Soviet police agents arrested Russian writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, at his apartment in Moscow. He would be deported to West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship the following day. Dissident Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested on unknown charges. The arrest came after the publication of his latest book which denounces Soviet prison camps. Some U.S. experts see the arrest as an attempt to crush the Soviet intellectual movement completely.
Solzhenitsyn interviewed Alexander Dolgun, now in America, for his new book. Dolgun says he fears for Solzhenitsyn’s life. Asked if imprisonment and exile would be the only punishment, Dolgun replied that he can’t predict the exact punishment, but noted that tortures and beatings have occurred previously. Dolgun believes that the government intends to stop Solzhenitsyn’s literary activities one way or another.
Only one book of the many written by Solzhenitsyn has been published in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in 1970 but wasn’t allowed to accept it. After the publication of “The Gulag Archipelago”, the Soviet government denounced Solzhenitsyn. The White House declined any comment on the situation.
A plan to tempt Britain’s striking coal miners back to work by supplementing their wages with private donations was rejected today by the National Union of Mineworkers. The offer came from unidentified industrialists who would be hard hit if the coal strike, which started Sunday, lasted much longer. It was the idea of a young merchant banker, Godfrey Bradman, who put it to the union. The extra payments would reportedly have amounted to $3.50 to $4.50 a week for each of the 260,000 miners — a total, roughly, of $1‐million a week. The union’s executive rejected the proposal at its meeting today and the indications were that it was not treated very seriously. The government and the main employers’ organizations frowned on the idea.
Italy began a massive attempt to cripple the Mafia with the opening of a trial of 76 alleged bosses. Almost half of the defendants did not show up at court in Palermo, Sicily, but judges decided to proceed against all but one — Giuseppe de Cristina, who is being tried in Argentina. Among those absent were 12 held in custody who sent certificates attesting they were too ill to travel and 10 already on the run. Another 12 — who had been confined to remote villages — stayed away without explanation.
Bakers in Rome found a yeasty way to protest a government price freeze. First, they went on strike; now they are giving their bread away. When housewives heard about it they jammed the city’s 4,000 bakeries and grabbed 90 tons of ciriole. Ciriole is the cheapest kind of bread but it accounts for 30% of the city’s total bread consumption. Other kinds sold at the usual prices.
Thirteen oil-consuming nations continued their conference in Washington. French foreign minister Michel Jobert refused to go along with Secretary State Henry Kissinger’s proposal for consuming countries to unify as a group and meet with OPEC. Ambassador David Bruce attempted to calm the differences. West German financial minister Helmut Schmidt admitted that underlying political considerations have played a part in the dispute. Jobert and Kissinger later met privately but no agreement was reached. Jobert declared that he doesn’t plan to change his stance, and he stated that no compromise will be made if an agreement can’t be reached.
The leaders of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Algeria will meet in Algiers to discuss further troop disengagement with Israel and the possible easing of the oil embargo against the United States. President Sadat of Egypt is said to favor both actions. Iraq announced that it will not lift its embargo against the U.S.
More plans are brewing in the Mideast for takeovers of American oil companies in the region. The Christian Science Monitor reported that Saudi Arabia intends to expropriate a large oil company which is owned by Exxon, Texaco, Mobil and Standard of California.
In Cambodia, dazed people wandered through the drifting ashes today, searching for missing relatives who are probably dead. When they found bodies, they moaned as they burned them on little pyres on the spot because they own so little that they cannot afford to take their dead to pagodas for proper Buddhist cremation. Others sifted through the dirt and charred debris for the least little thing they might salvage — nails, hinges, a big enough piece of dish to eat from, a handful of burned rice or fishpaste.
Some people had been stunned into senselessness and were babbling, but most were quiet, eerily so, as they tried to piece their lives together again. This was how Phnom Penh recovered today from the shelling of the city in daylight yesterday afternoon — the worst destruction of civilian life and property in the four‐year‐old war between the Cambodian Government and the Communist‐led insurgents. More than 150 people were killed and a few hundred more wounded in the bombardment. It lasted only half an hour, but a cluster of high‐explosive shells rained down on one of the busiest and most closely packed market and housing areas of the capital, a neighborhood in the southern sector.
