heroin and other expensive narcotics. The dealers run laboratories known as "pig outfits" to cater to a revived market for a potent drug, PCP, or phencyclidine. PCP goes under various names: angel dust, hog, peace pills, superjoint, magic mist and wobble weed. [New York Times]