News stories from Sunday October 28, 1979
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- Park Chung Hee's death was no accident, as first announced, the martial law command in Seoul said. In what was described as an "interim report," the military command said that President Park's shooting was a premeditated plot by Kim Jae Kyu, director of the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency.
Intense discussions in Seoul over South Korea's future are under way in government offices. The major question is whether the existing constitutional process for choosing a new leader should remain intact or whether it should be changed, and which potential candidates would be favored if a change were made. Meanwhile, memorial meetings were being held for President Park, attracting people from all walks of life. The official funeral will be held Saturday.
[New York Times] - A $10 billion to $15 billion deficit in the federal budget for the fiscal year 1981 is anticipated by President Carter's budget planners, if taxes are not cut. Although it would be much smaller than the $35 billion to $40 billion expected in the current fiscal year, it would still fall short of Mr. Carter's 1976 campaign pledge to balance the budget by the end of his first term. The 1981 budget could become an issue in the presidential campaign, since it will go into effect five weeks before Election Day. [New York Times]
- The New York Stock Exchange faces a tough challenge: how and to what extent a computer will replace the famous trading floor and the 2,500 men and women who operate the nation's principal stock market. Fifty years after it survived the Great Crash, the exchange is being urged to "accept electronics more, to become more productive," in the words of the chairman of the Merrill Lynch & Company, the brokerage firm. [New York Times]
- Up to $80 million in rent refunds will be shared by tenants of 4,800 federally financed housing developments under a settlement that is one of the largest ever reached in a consumer action suit against the government. [New York Times]
- Houston employers are cheating illegal alien workers coming into the area from Mexico and Latin America to seek work in its booming job market, according to a Department of Labor investigation. The department's investigators examined records of 63 companies and found that 40 of them had been paying illegal alien employees less than the federal minimum wage of $2.90 an hour, not paying overtime or not compensating them fully for all hours worked. [New York Times]
- Productivity is under scrutiny in dozens of centers established across the nation, where seminars are being held on what can be done to increase the productivity in goods and services, which has declined markedly. "Every major university seems to have one," according to Richard Landry, deputy economist of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States. "It's a growth industry." [New York Times]
- Residents near the Cuban Mission in Manhattan, where a bomb exploded Saturday night, spent the day cleaning glass from their apartments and voicing anger over the presence of the mission. News agencies said that a group opposed to President Fidel Castro of Cuba claimed responsibility. [New York Times]
- King Hussein of Jordan is trying to get the other Arab nations to seize the initiative and propose their own basis for a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement. He said in an interview in Amman, "We in the Arab world should do more than we have done until now, at least among ourselves, to discuss the problem." [New York Times]
- Israel decided to move a settlement ruled illegal by the Israeli Supreme Court to a new site on the occupied West Bank, and to give back to its Arab owners the 200 acre tract south of Nablus, which the court said had been unlawfully requisitioned. [New York Times]