News stories from Sunday March 21, 1982
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- Annual raises will be given up by General Motors employees under a tentative contract agreement reached between the company and the United Automobile Workers after 37 hours of continuous bargaining. Employees will also give up nine days a year in paid time off and defer for nine months their cost-of-living increases. Private analysts and G.M. officials have said that these concessions could save G.M. between $2 billion and $3 billion over the 30-month period of the contract. [New York Times]
- The administration has not justified the military need for its five-year plan to expand the armed forces, according to critics who include Democrats and Republicans in Congress and non-government military specialists who span the political spectrum. The increasing attack on the military pro-gram has complicated the administration's justification for increasing military spending when the government faces a $91.5 billion deficit for the fiscal year 1983. The view in Congress is that the proposed military budget will almost certainly be cut this year. [New York Times]
- Favorable weather was forecast for the space shuttle Columbia's third test flight around Earth from Cape Canaveral at 10 A.M. tomorrow. Preparations for the flight were described as "remarkably trouble-free." Tracking stations around the world were reported ready to follow the craft's 115-orbit, seven-day mission. [New York Times]
- New Orleans's Mayor was re-elected after defeating his conservative opponent, Ron Faucheux, in a runoff by a surprisingly wide margin. Mayor Ernest 'Dutch' Morial, the city's first black mayor, and a Democrat who was a state legislator and criminal court judge, said forces that had opposed him were "finished politically." Among his opponents was former Mayor Moon Landrieu. [New York Times]
- A takeover of the police department in Rochester (N.Y.) by the county from the traditional administrator of public safety, the municipal government, has been endorsed the city council, the business community and key county officials. The idea was proposed by the Chamber of Commerce a year ago and officials predict it will become a reality in the fiscal crisis, not from choice but from necessity. Rochester provides a study in how a diminishing federal presence is forcing an organic change in American government without any of the formal realignment of powers that President Reagan and the states' governors have been seeking. [New York Times]
- Salvadoran rebels and a businessman, Conrado Lopez Andreu, who normally are widely apart politically, share a loathing for the Christian Democratic Party which is led by the President of the military-civilian junta, Jose Napoleon Duarte. Mr. Lopez, president of El Salvador's Chamber of Commerce, was recently given time on the guerrillas' radio station to express his opposition to the Christian Democrats, who the Reagan administration hopes will win Sunday's elections. Mr. Duarte's party has engendered such hatred that it doubtful that it can win a majority of assembly seats and if it does there is the question of whether it could govern effectively. [New York Times]
- The French Left suffered a setback when leftist candidates failed to gain control of a majority of provincial councils from conservative forces in regional elections. The elections were runoffs for 1,063 of 2,029 seats in 95 provincial councils that will become powerful political bodies under President Francois Mitterrand's decentralization program. [New York Times]
- West Germany's first major election since 1980 gave the Christian Democrats a substantial victory in the state legislature in lower Saxony. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's Social Democratic Party lost heavily in the election, which was regarded as a national test, when its followers switched to the Christian Democrats or to the Greens, an ecological party. [New York Times]