Christmas Day.
Meeting on Christmas Day in Kuwait, the Arab OPEC nations announced that they would end monthly production cuts to all but two world nations, with the flow of oil to be increased by 10% for Japan, as well as the UK, France, Belgium and other European nations. The embargo continued, however, against the United States and the Netherlands. Arab countries eased their oil restrictions against Western Europe, Japan, and the Philippines, but the oil embargo will continue against the United States and the Netherlands. The decision came as no surprise to Secretary of State Kissinger. If Israel and Egypt agree on mutual disengagement of armed forces in the Mideast, the Arabs could lift the U.S. oil boycott.
Officials in Washington said that more oil would reach the United States as a result of the production increase announced in Kuwait and consequently, they expected no gasoline rationing this winter. Washington analysts said that the Arabs were being more conciliatory than their own stated conditions required, a development that generated some optimism that from now on the fuel situation would get better, not worse. A rationing plan has been drafted and could be put into effect next spring or summer, officials said, but it was equally likely that conservation practices and public tolerance of shortages might make rationing unnecessary.
In Europe, officials and economists say the easing of the Arab restrictions dispels the danger of serious economic dislocation, but leaves the long‐term problem of managing the effects of sharply higher oil prices. A British authority said the action was not too surprising in view of the intense diplomatic work that has gone into getting the Arabs to one up. Europeans are divided over the issue of sharing oil with the Netherlands, where the embargo remains, the British and French fearing that the move would antagonize the Arabs.
Egypt and Israel will discuss disengagement at the Geneva peace conference soon. In Tel Aviv, Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan stated that he is optimistic regarding the talks.
The wife of Israel’s President Ephraim Katzir beat a retreat in the face of rabbis who opposed her plans to pass out 3,000 copies of Playboy magazine to frontline troops. A statement from Mrs. Katzir said that the shipment of the magazine had not arrived in the country and would not be distributed. The National Religious Party and the Union of Immigrant Rabbis of Western Countries assailed the planned distribution after a U.S. Embassy spokesman said Ambassador Kenneth B. Keating had agreed to assist Mrs. Katzir obtained the magazines.
Israel Radio said Soviet ballet dancer Valeri Panov and his wife Galina were due to arrive shortly in Vienna after a long struggle to get exit visas from the Soviet Union. Panov, who formerly danced with Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet, has been trying to leave for Israel for many months. He recently staged a hunger strike and a few days ago said he had been offered a visa to leave without his wife, who is not Jewish, but he refused.
The South Vietnamese military command reported a slight drop in fighting today, but the battle level was still higher than during Christmas a year ago — a month before the cease‐fire went into effect. The command reported 92 clashes across the country during the 24 hours ending at noon today, a drop from the more than 100 daily during recent days but a sharp increase over last Christmas’s 65. A command communiqué said that 40 Communist soldiers and 12 government soldiers were killed in the day’s fighting. It said 43 government soldiers were wounded.
Communist gunners shelled Phnom Penh today for the third consecutive day, killing a civilian worker and wounding one. Three battalions of Cambodian government troops later reportedly cleared the east bank of the Mekong River facing the capital without finding any insurgent forces. Reports from the field said that three battalions — about 600 men — had covered three miles of the river road from Svay Chrom, two miles across the Mekong from Phnom Penh, to Prek Luong, five miles northeast of the capital. However, government forces have yet to strike inland toward rocket‐launching sites in swamp country five miles northeast of the capital. From there, Communist forces have fired Soviet‐built 122‐mm. rockets into Phnom Penh since Sunday.
The U.S. dollar continued to advance against the yen in forward trading on the Tokyo foreign exchange market, with dollars for delivery in six months quoted at 304 yen. Bank of Japan intervention kept the spot rate unchanged at 280 yen to the dollar. Neither the bank nor the Finance Ministry would comment on rumors that the intervention point soon would be moved from 280 yen to a point nearer 300.
The Tokyo newspaper Asahi Shimbun quoted what it called highly reliable sources in Seoul as saying that South Korean opposition leader Kim Dae Jung would be allowed to leave the country early next year. Kim, kidnapped from a Tokyo hotel to Seoul in August, has applied to the South Korean government for a passport to enable him to go to the United States. The kidnapping strained relations between Seoul and Tokyo and the Japanese government had expressed hope that Kim would be allowed to leave his country when he wished.
