Secretary of State Kissinger will visit Moscow next month to prepare for President Nixon’s trip to the Soviet Union, expected to take place in June. A communique issued after two days of talks by President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger with the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, asserted that both sides had paid “special attention” to the need for progress toward peace in the Middle East.
Communist-led insurgents, slipping through the defense ring around Phnom Penh, shelled a refugee camp and a cigarette factory on the city’s southeastern edge today. The military police said 13 people had been killed and 15 wounded. Twelve of the dead were refugees crouching in a bunker struck by a shell from a mortar or recoilless cannon. At tobacco factory, seven workers were wounded as a shell smashed through the roof. It was the first time that the insurgents had approached so close to the capital and their use of such short‐range weapons spread panic. Women rushed screaming from flimsy huts end children wandered wide‐eyed through the confusion. Military officers said the shells could have been fired from the east bank of the Bassac River, about 500 yards from a bridge on Route 1, which runs into the city. More than 550 people have been killed or wounded in Phnom Penh since the insurgents opened their present shelling campaign just before Christmas.
South Vietnam and China appeared a step closer to another confrontation in the South China Sea. Saigon military sources said South Vietnamese commandos landed on another island in the disputed Spratly archipelago and a task force of about 300 men now controls six islands there. China denounced the action as an infringement of its territory. Saigon responded by calling China’s claim to the islands groundless.
The South Vietnamese Government today rejected a Chinese claim to the Spratly Islands and reasserted its sovereignty over them. The Saigon statement, issued by the Foreign Ministry, came a day after the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that China would not tolerate moves by the South Vietnamese to reinforce their presence on the islands, in the South China Sea about 425 miles southeast of Saigon. The South Vietnamese, who are believed to have about 300 men on the Spratlys, sent task force to the islands last week after Chinese naval and air forces occupied the Paracel Islands, some 500 miles farther north. Saigon’s statement also reasserted sovereignty over the Paracels.
Negotiators for the South Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong agreed today to exchange more than 4,000 civilian and military prisoners over a three-week period beginning Friday, the Viet Cong announced. A spokesman for the Viet Cong delegation to the Two Party Joint Military Commission said the two sides “were in complete accord on the details.” The program had been suspended since July in a procedural dispute. Under the Paris agreement signed a year ago, the exchange should have been completed by last April 30. The Viet Cong said the Saigon Government would free 3,506 civilian prisoners and 33 military men in exchange for 224 civilians and 410 soldiers.
John Gunther Dean, No. 2 man in the U.S. Embassy in Laos, has been named ambassador to Cambodia, the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh reported. Charge d’Affaires Thomas Enders has headed the Cambodian mission since Ambassador Emory C. Swank left in September. Dean, 47, has held posts in Africa, Washington, Paris and Laos in his 18 years with the State Department. He was born in Germany and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944.
The last obstacle to the formation of a national union government between the Pathet Lao and the royal Laotian government has been removed, a Pathet Lao spokesman in Vientiane reported. Organization of mixed defense forces was agreed on Jan. 24. Two other preconditions to national union-the organization of mixed police forces and joint administration of Vientiane and Luang Prabang-were agreed upon and were to be signed today by the two factions. The Communist Pathet Lao had demanded agreement in the three areas before participating in formation of a joint government.
Four saboteur-guerrillas in Singapore’s harbor used a plastic bottle containing the name of North Korea to indicate they had chosen that country to help them make a safe getaway to an as yet unnamed Arab country. The North Korean consulate-general staff immediately cabled Pyongyang for instructions. The guerrillas have held three hostages on a hijacked ferryboat since Thursday after an attempt to blow up an offshore refinery.
Two South Korean novelists, a university professor and two university instructors were charged in Seoul with spying for North Korea. Lee Ho Chul and Chung Ul Byong, the novelists, and Kim Wu Jong, Yim Hun Yung and Chang Byong Hi are under arrest and several others, including a former newspaper executive, are being questioned, the Seoul district prosecutor’s office said. Those arrested led a group of 61 literary men who launched a campaign January 7 for revision of the constitution and curtailment of President Park Chung Hee’s dictatorial powers.
Britain’s coal miners were ordered by their union to close down all pits on Sunday in a strike that is expected to lead to economic hardship and unemployment for millions. Turning down a last-minute government appeal for more talks, the union thus set the stage for a bitter labor struggle in that country.
Cardinal József Mindszenty of Hungary, long a symbol of resistance against totalitarian governments by the Roman Catholic Church, was dismissed by Pope Paul VI from his positions as Archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of Hungary. Mindszenty had been imprisoned for eight years in Hungary and then spent another 15 years inside the U.S. diplomatic legation in Budapest, before being allowed to leave the country in 1971. The dismissal was linked to the Vatican’s campaign to establish better relations with the Communist nations in Eastern Europe and Mindszenty’s refusal to resign, a condition demanded by the Hungarian Communist Party in negotiations with the Vatican.
The maximum speed on the Dutch motorways is reduced to 100 kph.
Three gunmen who hijacked a Greek freighter in Pakistan last week left Cairo for Libya, the official Middle East News Agency said in Cairo. They were accompanied by the Libyan ambassador in Pakistan, Ibrahim Djirbi. He and the Egyptian ambassador in Pakistan persuaded the three to free two hostages they had seized in Karachi in return for a pledge by the Greek government to spare two Arabs, sentenced to die for the Athens airport attack last summer.
