News stories from Saturday October 19, 1974

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

The year 1974, the first to have double-digit inflation in peacetime, the year of Watergate reckoning and of the first presidential resignation in American history, is also a campaign year in which national issues, in the conventional sense, barely exist. Pulse takers and candidates agree that anxiety about the economy has driven other issues out of the public mind without giving voters a clear choice of economic remedies. And the Watergate scandal has given rise to the "politics of full disclosure," called by some analysts "the politics of character." [New York Times] The traditional flow of basic foodstuffs from American farms to world markets has been radically altered by President Ford's recent moves to monitor grain and soybean exports. With shortages of food confronting millions abroad with the specter of starvation, American grain traders believe the President's action is the first step toward apportioning food exports and curbing food consumption in the United States. [New York Times] In Washington, a leading tax lawyer has said that one argument used by Nelson Rockefeller to reduce his federal income taxes conflicted with an established Internal Revenue Service ruling. The service has overturned Mr. Rockefeller on this and other issues and will assess him $903,718 in delinquent taxes plus interest charges of $122,875, a total of $1,026,593 covering the period since 1969. The disclosure that his choice for Vice President had underpaid his income tax by 21 percent over the last years brought from President Ford a re-affirmation of his confidence in Mr. Rockefeller. [New York Times] Vice President-designate Nelson Rockefeller has disclosed that since 1957 he has given approximately $24.7 million to 193 organizations. The gifts ranged from $10 to Phillips Academy at Andover, Mass., to $6.6 million to the Museum of Primitive Art in New York City. The donations to charitable, educational and other tax-exempt organizations include a wide range of such institutions as well as $6,500 to the United States government and $656,393 to New York state. Mr. Rockefeller said he was making the list of charitable contributions public because of the delay in reopening Senate hearings on his confirmation as Vice President. The gifts, a Rockefeller spokesman said, are only the personal donations of Mr. Rockefeller and his wife and do not include contributions from the family foundations. [New York Times] Margaretta Rockefeller is reportedly making a rapid recovery from her breast cancer operation last Thursday, and physicians report an "excellent range of motion" in her left arm. Her husband, Vice President-designate Nelson Rockefeller, after a two-hour breakfast visit, spoke of the attention directed at breast cancer by Mrs. Rockefeller's operation and that of Mrs. Betty Ford, wife of the President. "If Happy can help other people like she's been helped, she'll be happy," he said. [New York Times] A major United States oil company, through the use of off-the-record phone calls and selective distribution of an internal memorandum, has brought international attention to the discovery of what the company describes as a major oil field in Mexico. The Mexican government has said that newspaper estimates of a field containing up to 20 billion barrels of oil were exaggerated, but did not release any estimate of its own. If the estimate proves true, the field would be about twice the estimated volume of the Prudhoe Bay oil field in Northern Alaska. [New York Times] Now that the long drought is over, Timbuktu is the beautiful, changeless desert city of old once more. On the Moslem feast day marking the end of month-long fast of Ramadan, the regional governor, Capt. Korcissy Tall, received visits from dignitaries of the area, dressed in their finest robes. Afterward the elders took an afternoon promenade in the market square. And on the edge of town, where last year thousands of nomads camped for handouts of grain or medical attention -- or waited for death from cholera, measles or starvation -- now all is quiet and peaceful, with only a few hundred orphans or homeless elderly persons left living in the nearly deserted tent city. [New York Times] The United States will permit the Soviet Union to buy 2.2 million metric tons of American grain between now and next June 30, it has been announced by Secretary of the Treasury William Simon. An aide to Mr. Simon, who estimated the Soviet purchases at $380 million, said the Russians have agreed to receive shipments in regular phased increments, so as not to disrupt the market. [New York Times] A half dozen winners of Nobel Prizes and many other prominent figures in science gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge issued a spate of ideas at a two-day symposium honoring Victor Weisskopf, a professor of physics, who is retiring. Although not a Nobel laureate, Dr. Weisskopf's influence has been strongly felt in physics for the last several decades. [New York Times]