Secretary of State Kissinger arrived in Aswan, Egypt, on his latest mission to the Middle East, hoping to persuade Egypt and Israel to agree to general principles for negotiating an accord on separating their forces near the Suez Canal. A senior American official said Mr. Kissinger was seeking to work out a set of guidelines that the Egyptian and Israeli negotiators in Geneva could carry out in detail. Mr. Kissinger visited President Anwar Sadat at his residence, beginning what the Secretary said was “a serious conversation” that will resume tomorrow.
The United Nations command today reported a marked increase in the military activities of Egyptian and Israeli forces on the Suez front during the two days preceding Secretary of State Kissinger’s arrival on his third visit to Egypt and Israel. Rudolf Stajduhar, of Yugoslavia, the United Nations spokesman, said that there was a heavy four‐hour exchange of fire by artillery, mortars, tanks and machine guns yesterday morning in the area of Adabiya, on the Gulf of Suez southeast of Suez City. The Egyptians started the shooting, he said. In the afternoon, firing broke out “throughout the Suez City area” and lasted about 45 minutes, Mr. Stajduhar said. Mortars, artillery pieces and machine guns were used by both sides, he said. It was not clear which side initiated that exchange. Three empty Egyptian trucks, belonging to a supply convoy driven by United Nations personnel and parked in the area of the Finnish battalion, were burned as a result of the afternoon shooting and a fourth truck was damaged, the spokesman said. He explained that the United Nations soldiers often park the trucks there after unloading.
The Israeli command reported yesterday that two Israeli soldiers were killed and five wounded in the exchanges reported by Mr. Stajduhar. On Wednesday, Austrians in the United Nations truce force here observed heavy firing by tanks and artillery in an area some 10 miles west of Fayid, on the western bank of the Suez Canal, Mr. Stajduhar said. Israeli forces, he said, fired two antitank missiles southwest of Fayid, which is on the western bank of the Great Bitter Lake. There were other sharp clashes that day near Adabiya and southeast of Qantara on the eastern bank of the canal, Mr. Stadjduhar reported. He said that an Egyptian unit that had advanced 200 yards southeast of Qantara and planted land mines a few days ago was still in its position, as was an Egyptian patrol that moved 50 yards forward outside Suez last Monday.
A Syrian military spokesman reported today that, in five separate clashes on the Golan Heights late last night and early today, Syrian artillery shelled Israelis “who were trying to change the nature of the terrain” to strengthen their positions. The spokesman, quoted by Damascus Radio, said that several Israeli military vehicles and two bulldozers were destroyed and 10 Israeli soldiers killed or wounded by shelling between midnight and noon in the northern and central sectors. This brought to 35 the number of Israeli casualties reported by the Syrians in this week’s clashes. No reports of Syrian casualties or losses of equipment were given. Syrian officials have said that their forces are determined to prevent the Israelis from completing a new road on the slopes of Mount Hermon that would connect the positions they occupied in October with their old supply routes in the area. Western diplomatic sources report that the Syrian forces have recently been showing new strength. They attribute this to additional materiel equipment supplied by the Soviet Union in the last two months.
Several thousand anti-Government Khmer Rouge troops have intensified their offensive against the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh in recent days, beginning what government and Western analysts describe as “a maximum effort” to force the fall of the government of President Lon Nol. These analysts contend that the Communist‐led insurgents will fail in their new offensive, as they did last year after United States bombing in support of the government was halted by an act of Congress. The new insurgent drive has included penetration of sizable infantry forces within six miles of the city, and within a mile of the principal airport at Pochentong. The number of insurgent troops involved, according to military officers in Phnom Penh and commanders in the field, is at least 3,000.
The offensive push was preceded, since mid-December, by sporadic attacks by 122‐mm. rockets that have killed at least 40 persons, mostly civilians, in the capital itself. In the same period, there have been several terrorist attacks in the city, including one on the home of Major General Sosthene Fernandez, commander of the government armed forces. The Government military command says it has killed several hundred rebels in the last four days and that only “light” government losses were sustained.
The Soviet Union has agreed to a delay in delivery of 18.4 million bushels of American wheat in a move that officials here said could help ease threats of a bread shortage in the United States this spring, the Agriculture Department said today. Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, meanwhile, termed “preposterous” a warning from bakers that the price of a 1.5-pound loaf of bread could go up to $1. Assistant Agriculture Secretary Carroll G. Brunthaver said the shift was disclosed today in a routine report on export contracts held by private United States traders as of December 30. The report showed that 18.4 million bushels, which previously had been listed for shipment during the 1973‐74 season were now listed for delivery during the 1974‐75 season, which begins July 1.
A former inmate of Soviet labor camps today issued an open letter of support for the general theme of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s work. “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918‐1956.” David Azbel, a retired professor of physical chemistry, said that he had spent 161 years in the camps though he had been sentenced only to five. He was given an extra year for each day of an 11‐day hunger strike in a camp. In 1951, he said, he was released from the camps but had “not become free” because his request to emigrate to Israel in April, 1972, was refused and because “the shadow of Gulag” had fallen on him and his family with new arrests and harassment, he said.
