News stories from Thursday December 25, 1975

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

The world's youth was the subject of the traditional Christmas Day's message from Pope Paul VI, who said that "the emptiness" of modern society had turned youth back to religion and away from materialism. He told a crowd of 100,000 people in St. Peter's Square in Rome that it was "consoling" to watch trends in the new generation that young people were rejecting the "specious" wisdom of earlier generations. Those earlier generations, he said, had inoculated youth with concepts of "war for power" and "materialism as the only justice." [New York Times] There are many signs that resentment against President Ford is rising among Republican farmers in the Middle West. As prices for wheat and corn continued to slip, the President was being criticized this week for the three-month embargo he imposed late last summer on grain sales to the Soviet Union. Not since 1948, when President Truman swept the Middle West by accusing a Republican Congress of "sticking a pitchfork in the farmer's back" has an issue angered farmers any more than the embargo. [New York Times] More restrictions on smokers that seek to protect the public from tobacco smoke as well as fire hazards have gone into effect in about 30 states since 1973. Smokers who ask "Do you mind if I smoke?" are finding that the answer is often "Yes." Jacob Meyer, a New Orleans lawyer who filed a class action suit to prevent smoking at the New Orleans Superdome, is basing his case on the presumption that under the Bill of Rights, people have a right to clean air in all state buildings. [New York Times] The murders last Oct. 15, in a town in Nebraska's cattle country, of a 66-year-old farm laborer, his wife, son and three grandchildren have become the focus of a complex and constitutional issue involving the First Amendment guarantee of a free press and the Sixth Amendment guarantee of a defendant's right to a fair trial. The constitutional controversy began when a Nebraska judge imposed a gag rule limiting the publication and broadcast of testimony given at a pretrial hearing of the suspect in the murders. The judge ruled that the right of a free press "must be subservient to the right of due process" when the rights of a defendant conflicted with those of the press. [New York Times] Millions of Indians have adapted to the structural alteration that India has undergone in the six months since Prime Minister Indira Gandhi began dismantling some of the institutions of Indian democracy. An opposition leader, who said last summer that the Indian people would not tolerate for more than a couple of months the emergency that was declared by Mrs. Gandhi, now speaks of "a long, long struggle -- five years or more." Censorship of the once lively and controversial press is one of the things the country is learning to live with. [New York Times] High-level Arab consultations are underway over the United Nations Security Council debate on the Middle East scheduled to begin Jan. 12. The policy-making body of the Palestine Liberation Organization has just completed two days of talks in Damascus. Informed press sources expect the subject to be high on the agenda when President Hafez al-Assad of Syria and King Khalid of Saudi Arabia confer. [New York Times]