News stories from Saturday December 8, 1979

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

Foreign representatives are in Iran, hoping to negotiate the hostages' release on behalf of the United States, State Department officials said. They are mostly from Middle East and European nations and have instructions from President Carter and his aides to offer a deal for the release of the hostages with a proposal for an international forum where Iran may air its charges against the Shah and its grievances against the United States. [New York Times] A dissident Ayatollah warned Iran's revolutionary leaders that agreements he had made with them were being broken and if they continued to be violated he "would not be responsible" for what happened in the troubled province of Azerbaijan. The bluntness of Ayatollah Kazem Shariat-Madari, who has sided with the ethnic Turks in Azerbaijan in their protest against Iran's new constitution, emphasized the seriousness of the crisis facing the revolutionary authorities in Teheran. [New York Times] Alaska's unexplored oil resources will be offered to major oil companies Tuesday at a federal-state lease sale in Fairbanks. The offering is for hundreds of square miles of the floor of Beaufort Sea. The tracts lie offshore of the extremely oil-rich Prudhoe Bay field. The Beaufort Sea tracts will be awarded to the oil companies that offer the biggest share of profits. [New York Times] A switch from oil to coal was begun at New England's largest generating plant, the nation's first major industrial conversion from oil since the end of the Arab oil embargo nearly five years ago. The conversion by 1981 of three of the four units of the New England Electric Power Company's Brayton Point plant in Somerset, Mass., is expected to save almost 500 million gallons of oil annually. [New York Times] Little progress on solar energy has been made in the four years since the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 required the President to develop and carry out a plan to reduce energy consumption in the government's 400,000 buildings by, among other means, solar energy. [New York Times] Racketeers have seized over 100 ships in the last two years on the trade routes between Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The ships and the cargoes valued at a total of more than $250 million have disappeared. These modern pirates operate through a variety of machinations, usually diverting the ships to Lebanon, which has become the major market for pirated goods as a result of the breakdown of authority after years of civil war. [New York Times] South Korea lifted house arrest for Kim Dae Jung, a dissident whose challenges alarmed the government, and 68 students and other dissidents were released from prison. Mr. Kim, who had been in prison or under house arrest since 1976, immediately demanded that the government quickly honor a promise to hold a presidential election. He was a strong challenger to the late President Park Chung Hee in South Korea's last democratic election in 1971. [New York Times]