News stories from Monday May 7, 1979

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

Serious damage to the fuel core of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant was indicated two days before it was reported, a plant technician told Congressmen visiting the plant in Pennsylvania. A control room supervisor said that federal nuclear inspectors were present when a reactor monitoring gauge indicated that a hydrogen explosion had occurred on Wednesday March 28. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission maintained that it was not aware of the explosion until the following Friday, when it formally reported by the Metropolitan Edison Company, which operates the reactor. [New York Times] Shutting down all nuclear plants is "out of the question," President Carter said at a meeting with six organizers of Sunday's anti-nuclear demonstration in Washington, attended by about 65,000 protesters. He said the administration was trying "to minimize the requirement for the use of nuclear power" through alternative energy sources and strict conservation. [New York Times] More than half of each dollar spent on auto repairs goes for needless work, undercover investigators for the Department of Transportation found in a national survey of repair shops. [New York Times] Iowa is the new home of 167 "boat people" who fled the Communist regime in Vietnam. They were brought to the United States under the government's Indochinese Refugee Resettlement Program and are the first group of 1,500 refugees that Iowa volunteered to accept. Iowa is the only state presently sponsoring refugees under its own resettlement program. [New York Times] Nine rural post offices were saved from being closed by the Postal Service. The Postal Rate Commission, an independent agency with regulatory authority over the Postal Service, ruled against their closing in its first hearings on appeals to prevent them and other rural offices from being shut down. [New York Times] A high rate of cancer deaths in a suburb of Niagara Falls has been attributed by some of its residents to radium-rich wastes stored there that emit a radioactive gas. The radioactive materials, left over from the Manhattan Project, are kept in a 165-foot-high concrete water silo in Lewiston, near Niagara Falls. [New York Times] The U.S. intensified efforts to conclude negotiations this week with the Soviet Union for a strategic arms limitation treaty. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin met twice, in the morning and briefly in the afternoon after Mr. Vance had conferred with President Carter. Mr. Vance announced that he would go to London May 20 for talks with members of the new Conservative government on coordinating British and American policy on issues of mutual interest. [New York Times] Israel proposed a peace treaty with Lebanon. Prime Minister Menachem Begin suggested a treaty in a speech in Parliament, but he said that Israel would continue to attack Palestinian guerrilla camps in Lebanon. The Israeli military announced that such raids were continuing. Lebanon immediately rejected the idea of peace talks. [New York Times] Rhodesia's black-majority Parliament met for the first time in a special session to elect eight whites from among the 50 white members of the old Parliament. Another 20 white-held seats were decided by a vote among Rhodesia's white population. There will be a total of 28 whites and 72 blacks in the new Parliament. [New York Times] East Germany is repressing dissidents. The harassment of the Communist government's leading critics is described by a writer facing possible criminal charges as "a revival of Stalinism." The government is said to preparing currency-law violation cases against two of its most vocal critics, Stefan Heym, a novelist, and Robert Havemann, a political theorist and social commentator. [New York Times]

Stock Market Report

Dow Jones Industrial Average: 833.42 (-14.12, -1.67%)
S&P Composite: 99.02 (-1.67, -1.66%)
Arms Index: 3.06

	Issues	Volume*
Advances	193	1.20
Declines	1,430	27.21
Unchanged	298	2.07
Total Volume		30.48

* 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*
May 4, 1979	847.54	100.69	30.63
May 3, 1979	857.59	101.81	30.86
May 2, 1979	855.51	101.72	30.51
May 1, 1979	855.51	101.68	31.05
April 30, 1979	854.90	101.76	26.44
April 27, 1979	856.64	101.80	29.63
April 26, 1979	860.97	102.01	32.41
April 25, 1979	867.46	102.50	31.75
April 24, 1979	866.86	102.20	35.54
April 23, 1979	860.10	101.57	25.62