News stories from Sunday May 4, 1975

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

The nine-year-old daughter of a Soviet diplomat said that she had been abducted and tortured Saturday night by three men and an armed, Russian-speaking woman, all wearing ski masks, at the new Soviet diplomatic residence in Riverdale (New York). The police said that they had not received any corroboration of the incident, which was originally reported to them by a Soviet official. [New York Times] American companies doing business abroad are spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year for agents' fees, commissions and outright payoffs to foreign officials. The practice is defended by many businessmen as the only way they can compete effectively abroad. Some such payments are officially sanctioned by the United States government. Bribes are getting increased scrutiny in the United States. The Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on multinational corporations has begun an investigation involving several large corporations. [New York Times] The government was charged by the General Accounting Office with being so lax in enforcing its own orders requiring private concerns doing business with the government to follow nondiscriminatory employment practices that the government has no list of all the contractors subject to the requirement. The G.A.O., auditor and overseer of the performance of the executive branch for Congress, said this could lead government contractors to believe "that the compliance agencies do not intend to enforce" the regulations against discrimination. [New York Times] The Saigon radio said today that the Military Management Committee administering the city had freed former President Duong Van Minh of South Vietnam, who surrendered the country to the Revolutionary Government, and that 18 other high officials of the former South Vietnamese government had also been released. Among the officials were former Vice President Nguyen Van Huyen and former Premier Vu Van Mau, the broadcasts said. The decision to release them reportedly was made by the 11-member North Vietnamese military committee. [New York Times] Hong Van Hoanh was one of South Vietnam's elite. He had a thriving business, a young wife, 12 children, two large houses, four cars and seven servants. He is now a refugee, impoverished, dazed and bewildered. He was one of 343 South Vietnamese who arrived at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base at Valparaiso in the northwest part of the state. Most of the refugees, like Mr. Hong, were well-dressed and well-educated. They were, a United States diplomat said, an "accidentally representative cross section of the Vietnamese middle class, who, because of their links to us, had reason to run." [New York Times] Another refugee, Nguyen Cao Ky, former Premier and Vice President of South Vietnam, said the United States is not to blame for his country's fall. "Concerning America, and the American people, in the last 10 years you did a lot for us -- too much, in my opinion," Mr. Ky said when he arrived in Guam. "But unfortunately," he said, "we were not brave enough to overthrow Mr. Thieu." [New York Times] The miracle of reconstruction that made West Germany the strongest economic power in Europe following the devastation of World War II has long since become a commonplace. The 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Nazi Reich on May 9, 1945, is approaching. Have the Germans, who inflicted so much death and suffering and endured so much themselves, earned the right at long last no longer to be condemned for their history? The West Germans who replied to that question feel able now to talk to Americans in condescending, even morally superior tones, at the end of a painful period in United States history. [New York Times]