The Battle of the Paracel Islands between China and South Vietnam began. The South Vietnamese government announced today that Chinese MIG’s had bombed three islands in the disputed Paracel group in the South China Sea and had followed up with the landing of Chinese troops on the islands, which are claimed by both Peking and Saigon. The Republic of Vietnam Navy lost 75 killed and 48 captured and one Corvette sunk while the People’s Liberation Army Navy lost 18 killed. As a result of the battle, the PRC established de facto control over the Paracels. China conquered all of the islands in the Paracel archipelago the next day.
A U.S. Department of State spokesman said today that “we do not take any position” in the reported fighting between China and South Vietnam over the Paracel lslands. “Of course, we do strongly desire a peaceful settlement,” John F. King, a public affairs officer, said in response to questions. But, he said, “we’re not involved.”
The U.S. Defense Department has begun developing a new missile warhead that can be maneuvered to avoid defenses or eventually could home in with high accuracy on such enemy targets as missile silos. The new warhead is known as MaRV for “maneuverable re-entry vehicle.” It represents the third generation in a family of multiple warheads that the United States has developed for its strategic missiles.
President Anwar Sadat of Egypt toured Arab capitals in an attempt to get the most important Arab leaders to underwrite the agreement signed by Egypt and Israel Friday on the disengagement of their forces along the Suez Canal. The President spent the morning at Damascus Airport with President Hafez el‐Assad of Syria, his partner in the October war. In the afternoon Mr. Sadat flew to Kuwait. From there he will go to other oil‐producing states in the Persian Gulf and tomorrow he will take the long flight to the two countries on the western rim of the Arab world, Algeria and Morocco. Mr. Sadat conferred last night with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital.
Cambodian President Lon Nol said today that the current offensive by Communist-led guerrillas would be decisive for the future of Cambodia’s 7 million people. The President, making his second nationwide radio broadcast since the rebel dry-season offensive began six weeks ago, spoke for 25 minutes in a somber tone about the war. As he spoke, more rockets were fired Into Phnom Penh from a point just five miles west of the capital, marking the fifth consecutive day the city has been shelled. One person was killed and at least 13 were wounded when two 122-mm rockets hit the city.
The first rocket hit a government building behind the Cambodian armed forces general staff headquarters, killing one person and wounding nine. Minutes later, the second rocket exploded near a monastery on the northwest side of Phnom Penh, wounding four young children.
Earlier today all public and private schools and universities in Phnom Penh were ordered closed immediately because of the rebel rocket attacks on the capital. A French-run school had already closed yesterday after a rocket struck its grounds, wounding two persons and killing another. In his broadcast, President Lon Nol said: “This present attack is decisive. The enemy has even sent subversive elements into Phnom Penh, and North Vietnamese troops are on the east bank of the Mekong River to rocket the capital to scare our citizens” But he asserted that the Cambodian Army was systematically destroying the enemy forces “and we will win the war and become a free nation.”
Five Soviet citizens, including a senior diplomat and two other members of the Soviet Embassy staff, were expelled from China on a charge of espionage activities. A Chinese Foreign Ministry note, made public by the official Chinese press agency, said the facts of the case showed the “utter hypocrisy of the Soviet authorities’ official claim that they want to normalize the relations between the Soviet Union and China.”
Permissiveness in the field of culture is under attack in China, where the relaxed atmosphere of last year is giving way to demands for stricter censorship and more intensive propaganda. Even pornography is said to have surfaced as a result of the liberal climate prevailing in some areas. However, the “pornography” referred to is believed to be not the modern hard‐core variety but the racy tales of traditional Chinese literature. Last year China appeared to be loosening cultural controls and opening the door to greater freedom of artistic expression. Warm welcomes were extended to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra. A visitor to the Cultural Park in Canton last November was impressed with the high entertainment value and low propaganda content of the dancing, singing and story‐telling performed by a local troupe for mass audiences.
David W. Schorer, the American vice consul in Leningrad, was roughed up by unidentified Russians in the streets of that city earlier this month, State Department officials said today. Mr. Schorer was returning from a hospital where he had been visiting an American citizen when he was involved in a scuffle with a group of Muslims, according to the officials. He was not beaten and is all right, although he was roughed up, the officials said. A protest was made to the Soviet Government in Moscow and to the Russian Embassy in Washington. Details remained sketchy about the incident, although the disclosure was the first public discussion of the matter, which occurred January 11. Mr. Schorer, 33 years old, has returned to the United States on leave.
