Portugal’s biggest political crisis in more than a decade erupted as the nation’s two leading generals were dismissed because of their opposition to Portugal’s war policy in Africa. The generals, who feel the military cannot defeat guerrilla forces in Portugal’s African colonies, have called for concessions leading to a federation. Portuguese Army generals Francisco da Costa Gomes and António de Spínola refused to attend a ceremony in Lisbon where more than 100 other senior military officers pledged their loyalty to the authoritarian government of Prime Minister Marcello Caetano.
Both Costa Gomes and Spinola were fired four hours later. Spinola, monocled hero of Portugal’s 13-year-old campaign against nationalist guerrillas in its African territories, caused a political sensation recently by saying in a best-selling book that no military solution of the African wars was viable. In April, the two men would lead the “Carnation Revolution” that would overthrow Caetano’s Estado Novo regime and being the Portuguese transition to democracy.
Frelimo, the Mozambique Liberation Front, has charged Portuguese troops with massacring 28 civilians on January 13 in Mozambique’s Manica e Sofala province. A communique from Dar es Salaam said the massacre at Chimara was part of an intensified terror campaign following Frelimo successes. It claimed the Portuguese destroyed all the crops in the area before killing the villagers.
Syrian artillery shells struck in and all around the deserted village of Mazrat Beit Jinn in Israeli-occupied Syria for about an hour this morning. The harassing fire drove Israeli troops into their bunkers and caused no casualties. Throughout the morning, occasional barrages struck all along the Israeli front line in the bulge, inside Syria, that was taken during the October fighting. The Israeli command said there had been no casualties anywhere and that the fire had been returned. In Damascus, military spokesman said that Syrian gunners had inflicted casualties on the Israeli side. The exchanges of fire have occurred daily since last week. The step‐up in artillery duels — not apparently accompanied by action at closer range — has led Israel to put her troops on the northern front on a higher state of alert. Israel has warned that a major Syrian attack is possible.
While vigilance along the Syrian front has never been greatly relaxed since the ceasefire went into effect, it has clearly been intensified. In the recent past, Israeli troops stayed near their tanks or other armor, but now at least one soldier is on alert inside the vehicle. The men are under instructions to stay in or near their bunkers unless duty requires them elsewhere. Roads in the area of the Golan Heights that was wrested from Syria in 1967 are open only to limited, necessary traffic, and hardly any but military vehicles enter the newly taken area. A correspondent touring the front today in a red civilian car was greeted with incredulous stares; frequent gestures by Israelis expressed the soldiers’ doubts about the visitor’s mental state.
A military spokesman said today that Syrian gunners destroyed an Israeli ammunition dump, two tanks and a machine‐gun emplacement in the latest round of shelling. The Israelis suffering casualties during the battle, the spokesman said. Several times during the morning, pairs of MIG‐21’s climbed fast over Damascus and the surrounding slopes. The jets appeared to be on protective patrol during the artillery fighting. The gunfire along the front, in the opinion of diplomats here, is meant mainly to keep the Israelis in a tense state of alertness and to prevent Syrians from getting any impression that their army has allowed a stalemate to settle over the cease‐fire lines.
The Arab oil countries, which decided to lift the embargo on sales to the United States, have agreed to review their action in two months, according to informed Arab sources. The aim is to insure satisfactory use of American influence on Israel.
Key government and oil industry officials expressed confidence that the oil embargo had been lifted and that Saudi Arabia, the leading Arab producer, would soon increase production to pre-October levels. White House and State Department officials were more cautious in their public statements, however, and stressed that there had been no official confirmation that the embargo had been lifted.
