News stories from Saturday November 22, 1980
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- Iran requested the United States to give a "positive" or a "negative" response to its four conditions for the release of the American hostages, Pars, the Iranian press agency, said. The request, the agency said, was sent to the Algerian government, the intermediary in the release terms, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Rajai was quoted as saying Washington's initial response "was neither explicit nor clear." [New York Times]
- More than 100 people might have died in the Las Vegas hotel fire, and it is known that at least 500 others were injured in the blaze that engulfed the first two floors of the MGM Grand Hotel at dawn Friday. The number of dead has been confirmed at 83. Most of them died of the smoke that rose through the 26-story building, which contained 2,076 rooms and a casino. The fire's origin has not been determined, but the kitchen is the focus of attention. [New York Times]
- Ronald Reagan's key advisers were helping him in Los Angeles to choose nominees for his principal cabinet posts: State, Defense, Treasury and Attorney General. [New York Times]
- The Reagan administation may be greeted by a Soviet Union looking for a "a more stable, less confrontational relationship," with the United States, according to Secretary of State Edmund Muskie. He said in an interview that Moscow seems to desire "a face-saving" way to resolve the Afghanistan issue. The new administration, he said, will have to deal with some issues immediately, including the necessity of ending the war between Iran and Iraq, which threatens to further inflate oil prices. [New York Times]
- Mae West died at her home in Hollywood. She was 87 years old and had been recuperating from a stroke three months ago. [New York Times]
- John McCormack, former Speaker of the House and a member of it for 42 years, died at a nursing home in Dedham, Mass. He was 88 years old. He was a Boston Irishman and the archetype of a big-city politician. [New York Times]
- Exclusion of the public from most of the nearly 24 hours of a conference that a federal immigration policy group scheduled in Virginia Dec. 5 to 7 has angered interested immigration lawyers and citizen groups. All but three and a half hours of the session, which will discuss major policy changes, will be closed to the public. [New York Times]
- Philadelphia's last barge of sewage sludge will be sent to sea Tuesday, ending a 10-year legal battle over the city's participation in the fouling of East Coast waters. The city is a month ahead of a deadline set in a court-sanctioned agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency. [New York Times]
- Poland's Communist Party is undergoing a drastic shakeup, the biggest since the de-Stalinization of 1956. At least 18 first secretaries in the country's 49 provinces have been dismissed. The changes have followed last summer's labor strikes, which indicated public contempt for the party and the party's concern with the public's demands for an open and democratic society. [New York Times]
- Malnutrition among blacks in South Africa, Africa's leading food exporter, is not mainly attributable to drought but instead to poverty and chronic shortage of food among the country's majority, according to a pediatrician who has been treating children with the severest indications of malnutrition. South African whites were incredulous when they saw a photograph of a famished black infant in a Johannesburg newspaper. Drought has caused crop shortages in black "homelands" and the price of corn, a basic food, has risen 30 percent in a year. [New York Times]