First Lady to Meet First Ladies

First Lady Nancy Reagan plans to invite the first ladies of 24 countries to a White House briefing in late April on worldwide drug abuse among youth, her spokeswoman, Sheila Tate, said. Mrs. Reagan will then accompany the first ladies to an international conference on drug abuse in Atlanta sponsored by a parents’ anti-drug organization known by the acronym PRIDE. Tate said that the First Lady wants to describe the U.S. efforts to stem drug abuse among teen-agers to her counterparts around the world. The first ladies will come from Africa, Europe, South America, Asia and the Middle East. But Tate said that the State Department preferred not to specify which countries will be represented until the women receive their invitations.

--Part of Princess Margaret of Britain’s left lung was removed in surgery and it showed no sign of malignancy, doctors reported in London amid nationwide concern over the health of Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister. Fears that the 54-year-old divorced princess was suffering from cancer as a result of heavy smoking had been expressed in the press ever since she suddenly entered a leading heart and lung disease hospital on Saturday. But a medical bulletin issued from Brompton Hospital in London said that the small area of her lung that was cut out “proved to be innocent”--a medical term meaning that the tissue was benign.

--ABC’s David Brinkley reports on the state of the world but he is also concerned with life closer to home--even right outside his own front door. Writing in the opinion page of the Washington Post, Brinkley said that his Washington, D.C., neighborhood is plagued by drivers “cruising restlessly back and forth like beagles sniffing for hares, looking for parking places.” Worse, he says, the motorists dump their trash and empty their ash trays on his street, leaving it looking “like the top layer of a sanitary landfill.” “And there you have it every day--the law of the jungle, fang and claw, on 44th Street in Northwest Washington,” he wrote. “Why do we have to put up with this?” Brinkley suggested that the city ban all non-residents from parking on the streets.

--Judge Domenico Bonaccorsi ruled in Rome that pictures published in Playmen magazine were “rather chaste nude images, not at all obscene or unbecoming,” and rejected the plea of Academy Award-winning Sophia Loren, 50, that Italian authorities seize copies of the magazine featuring photographs of the actress naked when she was 18. Bonaccorsi said that publication of the pictures had not damaged Loren’s standing as a wife and mother.