İsmet İnönü, first Premier of modern Turkey and her second President, died of heart attack today at his home here. He was 89 years old. The Council of Ministers said Mr. İnönü would be buried in the grounds of the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish republic, with whom “he served honorably and well.” The day of the funeral was not announced.
A Turkish military court today sentenced 151 young leftists to up to 20 years in prison after a trial here that lasted two years. Eighty‐four others were acquitted, including the best-known defendant, Professor Muammer Aksoy, one of the architects of Turkey’s liberal 1961 constitution. Originally 257 defendants were put on trial. All were charged with being members or supporters of Revolutionary Youth, an underground organization responsible for acts of violence during the civil unrest that preceded the ousting of the government in 1971 by the military. The organization, whose leader, Deniz Gezmis, was hanged last year, carried out aircraft hijackings, bank robberies and bombings.
Soviet archeologists have uncovered a heavily fortified citadel located 26 feet below ground which was built in the third century BC. Called Kavardan, the citadel is 15 miles from Tashkent in the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, Tass news agency reported. Surrounded by a wall with only one entrance, the city contained houses, metal and pottery workshops, mills and ceramic-lined water canals, all testifying to the advanced state of civilization of Kavardan, Tass said.
One year after being hit by a major earthquake, Managua, Nicaragua, still appears demolished today. The poor are still forced to live in temporary shelters. Many Nicaraguans blame strongman General Anastasio Somoza. Somoza stated that Managua needed to be redesigned, and the disaster has helped the city in this way.
A private single-engine plane crashed into the radio tower shortly after takeoff from the Montes Claros airport in the northern part of Minas Gerais state, police reported in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. All five aboard, the pilot, his fiancée and three other women, were killed when the plane burst into flames after hitting the tower. The cause of the accident was not determined.
Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s wife, Margaret, gave birth to the couple’s second child. Their first child was also born on Christmas day, two years ago.
U.S. Vice President Gerald Ford and his family are taking a skiing holiday in Vail, Colorado. Ford brayed 15‐degree temperatures and a gusty breeze to get in two hours of skiing Christmas Day and then had a traditional Christmas dinner.
President Nixon and his family exchanged presents at the White House as six persons were arrested nearby for demonstrating against continued warfare in Vietnam. Washington, D.C. outside of the White House has not been very friendly toward the President lately. In what the Rev. Philip F. Berrigan called “our way of celebrating Christmas,” 37 protesters performed a medieval morality play in front of the White House today and said a mass that likened President Nixon to King Herod. Six persons were arrested. Two protesters were arrested for climbing the black iron fence around the White House and walking toward the mansion where Mr. Nixon was having Christmas dinner with his family. The two demonstrators, Deborah Daniell and Mitchell Snyder, were charged by the Secret Service with unlawful entry.
Talk of impeachment is spreading like wildfire through the capital. Organized labor is bringing its own pressure for impeachment. United Auto Workers legislative director Jack Beidler said that the “Saturday massacre” was responsible for labor’s disenchantment with the President. Guides to impeachment procedures have turned up on every newsstand. Churches are also involved in the clamor for impeachment. Charles Morgan, legislative director of the ACLU, declared that Americans have the right to determine President Nixon’s innocence or guilt.
A confidential report of the Federal Bureau of Investigation apparently contradicts L. Patrick Gray 3rd’s testimony last March that he had no knowledge of nearly 20 “national security” wiretaps ordered by President Nixon on newsmen and officials of his Administration. Mr. Gray had told the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was holding hearings on his nomination to become director of the FBI, that he had made an investigation and had found “no record of any such business.” But a copy of the confidential report indicates that Mr. Gray, while the bureau’s acting director, had been advised in advance of his testimony of the then defunct surveillance operation.
Skylab astronauts Gerald Carr and William Pogue took a record seven-hour spacewalk to photograph the comet Kohoutek. Kohoutek is almost invisible to the naked eye on earth. Kohoutek is getting closer to the sun each day, but not many persons have seen it.