Hundreds of Protestant teenagers rampaged through the Dockland area of Belfast tonight, setting fire to buildings and looting shops in protest against the British Army. Troops in armored vehicles were stoned and shots were fired at soldiers in the East Belfast area after a local Protestant leader was taken away by troops for questioning. Buses and cars were hijacked and overturned to form barricades. After eight hours of sporadic rioting, the army sent in bulldozers and reinforcements. No casualties were reported. Elsewhere in Northern Ireland, bomb attacks were reported during the night against a customs post, communication facilities, and a restaurant where leaders of a Roman Catholic political party were holding a monthly meeting. The leaders evacuated the restaurant before the blast.
France set the franc free for a period of six months, allowing it to float in value according to market pressures. French President Georges Pompidou floated the French franc for six months, abandoning intervention in money markets to maintain the franc’s value. The change took effect when trading opened on Monday, January 20. The move broke up the Common Market’s monetary agreement, leaving all European currencies free, as the pound and the lira and the Irish pound have been since last March. In announcing the decision, Finance Minister Valery Giscard d’Estaing said it was “a parenthesis” in the Common Market’s effort to reach a monetary union and that France was still committed to that goal.
The Belgium government of Leburton falls. King Baudouin accepted the resignation of Belgium’s three‐party coalition government this morning after a short meeting with Premier Edmond Leburton at Laken Palace. The Government split apart last night after Iran refused to go through with plans for a joint Belgian‐Iranian oil refinery near Liege. The Premier and the Socialists in the Cabinet had strongly backed the project. Brussels’ delay in approving the project and the conditions it imposed were factors in Iran’s decision to withdraw. But most observers in Brussels today agreed that the year‐old Socialist‐Social Christian-Liberal coalition was already riddled with contradictions and the refinery dispute simply provided a convenient opportunity for the final split. In the coming days the parties will caucus to decide whether to dissolve the Parliament and call new elections or try to build a new Government on the ruins of the last.
Brazilian political policemen detained a United States newsman, Henry Raymont, yesterday and seized his recently taped interview with President Juan D. Perón of Argentina. Mr. Raymont was taken to political police headquarters and interrogated for four hours about the interview and his journalistic activities. He was released last night after the intervention of Manuel Francisco do Nascimento Bilto, executive vice president of Journal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro’s leading daily. Mr. Raymont is a writer for Journal do Brasil and a former correspondent of The New York Times. After his interrogation, the policemen returned the tape but said that they had kept a copy.
An armed band freed two prisoners being taken to jail in a Chilean military vehicle today, but six of the band were killed in the resulting gunfight. An unspecified number of gunmen stopped the unidentified vehicle as it approached Quillota, 50 miles northeast of here. The vehicles military guards engaged them in a gun battle, but the surviving attackers managed to release two prisoners and escape with them, the communiqué said. The communiqué described the band as Marxists, but did not identify them any further. It said that one army captain was badly wounded in the fighting.
President Nixon, in a radio address, told the American people that if their voluntary cooperation in conserving energy continued, there would be no heating hardships this winter and no gasoline rationing in the spring. He said the energy shortage was “genuine,” and that the public effort to conserve the use of oil and other energy had been “far more important than anything else” in avoiding damaging shortages.
President Nixon’s new budget will all but abandon last year’s highly controversial device of impounding funds for programs approved by Congress. This was disclosed in an interview with Roy Ash, director of the Office of Management and Budget. He made an exception for grants under the Water Pollution Act for sewage treatment plants, where the President has already announced his decision to allot more money in the new budget than was allotted this fiscal year, but again to withhold part of the amount authorized.
The Nixon Administration has decided to ask Congress for almost $99 billion in new spending authority for defense, including $92.6 billion in the new budget and $5.9 billion in supplemental funds for the previous year. The new total package, up 15% from the $84.2 billion approved last year, is certain to set off serious debate in Congress — which is precisely what Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger is known to desire.
The National Committee for an Effective Congress predicted that President Nixon would be impeached as a result of legal and political developments this year in the Watergate case. Russell Hemenway, the committee’s director, in a 20-page statement prepared for newsmen, said that the committee was “the largest source of liberal money in the country.” The statement described Congress as an inherently weak institution, many of whose members “seek to make themselves innocuous and indispensable parts of the political architecture, a function performed previously by the hat racks”. The statement also said that, by spring, “for most Congressmen it will take more courage to vote against impeachment than for impeachment” of the President.
Byron De La Beckwith was acquitted on federal firearms charges for bringing a live time bomb into New Orleans in his car in order to bomb the home of Anti-Defamation League regional director Adolph Botnick. De La Beckwith had previously been tried twice in Mississippi for the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers, with both trials resulting in hung juries. De La Beckwith would be convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in the Botnick case on August 1, 1975. He would be convicted of Evers’ murder in 1994 and sentenced to life in prison.
