News stories from Sunday September 28, 1975

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

This country might not be warned in advance of a surprise attack because United States security agencies have become such unwieldy bureaucracies, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence said in an interview. Representative Otis Pike, a Suffolk County Democrat, praised the men who gather intelligence, but said that "above the gathering level" the intelligence system "just bogs down every single time." After Mr. Pike's television appearance, William Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, issued a rebuttal. [New York Times] The Federal Election Commission has issued a ruling that strengthens the political arm of Associated Milk Producers, Inc., a dairy cooperative with 35,000 members, which in 1974 pleaded guilty to making illegal corporate contributions in the 1968, 1970 and 1972 election campaigns. The commission authorized a political committee of the milk producers to spend unlimited amounts of money for "nonpartisan" registration and get-out-the-vote drives, even though the milk producers had confined their drives to districts heavily in favor of candidates backed by them. [New York Times] The eradication of smallpox is expected in the near future by officials of the World Health Organization. They believe that the battle against the disease will end early next year, if not sooner. Two years of further searching for new cases will be necessary before an international commission will be able to declare officially that smallpox has been wiped out. The W.H.O. says it knows of only 16 people in the world infected with the most devastating kind of smallpox, a viral disease, and all are quarantined in Bangladesh. [New York Times] Civil guards fired on a crowd of about 2,000 Basque demonstrators in Algorta, a suburb of Bilbao in northern Spain. They wounded at least six people. The clash was the first serious incident following the execution on Saturday of five terrorists convicted of killing policemen and civil guards. Two were members of E.T.A., the Basque nationalist organization. Tension increased with the call by Basque and leftist groups for a general strike today and tomorrow to protest the executions. [New York Times] With voters apparently expressing uneasiness over the country's economic problems, West Germany's leading political party suffered a major setback in a state election. The Social Democratic party barely held its majority in the Bremen state legislature, receiving 49 percent of the vote, down 6 percentage points from the election four years ago. The Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats' principal opposition, had a gain of only 1½ percentage points over 1971, getting 33 percent of the vote. [New York Times] As the North Atlantic Treaty allies move toward a new generation of weapons, a policy dispute is developing over whether the United States, which has dominated the arms business, will now start buying more European equipment for its forces. This has been the major issue in discussions between European officials and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, who went to Europe to urge the European nations to increase their defense spending. The Europeans are demanding "standardization," under which the NATO allies would abandon their nationalistic approach and agree upon similar weapons for their forces, This way, they believe, the United States would purchase more weapons from its allies. [New York Times]