The Israeli and Egyptian governments signed the Israel-Egypt Disengagement Treaty of 1974, ending conflict on the Egyptian front of the Yom Kippur War. The signing at Kilometer 101 was made by Lieutenant Generals Mohammed Gemasy of Egypt and David Elazar of Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir praised Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for his work on the agreement. Kissinger stated that he hopes the signing of the disengagement plan will mark the beginning of an era of peace in the Mideast. Israeli and Egyptian generals met at Kilometer 101 of the Suez Road to sign the plan. Israeli General David Elazar expressed cautious optimism about the disengagement; Egyptian chief of staff Mohammed Gemasy refused comment, but President Sadat praised the disengagement agreement and Kissinger. Kissinger will try to persuade Syria to join the Geneva peace talks as his next diplomatic move and will set his sights on getting a similar deal between Syria and Israel.
Syria feels betrayed by the Egyptian government; sources in Damascus called the new agreement “treachery”. Sadat will attempt to patch relations with Syria. Israeli commander Ariel Sharon may quit the army to protest the troop withdrawal.
Major developed and developing countries agreed here today to cooperate, to ease the impact of sharply higher oil prices on their economies. A 1,000‐word communiqué by a committee of finance ministers of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said: “The committee agreed that, in managing their international payments, countries must not adopt policies which would merely aggravate the problem of other countries. Accordingly, they stressed the importance of avoiding competitive depreciation and the escalation of restrictions on trade and payments. They further resolved to pursue policies that would sustain appropriate levels of economic activity and employment, while minimizing inflation.”
Communist‐led insurgents fired two rockets into the center of Phnom Penh this morning, killing one person and wounding four, police officials reported. More than 40 have, been killed and hundreds wounded in almost daily rocket and shelling attacks on the capital since December 23. Most of the blasts have been in the early morning. One of the 122‐mm rockets fired today hit the grounds of a high school, killing a laborer and wounding two other persons. The second rocket exploded atop an apartment building, injuring two persons. Police said the 100‐pound projectile failed to penetrate the roof. The Cambodian military command said that operations were continuing against the several thousand insurgents entrenched five to seven miles northwest of the city, but no progress was reported.
France began airlifting French women and children from Cambodia to Bangkok today after the rocket exploded on the grounds of the school, which is French‐run. The flights will continue on a daily basis until all French women and children are out of the country, a source at the French Embassy said. The mothers may return if they find suitable accommodations elsewhere for their children.
United States officials said today that the Central Intelligence Agency’s operations in Thailand would be sharply reduced soon. The C.I.A. has been conducting a sizable counterinsurgency program against communist guerrillas in Thailand for almost 10 years. But last month an agency operative stationed in a provincial town in Thailand sent to the Bangkok government a fake letter purporting to be a peace offer from a guerrilla leader. But the deception was revealed, stirring an outcry in Thailand against the intelligence agency, the United States and Ambassador William R. Kintner. The Washington officials said that Mr. Kintner was preparing recommendations that would greatly limit the agency’s operations in Thailand. The agency is now said to have 150 operatives in Thailand, most of them in the counterinsurgency program and the rest combating narcotics traffickers from Burma.
Five Americans, most of whom have been active in the peace movement, ended a two-week visit to South Vietnam today with a denunciation of President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu’s rule and a plea to Congress to halt all United States aid to South Vietnam. “We have learned of torture that is routine and maltreatment that is universal in every prison and place of detention,” they declared in a statement distributed to newsmen. The five were John Boone, 52 years old and a former Massachusetts state corrections commissioner; Mrs. Ying Lee Kelly, 41, a councilwoman from Berkeley, California; Robert Ransom, 54, an attorney, for International Business Machines whose son was killed while serving in the United States Army here in 1968; the Rev. George W. Webber, 53, president of the New York Theological Seminary, and Debrah Wiley, 26, who writes for American Report, a publication of the Committee of Clergy and Laity Concerned.
