News stories from Sunday December 29, 1974

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

A high administration source said that President Ford had abandoned his proposal for an income tax surcharge as an anti-inflation measure. Government economists reportedly were putting strong pressure on the President to do the opposite and cut taxes as a means of pulling the economy out of a worsening recession. [New York Times] The continuing, apparently uncontrollable, increase in federal spending threatens to cut the size of any anti-recession tax reduction that President Ford is expected to propose to Congress next month, according to administration officials. The major constraint on a tax reduction is the huge size of the budget deficit that may exceed $30 billion. [New York Times] Three more high-ranking officials of the Central Intelligence Agency resigned last week in a major shake-up of the agency's Counterintelligence Division, well-informed government sources said. Their resignations occurred within a week of that of James Angleton, who had been the C.I.A.'s counter-intelligence chief. [New York Times] Twenty-one American tourists, including 19 from the New York metropolitan area, were killed when a chartered plane crashed in northern Guatemala. Three members of the plane's crew were also killed. The plane crashed shortly alter takeoff from Tikal, where the tourists had been visiting the Mayan ruins. [New York Times] At least 300 persons and perhaps as many as 1,000 were believed to have been killed in a severe earthquake that destroyed the remote mountain village of Paten, which had a population of about 4,000, in northern Pakistan, officials in Rawalpindi, the capital, said. Another village was badly damaged. Pakistan did not immediately call for international aid. Officials said the government preferred first to learn the full extent of the damage. [New York Times] Inflation is beginning to slow the steady growth in defense budgets of the Western alliance and Japan, though not yet to the damaging degree that had been feared by defense planners in the United States. A country-by-country survey by the New York Times on the impact of inflation on defense budgets of the major allies of the United States finds that most of them are still increasing their budgets sufficiently to keep pace with inflation, except for Britain, Canada and Italy, and that the United States defense budget has been hardest hit by inflation. [New York Times] The Nicaraguan government agreed to release 26 political prisoners and fly them to Cuba in exchange for the lives of a group of prominent politicians and business leaders seized by leftist guerrillas at a Christmas party in Managua Friday night. Earlier in the day, the guerrillas released five remaining women hostages, but kept 13 men for bargaining purposes. [New York Times]