The United States has begun exchanging ideas with Israel and Syria to find a formula for the start of Syrian-Israeli negotiations and on the separation of their troops on the issuance of a list by Syria of its Israeli prisoners, senior State Department officials said in Washington. They said that Secretary of State Kissinger, who served as the intermediary in the Egyptian-Israeli disengagement talks, has taken an active role in the Syrian phase of the discussions. The officials also said that King Hussein of Jordan had given Mr. Kissinger detailed proposals, including maps, for Jordanian-Israeli disengagement talks.
Nine guerrillas who flew to Southern Yemen after terrorist actions in Singapore and Kuwait have been given freedom to leave the country when they wish and were awaiting instructions from their commands, the Iraqi press agency said today. No restrictions have been placed on the movements of the guerrillas, who said they were members of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Japanese Red Army, the agency said in a dispatch from Aden, capital of Southern Yemen. The guerrillas flew to Southern Yemen yesterday from Kuwait aboard a Japan Air Lines DC‐8 jet accompanied by 13 Singapore and two Japanese Government officials.
Muslim rebels burned the main market and attacked the airport at Jolo, the last Government stronghold on Jobe Island, reliable sources said today. The armed forces command in Manila had no comment. But well‐informed sources arriving from the south said that heavy fighting had erupted between Government forces and the dissidents. Jolo is the main town on Jolo Island, about 600 miles south of Manila and the largest island in the Sulu chain. The Muslim rebels have demanded a free Muslim state in the southern Philippines, saying they are victims of discrimination. The government of President Ferdinand E. Marcos says that those doing the fighting are Maoists and has pledged to right legitimate Muslim grievances.
After bitter and prolonged debate, Japan’s governing Liberal-Democratic party agreed on a draft of an aviation agreement with China. The party’s decision was announced in Tokyo in an ambiguously worded statement that indicated that some details of the pact would still have to be worked out. The agreement could have far-reaching consequences. The Chinese Nationalist government on Taiwan has threatened to bar all Japanese planes from its air space if the proposed accord is accepted.
The chances are not good that the South Korean Government will permit a prominent opposition leader, Kim Dae Jung, to leave Korea as he desires, according to the Foreign Minister. Kim Dae Jung, who was President Park Chung Hee’s opponent in the presidential election of 1971, became the center of a major international incident when he was kidnapped by South Koreans in Tokyo and was than spirited secretly to Seoul last August. The incident quickly became a tense issue between South Korea and Japan, with the Japanese Government demanding that Mr. Kim be allowed to return to Japan. According to Japanese officials, the South Korean Government agreed to that in December when it admitted that Korean officials had been involved in the kidnapping.
The territorial dispute between China and South Vietnam over the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea has touched a raw nerve in the Kremlin, and suggested some inconsistencies in Soviet foreign policy. For the Soviet Union, the broader implication of the dispute over the remote islands is that China, if she can successfully advance her territorial claims against other neighbors, might be encouraged to press anew her own long‐standing dispute with the Soviet Union over the China‐Soviet border.
Soviet geographical atlases identify both the Paracels and Spratlys as Chinese territory. But with Soviet‐Chinese relations at their lowest point since the brief eruption of hostilities in 1969, Moscow has pointedly refrained from backing Peking’s claim to the islands. Instead, it contends that China is embarking on a new campaign of aggression in Asia. This, however, has put the Soviet Union in the awkward position of tacitly supporting the Government of Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in Saigon in the islands dispute at a time when the Soviet Union has embarked upon a program of broad economic aid to the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam.
The Soviet state prosecutor’s office has taken the first legal step against Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn since the publication of his latest book by issuing a summons for the author to meet with investigators, friends of his family disclosed today. The legal summons was presented yesterday to his wife, Natasha Svetlova, who refused to accept it on grounds that it stated no charges or cause for investigation and was improperly drafted in other ways, the sources said. As a result, Mr. Solzhenitsyn did not appear before investigators yesterday. The summons was signed by Prosecutor Balashov of the investigation division of the state procurator’s office in Moscow, informants said. Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who lacks, official registration entitling him to live in Moscow with his family, was not at his wife’s family home off Gorky Street when the summons was delivered by a man in civilian clothes at 12:30 P.M. yesterday, informants said.