Two days after presentation of an ultimatum to the Kurdish minority to accept the Iraqi Government’s autonomy plan, fighting has broken out between Kurdish insurgents and government forces in northern Iraq, according to informed Kurdish sources. Under the ultimatum issued Monday to the Kurdish leader, General Mustafa al‐Barzani, by Vice President Saddam Hussein, the Kurds were given 15 days to accept the autonomy plan and to join the state‐controlled National Front, composed of the ruling Baath Party and the Moscow‐oriented Communist Party. The plan provides for Kurdish self‐rule in the northern areas where the Kurds form majority, but does not define the boundaries of the autonomous region. The 74‐year‐old general, who has been leading the Kurdish nationalist movement for more than 30 years, rejected the government’s plan, saying it did not fulfill the aspirations of Iraq’s two million Kurds.
Cambodian rebels attacked two Mekong River islands less than three miles northeast of Phnom Penh, apparently in a major drive to capture the outposts which are within shelling distance of the city. The attacks on Khsach Kandal and Oknhatei sent thousands of civilians fleeing toward the city.
A United States military attaché in Cambodia has denied acting illegally as a combat adviser to Government troops, the State Department said today, but Congressional demands for an investigation of his activity increased. The State Department spokesman, George S. Vest, said the United States Embassy in Phnom Penh had termed unjustified a report in The Washington Post saying Major Lawrence Ondecker had advised Government troops at Kampot in violation of United States laws barring military advisers from Indochina. Mr. Vest did not say the article was inaccurate. The Post’s foreign editor, Lee Lescaze, said the newspaper was standing by the report.
U.S. officials have exaggerated the Soviet naval threat in the Indian Ocean in an attempt to stampede Congress into approving a proposed naval base on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia, a retired Navy admiral told the House South Asia subcommittee. Rear Admiral Gene R. LaRocque, former commander of a 6th Fleet task force, said “the implication is clear” that Polaris submarines and the new, long-range, missile-firing Trident subs are to be served at the atoll, about 800 miles south of India. He urged Congress to examine the need for a base very closely to ensure that the Navy was not contemplating an arms race with the Soviet Union in the Indian Ocean.
Italian Premier Martano Rumor formed a new center-left government from a pared-down coalition of Christian Democrats, Socialists and Social Democrats. Rumor presented President Giovanni Leone with a list of 25 ministers, many of them carried over from the previous center-left government. The new government, Italy’s 36th in 31 years, was weakened by the withdrawal of the small but pivotal Republican Party, which promised its support from outside the cabinet for the time being.
A booby-trap bomb wired to his car mangled the legs of a senior official of the Protestant Ulster Defense Association in Portadown, Northern Ireland, police said. James Redmond, 42, was injured after a pledge by the militant Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army to continue fighting for a united Ireland.
Pursuant to the Grundlagenvertrag, the treaty signed between West Germany and East Germany on December 21, 1972, representatives of the two nations signed the Protocol on the Establishment of Permanent Reperesentation, with each country to have a representative and staff in the other’s capital. The Protokoll über die Einrichtung der Ständigen Vertretungen stopped short of establishing diplomatic relations, in that neither nation recognized the other as legitimate.
Despite persistent rumors throughout the day of his imminent release, by nightfall there had been no word on whether Victor Samuelson would be freed by the Argentine guerrillas who kidnapped him last December. Mr. Samuelson is an executive with the Argentine subsidiary of the Exxon Corporation, which paid $14.2 million in ransom to a Marxist group known as the People’s Revolutionary Army.
Fire broke out in a giant apartment building in the heart of Caracas, Venezuela, only 10 minutes after an anonymous telephone warning that leftwing guerrillas would set it ablaze. Smoke billowed from the 40-story building as 800 firemen and volunteers battled a huge fire that destroyed a warehouse complex on the western side of the city. It was not known how many people were in the apartment building in the city’s ultra-modern “Parque Central” complex.
The White House announced that Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz has resigned and will leave his cabinet post in May. Mr. Shultz, the last remaining member of the original Nixon cabinet, is regarded as almost as powerful as Secretary of State Kissinger, with an influence on administration affairs extending far beyond the Treasury. No successor was named, but William Simon, the federal energy chief, is regarded as a likely choice.
Four men, including three members of the original Watergate burglary team, pleaded not guilty to charges growing out of the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist. Defense attorneys said that President Nixon would be called as a witness, and legal experts said his refusal to testify might constitute grounds for dismissal of the charges.