The Manila government said it had ousted Moslem insurgents from Jolo, the chief city in the southern Sulu Island chain, but faces a massive refugee problem. The secretary of national defense said the town was well secured and the rebels were on the run but almost half the population had fled to Zamboanga. Government officials said the rebels put the town to the torch to cover their retreat. Troops were reportedly hunting for Aminkadra Barlie Abubakar, mayor of Jolo and member of the former Liberal Party opposition, who had abandoned his post, according to the government.
The South Korean government dismissed 113 tax officials as part of a campaign against corruption launched by President Park Chung Hee. A government spokesman said that officials’ houses, their way of life and their performance on the job were being investigated in the search for men who have amassed fortunes by corrupt means. The 113 officials were all at the National Taxation Office, where 2,500 members, or 25% of the total staff, have been subjected to various disciplinary actions for allegedly taking bribes.
On Indonesia’s Lombok Island, an angry mob raided the houses of the village elders in Dasan, Lajut and Newar Praja and beheaded nine of the men. Police arrested 132 people and their leader, who had compiled a list of 32 village leaders who had tried to stop his business of selling sacred oil to the local residents.
Unemployment in Canada went up 0.1% in January to 5.5%, on a seasonally adjusted basis, Statistics Canada reported. There were 647,000 Canadians out of work for the month but the rate was down from 6.2% last January. At the same time, the seasonally adjusted employment level in January increased for the fourth consecutive month to 9,005,000. Last month’s increase of 94,000 new jobs was higher than in the previous three months with the majority of the new jobs going to people between 14 and 24. British Columbia was the only region registering a sizable decline in unemployment.
In Argentina, 3,000 physicians employed by the government began a 48-hour strike, demanding higher wages and better working conditions. The doctors, residents in dozens of hospitals operated by the Department of Public Health, claim that their wages are slightly above $100 a month and that their contracts with the government call for full-time work. The government has asked wage earners not to strike and endanger a pact signed by labor and business which calls for a virtual wage and price freeze to curb once galloping inflation.
The Argentine police announced tonight that they had foiled a terrorist attempt to assassinate President Juan D. Perón, his wife and the visiting President of Uruguay, Juan M. Bordaberry. Another intended victim, the police said, was Mr. Perón’s personal secretary, José López Vega. The alleged attempt was said to be a combined operation by left‐wing Peronist guerrillas and Uruguayan Tupamaro guerrillas. The police reported that 30 Uruguayans who had recently entered the country as tourists were under arrest after being implicated in the plot. They also said that an Argentine citizen, identified as Carlos Alberto Caride, had been detained while carrying a gun and a suitcase full of grenades.
President Nixon placed a wreath at the Lincoln Memorial today and, in a speech that seemed to draw a comparison to himself, said that the Civil War President, despite vilification, had the character to “stand tall and strong and firm no matter how harsh or unfair the criticism might be.” Appearing unannounced at a small, quiet ceremony noting the 165th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, Mr. Nixon did not directly mention the torrent of criticism that had been heaped upon him and his Presidency, the impeachment inquiry under way in the House or his repeated assertions that he would not resign. But he said of Lincoln: “No President in history has been more vilified or was more vilified during the time he was President than Lincoln. Those who knew him, his secretaries, have written that he was very deeply hurt by what was said about him and drawn about him, but on the other hand, Lincoln had the great strength of character never to display it, always to stand tall and strong and firm no matter how harsh or unfair the criticism might he. These elements of greatness, of course, inspire us all today.”
Patty Hearst contacted her parents for the first time since her abduction, by way of a tape sent by the kidnappers to Berkeley radio station KPFA. The Symbionese Liberation Army requested that Randolph Hearst donate $70 worth of food for each needy person in California before the kidnappers will consider releasing Patricia, in a message preceding Patricia’s conversation on the tape. Miss Hearst discussed her physical and mental condition and her captors’ demands. Randolph Hearst said he doesn’t know if he can comply with the demands for food donations, which would cost over $130 million.