Secretary of State Kissinger’s plans to visit Moscow next month have been welcomed in Moscow as a sign that President Nixon will be coming in June for talks with Leonid I. Brezhnev. Highly placed Soviet journalists are reassured that the Administration seems interested in maintaining the rhythm of annual summer meetings between the two leaders especially because, from Moscow’s vantage point, the developing Soviet‐American relationship has been through a sobering and sometimes disenchanting period in the last few months.
It is not that Moscow considers détente fatally injured, but it has not been as healthy as Moscow would have liked. The ailments are not so harsh and painful as the confrontation over the Middle East last fall. Though that rift has healed, the euphoria that surrounded the two previous Nixon-Brezhnev meetings has given way here to a more realistic, sometimes even troubled, appraisal of the limitations of Soviet‐American accommodation and the obstacles in the way of major new agreements, especially in such crucial areas as arms control and trade.
Gunmen, firing from a car, killed two men and wounded a woman outside a pub in a Roman Catholic district of west Belfast, Northern Ireland late tonight, the police reported. The three were in a crowd that had just left a pub in the Grosvenor Road district at closing time. The police said that one of those killed, the husband of the wounded woman, was 42 years old, and that the other slain man was 22. The woman was reported in serious condition.
Meanwhile incendiary bombs set six stores ablaze late today in Omagh, 25 miles south of Londonderry, and a bomb in an automobile outside a public building there caused extensive damage. This afternoon, dozens of diners in a downtown Belfast restaurant managed to get out minutes before a bomb went off in the building. A woman, who had noticed a suspicious package in the restaurant, the Scandia, close to City Hall, alerted the authorities to the threat in time.
Greece has slammed the door on foreign shipowners who seek to take advantage of Greek-flag privileges to cut the operating costs of their merchant ships. In the last five months, applications for Greek registration of 13 vessels were rejected when it was found that the owners were not Greek.
In India, Presidential rule was imposed on the state of Gujarat after Chief Minister Chimanbhai Patel was asked to resign in the face of the violent protests by the Navnirman Andolan movement against state government corruption. President V. V. Giri became the administrator of the state, followed by Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed until the lifting of President’s rule on June 18, 1975. The law would remain in effect for 16 years before being repealed in 1990.
The parliament of Bangladesh enacted the Special Powers Act, 1974, allowing the government to detain any arrested person up to six months without charges, and indefinitely if a special advisory board approved a longer incarceration.
A boat and 13 people in it was sucked into a whirlpool on the Urubamba River in Peru’s La Convención Province, drowning everybody on board.
Rhodesia’s white minority Government has announced that it will increase the size of its army in the face of continued attacks by black nationalist guerrillas. A government statement on Wednesday said that the draft would immediately be doubled and that a second battalion of black troops would be recruited to augment the regular army.
Alfred Schnittke’s Symphony No. 1 was given its first performance, as Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducted the Gorky Symphony Orchestra in the Soviet Union.
The underground radical group that says that it is responsible for the kidnapping of the daughter of Randolph A. Hearst, the, newspaper executive, did not deliver its expected ransom demands today. The group, which calls itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, said in a letter to a radio, station here Thursday that it was holding Patricia Hearst, a 19‐year‐old college student who was abducted from her Berkeley apartment Monday night. Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who are in charge of the case, had expected communication from the group today. But late this morning Mr. Hearst met with reporters outside his home and announced that there had been no further word. “This doesn’t seem to be a senseless organization we’re dealing with,” he said. He reiterated his hope that the ransom demands could be met.
The FBI has speculated that the group kidnapped the Hearst girl and expected to use her as ransom for the release of two members of the group who were arrested last month and charged with the murder of Oakland’s Superintendent of Schools. Last November Dr. Marcus A. Foster, the superintendent, was killed in an ambush outside the Board of Education building in east Oakland. Two days later, in letters to Bay Area newspapers and a Berkeley radio station, the Symbionese Liberation Army said that elements of its membership had carried out the murder and contended that Dr. Foster had been declared guilty of crimes by what it called “a people’s court.” It accused Dr. Foster of promoting a plan to put police the schools. The group said the action would work against the people, particularly students from minority groups.
In early January, the police arrested two men in Concord, California, not, far from Oakland, and both were linked to the Symbionese group. The two are being held in San Quentin Prison. The police checked a three‐bedroom house in Concord that they now believe was a headquarters of the organization, which uses leftist revolutionary rhetoric. Documents taken from the house indicated that the group had many business executives in the San Francisco Bay area under surveillance. The police theorized that the group might have been planning some terrorist activities. The police were led to the Concord home by a fire they suspect was deliberately set. A woman seen leaving the home just after the fire is being sought by the police. That woman, identified as Nancy Ling Perry, purportedly said she was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army in a letter to a San Francisco newspaper.
