News stories from Sunday September 14, 1975

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

The pro football game between the New York Jets and the New England Patriots, scheduled at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, was canceled when the Patriots maintained their earlier refusal to play. On Saturday they had voted 39 to 2 to strike in protest over the lack of a contract between the National Football League Players Association and the N.F.L. Management Council. [New York Times] "The Night Watch," one of Rembrandt's most famous paintings, was slashed more than a dozen times in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum by a man armed with a serrated bread knife. The knife marks were more than two feet long and a section of the painting about seven feet wide was severely damaged. The damage, however, was not irreparable, a museum official said. [New York Times] In one of the most colorful ceremonies seen in Rome in years, Pope Paul VI, in a canonization mass today in St. Peter's Square, declared Mother Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton a saint. She is the first American-born saint. About 100,000 persons attended the ceremony. Among them were some 16,000 Americans. [New York Times] The Department of Defense said that the per-plane price of the controversial F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, which is being bought by both the United States Navy and Iran from the Grumman Aerospace Corporation, had increased by $2 million this year, bringing the total cost of each plane to at least $20 million. The Tomcat will be the most expensive fighter plane ever built. The rise in price comes at a time when there are increasing congressional objections to the plane. [New York Times] The new Federal Election Commission has suddenly become the target of the Senators and Representatives who established it because of what some of them regard as overzealousness in monitoring the office funds of Congressmen. The five-month-old commission is facing its first test of power by tackling the touchy issue of a little-known congressional financial ploy formally known as "constituent service funds," which are more generally called "office slush funds." [New York Times] Some of the nation's leading academic experts on big cities say that although New York City has temporarily weathered its financial crisis, its continuing survival depends on major changes in long-term relationships with the federal government. They believe that a takeover by Washington of the financing of the nation's costly welfare system and an altered form of revenue sharing is necessary to help large cities survive national economic recessions. [New York Times] A quietly developed plan that would enable thousands of state-inspected slaughterhouses to begin shipping meat through interstate commerce has the approval of the Department of Agriculture, but is under attack by members of Congress, consumer groups and members of the meat packing industry. Its critics say that the plan is an attempt to circumvent the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967. An Agriculture Department official said the plan was an effort to block a trend toward federal takeovers of state meat-inspection systems, which, he said, has resulted from the 1967 law. [New York Times] The General Assembly's special session on the plight of the third world moved toward a grim end, with United Nations delegates working through the night in search of a formula for narrowing the chasm between rich and poor countries. The chief United States delegate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said that some progress had been achieved during the evening and that negotiations would continue. [New York Times] A contagion of political and communal violence has spread a mood of almost helpless foreboding in Lebanon. "We might just be watching the demise of a country as we know it." a Lebanese analyst of Middle East business affairs said. Tensions increased in Beirut, which has been struck by violence this spring and summer, when shooting and kidnapping broke out in skirmishes between Christians and Moslems. Four persons were reported killed. [New York Times]