News stories from Monday July 4, 1977
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- Additional budget deficits of $30 billion to $40 billion could result from changes that House committees made In President Carter's energy program in the last two weeks, administration officials said. The administration had intended expenses and income to be about equal and at one point even estimated that there would be a slight surplus. [New York Times]
- A retired Navy captain, Spencer Robbins, is said to have been right-hand man of Tongsun Park, allegedly the South Korean government's main agent of influence in Washington. A business associate of Mr. Park said, "Robbins knows everything Park did in this country and most of what he did outside this country." [New York Times]
- Plans of a Canadian-American consortium for a $8.6 billion natural gas pipeline across western Canada were approved by the National Energy Board of Canada. The pipeline will be connected to the proposed Alcan pipeline in Alaska that will bring natural gas to accessible ice-free ports contiguous to the United States. The consortium's proposal still must be considered in Parliament. [New York Times]
- A battle for the control of the deep-water oil terminals proposed for the Gulf of Mexico is going on between the big oil companies that formed consortiums to build the ports and the federal government, which will license them and put certain restrictions on their use. The government believes that the companies are applying monopolistic pressure to gain control of the ports. [New York Times]
- Soccer, long known as an "immigrant" sport, is now being played and watched increasingly across the United States and is the country's fastest-growing team sport. Total registration figures of national soccer organizations show that 350,000 youths 18 and under are playing organized soccer, and it is estimated that the number of players is more than a million when the members of unaffiliated soccer leagues are counted. "Soccer is kicking Little League baseball in the teeth," said the owner of a Long Island sporting goods store who has sold 3,000 soccer balls so far this year. [New York Times]
- The United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Malcolm Toon, was not allowed to deliver a traditional Fourth of July speech over Soviet television when he declined to delete a passage alluding to the human rights policy of the Carter administration. A passage that annoyed Soviet officials said that the United States was trying to live up to the "fundamental and inalienable rights" inherent in its founding principles. [New York Times]
- Vladimir Nabokov, the poet, novelist and biographer, died Saturday in Montreux, Switzerland, where he had lived in recent years. He was 78 years old. His wife said he had been sick for a year and a half with an unidentified virus infection. [New York Times]
- President Idi Amin of Uganda admitted publicly that there had been an attempt to assassinate him last month. He said at a meeting of African leaders in Libreville, Gabon, that he had foiled a Western-inspired conspiracy to murder him and other African leaders. [New York Times]
- The cabinet that will serve in Spain's first freely elected government in 40 years was announced by Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez. Its makeup was a mixture of the continuity and reformism that has characterized the Prime Minister's year in office. His post-election cabinet includes seven holdovers and 13 others from Mr. Suarez's Union of the Democratic Center, the center-right coalition that emerged as the largest party in the June 14 parliamentary elections. [New York Times]