News stories from Sunday November 16, 1975

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

Even before announcing his candidacy, Ronald Reagan has emerged as the clear favorite over President Ford in the pivotal Florida primary next March 9. Former Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia has put together an organization of Democrats strong enough to discourage most of his rivals from campaigning actively in Florida, greatly improving his prospects against Gov. George Wallace of Alabama. Florida victories by Mr. Reagan and Mr. Carter would provide an early momentum for their underdog candidacies and badly damage President Ford and Governor Wallace. [New York Times] A federal study has found that the treatment of taxpayers by the Internal Revenue Service frequently is "whimsical, inconsistent, unpredictable and highly personal," and that pressures from an unacknowledged quota system and a lack of broad guidelines have provided "dissimilar treatment of similarly situated taxpayers." Under authority granted by Congress, I.R.S. agents are among the most powerful in government, but a general lack of laws and regulations made the application of these powers erratic, the study said. [New York Times] At the six-nation economic meeting at the Chateau de Rambouillet near Paris, the United States and France today reached a compromise agreement on their dispute over exchange rates and President Ford invited foreign countries to invest in new energy development in the United States. Mr. Ford's invitation carried a promise of a share in the new energy production. The agreement on exchange rates reportedly would allow both fixed exchange rates, favored by France, and a floating system for the dollar, which the United States has insisted upon. [New York Times] In a major show of strength, Communist-led unions demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Jose Batista Pinheiro de Azevedo of Portugal. The anti-government demonstration in Lisbon was said to have attracted the largest crowd -- estimated at more than 100,000 -- since last year's April 25 revolution. [New York Times] Abdel Halim Khaddam, Syria's Foreign Minister, hinted in a major address in Damascus that Syria might intervene militarily to prevent any partition of Lebanon, and that it might take unspecified military action to undermine the recent Egyptian-Israeli agreement on Sinai. This was the strongest official suggestion that Syria might intervene actively in the Lebanese crisis. [New York Times] A decree by the Spanish government declaring Spain's regional languages -- Catalan, Basque and Galician -- to be national languages deserving of protection was greeted as a "step backward" in the regions where they are spoken. The decree, published in the official state bulletin, said that the regional languages should be protected as part of Spain's heritage but, in effect, it made Spanish, the only official language, virtually obligatory for all official bodies at whatever level. [New York Times]