Locomotive engineers called off a “work by the book” slowdown today, and rail service was reported up to 80 percent normal on some lines and 50 percent on others. But they continued a ban on overtime and Sunday work and threatened a one‐day strike Tuesday unless the National Railways Board resumes wage negotiations. There was also slender hope of progress toward ending the coal miners’ slowdown, which impelled Prime Minister Heath to put 16 million of Britain’s 25 million workers on a three‐day work week January 1. Reversing a previous rejection, Mr. Heath and his top economic ministers met with union leaders to discuss a proposal by the Trades Union Congress to get the mines back to full production.
The Japanese government announced a mandatory energy-saving program, requiring industry to reduce its use of oil and electricity by 5 to 15 percent until the end of February.
On the Tunisian island of Djerba, Tunisia’s President Habib Bourguiba and Libya’s President Muammar Gaddafi signed the Djerba Declaration, committing Tunisia and Libya to a merger as the Arab Islamic Republic. The two presidents announced that referendums would take place in each country on March 2 to vote on the issue. The scheduled vote was soon cancelled after Tunisia’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Masmoudi was fired on January 14.
Investigative reporter Tad Szulc revealed that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had spent six months in 1964 and 1965 to finance a plot to assassinate Cuba’s premier Fidel Castro and then to invade Cuba. Szulc’s article was published five days later in Esquire magazine.
There is a new feeling of insecurity and urgency among political refugees in United Nations‐sponsored safe havens here as the February deadline for leaving the country draws near. There are known to be more than 3,000 Chileans and foreigners in the four sanctuaries and in foreign embassies or private homes, desperately waiting to get out of reach of the military junta that ousted the Marxist Government of President Salvador Allende Gossens in September. The Junta declared that it had delivered 6,462 safe‐conduct passes. A major problem has been to find countries willing to take the refugees, who include not only partisans of the Allende Government but political exiles from neighboring right‐wing dictatorships and other Latin‐American countries.
The first surviving sextuplets in recorded human history— David, Elizabeth, Emma, Grant, Jason and Nicolette Rosenkowitz— were born in South Africa to 25-year-old Susan Rosenkowitz at the Mowbray Maternity Hospital in Cape Town.
A high administration official said that storage tanks for home heating oil are virtually full, though energy official Charles Owens warned against a false sense of security. Commerce Secretary Frederick Dent admitted that he doesn’t know all of the sources of oil received by the United States.
Many Americans are questioning the truth of the oil shortage. Industry critic Christopher Rand claims that oil companies are withholding supplies, with the government’s knowledge. Senator Henry Jackson’s committee will investigate the energy crisis; Jackson wants the major oil companies to voluntarily submit facts and figures.
The administration’s plan to collect data from refiners across the country is being put into effect. The American Petroleum Institute usually collects and distributes that data. API president Frank Ikard insists that an acute shortage exists, and he cautioned that the energy crisis won’t be alleviated immediately once the Arab embargo is lifted.
Texaco released its figures regarding oil supplies, which aroused suspicions. Airlines complained that Texaco won’t deliver their jet fuel allotments, and gas station owners have seen drastic cuts in fuel supplies. Texaco insists that no gasoline is being withheld and listed its reasons for lower supplies and less distribution.
Texaco president John K. McKinley stated that the main effects of the Arab oil embargo are just being felt now. At the time the embargo began, supplies had been built up in the United States, but those supplies are at a low ebb now.
Other oil companies are on the spot because of Texaco’s release of data. Amoco and Mobil will also release their own figures. Exxon and Phillips are considering whether to disclose data, and Sunoco is studying the situation.
The oil industry is mounting a counter-attack against growing criticism being directed at it by Congress, the news media and the public. Meanwhile, the Exxon Corporation announced that, effective today, it was raising its gasoline prices by seven-tenths of 1 cent a gallon, and its prices for distillate products, including home-heating oil, by 5.1 cents a gallon.
The White House investigative unit known as the plumbers uncovered evidence in late 1971 that led it to believe that a “ring” of military officers assigned to the National Security Council and elsewhere was trying to relay highly classified information on the China talks and other matters to officials in the Pentagon, well-informed sources said. It was the plumbers’ investigation into the ring’s activities, reliable sources said, that has repeatedly been cited by President Nixon as the “national security” matter that justified his initial attempt last spring to limit the Justice Department’s investigation into the plumbers.
Attorney General William B. Saxbe said today that the Justice Department would not help President Nixon fight impeachment by the House of Representatives unless the House was proceeding on “obviously political grounds” and not on “criminal charges.” The President would have to get his own private attorneys to assist him, paying for them, perhaps, by a “defense fund,” the Attorney General said. And should the President be impeached and the impeachment be sent to the Senate for trial, Mr. Saxbe said, the Justice Department would have “no role” whatsoever—no matter what the grounds for the impeachment. “When it gets to the Senate,” for “any reason,” Mr. Saxbe said, “at that time the Justice Department is out of it.”
