News stories from Saturday July 5, 1975

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

Mayors of the country's largest cities called for $2 billion in emergency federal urban aid as they began their annual meeting in Boston. Mayor Joseph Alioto of San Francisco, chairman of the United States Conference of Mayors, and other mayors expressed support at a news conference for an emergency urban-aid bill pending in Congress that would provide special grants to a city when its unemployment rate exceeded 6 percent for three consecutive months. The bill is known as the Intergovernmental Anti-recession Assistance Act. [New York Times] The Ford administration is preparing a gun control bill that seeks to limit the proliferation of handguns through changes in licensing laws affecting gun dealers. The bill would reduce to 40,000 from 156,000 the number of persons licensed to sell guns. Dealers who do not investigate the credentials of gun purchasers would be most affected by the proposed licensing restrictions. [New York Times] Juries are awarding more money than ever before to people who were injured because of other people's negligence or misconduct, and to the estates of persons who died as a result of another's negligence or misconduct. Before 1962, a million-dollar award for personal injuries or libel was unheard of. But since then, there have been dozens. [New York Times] The degree of American support for Israel, Secretary of State Kissinger suggested today, would be linked to whether the Israelis "take a chance" and make the territorial concessions needed to bring about a new accord with the Egyptians in Sinai. The Israeli cabinet will meet tomorrow to decide whether to withdraw from the strategic mountain passes of Mitla and Gidi. It had refused to do so earlier because of dissatisfaction with the limited political concessions offered by Egypt. [New York Times] Continuing to seek support for her government's new authoritarian attitude, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi met with several of India's top labor leaders. An official account of the meeting said that the union leaders had "assured the Prime Minister of fullest cooperation from the workers." According to reports received in New Delhi there were dozens of additional political arrests in other parts of the country. Policemen raided regional offices of anti-government organizations that were banned by government decree Friday and seized files and records and sealed the offices. Many of the members of the outlawed organizations had been arrested earlier in the week, while others had gone underground. [New York Times] Former crew members of a Navy submarine said that on an intelligence patrol in Soviet waters the commander was ordered to file a series of falsified reports late in 1969 after a collision with a Soviet submarine. The US.S. Gato, participating in what the Navy called the Holystone program, struck the Soviet submarine in the Barents Sea, about 15 to 25 miles from the entrance to the White Sea, in northern Russia, the crew members said. A few days after the collision, they said, the commanding officer of the Gato was ordered by the Navy's Atlantic Fleet command in Norfolk, Va., to prepare 25 copies of a top-secret after-action report alleging that the submarine had broken off her patrols two days before the collision because of a propeller shaft malfunction. [New York Times]