News stories from Sunday August 10, 1975
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- Former President Richard Nixon has sold the rights to four 90-minute television interviews to David Frost, who said he represented an "international consortium." He would not say how much was paid for the rights. Filming will start immediately but the interviews will not he broadcast until after the 1976 elections, Mr. Frost said. [New York Times]
- Thousands of Indochina refugees greeted President Ford with applause, waves and smiles when he visited the Fort Chaffee refugee resettlement center near Fort Smith, Ark., on his way to a vacation in Vail, Colo. Officials gave Mr. Ford a briefing on the slow progress of the effort to resettle the refugees. [New York Times]
- As a result of New York City's financial crisis, a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission warned that the agency would consider bringing suit against municipalities that failed to disclose "unfortunate circumstances that afflict them" when they are selling bonds. Never in the agency's 42-year history has it sought an injunction against a municipality. The commissioner, A. A. Sommer Jr., said that the agency was not contemplating action now against New York. A spokesman for Mayor Beame, after being told of Mr. Sommer's remarks, said that since March the city had been preparing a prospectus for its bond and note issues. [New York Times]
- Portuguese Communists fired on a crowd of hostile Roman Catholics in the northern town of Braga, wounding 20 people participating in a protest march sponsored by the local archbishop. The attack was one of the worst of a series of clashes between Communists and anti-Communists in northern Portugal. Hostility to the Communist party has spread throughout the civilian population and the armed forces, isolating the new government formed under the pro-Communist Premier, Gen. Vasco Goncalves. [New York Times]
- Hundreds of thousands of West German applicants for civil service jobs are being subjected to loyalty checks, lawyers for "enemies of the state" are being jailed and other lawyers have been excluded from courtrooms where their clients are on trial. This is the official reaction to the threat of leftist "radicalism." [New York Times]
- Dmitri Shostakovich, the most famous of contemporary Soviet composers, died Saturday at a hospital in Moscow that cares for top-level government figures and Soviet celebrities. The official press agency, Tass, said that the composer had died after a "grave illness." He was 68 years old, and was recently admitted to the hospital's heart disease section. [New York Times]
- Senator William Proxmire, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who has begun investigating the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation's overseas payments, has found that the payments ranged "from a few thousand dollars to several million dollars" and often went to officials of foreign governments who were responsible for the award of contracts to Lockheed. One foreign official, according to Senator Proxmire, apparently received $8 million from Lockheed, which has acknowledged that since 1970 it gave at least $22 million to foreign officials and political organizations. [New York Times]
- Physicians in Northern Ireland have developed a lightweight portable defibrillator that cardiologists believe may be of major help in giving emergency care quickly to people who suffer heart attacks. The defibrillators help correct heart-rhythm abnormalities that kill suddenly. The portable machines weigh seven pounds, compared to the conventional ones of 35 or more pounds. Fifty of the machines will be extensively tested in the United States. [New York Times]