News stories from Saturday May 24, 1975
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- The White House announced that President Ford had approved two bills providing $405 million for the resettlement of South Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees. The resettlement program had been operating on money borrowed temporarily from other foreign-aid programs. [New York Times]
- The resettlement of South Vietnamese refugees in the United States has slowed to a trickle. Most of the 130,000 people who fled their country in the face of the Communist takeover are languishing in military camps nearly a month after their arrival. Many of them may be there much longer. Officials of voluntary agencies that are aiding the refugees believe it may be a year or more before the resettlement is complete. They are frustrated by what they consider to be unnecessarily time consuming security checks and bureaucratic bungling by the government. [New York Times]
- "Cities are viewed as the seed of corruption and duplicity, and New York is the biggest city," said Senator Joseph Biden, Maryland [sic] Democrat, in explaining how his congressional colleagues feel. He said he did not share that view, but, "There is a general negative feeling toward New York, a feeling that "who can do anything' and 'what difference will it make?" Representative Richardson Preyer, North Carolina Democrat, said that as far as many of his colleagues were concerned, "New York City has a certain overtone of sinfulness about it" and Representative Robert Kastenmeier, Wisconsin Democrat, said that many on Capitol Hill regarded New York as "Sin City." Thus does Congress approach New York City's appeals for aid. [New York Times]
- For nearly 15 years, the Navy has been using specially equipped electronic submarines to spy at times inside the three-mile coastal limit of the Soviet Union and other nations. The submarines have reportedly obtained vital information on the configuration, capabilities, noise patterns and site-firing abilities of the Soviet submarine fleet. Critics of the Navy's operation argue that much of the intelligence gathered by the submarines can be obtained through other, less provocative means -- such as satellites. They also question whether such intelligence operations have a place in the current atmosphere of detente. [New York Times]
- Five years after federally financed education vouchers were widely proposed and debated as a device to broaden educational choice and to give parents more control over their children's schooling, the notion is still having difficulty taking root. The basic theory holds that if families were given a public voucher worth whatever the local district spends to educate each child in the public schools, parents would be able to shop around for school services in a competitive market system. The result, it was hoped, would be schools that were diverse, and more responsive to their students, particularly children of the poor. A voucher system, financed with $7 million in federal money. is operating in the Alum Rock Union Elementary School District in San Jose, Calif. [New York Times]
- Secretary of State Kissinger, in a news conference in advance of President Ford's trip to Europe this week, said that if Mr. Ford failed to narrow differences between Egypt and Israel next month the United States would probably put forth its own plan on how to make progress toward a Middle East settlement. He said a continued stalemate could lead only to "a catastrophe for all parties concerned," and that the United States was determined that diplomatic progress be continued. [New York Times]
- Moslem political and religious leaders in Lebanon demanded the resignation of the military cabinet appointed by President Suleiman Frenjieh Friday to restore order in the conflict between the right-wing Palestinian guerrillas. The military cabinet, the first in Lebanon, split the country with Moslems opposing it and Christians supporting it. [New York Times]
- The Soviet Union launched a Soyuz spacecraft carrying two astronauts to an expected linkup with a Soviet space research station, Salyut 4, which has been in orbit since last December. Soyuz 18 took off from the Baikonur launching pad on the steppes of Soviet Central Asia at 5:58 P.M. Moscow time (10:58 A.M. Eastern daylight time). Air Force Col. Pyotr Klimuk, commander of Soyuz 18, and Vitaly Sevastyanov, the flight engineer, reported from orbit that they were well and that the craft's systems were functioning normally. [New York Times]
- A group of 10 experts from industrial and less developed countries has reported unanimously to the United Nations that one of the most widely held beliefs about the world economy is not true. This is the belief that in the past quarter century the prices of raw materials exported by poor countries have risen much less than the prices of the machinery and other products that they import from industrial countries. [New York Times]