News stories from Sunday May 16, 1976

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

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who for eight years has been the main architect of American foreign policy, said in an interview that even if President Ford won the November election he would prefer to leave office. He went further in declaring publicly his intention to resign than he had previously. [New York Times] The Senate Intelligence Committee's staff said in a report that military agents had violated the rights of United States citizens and protest groups and in doing so threatened "to violate the traditional and legal restraints which govern the use of military forces in the civilian community." The staff also confirmed reports last week that the Army had under surveillance United States citizens living in West Germany regarded as "threats" to Army operations. [New York Times] In a tough report to the Senate on New York City's fiscal-crisis loan program, the Senate Banking Committee proposed that the government "seriously consider" ending its $2.3 billion in annual aid if the city failed to maintain its three-year municipal wage freeze, and proposed that city employees' fringe benefits he reduced as a condition for continuing the aid. The committee urged the city and state to confront the rent control "problem" squarely and, "if necessary," to take the actions needed to phase out rent control. Rent control, the committee said, was "a major cause of the decline of New York City's housing stock and the erosion of its real estate tax base." [New York Times] Nablus, an Israeli-occupied city on the West Bank, proclaimed two days of mourning and a general strike in protest over the killing of an Arab girl by an Israeli soldier. Later, two friends of the dead girl demonstrating in a crowd outside her house were injured when Israeli soldiers fired to disperse the crowd. The mayor of Nablus said that he had rejected an explanation by the Israeli Army that the girl had been shot accidentally. [New York Times] Beirut and its suburbs went through one of the most violent days of the Lebanese civil war. Scores of people, most of them civilians, died in exchanges of heavy artillery and mortars. The collapse of the two-day-old truce, which had been honored at best only partly, came as Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, conferred in Damascus with President Hafez al-Assad of Syria against a background of Syrian-Palestinian tension. [New York Times] The chief of staff of El Salvador's armed forces was arrested and charged in federal court in Manhattan with taking part with six other men in a plot to sell 10,000 submachine guns for $2.8 million to people he thought were underworld figures in the United States. Col. Manuel Rodriguez, 48 years old, was arrested in Mount Kisco. He was held in $3 million bail on charges of conspiracy to violate gun controls and to defraud the State Department and the United States Treasury. [New York Times]