A parcel bomb apparently mailed in Mexico exploded in the Cuban Embassy in Lima, Peru, injuring a female embassy official, the embassy reported. It said the victim, Mrs. Pilar Ramirez Vega, was taken to a clinic but her condition was not serious. Officials said the blast almost tore off one of her arms, however, and could be heard blocks away. Peruvian police said it was the first mail explosion to occur in Peru.
To help end the truckers’ strike, President Nixon has ordered a freeze on diesel fuel prices. The FBI will crack down on violent strikers. Three days of meetings between the government and striking truckers have resulted in no solutions to the problem. Attorney General William Saxbe warned truckers against violence during their strike and he stated that truckers will be punished if necessary.
Long lines of motorists at gas pumps caused some states to consider rationing plans. Massachusetts will begin rationing, and the New Jersey legislature gave emergency power to their Governor to take the same action. Exxon and Gulf raised gasoline prices. Support for price rollbacks is rapidly gaining favor in Congress, as both Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate endorsed the idea.
Many insurance companies don’t plan to reduce insurance rates because of lower highway speed limits. New Jersey ordered companies to make rate reductions across the board.
Patricia Hearst, the daughter of newspaper executive Randolph Hearst, was last yesterday night from her Berkeley, California, apartment by two men and a woman. The kidnappers seized Patricia after beating and tying up her boyfriend and a neighbor. Another neighbor described the sounds from the fray and said that Patricia pleaded with her captors before they took her away. The kidnapping may be linked to a political protest or a quest for ransom money.
Mrs. Joseph Alioto, the wife of the San Francisco mayor, returned home. She was missing for 18 days after disappearing from a fundraiser at a Palm Springs resort. Mrs. Alioto stated that she left abruptly to “punish” her husband for not introducing her during the fundraiser, and had spent most of the intervening time touring California missions.
President Nixon seems headed for a new confrontation with the Watergate special prosecutor after reportedly refusing to turn over requested tapes and documents. The refusal was said to have come in a letter citing reasons why the materials, requested for last Monday, would be denied.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, has acknowledged that on two occasions in 1971 he received documents “retained” by a Navy clerk who traveled to Asia with President Nixon’s top security advisers. In a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the admiral also said he had been told that the clerk had obtained the papers “in a clearly unauthorized manner.”
A two-year-old child who had been kidnapped at knife point more than a year earlier was rescued by the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department in California. Tommy Lauver, who had been taken from his mother on January 20, 1973, from a supermarket parking lot in Modesto, was found at the home of Robert Coffey and Marjorie Coffey in West Modesto, California, who were arrested after a tip from their neighbor, who had read a story in a local newspaper, The Modesto Bee.
Harlod Potts, the Fire Chief for Gladewater, Texas, was killed by a gunman, and two other firemen were wounded, after responding to a call to extinguish a blaze at a tavern.
John Murtha becomes the first Vietnam War veteran elected to the United States Congress.
The Food and Drug Administration said that Canadian chocolate, blamed for at least 47 cases of food poisoning in the United States was being recalled from the market. It said thousands of chocolate balls wrapped in multicolored metal foil have been associated with a salmonella illness that has been rare in this country. The candy, labeled Regent Solid Milk Chocolate, was manufactured by Regent Chocolate Ltd. of St. Hyacinthe, Quebec, and distributed by Triumph Candy Corp. of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
Dr. Vincent Montemarano was acquitted of injecting a dying cancer patient with a lethal dose of potassium chloride. It took a jury in Mineola, New York, 60 minutes to clear the surgeon of the December 7, 1972, death of Eugene Bauer, 59, a Long Island Railroad engineer hospitalized at the Nassau Nassau County Medical Center. Montemarano was accused of injecting the drug as the patient lay on the brink of death from a spreading cancer of the throat plus a failing heart, pneumonia-ravaged lungs, and blood clots or embolisms loose in the artery between the heart and lungs. The defense claimed that Bauer died of natural causes.
The U.S. space probe Mariner 10, launched on November 3, made the first successful broadcast to Earth of images of the planet Venus, starting with the transmission of 4,165 photographs. At 17:01 UTC, it made its closest approach, coming within 3,584 miles (5,768 km) of Venus, then proceeded toward the planet Mercury (which it would reach on March 29). Mariner 10 swept around Venus and sent back pictures showing the planet to be enveloped in what appeared as a well-defined shell of haze, with a brilliant top deck of clouds beneath.
Dr. Raymond Damadian received U.S. Patent No. 3,789,832 for his invention of a proposed “Apparatus and method for detecting cancer in tissue” using nuclear magnetic resonance, after applying on March 13, 1972. The patent described a means of scanning, but not of generating images from a scan, the basis for the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner.
Mats Wermelin of Sweden set a record by scoring 272 points for his team in a 272 to 0 win in a regional boys’ tournament in Stockholm. The story was reported the next day in the Stockholm tabloid Aftonbladet. Wermelin would later play professional basketball for the Stockholm Capitals.
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Born:
Omarosa Manigault Newman, American reality TV star & former political aide, in Youngstown, Ohio.
Adrienne Johnson, WNBA guard (Cleveland Rockers, Orlando Miracle, Connecticut Sun), in Louisville, Kentucky.
Died:
Mestre Bimba (ring name for Manuel dos Reis Machado), 74, master of the Brazilian martial art form capoeira who performed as “Mestre Bimba”.
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