News stories from Saturday December 13, 1980

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

The hostages' families met in Alexandria, Va., where they were briefed by State Department officials on the negotiations with Iran. A "basically positive" response to Iran's terms for freeing the 52 American hostages was received in Teheran, an Iranian official, Ahmad Azizi, director of American hostage affairs in the Prime Minister's office, said. [New York Times] The Senate handed President-elect Reagan his first legislative defeat by rejecting his request for a $10,000-a-year congressional pay increase that also would benefit senior government officials. The action was taken after the House accepted the Senate's language on federal financing of abortions, as Congress struggled toward adjournment. [New York Times] The mention of New York's Senators by a witness at the bribery-conspiracy trial of Representative Richard Kelly, a Florida Republican, has deeply distressed Senators Jacob Javits and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Senator Moynihan said that "the Justice Department owes us a complete explanation for this contemptible and totally unwarranted behavior." [New York Times] A major landmark designation of central Virginia farmland by the Interior Department, which was reversed by a federal court decision, will be upheld through amendments to the federal national historic preservation program signed into law by President Carter, government lawyers said. The amendments validated the status of all 1,300 federal landmark designations made to date. [New York Times] The Speaker of the Polish Parliament warned that "any intervention from the outside" in Polish affairs would be "inadmissable." In a speech before the eighth Congress of the Peasants' Party, which he heads, Stanislaw Gucwa did not refer to to the Soviet Union by name, and the tenor of his remarks was such that the warning could apply to the West as well as the Soviet bloc. Meanwhile, the government press continued its campaign against the Western media. [New York Times] El Salvador has a civilian President for the first time in 50 years. After intense negotiations between the armed forces and the Christian Democrats, the country's major political party, Jose Napoleon Duarte, who had been a member of the civilian-military junta, was named President and leader of the four-member junta that will now excercise legislative functions. [New York Times] An Italian magistrate was kidnapped near his home in Rome by members of the Red Brigades terrorist group. The kidnappers told a Rome newspaper that they were holding Giovanni D'Urso, a member of the Ministry of Justice, to force the government to close a high-security prison where more than a dozen of the leaders of the Red Brigades are being held. [New York Times] Milton Obote again became President of Uganda. The electoral commission announced that his party, the Uganda People's Congress, had won 66 of the 126 parliamentary seats contested in the election last week. Mr. Obote was Prime Minister in 1962 and later declared himself President. He was overthrown in 1971 by Idi Amin. [New York Times]