United States Representative Ella T. Grasso today formally opened her campaign to capture the Democratic nomination for Governor of Connecticut, declaring that if she did not win at the Democratic convention in June, she would challenge the party’s choice in a primary election. She is the first woman in either major party to run for Governor in Connecticut. If she does force a primary it would be the first for the party for the gubernatorial nomination.
In Woodbranch, Texas, a 22-year-old man was arrested after taking 13 people hostage during a supermarket robbery. The gunman, who held 13 hostages in a supermarket for 10 hours, was captured tonight shortly after he made his escape, the police said. The police said the gunman, identified as Wesley Earl Evans, 22 years old, a twice‐convicted felon, was captured on a dirt road off a freeway north of Houston. One of the three hostages the gunman had taken when he fled the Kroger supermarket in north Houston was slightly injured when she was hit by flying glass from the rear window of the car, the police said. They had said earlier the woman had been injured when she was hit as the gunman fired out the rear window at pursuing police. The two other hostages, including police Lieutenant William Doss, and the gunman were uninjured.
Four persons were arrested today while protesting a speaking appearance by Dr. William B. Shockley of Stanford University, proponent of controversial views about intelligence and race. Only residents of the Cold Spring Harbor school district on Long Island, New York were allowed to attend the panel discussion featuring Dr. Shockley, who won a Nobel Prize in physics, in the high school here, and it was estimated that only 320 of the 400 seats, were filled. An estimated 150 demonstrators marched outside, including representatives from community organizations; the People’s Town Hall, which is a counter‐culture organization; a group called United to Fight Racism, and the Attica Brigade from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. One demonstrator, Mickey Melchior of the People’s Town Hall, said, “There have been some differences in opinion whether he (Dr. Shockley) should be allowed to speak, but he shouldn’t be allowed to any more than someone should be allowed to shout ‘fire’ in crowded room.” He said they objected most strongly to Mr. Shockley’s views on “sterilization of people on welfare and his ideas on I.Q. tests.”
Cars, buses and trucks skidded and crashed, pedestrians slipped and tumbled through the night and into the morning on a coating of ice that glazed the roads and sidewalks throughout the New York City metropolitan area. The National Weather Service, which described it as the worst ice storm of the season, said that the entire Northeast had been hit and predicted possible icy conditions for tomorrow.
After causing its earthbound controllers nearly three months of “lost weeks and anguish” from a succession of technical problems, the American Mariner 10 spacecraft now appears ready for its first full‐dress scientific explorations near Venus February 5. Mariner 10 was launched last November 3 on a fly‐by voyage to Venus and Mercury, the first attempt to survey two planets an a single space flight. Among its assigned tasks is taking the first close‐up photographs of the cloud cover of Venus and the airless surface of Mercury. Although the spacecraft had difficulties with heaters in the television cameras, the problems have been corrected and the pair of powerful cameras now is judged ready for pictures of Venus, according to Walker E. Giberson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Pasadena, California, project manager for Mariner 10.
Australian racing driver John McCormack won the 1974 New Zealand Grand Prix at Wigram Airfield Circuit, Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand. It was his second consecutive New Zealand Grand Prix victory.
In the U.S. state of New Jersey, Essex County College set a collegiate record by scoring over 200 points in a basketball game, while its opponent, nearby Englewood Cliffs College, set a record by losing by 143 points. The final score was Essex County 210, Englewood Cliffs 67. Englewood Cliffs would close after its final graduation on June 7, 1974.
The 88-game winning streak of the UCLA Bruins college basketball team ended when the Notre Dame Fighting Irish beat the visiting Bruins by one point, 71 to 70.
Born:
Walter Jones, NFL offensive tackle (Pro Football Hall of Fame, inducted 2014; Pro Bowl, 1999, 2001-2008; Seattle Seahawks), in Aliceville, Alabama.
Ian Laperrière, Canadian NHL right wing (St. Louis Blues, New York Rangers, Los Angeles Kings, Colorado Avalanche, Philadelphia Flyers), in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Amaury Telemaco, Dominican MLB pitcher (Chicago Cubs, Arizona Diamondbacks, Philadelphia Phillies), in Higüey, Dominican Republic.
Dainius Adomaitis, Lithuanian Olympic basketball player, twice coach of the year in the Lietuvos Krepšinio Lyga, Lithuania’s pro basketball league; in Šakiai, Lithuanian SSR, Soviet Union.
Frank Caliendo, American comedian, actor and impressionist; in Chicago, Illinois.
Natassia Malthe, Norwegian model and actress; in Oslo, Norway.
Died:
Antonio Fernós-Isern, 78, Puerto Rican cardiologist, Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative in the U.S. Congress from 1946 to 1965
Wiktor Biegański, 81, Polish actor, film director and screenwriter.
Edward Seago, 63, British artist.
Leonard Shecter, 47, American sportswriter and editor (“Ball Four”), of leukemia.
History Diaries 