Despite the possibility of higher prices, shortages or rationing of gasoline, the millions of Americans who commute by automobile are not rushing to alternative, gas-saving ways of getting to their jobs, at least not yet. Two alternatives, bicycles and motorcycles, which normally have low sales in the cold months, have shown a modest increase in sales in the last month. But car pools and mass transportation, which could possibly save larger amounts of gasoline, have shown almost no increase in riders, with most gasoline stations still selling all the fuel motorists want, six days of the week.
18,000 gallons of gasoline leaked from a storage tank in Tullahoma, Tennessee. Rain washed the gasoline into sewers; an explosion is very likely.
Gasoline at 99 cents a gallon? That’s what a Brooklyn station was charging Christmas night, according to irate customers who brought their complaints to a nearby police station. Police referred the agitated customers to federal authorities. Earlier, Arnold Griffin, acting chief of operations for the Federal Energy Office on Long Island, had said the 79.9 cents a gallon charged by another Brooklyn station was illegal.
The unavailability of gasoline crimped Christmas, plans in the New York City area. Most service stations closed for the holiday and the few that were open and had gasoline to sell were mobbed by sometimes unruly customers.
The ARPANET crashes when a programming bug causes all ARPANET traffic to be routed through the server at Harvard University, causing the server to freeze.
Cincinnati police said they had suspects in the theft of two Rembrandt paintings under surveillance for four days before a $100,000 ransom was paid, but waited until the paintings were safe before moving in. The two stolen paintings, “Portrait of an Elderly Lady” and “Man Leaning on a Sill,” have been returned to the Taft Museum and three men have been charged with receiving stolen property. Soon after the second painting was retrieved Sunday, police picked up 11 persons and recovered all but $300 of the ransom. Being held were Carl Horsley, 21; Raymond McDonough, 21, and Henry Dawn.
Cowlitz County sheriff’s officers in Longview, Washington, were searching for a masked man who robbed a Liberian freighter of about $3,000, fatally shot the captain and wounded the first mate. Killed was Luk Po Chan, 55, of Hong Kong, and hospitalized in good condition was Lau Ching Lee, 35. As for the suspect, “We have a good physical description of him, with and without the mask,” a sheriff’s deputy said.
Eight inmates, including a murder suspect, took advantage of special Christmas television privileges and escaped from the aging Alachua County jail in Gainesville, Florida. Police said one of the men, William Philligame, 26, was awaiting trial on murder charges and was considered dangerous. The men had been allowed to stay up late and watch television in the jail’s dayroom as a Christmas Eve treat. They slipped away at about 2 a.m.
Firefighters who earlier snuffed out an oil well fire at Glenrock, Wyoming, were considering using a second detonation to put out a new blaze that erupted Christmas Eve. The 40-man crew under Jimmy Adair of Houston had earlier stopped the flames with a 500-pound blast of nitroglycerine but was unable to stop the flow of crude oil that fueled the new fire. Wind gusts up to 60 m.p.h. stood in the way of a decision on use of the explosive a second time.
The four-day search for five adults and three children aboard the cabin cruiser Sea Boy II which sank in the Bahamas was called off and all eight were presumed lost at sea, the Coast Guard said in Miami. Aboard the missing vessel were Michael Baldwin, 28, operator of the boat; his brother, Billy, 26; Kathy Mazzulo, 22; Richard Mazzulo, 35; his wife Nancy, 30, and three Mazzulo children. They were all from the Washington, D.C., area.
“The Sting” directed by George Roy Hill, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, with music inspired by Scott Joplin, premieres in Los Angeles and New York (Best Picture 1974).
Ballon d’Or: Ajax forward Johan Cruyff wins his second award for best European football player ahead of Juventus goalkeeper Dino Zoff and Bayern Munich striker Gerd Müller.
Born:
Alexandre Trudeau, Canadian journalist, son of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Trudeau, born in Ottawa, Canada.
Tarrik Brock, MLB leftfielder (Chicago Cubs), in Goleta, California.
Eruani Azibapu Godbless, Nigerian physician, entrepreneur and billionaire; in Epibu, Bayelsa State, Nigeria.
Died:
İsmet İnönü, 89, Turkish Army General, former Prime Minister and President of Turkey.
Gabriel Voisin, 93, French aviation pioneer.
Maurício Grabois, 61, Brazilian politician and co-founder of the Communist Party of Brazil, was shot and killed along with several other anti-government Araguaia guerrillas.
History Diaries 