News stories from Saturday June 18, 1977

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

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline system is set to go into service at 9 A.M. Monday when buttons are pushed at Pump Station One of the Alyeska Pipeline Company. Conceived as a vehicle for the recovery and marketing of the continent's largest single deposit of petroleum, the $7.7 billion, 799-mile pipe extends from the Arctic Ocean to the ice-free water of Prince William Sound. [New York Times] Carried piggyback on a jumbo jet, the space shuttle Enterprise took its first men aloft in a flight over the desert space test center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The flight lasted 54 minutes. The shuttle will be the workhorse of the American space program for the rest of this century. [New York Times] Specific reports on Korean bribery of Congressmen were obtained by electronic surveillance, made in 1975 by a United States intelligence agency, of the presidential mansion in South Korea. according to sources connected with the Washington inquiry into alleged Korean payoffs to Congressmen. The State Department compiled the reports and turned them over to the Justice Department in the late spring of 1975. This indicates that United States officials knew even more than was previously disclosed about the allegedly illegal Korean efforts to influence American policy. [New York Times] New York City is spending $500 a year more than many other major American cities for each public school student, but because most of the extra money goes for administrators, it is actually spending "substantially less" than the national average on instruction, guidance and career planning, an analysis by the city comptroller has found. [New York Times] An increase in Communist strength in Western Europe would possibly make more problems ultimately for the Soviet bloc than for the Atlantic alliance, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance said in remarks in an interview to be made public tomorrow. He said, however, that the United States would prefer that Democratic governments persist in Western Europe. He told the correspondent for Il Tempo of Rome, a conservative newspaper strongly opposed to the entry of Communists in the Italian government, that it was too early to draw any final conclusion in response to this." In his replies to the correspondent's questions, Mr. Vance made clear the difference at least in tone if not basic policy, between the Carter administration's approach to the question of Communist participation in the governments of Italy and France and the tougher position maintained by President Ford and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. [New York Times] The Irish Republic's new Fianna Fail government is expected to follow a policy more or less similar to that of its predecessor and not offer comfort to the outlawed Irish Republican Army in the north even though the Fianna Fail is known to be sympathetic to the Irish reunification movement. An incomplete tally showed that the Fianna Fail, led by former Prime Minister John Lynch, had taken 84 of the 148 seats in Parliament, a gain of 18. [New York Times] Highly secret research on parapsychology, which deals with inexplicable mental phenomena, is being conducted in the Soviet Union apparently with the purpose of adapting the findings to aid military or police purposes. Psychic research is a sensitive issue in the Soviet Union and it appears that it is a matter of concern to the authorities. The Moscow correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, Robert Toth, who was interrogated last week and then permitted to leave for home following protests from Washington, was accused of receiving "state secrets" about parapsychology. [New York Times]