News stories from Tuesday July 18, 1978

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

The anti-inflation program of the Carter administration suffered a blow when a House committee, by a one-vote margin, turned down a proposal that would place a ceiling on rapidly rising hospital costs. The Commerce Committee altered the Carter administration's bill to substitute purely voluntary efforts for the proposed mandatory controls. [New York Times] The equal rights amendment won a victory when the House Judiciary Committee, after considerable debate, voted to support an extension of the ratification deadline by three years and three months. Thirty-five states have ratified the amendment and three more are needed to make it part of the Constitution, with the original seven-year deadline next March. [New York Times] The Endangered Species Act survived substantially intact as the Senate beat back attempts to weaken it significantly. Instead, the Senate is expected to accept a moderate amendment that would permit the completion of certain large federal projects even if they threaten a species. The amendment is sponsored by Senators John Culver and Howard Baker. [New York Times] A key government informant in the prosecution of the men accused of killing a civil rights worker in Alabama in 1965 asserted that another prosecution witness was not at the scene of the murder, James Turner, a Justice official who helped try the case, confirmed. Mr. Turner said the federal prosecutors ignored the statement by Gary Rowe because there was evidence to the contrary and they doubted Mr. Rowe's ability to identify the other man positively. [New York Times] Mayor Frank Rizzo of Philadelphia said he will dismiss 2,000 of the city's 19,600 striking employees if they continue to ignore a back-to-work order. City attorneys also asked a judge to hold prison guards, deputy sheriffs, court employees and others covered by the order in contempt of court. [New York Times] Exports of oil technology to the Soviet Union will be placed under government control in what was seen as an important shift in administration policy. White House officials said President Carter made the decision in response to the trials of Soviet dissidents to give Washington new leverage over Soviet behavior. The President also reportedly decided to cancel the sale of a large computer to the Soviet Union. [New York Times] A Soviet court ruled that two American correspondents had libeled Soviet television employees by reporting that friends and relatives of a Soviet Georgian dissident contended that a televised confession by him had been a fabrication. In what appeared to be the first such action against American correspondents in Moscow, the court ordered Craig Whitney of the New York Times and Harold Piper of the Baltimore Sun to publish retractions within five days and to pay $1,647 each in court costs. [New York Times] Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the Foreign Ministers of Egypt and Israel reported no progress in efforts to narrow differences between the two Middle East countries after the first two sessions in the latest round of Middle East talks, held at a medieval castle southeast of London. The talks, to be resumed tomorrow, were arranged by the United States to engage the Egyptians and Israelis in discussions on their conflicting plans for the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. [New York Times] Nelson Mandela, the South African black leader who would be most likely to head a black government there, spent his 60th birthday inside the stone walls of Robben Island prison in Table Bay, within sight of the sea route that brought the first white men to the southern tip of Africa almost five centuries ago. It was his 16th birthday spent in the island fortress where 350 men are confined on charges of subversion. [New York Times]

Stock Market Report

Dow Jones Industrial Average: 829.00 (-10.05, -1.20%)
S&P Composite: 96.87 (-0.91, -0.93%)
Arms Index: 1.28

	Issues	Volume*
Advances	492	5.54
Declines	969	14.02
Unchanged	440	3.30
Total Volume		22.86

* in millions of shares

Arms Index is the ratio of volume per declining issue to volume per advancing issue; a figure below 1.0 is bullish.

Market Index Trends
Date	DJIA	S&P	Volume*
July 17, 1978	839.05	97.78	29.18
July 14, 1978	839.83	97.58	28.37
July 13, 1978	824.76	96.25	23.62
July 12, 1978	824.93	96.24	26.64
July 11, 1978	821.29	95.93	27.47
July 10, 1978	816.79	95.27	22.47
July 7, 1978	812.46	94.89	23.49
July 6, 1978	807.17	94.32	24.99
July 5, 1978	805.79	94.27	23.74
July 3, 1978	812.89	95.09	11.57