News stories from Saturday October 4, 1975
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- Thousands of West Virginians cheered and applauded President Ford as he rode and walked more than a mile through the small West Virginia mountain town of Elkins as grand marshal of its annual festival. Despite severe security precautions, the President alighted three times from a glass-domed protective limousine to mix among crowds standing along Elkins Street. [New York Times]
- President Ford flew to Newark tonight and addressed a Republican fundraising dinner. Warning that New Jersey faced an economically disastrous shortage of natural gas this winter, he repeated his call for its price deregulation. [New York Times]
- President Ford's campaign for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination has met some serious internal problems, and a new campaign director has been brought in to get things moving. White House officials and other pro-Ford party officers said in interviews that chief among the problems are a marked lack of grass-roots organizing -- especially in the key early primary states of New Hampshire and Florida -- and the absence of concrete plans for direct-mail fundraising. [New York Times]
- Treasury Secretary William Simon proposed that banks holding New York City notes declare a form of debt moratorium to avert a city default, provided that the new Emergency Financial Control Board produces a "credible" plan soon for bringing the city's budget back into balance. Mr. Simon also suggested a "temporary" addition to the state sales tax to help the city and an "immediate study" by the federal government of whether it should assume a greater share of the burden of welfare and possibly other municipal services.
Also in Washington, officials disclosed that Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany had expressed concern to President Ford that New York's fiscal crisis could have a "domino effect" on financial centers in Europe.
[New York Times] - The federal government's largest educational research project is struggling to gain acceptance by its critics. The $30 million project, called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, seeks to gather at intervals census-like data on pupil achievement against which future generations of American schoolchildren can be compared. But the project, based in Denver, despite having generated 20 million pages of test results, is still criticized for the vagueness of its findings, which are not reported on a district-by-district or even state-by-state basis, and for paucity of interpretation of its findings. [New York Times]
- The Labor Department has proposed a new standard to protect workers and their families from the lung-scarring and cancer-causing effects of asbestos. Millions of Americans are exposed to the mineral, which has a thousand uses, and cancers have caused more than 40 percent of the deaths among some groups of asbestos workers, a rate three to four times higher than that in the general population. The government's existing asbestos standards have been widely challenged by labor groups. [New York Times]
- Hours before Emperor Hirohito of Japan arrived in New York, federal agents raided a Brooklyn apartment, where they seized a cache of arms that the agents believed might have been intended for use in an assassination plot against the Emperor. A man and a woman were arrested. The action followed leads supplied by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. [New York Times]
- The United States and Spain announced agreement in principle on a five-year, wide-ranging accord including provisions for the continued used by American air and naval forces of bases in Spain. If Congress approves, officials said, Spain will receive military aid totaling from $500 million to $750 million. A joint statement issued after two weeks of talks in Washington and New York between Secretary of State Kissinger and Foreign Minister Pedro Cortina Mauri gave few details. But it said they had agreed on "a new framework governing cooperative relationships between the United States and Spain." State Department officials said that, under the accord, the United States would be allowed to continue using all the present bases, but there might be some paring down in the American presence. [New York Times]
- About 120 commandos broke into a regimental barracks in Oporto, Portugal, and expelled dissident soldiers whose unit had been ordered disbanded. In several other parts of the country a new wave of military dissidence erupted, provoking some commanders to counteraction. The conflicts reflected the role of the extreme left, which has gone well beyond Portugal's Communist party in demanding immediate fulfillment of the "People's Revolution." [New York Times]
- Canada formally opened her new Mirabel International Airport outside Montreal. The airport is called the world's largest and is designed to protect the environment and provide for Canada's air travel needs well into the next century. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau dedicated the sprawling facility at a ceremony that drew more than 1,000 guests to the sleek $80 million terminal 34 miles from Montreal. [New York Times]