Communist forces launched heavy attacks across South Vietnam with bitter fighting reported in the Mekong Delta, the Saigon command said. It was called the third heaviest day of fighting in a year, with 148 attacks reported in the 24 hours starting at dawn Sunday. Details were provided on only six battles — all in the Mekong Delta — in which 45 Communists were listed as killed and two government soldiers wounded. Heavier fighting in the past year was reported for December 21 with 166 attacks and June 9 with 161.
The United States has been helping South Vietnam spy on the Paracel and Hainan islands, but from an apparently safe distance, United States sources here said today. They said that the United States had set up a radar watch — either by aircraft or by a Seventh Fleet destroyer — in the South China Sea 100 miles northeast of the disputed Paracel Islands. The Paracels lie 225 miles east of Da Nang and 165 miles southeast of China’s Hainan island.
China occupied the Paracels in a two‐day clash last month, but Saigon says that the islands, valued partly for possible offshore oil deposits, are part of its territory. The last 43 South Vietnamese prisoners captured in the battle for the Paracels were released by China today at the Hong Kong border and returned to Saigon.
American officials in Phnom Penh have been pressing the Cambodian military to provide more aerial protection for Phnom Penh to prevent the kind of artillery attacks that the Communist‐led insurgents have been inflicting on the civilian population, according to authoritative military sources. The sources said that the United States Embassy became vociferous on the subject after the artillery bombardment last Monday, which killed nearly 200 persons and wounded about 200. It was the highest toll of civilians in this war, now nearly four years old. As a result of the American initiative, the Cambodian Air Force began increasing its air cover and surveillance flights the very next day over the areas south of the city from which the insurgents are firing their captured, American‐made 105‐mm. howitzers. It’s not yet clear whether the increased surveillance is having any deterrent effect, since the insurgents artillery fired into Phnom Penh again yesterday, killing 8 and wounding about 50.
Secretary of State Kissinger met separately with the Egyptian and Saudi Arabian Foreign Ministers and a Syrian representative while American officials sought to dampen optimistic speculation about the lifting of the Arab oil embargo against the United States. “The oil embargo is not the principal purpose of these discussions,” Mr. Kissinger explained to reporters after escorting the Egyptian envoy, Ismail Fahmy, to his limousine. Mr. Kissinger also told reporters that “I decided to meet the Arab ministers separately because I can’t handle the three of them together.”
Several thousand demonstrators gathered in Jerusalem outside the office of Premier Golda Meir to demand the resignation of Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, whom they held responsible for the “failures” of the October war.
During disturbances in Belfast, British Army troops shot and killed a member of the Ulster Defence Association and mortally wounded another, who would die on February 25. British troops opened fire on a mob of gunmen in Protestant East Belfast, killing 19-year-old Kirk Watters and wounding two others. The British troops in Land Rovers had been under fire intermittently during the day as Protestant extremists lit bonfires and erected street barricades. The soldiers held their fire, a spokesman said, awaiting a clear target. Finally, a group of gunmen sprinted away from a crowd and the British began shooting.
Opinion polls in Britain’s general election raise the possibility that the Liberal Party — which hasn’t been in national office for almost 50 years — could hold the balance of power in the next Parliament. The polls show the ruling Conservative Party is leading the Labor Party by margins ranging from 1% to 11%. But the polls also indicate that the Liberals will get from 11% to 20% of the vote in the February 28 election. This would give them about 20 seats in the 635-seat Parliament and could keep either of the two major parties from obtaining an absolute majority.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet poet, defended Aleksandr L Solzhenitsyn for having raised the issue of Stalinist purges in his book “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” and charged that the truth about the past was otherwise being concealed from Soviet youth. His poetry reading scheduled for radio and television last Saturday was canceled after he sent a telegram to the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, expressing concern over Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s arrest.
A stampede killed 49 people and injured 46 others at a soccer football match at the Zamalek Stadium in Cairo, where a Cairo team was scheduled to play against Dukla Praha of Czechoslovakia. The accident occurred about 15 minutes before a local team was due to play the Dukla squad. Cairo news reports said there were an estimated 80,000 persons jammed into the stadium, which has a capacity of 40,000. Organizers had canceled TV coverage and moved the game from 100,000-seat Nasser Stadium despite all 100,000 tickets being sold. Fans stampeded in the stadium after an iron fence surrounding the playing field collapsed in three places from the weight of the spectators, some of whom had climbed atop the fence. An official said that some of the victims in Zamalek Stadium were buried under the collapsing fence and others fell to the ground as fans rushed to escape. The match was canceled after the disaster, but Dukla Praha and Zamalek Sporting Club would play on February 19.
