News stories from Sunday November 2, 1975

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

President Ford has dismissed Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and William Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, in a major shuffling of top national security posts. Administration officials said that Mr. Ford had also asked Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to relinquish his post as national security adviser in the White House but to stay on as head of the State Department and that Mr. Kissinger had all but agreed. White House officials said that Mr. Schlesinger would probably be replaced by Donald Rumsfeld, the White House chief of staff, and that Mr. Colby's likely successor would be George Bush, now head of the American liaison office in China. [New York Times] President Ford went to Jacksonville, Fla., for three hours of talks with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt who is taking a four-day sojourn there during his trip to the United States. The conversations, officials said, focused on Lebanon, the Middle East in general and mutual concerns of the United States and Egypt. [New York Times] President Ford and the Department of Justice are making efforts to keep details of United States involvement in assassination plots against foreign leaders from being made public by either the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence or in a Washington court case in which government documents are being sought under the Freedom of Information Act by a private research group. A spokesman for the Senate committee said that each member had received a "strongly worded" letter signed by President Ford urging the members for national security reasons not to make public a forthcoming report on the Central Intelligence Agency's involvement in assassination plots. Senator Frank Church, the committee's chairman, has refused to comply with the President's request. [New York Times] John Swainson, a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and a former Governor of Michigan, was convicted of three counts of perjury but was acquitted of conspiracy in connection with charges that he accepted a $20,000 bribe in 1972 to help a burglar gain a review of his conviction. [New York Times] Prince Juan Carlos de Borbon, Spain's Acting Chief of State, flew to Spanish Sahara with a promise to protect the "legitimate rights" of its inhabitants and the "honor and prestige" of the army. He wore a general's uniform. His trip, sudden and unexpected, signified a stiffening of Spain's resistance toward Morocco's claims to the territory. [New York Times] With the threat of war in Spanish Sahara, the United Nations Security Council urged all parties in the dispute to avoid any action that "might further escalate the tension in the area." Council members said privately that what was envisioned was a United Nations presence in Spanish Sahara to help administer the territory until its future was settled. [New York Times] The religious treasury of Cologne Cathedral was robbed of precious stones and gold and silver possibly worth millions of dollars by thieves who climbed the outside scaffolding used by masons who have been cleaning the cathedral's ancient stonework for most of the last year. [New York Times]