The Gulf Oil Corporation, that nation’s fourth-largest oil company, announced operating results for 1973 that indicated a 153% gain in its fourth quarter earnings. Net income for the full year climbed to $800 million, ending a four-year slide in profitability.
William E. Simon, administrator of the Federal Energy Office, prohibited service station owners today from discriminating against motorists by selling gasoline only to regular customers or by selling large amounts in advance. “These practices have now been banned by the Federal Energy Office as discriminatory,” he said. Mr. Simon, who exercised his powers to control prices and the allocation of motor fuel under the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act, said that the restrictions would be effective immediately.
The General Accounting Office has found no evidence of excessive profits for grain companies in the big wheat sales to Russia in 1972, but those deals did give the concerns “opportunities to make unusual profits” on other business, the agency said in a report to be issued tomorrow. The report said that the Soviet Union got a better deal than previously reported because the grain companies made their contracts at below the “target” that the United States was attempting to make with subsidies.
President Nixon will nominate Carla Anderson Hills, Los Angeles lawyer, to be assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil division, White House press secretary Gerald L. Warren said yesterday. Mr. Warren said that Mrs. Hills will be the first woman to hold the rank of an assistant attorney general since Woodrow Wilson appointed Annette Abbot Adams and Mabel Walker Willebrandt in the early twenties.
A district court judge in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, saying “the state must regulate the conduct of both of those who tango,” has declared an anti-prostitution law unconstitutional on the ground that it discriminates against women. Judge John S. Covington noted in his ruling that the state makes it a crime for a woman to receive money for sex, but does not make it a crime for a man either to give or receive money for sex.
Federal marshals forcibly removed three defense attorneys in the Wounded Knee trial from the courtroom in St. Paul, Minnesota, after they protested a ruling by U.S. District Judge Fred Nichol. After a recess, Nichol blamed his action on a misunderstanding and allowed attorneys William Kunstler, Kenneth Tilsen, and Mark Lane to return. “I regret the incident occurred here was excessive,” the judge said. The lawyers represent Dennis Banks and Russell Means, who are charged with a series of felonies in connection with last year’s 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation.
Five cars of a San Francisco-to-Chicago passenger train derailed at night, sending 16 to 17 passengers to the hospital, Amtrak said. The derailment occurred 33 miles west of McCook, Nebraska, and about 225 miles west of Lincoln, Nebraska. Those injured were taken to hospitals in McCook and several other towns, the spokesman said.
The Soviet Mars 5 space probe successfully entered orbit around Mars at 14:44 UTC, but sustained a micrometeoroid impact along the way, causing a slow leak in the spacecraft’s pressurized instrument compartment. Mars 5 would cease transmission 16 days later, after returning 43 good quality photographs and making spectrometer observations of elements on the Martian surface, and obtaining specific surface temperatures ranging from 28 °F (−2 °C) during the day to −99 °F (−73 °C) at night.
It will take months and probably years for scientists to puzzle out all the implications of the flood of data about Venus that Mariner 10 has radioed back to earth. It is already evident that information of importance has been received. Mariner 10 photographs have shown that the planet’s dense atmosphere has bands and streaks that give clues to wind and weather patterns on Venus. First seen in pictures taken in ultraviolet light, these features the Venusian atmosphere bear an uncanny similarity the well‐bands in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The reasons for this unexpected resemblance have still to be determined. It is a problem that poses a formidable challenge to astronomers.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 806.63 (+2.73, +0.34%).
Born:
Scott McGarrahan, NFL defensive back (Green Bay Packers, Miami Dolphins, Tennessee Titans, San Diego Chargers)
Naseem Hamed, British boxer, WBO featherweight world champion 1995 to 2000, holder of WBO, IBF and WBC titles 1999 to 2000; in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom.
Died:
Arthur Samish, 75, California lobbyist.
Alec Harris, 76, Welsh and South African spiritualist known for conducting elaborate séances with multiple “spirit” figures.
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