News stories from Saturday June 16, 1979

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

Airliners will be ordered out of the area where the Skylab space station is expected to fall to earth next month under an extraordinary safety measure by the Federal Aviation Administration, which said, however, that the likelihood of a plane being struck by pieces of the disintegrating space station was small. [New York Times] Whether the oil industry needs still higher profits to encourage the search for new oil reserves is increasingly questioned by the industry's critics, who include economists, environmentalists and consumer spokesmen. The typical return is running at 20 percent and more on investments in domestic exploration and production. The critics say that the expected decontrol of domestic crude oil will affect primarily the companies' exploration and production operations, whose profitability is what really matters, and in that phase of the oil business the returns are already quite handsome. [New York Times] A mutual desire to continue efforts to control nuclear arms was expressed by President Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at the opening session of their meeting in Vienna, which is to culminate Monday in the signing of a strategic arms treaty. [New York Times] Malaysia will not fire on refugees from Vietnam, a United Nations refugee official in Kuala Lumpur said, despite the Malaysian government's reported announcement Friday that any refugees who tried to land there would be shot and refugees already in camps sent back out to sea. Rajagopalam Sampatkumar, a representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said he was "gratified that no human tragedy would occur." [New York Times] China reacted coolly to an American appeal that it provide a safe haven for the ethnic Chinese who have recently been forced to flee Vietnam, according to administration officials in Washington. China said that it had already accepted 200,000 refugees. [New York Times] El Paso has become the drug hub of the Southwest, investigators said in their search for the killers of Federal District Court Judge John Wood, who was shot recently outside his home in San Antonio. It was no accident, federal law enforcement agents said, that the judge died in the midst of a fierce government battle against the burgeoning drug trade in the Southwest. The investigators seeking the killers were following leads in many directions, to Juarez, Mexico, the Florida Everglades, northern Colombia, Seattle, Boston and Las Vegas. [New York Times] Ghana's former head of state was executed after being convicted of squandering government funds. Ignatius Acheampong, a 47-year-old former general, was tried by a revolutionary court set up by a group of junior officers who overthrew the government 12 days ago. Ghana's former commander of its border guards, Gen. E. K. Utuka, was found guilty of the same charges and was also executed by a firing squad. [New York Times]