News stories from Friday June 4, 1976

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

The unemployment rate in May was the lowest for any month since December 1974, the Labor Department said, The rate declined to 7.3 percent after holding steady at 7.5 percent in the two preceding months. The total number of people holding jobs also increased substantially, rising by 300,000 to a record 87.7 million. The department also had encouraging news about the inflation rate. The index of wholesale prices rose by three-tenths of 1 percent in May and wholesale prices of industrial commodities, which are regarded as the most accurate measure of underlying inflationary pressures, rose by only one-tenth of 1 percent. [New York Times] President Ford said that the anti-busing legislation he plans to send to Congress would require that every future court case ordering busing be reopened every three years to decide whether court jurisdiction could be lifted. He said that the court would have to give up its jurisdiction "unless it was affirmatively found that there had been no correction of the unconstitutional abuses" of desegregation laws. He also said that Attorney General Edward Levi had been asked to determine whether the proposed legislation would apply retroactively. [New York Times] Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, the country's largest brokerage concern, agreed to settle two anti-discrimination suits by paying $1.9 million to persons it had allegedly wrongfully failed to hire or promote and by establishing a $1.3 million employment plan, under which specified percentages of women and minority group members will be hired. [New York Times] Although he had been severely reprimanded last March for accepting hospitality from a major defense contractor, Dr. Malcolm Currie, a high-ranking Pentagon official, has been put in charge of the development and acquisition of all weapons by the Defense Department. He had been director of defense research and engineering, supervising the development of all weapons. In an unannounced promotion, he was recently made "acquisition executive" with the responsibility for the procurement as well as the development of new weapons. [New York Times] A New York state Supreme Court jury has ordered CBS to pay more than $250,000 to a Manhattan restaurant because the network's television camera crew, on a story about health code violations in restaurants, entered without permission and took pictures. The restaurant was Le Mistral at 14 East 52nd Street. A lawyer for CBS said the verdict was a threat to all reporters seeking information on private property, but Justice Martin Stecher said that "the right to publish does not include the right to enter upon or trespass upon the property of these plaintiffs." [New York Times] The United States lost its fight to keep the Palestine Liberation Organization out of the 132-nation World Employment Conference in Geneva. The governing body of the International Labor Organization, which had decided by the margin of one vote last Saturday to bar the P.L.O. from the conference, reversed itself under pressure from the League of Arab States, the Organization of African Unity and the Soviet bloc. Despite the rebuff, the American delegates decided not to walk out, but they will boycott sessions in which the P.L.O. participates. [New York Times] South Africa, which has been ostracized in the West for several years because of its apartheid policies, warmly welcomed the coming meeting between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Prime Minister John Vorster. The state-owned South African radio said that the meeting would be "in itself, apart from the outcome, a historic occasion." [New York Times]

Stock Market Report

Dow Jones Industrial Average: 963.90 (-9.90, -1.02%)
S&P Composite: 99.15 (-0.98, -0.98%)
Arms Index: 1.34

	Issues	Volume*
Advances	371	3.00
Declines	1,006	10.90
Unchanged	440	2.06
Total Volume		15.96

* in millions of shares

Arms Index is the ratio of volume per declining issue to volume per advancing issue; a figure below 1.0 is bullish.

Market Index Trends
Date	DJIA	S&P	Volume*
June 3, 1976	973.80	100.13	18.90
June 2, 1976	975.93	100.22	16.12
June 1, 1976	973.13	99.85	13.88
May 28, 1976	975.23	100.18	16.86
May 27, 1976	965.57	99.38	15.31
May 26, 1976	968.63	99.34	16.75
May 25, 1976	971.69	99.49	18.77
May 24, 1976	971.53	99.44	16.56
May 21, 1976	990.75	101.26	18.73
May 20, 1976	997.27	102.00	22.56