President Park Chung Hee of South Korea proposed today nonaggression pact with North Korea. Mr. Park made the offer at his first news conference of the year when he was asked to comment on Pyongyang’s repeated call for a peace treaty to replace the 1953 truce agreement and have American troops withdrawn from South Korea. It was the first time that South Korea has proposed nonaggression pact with the North, although Pyongyang has made a similar bid several times in the past. North Korea’s proposition, first put forth in 1963, was different from Mr. Park’s proposal in that it called for American Withdrawals and mutual troop reductions. This was later transformed into the proposal for a peace treaty. The South Korean leader said that the pact should contain a pledge to the whole world by both sides to refrain absolutely from armed aggression on the other side, a promise that both sides never interfere with each other’s internal affairs and a provision that the present armistice agreement be kept in force under any circumstances.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn charged today that the campaign by Soviet authorities against his new book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918‐1956,” revealed their “animal fear of exposure.” The dissident Soviet writer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, predicted that “the time will soon come when this book will be widely and even freely read in our country.” In a written rebuttal, his first reaction to the campaign begun two weeks ago to discredit him here, Mr. Solzhenitsyn accused his critics of maliciously distorting the book, which deals with the Soviet internal security and prison‐camp system up to 1956. He said press depictions of his book as anti‐Russian and pro‐Nazi were lies spread by cowards hiding behind pseudonyms. “Please cite the exact pages!” he challenged them. Mr. Solzhenitsyn went on to call the secret police, or K.G.B. as it is known by its Russian initials, “the chief reactionary force in the world today.”
The coalition government of Belgium collapsed today after the National Iranian Oil Company announced that it was pulling out of a joint project to build a refinery near Liege. Premier Edmond Leburton said after a Cabinet session that he would hand in the resignation of the Government that had come into power last January 25. The controversial refinery project had the strong support of the Socialist members of the government, led by the Premier, who considered it vital to give the government a foothold in the privately-owned Belgian oil industry. But politicians in both the Flemish Christian and the Liberal parties attacked the plan as uneconomical.
The Basque terrorists who assassinated the Spanish Premier last month are getting little support here from other leftist groups that are equally opposed to Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Government but which disapprove of the Basques’ methods. Conversations with Communists, Socialists, Trotskyites and other leftists as well as with representatives of E.T.A., the Basque nationalist organization, reveal some of the weaknesses of Spanish opposition forces, divided by rivalries and jealousies as well as by discord over ideology and strategy. Even in the Basque separatist movement itself, divisions are evident. The only common sentiment among all the groups is dislike for the late Premier, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, and obvious satisfaction at his passing.
Poland’s news agency PAP announced that authorities had extinguished a coal mine fire that had been burning since 1933 in Silesia at the Polska Coal Company.
Glenis Carruthers, a student teacher, was strangled to death on Clifton Down in Bristol, England, after leaving her 21st birthday party. As of 2024 the case remained unsolved.
A fire today burned through an old apartment building in Winnipeg, Canada that housed many elderly persons and invalids, killing 8 and injuring 18. One tenant was listed as missing.
Judge John Sirica recommended that Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski take his case regarding erasures of the White House tape to the grand jury. Nixon attorney James St. Clair cross-examined the electronics experts today, but their scientific explanations offered little room for discounting their testimony. Dr. Richard Bolt insisted that the experts’ conclusions were correct. Rose Mary Woods’ attorney Charles Rhyne read former Nixon attorney Fred Buzhardt’s statement to Sirica on the day the White House tape gap was discovered. Rhyne stated that Buzhardt attempted to plead Miss Woods guilty even before the court session started.
The special Watergate prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, said today that his office was considering filing criminal charges in connection with the Government’s settlement of International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation antitrust cases and a broad range of related matters. “The investigation is currently active and involves consideration of the initiation of criminal proceedings,” Mr. Jaworski said. He made the statement in an affidavit filed in United States District Court here by the Justice Department in support of its motion to block efforts by Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate, to obtain the I.T.T. files.
Prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste informed that court that two other gaps exist on the White House tapes. Those tapes contained recollected conversations between the President, John Dean and John Mitchell. The White House says those gaps were simply pauses in dictation, and aide Steve Bull denied erasing any tapes. The grand jury will determine whether any illegalities were involved in the tape erasures. The White House urged Americans not to forget that the grand jury simply intends to discover how the erasures were made, not determine the substance of the taped conversations.
