News stories from Sunday September 1, 1974

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

Secretary of Labor Peter Brennan said in a television interview that his department had prepared a series of gradually rising payments to municipalities to help them create jobs if the nation's jobless rate increased. He said that "public service employment" -- amounting to about 800,000 new jobs -- would not be "triggered" until the national unemployment rate reached "around 7 percent." It is now 5.3 percent of the country's total labor force. His department administers the relatively small existing programs of employment aid for state and local governments. [New York Times] Millions of Americans apparently abandoned traditional vacation patterns this summer because of inflation, doubts about the economy and high gasoline prices. Many families decided to stay at home, take short trips, rent a cottage or stay put, or invest in a swimming pool or a boat instead of taking a trip to Europe. [New York Times] Hundreds of Puerto Ricans hurled rocks and bottles and fought a gunshot-punctuated battle with club-swinging policemen as a Labor Day festival in Branch Brook Park in Newark, N.J., turned into a riot. The Newark police department mobilized virtually its entire 1,500-member force when fighting spilled into the streets of north Newark. However, by late evening, after intervention by Mayor Kenneth Gibson and a heavy rain, the crowds dispersed peaceably. [New York Times] Ben Wattenberg, the theoretician of the Democratic center, said that when Richard Nixon resigned as President, "he left a great political party in shambles -- the Democratic party." His irony has a sound basis. Almost at the same time that Mr. Nixon was stepping down and President Ford was stepping up, the Democrats were tearing at themselves again. Another in the series of the party's devastating quarrels occurred at a meeting in Kansas City, Mo. [New York Times] The Arab League set Oct. 26 as the date for an Arab summit conference in Morocco to work out a joint Arab strategy for the next phase of Middle East peace talks. Representatives of 20 Arab delegations in Cairo, most of them headed by foreign ministers, also took up a Palestinian request to put the question of the rights of Palestinians in a separate item on the agenda of the forthcoming session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. [New York Times] Italy's Communist party offered to cooperate with the government to save the country from social and economic disaster. The offer was made in an editorial in the party newspaper. L'Unita, which was signed by Carlo Galluzzi, a party official and a deputy chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Chamber of Deputies. He said that progress in the Soviet-America detente had laid "specters of anti-Communist crusades" to rest and made it possible for his party to go to the government's aid. The Communist party has been barred from participating in the national Italian government since 1947. [New York Times]