News stories from Sunday January 7, 1979

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

The capture of Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, was announced by the Hanoi radio and the station of the Vietnamese-sponsored Cambodian insurgent front. "The regime of dictatorial, militarist domination of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique has completely collapsed," the announcement said. Nothing was said about where Cambodia's Prime Minister, Pol Pot, or the Deputy Prime Minister, Ieng Sary, were.Cambodia evacuated many people from the eastern part of the country to keep them from falling into the hands of the Vietnamese, according to persons who arrived in Peking by air from Cambodia. Cambodian leaders and members of Phnom Penh's small diplomatic community have gone to Battambang, near the border with Thailand, the sources said. Phnom Penh's "liberation," as it was called in the Moscow press, seems to have come more quickly than Soviet leaders had anticipated. [New York Times] Rioting continued in Teheran despite the new civilian government. The city was more tense than it had been for a week. Troops fired on demonstrators who set fire to piles of tires and garbage and put barricades across streets. The soldiers fought with people who tried to stop them from smashing windows hung with pictures of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the exiled Moslem leader. [New York Times] Art thefts like the recent ones from San Francisco and Chicago museums are frequently done by gangs, sometimes with inside help and often under contract, for fences or organized crime figures, according to law enforcement officials, who said that most of the art is never recovered. [New York Times] Oil companies kept within the government's 7 percent voluntary guideline limit in wage offers as bargaining in Denver with the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union approached a midnight contract expiration. The companies are willing to stretch their fringe-benefit proposals, but the union has rejected all offers. [New York Times] Philadelphia's black leaders are listening with caution to promises from prospective successors to Mayor Frank Rizzo, who is prevented by law from running for a third term. [New York Times] Children conceived with sperm that has been frozen and thawed are growing in numbers. Such children may have fewer defects than those born of normal conceptions and the likelihood of a miscarriage may be lessened. A study at the University of Arkansas of more than 1,000 children whose mothers were impregnated with thawed donor sperm found that fewer than 1 percent suffered from birth defects, compared with 6 percent in the general population. [New York Times] Mayor Koch of New York City committed himself to a program of budget cuts in the next several months to lessen the likelihood of much more drastic cutbacks in 1980 and later, President Carter's chief domestic adviser, Stuart Eizenstat, said. Mr. Eizenstat said that Mr. Koch had made the commitment in recent conversations with the White House. His comment followed the disclosure of a White House memorandum suggesting that the city had been slow in initiating budget cuts last year, and that Mayor Koch had to be pressed to do more in the year ahead. [New York Times] The United States and the Philippines signed treaty amendments in Manila that assure American forces of unhampered use of air and naval installations in the Philippines until 1983. The signing ceremonies ended three years of negotiations. President Ferdinand Marcos said the agreement was defensive in character and "not meant for aggressive operations anywhere in Southeast Asia." [New York Times]