News stories from Sunday March 13, 1977
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- Under pressure from the Labor Department, the trustees of the Teamsters union's Central States pension fund have agreed to give up control of the scandal-ridden fund to independent investment managers, then resign as trustees. The Labor Department has been threatening to go to court to force Frank Fitzsimmons, the union's president, and other trustees to surrender control of the fund. The Secretary of Labor, Ray Marshall, said "it now appears possible that we can avoid litigation, assuming that the fund trustees make good progress in following up on their commitments." [New York Times]
- No government agency anywhere has more regulatory authority over consumer goods than the Food and Drug Administration, but it is the federal government's most criticized and demoralized agency. Its bureaucratic problems have been so vexing that in the last three years the agency has been the subject of more than 100 congressional investigations, 50 highly critical reports by the General Accounting Office and a series of internal inquiries. Its proposed ban on saccharin is the latest of its troubles. [New York Times]
- With pressures rising on all sides, it seems unlikely that the Postal Service can escape significant transformation this year. The agency avoided financial losses in two recent quarters, but its success will probably be overshadowed by worsening financial problems. Litigation that could upset the agency's ability to raise rates is pending, and complaints from the public about service continue. [New York Times]
- Charges of fraud against two former top officials of the defunct Penn Central Transportation Company were dismissed by a federal judge in Philadelphia. David Bevan, 70 years old, and William Gerstnecker, 64, had been charged with transferring $4 million of Penn Central funds in 1969 to a corporation in Europe, allegedly controlled by a cohort. The trial of two lawyers, Francis Rosenbaum and Joseph Rosenbaum, who are brothers, on charges related to the alleged swindle, will continue. [New York Times]
- An idea that has gained favor in key Western councils to get the industrialized world out of its slump is "probably mistaken," a Senate report said. The premise was based on the coordinated expansion of the strong economies of the United States, West Germany and Japan. The strategy is wrong, said the subcommittee on foreign economic policy of the Foreign Relations Committee, because of the "cautious" economic course of the West German government. "External pressure from France or Britain, or from the United States, is unlikely to sway the German government's determination to follow a policy of slow economic growth, the report said. [New York Times]
- Jacques Chirac, the former Prime Minister of France, apparently won the first round of his election campaign to become mayor of Paris over a candidate hand-picked by President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. He will now run against a Socialist-Communist electoral bloc in a second-round election next Sunday. If he wins, Mr. Chirac will have made a major advance in his apparent campaign to replace President Giscard d'Estaing as the leader of the non-leftist parties in the next elections for the National Assembly. Municipal elections were nationwide and showed that the leftist opposition was making considerable gains. [New York Times]
- Pravda warned that President Carter's outspokenness on human rights could damage the atmosphere in which a strategic arms agreement must be negotiated. The Communist Party newspaper's weekly review of world affairs ridiculed "the illogic of the argument" by Washington that criticism of Moscow on rights did not interfere with the pursuit of detente and particularly of a limitation on long-range nuclear weapons. [New York Times]
- Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel rejected President Carter's view that Israel should give up virtually all territory captured from the Arabs in the 1967 war. He said in a television interview that Mr. Carter's remarks last week at a news conference called on Israel to return more territories than "we want to give." [New York Times]