News stories from Sunday November 19, 1978
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- Guyana reported that its troops found between 300 and 400 bodies at the headquarters of a California religious cult in a remote jungle area, and there were indications that there may have been a mass suicide. Saturday night, Representative Leo Ryan of California, a woman, and three reporters from the United States were killed and nine others wounded in an ambush nearby. Nine wounded men and women were rescued. [New York Times]
- A single integrated busing program has been proposed for Los Angeles County's schools by a panel of social scientists and educators, which urges scrapping the present concept of integrating only the Los Angeles city school system, the nation's second largest. The county proposal would consolidate more than 80 suburban districts and dozens more in adjoining Orange and Ventura counties. [New York Times]
- Columbus is the exception to the decline of Ohio's major cities. Its population has been increasing, though slowly, since the 1950's. The diverse job market has been growing steadily, and the city has assembled land to facilitate its growth. Columbus occupied only 40 square miles in 1950, but it now occupies 175 square miles, the result of aggressive annexation. [New York Times]
- Menachem Begin ducked a barrage of eggs thrown by disenchanted supporters outside his party's headquarters in Tel Aviv, and said, once inside, that he would ask his cabinet to reject an Egyptian proposal for a timetable linking an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty to a solution of the Palestinian problem. But the Prime Minister added that he would also ask the cabinet to drop its earlier objections to a general statement in the preamble of the proposed treaty drafted at talks in Washington that would commit the two sides to move ahead on Palestinian problems as called for at Camp David. [New York Times]
- A packed bus was bombed near Jerusalem. Four passengers were killed and forty others were wounded. The bombing was the most serious of a number of terrorist incidents in Israel on the anniversary of Anwar Sadat's trip to Jerusalem last year. [New York Times]
- Iran released 210 political prisoners and the Shah renewed the pledge he made two weeks ago to hold free elections next June and bring an end to the military government.
President Carter quickly rebutted a warning from Leonid Brezhnev against any American interference in Iran. The White House regarded the Soviet leader's statement on the front page of Pravda as "highly inappropriate." American officials believe that the Soviet Union was trying to embarrass the United States and was gratuitously criticizing President Carter personally.
[New York Times] - Mao Tse-tung is accused in Peking of having been a supporter of the disgraced "Gang of Four" extremist leaders. It was the first time that the late Communist Party chairman had been linked directly with the gang, which includes his wife Chiang Ching. [New York Times]
- Improved relations with Mexico is the aim of a new set of policies being drafted by the Carter administration, which is alarmed by the decline in Mexican-American relations. The draft is complete except for minor additions, officials said. [New York Times]
- The rate of world population expansion has shown a "perceptible decline" for the first time in three centuries, the Bureau of the Census said in a report on fertility trends in all 200 countries of the world over the last decade. "This is really a major turning point in world history," the bureau said. [New York Times]