The Shah of Iran commuted the death sentences of three persons, convicted of plotting against his life and those of Empress Farah and Crown Prince Reza, to life imprisonment. The military appeal tribunal had confirmed the death sentences on January 23.
At least 550 persons have been killed in recent fighting with Muslim rebels in Jolo in the Philippines, according to the Jolo Social Welfare Department. That is double the casualty toll given by the Defense Ministry in Manila. A Jolo official said a body count showed 250 rebels and 300 civilians killed and “a lot of others reportedly perished in the fire while others are missing.” Much of the town was destroyed by a fire which the army and residents say was started by rebels. Residents said the town had been bombed and strafed repeatedly by government planes.
“Costa Ricans have no sense of nationality,” a young lawyer complained. “Worse than that, they like foreigners simply because they’re foreigners.” Costa Rica is the only Central American country with no pre‐Columbian culture and has little Indian influence. Her two million inhabitants are mostly descendants of European immigrants, and nationalism has, never been strong here. “There are three ways to become Costa Rican,” one 58‐year‐old Spanish immigrant said. “By birth, by naturalization and by absorption. I’ve been here 25 years, and I’m Costa Rican by absorption.”
At least 60 people have died and more than 100,000 have been evacuated from their homes in three northwestern provinces of Argentina in the wake of severe flooding. President, Juan D. Perón signed a decree yesterday declaring Jujuy, Salta and. Santiago del Estero disaster areas. Food, medicine, clothes, blankets and other necessities have been rushed to the provinces, which have been battered by almost continuous rain for the last three weeks. In all, 11 provinces have suffered unusually heavy rainfall and flood damage. But Santiago del Estero appears to have been the hardest hit.
Famine is not new to Ethiopia. Although little world attention was attracted, at least 100,000 people died of hunger in the northern and central regions in 1958 and 1959, according to a Western historian. When famine came again last year, it brought much death and suffering in Wallo and Tigre Provinces, which are north of Addis Ababa. It also placed under stress a society and Government that for decades have been divided by a conflict between medieval conservatism and the desire for reform. The important question is not so much what foreigners think but what the Ethiopians think: Will the famine affect the already awesome gap between traditional Ethiopia and the restless young students, intellectuals and radicals. The Government maintains that it was unaware of the famine until mid‐April of 1973 because it was ill‐informed by provincial officials. In November, 1972, however, the Ministry of Agriculture had completed an annual crop survey that predicted serious harvest failures in Wallo and Tigre. “It should have been a storm warning,” said a liberal young Ethiopian, who charges that the Cabinet suppressed the survey.
President Nixon’s Watergate lawyer, James St. Clair, said that a White House-sponsored technical review had refuted reports that two subpoenaed tape recordings were not authentic. In a statement issued at the presidential estate in Key Biscayne, Florida, he said that reports in the Washington Post that two of the recordings were not originals but had been re-recorded were “utterly false.”
A soldier landed a stolen Army helicopter in a hail of shotgun buckshot on the south lawn of the White House at 2 A.M. today. He was wrestled to the ground by officers of the Executive Protection Service after bouncing the helicopter to a rough landing about 100 yards short of the White House. The soldier was identified as Pfc. Robert K. Preston, a 20-year-old helicopter maintenance man from Panama City, Fla., who flunked Army flight school last year. He is undergoing psychiatric evaluation. Preston had stolen the helicopter from the Tipton Airfield at Fort Meade in Maryland. U.S. President Richard Nixon was at his vacation home at Key Biscayne, Florida at the time of the incident. Preston would receive a one-year prison sentence and a general discharge from the Army, dying of cancer in 2009.
Spiro Agnew, the former Vice President of the United States, lost all rights to protection by the U.S. Secret Service, four months after his resignation. Agnew’s security detail of at least 12 agents left after midnight after traveling with him to the home of Frank Sinatra in Palm Springs, California. “The decision was made by the treasury with prior knowledge of the White House and Mr. Agnew,” a spokesman for the department said.
Nixon administration strategists said that if Congress passed the emergency energy bill, the President would veto it because he believes that its provision for a rollback of crude oil prices is inflexible. To help sustain the veto in Congress, the strategists said, the federal energy administrator, William Simon, would order a price rollback for crude oil from new wells. Such oil, not now under price controls, has been selling up to $10.35 a barrel, almost double the $5.25 ceiling on old oil.
