News stories from Sunday January 3, 1982

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

The President and Richard Allen, the national security adviser, will meet soon to discuss Mr. Allen's status in the administration, White House officials said. Mr. Allen said that he had requested the meeting, but declined to say what he planned to discuss with Mr. Reagan. A senior White House official said that Mr. Allen had requested the meeting after White House officials were quoted as saying that Mr. Reagan was planning to replace Mr. Allen with William P. Clark, Deputy Secretary of State. [New York Times] President Reagan opposes quotas in affirmative action programs, according to his aides, who said that the President believed the Supreme Court erred in a 1979 ruling that upheld certain types of affirmative action for blacks. Comments by Mr. Reagan at his Dec. 17 news conference have been widely viewed as indicating his approval of the Court's ruling against a white employee of the Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation who unsuccessfully challenged an affirmative action program negotiated by Kaiser and the United Steelworkers of America. This is not so, according to a White House spokesman, who said that Mr. Reagan agreed with William Reynolds, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, who said that the Kaiser case had been "wrongly decided." [New York Times] Removal of 396 Cuban refugees from the detention camp in Fort Chaffee, Ark., and 135 others from the Federal Correctional Institute in Atlanta and St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington to Glasgow, Mont., is being worked out by the government despite some administration opposition over the cost. The closing of the Fort Chaffee camp is expected to bring economic hardship locally, and some camp employees are trying to rally support to keep it open as a permanent refugee relocation center. [New York Times] European Community ambassadors will meet in Warsaw tomorrow with Poland's military leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, according to the West German news agency. It said diplomatic sources had reported that General Jaruzelski had requested the meeting. In the meantime, Poland's military government promised to increase wages to offset some of the steep rises in the price of staple goods. It was also announced that the Polish currency had been devalued. [New York Times] Poland now has the money to pay the $350 million that it said it needed to pay Western banks and avoid technical default at the end of 1981, Western sources said. The sources said this information had been given by Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski during a visit last week to West Germany. It was assumed that the $350 million came from the Soviet bloc, probably from Moscow. [New York Times] The assignment of a U.S. negotiator to the drawn-out Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian self-rule is being considered by Secretary of State Alexander Haig. His aides said that that such an appointment would dramatize the Reagan administration's commitment to gaining an agreement by the end of April. [New York Times] A blast wrecked the pipeline that carries Iraqi oil to the Lebanese Mediterranean coast. The Lebanese radio said that the explosion, which it called sabotage, started a huge fire that continued for hours in the northern district of Akkar, three miles south of the Syrian border. The blast occurred a week after the pumping of Iraqi oil to Tripoli, 50 miles north of Beirut, was resumed after an interruption of six years. [New York Times] Stepped-up guerrilla attacks on Nicaragua's border with Honduras by presumed exiles seeking to retake Nicaragua are cited as one reason why the Sandinist revolutionary government is taking steps to place the country on a virtual war footing. [New York Times]