Both the special Watergate prosecutor and an attorney for John D. Ehrlichman denied today that the former Presidential assistant was engaged in plea bargaining. Mr. Ehrlichman, who was President Nixon’s chief assistant for domestic matters until he was forced to resign last year as a result of the Watergate scandal, arrived in Washington last Sunday and plans to return tomorrow to his home in Seattle, Washington. He is expected to return to Washington next month. Leon Jaworski, the prosecutor, said that his office had offered no deal to the former Presidential aide. And John J. Wilson, one of Mr. Ehrlichman’s attorneys, said when asked whether his client had been asked to enter a plea, replied, “Not that I know of.” Mr. Wilson acknowledged that he and Mr. Ehrlichman spent 65 minutes with Mr. Jaworski yesterday. But the capital was awash tonight with reports that something major was developing in the Ehrlichman case.
A tape recording of a meeting between President Nixon and dairy industry representatives in 1971 indicates that the White House contention that President Nixon did not mention campaign contributions may have been false or misleading, lawyers for Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate, asserted in a brief filed in Federal District Court in Washington. It was the first time that any verbatim portion of the White House tapes has been put on the public record.
A federal court in Washington ruled that the Cost of Living Council had been illegally withholding financial information submitted by the nation’s largest corporations to justify price increases. The ruling by the Temporary Emergency Court of Appeals is expected to mean that much of the data in the council’s files relating to costs and profits, figures that the corporations have vigorously defended as confidential, will now be available for public scrutiny.
The U.S. Postal Service will build an experimental post office in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania. The office will use the sun’s rays to cool and heat the building.
Total employment in the nation was unchanged in December, according to the Labor Department, which said that lack of an increase in jobs could be attributed to the energy shortage. Neither the agency’s statistics nor its officials gave specific figures about the energy-related loss of jobs, but it appeared that 50,000 could be traced to automobile dealers and gasoline stations.
The United States, in an effort to check another steep rise in domestic sugar prices, raised today the total amount of sugar that may enter the United States market this year — from both domestic and foreign supplies — by 500,000 short tons to a record 12.5 million tons. Foreign producers, other than Cuba and Rhodesia, can bring in 413,334 tons on a first‐come-first‐served basis, The Agriculture Department said the latest increase — the largest ever authorized under the existing sugar act — was triggered when the price of raw sugar in New York jumped today from 11.70 to 12.05 cents a pound, putting it more than 10 per cent above a so‐called “objective” price specified in the Sugar Act.
Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Senate subcommittee today that the agency’s shrinking work force and the relatively few available women and minority engineers and scientists were responsible for the agency’s self‐admittedly poor record on equal employment. The agency’s defense came before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Housing, Space, Science and Veterans Affairs, headed by Senator William Proxmire, Democrat of Wisconsin. The Senator called the hearing to look into the dismissal last October of Ruth Bates Harris, a top official of the agency. Mrs. Harris was dismissed as deputy assistant administrator for equal opportunity after she and two of her aides, in a report submitted in September, said that the agency was not moving fast enough to hire minority and women workers. Mrs. Harris and her aides also testified today. The report called the agency’s equal employment program a “near‐total failure.”
ABC airs the final episode of “Love, American Style”.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 841.48 (+18.37, +2.23%).
Born:
Xiong Ni, Chinese diver and Olympian, three-time gold medalist from the 1996 and 2000 games; in Changsha, Hunan province, China.
Warren Morris, Team USA and MLB second baseman (Olympic bronze, 1996; Pittsburgh Pirates, Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers), in Alexandria, Louisiana.
Cody McKay, Canadian MLB catcher, pinch hitter, and third baseman (Oakland A’s, St. Louis Cardinals), in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Rod Jones, NFL tackle (Cincinnati Bengals, St. Louis Rams), in Detroit, Michigan.
Brad Ford, NFL defensive back (Detroit Lions), in Alexander City, Alabama.
Dana Cottrell, NFL linebacker (New England Patriots), in Boston, Massachusetts.
Giuseppe Filianoti, Italian opera lyric tenor; in Reggio Calabria, Italy.
Kim Chambers, American pornographic actress; in Fullerton, California.
Died:
Antonio Bautista, 36, Philippine Air Force pilot who was also a member of the Blue Diamonds and Sabres aerial demonstration teams, was shot down over Jolo Island while providing support for government troops against rebels. The Antonio Bautista Air Base, located on Palawan near Puerto Princesa, is named in his honor.
Margit Barnay, 77, German silent film actress.
Tony Lama, 86, American boot manufacturer.
Clotilde von Derp (born Clotilde Margarete Anna Edle von der Planitz), 81, German expressionist dancer.
Ted Poston, 67, African-American journalist and author.
History Diaries 