After receiving what has been called an encouraging message from his kidnapped daughter, Patricia, Randolph Hearst said that he would announce a plan for the distribution of free food that would satisfy the Symbionese Liberation Army, which claims to be the kidnappers. Jay Bosworth, a spokesman for the family, said that the plan would involve what he called “a substantial amount of money” and that it would be detailed before 3 P.M. The announcement followed yesterday’s message from Mr. Hearst’s 19‐year‐old daughter Patricia, who said that he abductors, the Symbionese Liberation Army, were not trying to be unreasonable in the demands. “It was never intended that you feed the whole state,” she said in a tape‐recorded message to her parents “Whatever you come up with is O.K.,” she added. “Just do it as fast as you can and everything will be fine.”
In Queens, New York City, a fire destroyed the 117-year-old St. Mary’s Star of the Sea church building. The one‐story structure, built in 1857, when Queens was little more than a group of scattered villages, was destroyed, as was the Rev. William Bradley Memorial Hall, a smaller building attached to the rear of the church, and the square bell tower, at the front of the building. The fire was discovered about midnight last night, and went to three alarms within minutes.
Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., unveiled a portrait of her husband in the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, the first picture of a black man ever displayed in that building. A statue of King would be unveiled on the State Capitol grounds in 2017.
A police search was under way for four men who commandeered an armored truck in Somerset, Massachusetts, and stole an estimated $200,000 in cash and $300,000 in checks. Men wearing official-looking blue uniforms took over the truck at a supermarket. “It was definitely a professional job,” a state police spokesman said. The two armored car guards were released unharmed. No one was injured and no shots were fired.
Experiments in supplementing the incomes of poor working fathers indicate that such cash payments generally do not lead them to quit their jobs, the chairman of the Senate-House Economic Committee’s subcommittee on fiscal policy said. Rep. Martha W. Griffiths (D-Michigan) reported that conclusion from a series of technical studies made for the subcommittee. The results were drawn in large part from a supplementary payment experiment conducted in New Jersey from 1969 to 1972. Men who received a cash supplement worked almost as many hours a week as comparable men not receiving them and they also earned slightly more per hour.
The staff of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs has proposed creation of a national consumer panel to collect monthly information on actual food costs, a report said. A study on which the report was based attempted to determine the impact on nutrition of last year’s escalation in food prices. The report noted in many instances the lack of available information from government sources and incomplete information from private sources. But Chairman George S. McGovern (D-South Dakota) said, “It is possible to say this much now: Americans are eating less and less well nutritionally.”
A member of the Federal Trade Commission, Mayo J. Thompson, said he would propose a study of drug prescribing practices and price advertising to see if the commission could help people save money. Commissioner Thompson said he was concerned about the cost of keeping well and saw a study of prescription prices as a worthy starting point, even though the commission had no authority to change the practices. State regulation determines whether drug prices can be advertised and whether pharmacists may substitute cheaper common-name drugs for higher priced brand-name drugs. Most states forbid advertising of drug prices or even their posting in stores.
A woman was shot in the neck by two men who forced their way into her apartment in a robbery on the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix, police reported. Marjory Borrizo was partly paralyzed, according to Charles Harwood Hospital authorities in the city of St. Croix. There were 13 murders on the island, and seven on neighboring St. Thomas, last year. So far in 1974 there have been three murders in the territory, all of them on St. Thomas. Miss Borrizo, 45, a schoolteacher, said she was alone in her apartment in Christianstad when two men barged in, demanded money and shot her. They stole various items.
American driver Richard Petty won the 1974 Daytona 500, his fifth victory in the event, becoming the first driver to win the race two years in a row. Because of the ongoing energy crisis, the race was only 450 miles (720 km) and 180 laps around the track in Daytona Beach, Florida. In order to make 200 laps, the first lap was designated as “Lap 21”.
Born:
Jerry O’Connell, American film and TV actor (“Stand By Me”, “Scream 2”, “Sliders”), in Manhattan, New York, New York.
Bryan White, American country music singer (“Someone Else’s Star”, “Rebecca Lynn”, “So Much for Pretending”), in Lawton, Oklahoma.
Al-Muhtadee Billah, Crown Prince of Brunei; in Istana Darul Hana, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei.
Tavian Banks, NFL running back (Jacksonville Jaguars), in Davenport, Iowa.
Died:
Jack Cole (stage name for John Ewing Richter), 62, American dancer and choreographer.
Ralph W. Gerard, 73, American neurophysiologist and behavioral scientist.
History Diaries 