An organization representing the nation’s mayors criticized President Nixon’s 1975 budget today, contending that it puts more responsibilities on the cities without providing enough money. In the first detailed analysis of the budget for fiscal year 1975 by an organization outside the Federal Government, The League of Cities and United States Conference of Mayors said it found both good and bad in the proposal. On the whole, the organization noted what it felt were serious gaps in the. President’s New Federalism, and warned of major problems for the cities “victimized by the failure of public policy and the inadequacies of the Federal budget,” which was released February 4. “The budget requires analysis as both a government and an economic document,” the organization said in its 89‐page document titled, “The Federal Budget and the Cities.”
Stressing the need for better mass transit, President Nixon, in a radio address dealing with his administration’s transportation policy, proposed a $16 billion federally backed program to improve railroads, subways and bus lines over the next six years. The program, which is to be sent to Congress this week, would about double the present annual federal commitment to mass transportation systems, The President will also ask Congress to approve $2 billion in federal loan guarantees to the railroads for capital investment in equipment and facilities.
With private persuasion and public optimism, the Nixon administration intensified its efforts to win drivers’ support for a tentative agreement and end the 10-day-old nationwide strike of independent truckers. Across the country, drivers returned to the roads in growing numbers with cargoes of food, fuel and industrial parts, but tens of thousands of rigs remained idle as many trucker groups rejected the agreement Thursday that would allow a 6 percent surcharge on freight rates to cover fuel costs.
Across the nation, thousands of Americans are rediscovering the intercity bus. In the last three months, since gasoline shortages and soaring gasoline prices began to restrict the American motorist seriously, intercity bus companies say that, depending upon the route, their patronage has risen by an average of 10 to 20 percent.
A U.S. Air Force T-39 jet trainer carrying seven service members from Peterson Airfield in Colorado to McClellan Air Force Base in California crashed into the tail section of an NKC-135 jet at an altitude of 23,000 feet (7,000 m) and exploded, killing all aboard. The wreckage landed in a farmer’s pasture 17 miles (27 km) east of Peterson Airfield. The T-39, carrying 18 people, landed safely.
A Federal judge has warned the Reserve Mining Company, of Silver Bay, Minnesota, to stop dumping its waste into Lake Superior or face the possibility that Its large plant will be ordered closed upon conclusion of a water‐pollution trial some three months from now. The warning was issued during a Federal District Court suit seeking to stop the dumping of waste that the Government says contains large amounts of asbestos fibers. Judge Miles Lord told Reserve’s attorney, Edward Fride, that he had hoped that “by cajoling Reserve and working with them and begging them and doing whatever what was necessary, I would get Reserve to start working on an on‐land disposal systems.” But Reserve has taken no action.
Th Skylab program, whose smooth conclusion yesterday began an almost total hiatus in flights by American astronauts for at least five years, has made the idea of continuous occupation of an orbital base more concrete to the directors of American space efforts. Such an orbital base could be put together by flights of the two‐stage shuttle rocket being developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under a $6‐billion program that is focused on flights beginning in 1979. Although plans for such a base are not yet formulated or funded, leaders in the space agency are convinced that there would be useful work to be done in it, including observations of the sun and earth and the manufacturing of special materials under conditions of weightlessness. William C. Schneider, the Skylab program director, said, “We have shown that there is no man or machine limitation on whatever we want to do in space.”
The U.S. National Women’s Figure Skating championship is won by Dorothy Hamill.
The U.S. National Men’s Figure Skating championship is won by Gordon McKellen Jr.
Born:
Amber Valletta, American actress and model (“Hitch”, “Revenge”), in Phoenix, Arizona.
Brad Maynard, NFL punter (New York Giants, Chicago Bears, Cleveland Browns), in Tipton, Indiana.
Orlando Bobo, NFL guard (Minnesota Vikings, Cleveland Browns-Baltimore Ravens), in West Point, Mississippi (d. 2007, heart and liver failure).
John Wallace, NBA small forward (New York Knicks, Toronto Raptors, Detroit Pistons, Phoenix Suns, Miami Heat), in Rochester, New York.
Died:
Lieutenant General Raymond Wheeler, 88, Chief Engineer of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, 1945 to 1949
Amund Dietzel, 82, American tattoo artist.
History Diaries 