Most congressmen believe that the House Judiciary Committee will report out a bill of impeachment against President Nixon. Representative Wilbur D. Mills of Arkansas, a conservative Democrat, said today that President Nixon should not put the country through a prolonged procedure over his removal from office but should consider resigning if the House Judiciary Committee recommended his impeachment. Mr. Mills, whose over‐all views are much closer to Mr. Nixon’s than those of most Democrats, said he was not recommending impeachment or resignation at this time. But he said that if the committee recommended impeachment “I think it would be much better for the President to consider resigning rather than put the country into the greatest schism since the Civil War.” Mr. Mills made his remarks at an impromptu news conference. House majority leader Tip O’Neill also declared that the President should step down.
Nixon met today with Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott and House Republican leader John Rhodes. Sentiment against the President seems to be rising in the House.
Former White House aide Edward Morgan, who was responsible for signing the deed to President Nixon’s controversial donation of his vice-presidential papers to the government, resigned as assistant Secretary of the Treasury.
On the “Today” show, Admiral Thomas Moorer acknowledged receiving unauthorized documents from the National Security Council through a Navy yeoman. Moorer’s statement followed charges that the Pentagon was spying on the White House.
Maine today became the 31st state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution when the State Senate voted 19 to 11 in favor of the measure. The House of Representatives approved amendment yesterday 76 to 68. Today’s action was the first by a state on the controversial issue since Washington approved the amendment on March 22, 1973.
The second stage of a Delta rocket misfired tonight, apparently scrubbing an attempt to put a British military communications satellite into orbit, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. A spokesman said as a result of the misfiring, the Skynet 2 satellite could not achieve its proper orbit. “Instead, it went into a very low orbit and one that cannot last very long,” he said. “We have to categorize it as a mission failure.” At first, everything seemed in order as the Delta, the rocket workhorse of the space agency, soared into space, leaving a trail of fire. However, shortly after the 19:39 P.M. launching, the second stage refused to respond to an attempt to fire it a second time, the spokesman said. It was supposed to have fired twice.
Two more storms pounded the flood‐ridden Pacific Northwest today after week of rains that have taken 15 lives and caused damage estimated at more than $72 million. In Idaho, Governor Cecil D. Andrus called the flooding the worst natural disaster in state history. More storm warnings went up from Santa Cruz, California, to British Columbia today after a brief respite from weeklong, downpours that flooded rivers, and streams and triggered a fatal mudslide in Oregon. Heavy rains and winds up to 70 miles an hour drove ashore in the Pacific Northwest and in northern California. The National Weather Service said it would be a brief but violent storm.
Dean Martin Jr., 22‐year‐old son of the singer‐actor, was freed on $5,000 bond today after being charged with illegal possession of seven unregistered machine guns and an antitank cannon found in his home. Mr. Martin sold two of the machine guns for $625 to a man who turned out to be an undercover agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a division of the Treasury Department, the complaint said. The charges against Mr. Martin carry a penalty of 10 years in prison, a $10,000 fine or both for each unlawfully possessed firearm
“The Six Million Dollar Man,” starring Lee Majors, premieres on ABC Television.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 855.47 (-16.69, -1.91%).
Born:
Princess Claire of Belgium (born Claire Louise Coombs); in Bath, Somerset, England, United Kingdom.
Shane Burton, NFL defensive end and defensive tackle (Miami Dolphins, Chicago Bears, New York Jets, Carolina Panthers), in Logan, West Virginia.
Marco Geisler, German Olympic rower, winner of four world championships (1999, 2001, 2002 and 2003); in Cottbus, East Germany.
Tri Kusharjanto, Indonesian Olympic badminton player, 1995 World Cup mixed doubles title; in Yogyakarta.
Lieutenant Colonel Thibaut Vallette, French equestrian and part of the 4-member French team eventing gold medalists at the 2016 Summer Olympics; in Brest, Finistère département.
Vladimir Miholjević, Croatian Olympic and professional road bicycle racer; in Zagreb, SR Croatia, Yugoslavia.
Devon Odessa, American actress (Sharon-“My So Called Life”, “Girl of Limberlost”), in Parkersburg, West Virginia.
Maulik Pancholy, American actor and author; in Dayton, Ohio.
Died:
Bill Finger, 59, American comic strip and comic book writer, co-creator (with Bob Kane) of Batman.
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