Laurence Richardson testified at the Mitchell-Stans trial that he once warned his employer, Robert Vesco, that he was going to drop a public “bombshell.” Five days later, Mr. Richardson testified, he did — by walking into the United States Attorney’s office and implicating John Mitchell and Maurice Stans in Mr. Vesco’s tangled affairs.
Sources say some who have heard the tape of President Nixon’s March 21, 1973, discussion with John W. Dean 3rd about “hush money” payments agree that Mr. Nixon used the word “wrong,” but say that the context suggests he meant only that it wouldn’t work, The Washington Post reported in its Friday editions. Mr. Nixon, at his March news conference, said that at the March 23 meeting he told Mr. Dean the White House counsel at the time that it would be “wrong” to give the defendants in the Watergate case executive clemency and to continue the payments. A tape recording of that meeting is in the prosecutors’ hands. “According to informed sources however,” the Post said, “the President’s statement on the tape recording of the Dean meeting applied specifically to offers of executive clemency to the conspirators.
The Senate Watergate committee has been trying unsuccessfully for three days to serve a subpoena on Rose Mary Woods, President Nixon’s personal secretary. Samuel Dash, the committee’s chief counsel, said today that the subpoena, compelling Miss Woods to appear before the committee’s staff to give testimony under oath, was issued Monday.
President Nixon arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and was greeted by Mayor Richard J. Daley, a few boos and several cheers. What did the two talk about on the ride into the city to Mr. Nixon’s hotel suite? “The great scenery and what a fine city we have,” answered the Democratic mayor. Mr. Nixon will appear today before the Executive Club of Chicago at 11 am PDT for a question-and-answer session on national television. It will be the first of several trips to give Mr. Nixon public exposure in the next few days. On Saturday he goes to Nashville for the opening of the new “Grand Old Opry” House and on Tuesday evening he will be in Houston for another question-and-answer period at the National Association of Broadcasters convention.
The House Government Operations Committee approved a bill to let courts settle certain disputes when Congress seeks and the executive branch refuses information. But it would guarantee Congress’ right to information sought in connection with an impeachment. The full House, meanwhile, passed an amendment intended to provide further backing to citizens generally who seek information from the government. The amendment, sent to the Senate, was to the Freedom of Information Act.
The Justice Department filed a civil suit to force desegregation of the student bodies and faculties of Louisiana’s entire state university system, which consists of 16 four-year institutions, two junior colleges and 145,000 students. Attorney General William B. Saxbe said the suit, filed in Baton Rouge, was the first the Justice Department has filed to desegregate an entire state-supported system of higher education. The suit was filed at the request of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which notified the state twice in 1969 and twice in 1973 that it was violating the law.
The American Social Health Association, in its annual survey of cities with more than 200,000 population, reported a 12.7% increase in gonorrhea and a 4.5% increase in syphilis between 1972 and 1973. Washington, D.C., led in cases of syphilis last year and Atlanta had the highest gonorrhea rate. Tulsa ranked lowest in cases of syphilis and Yonkers, New York, had the least amount of gonorrhea cases. There were 809,681 cases of gonorrhea in 1973 and 25,080 cases of syphilis. In the West, Portland, Oregon, ranked in the top 25 U.S. cities. San Francisco was 26th. Far below the national average were Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland, and San Diego.
The Small Business Administration said it had investigated and cleared three white North Carolina businessmen of allegations that they set up minority-group front companies to siphon off federal funds. It said a review of the so-called Dunn Group, headquartered in Dunn, North Carolina, showed no evidence of wrongdoing or exploitation of the minority businessmen. An SBA spokesman said the report would not be made public, but Asst. Administrator Randall L. Woods said “all arrangements between the Dunn Group and SBA were legal, aboveboard and clearly visible.”
Ten thousand southern West Virginia coal miners returned to work today following Gov. Arch Moore’s decision to suspend a controversial gasoline sales restriction. The State Mines Department said 15,000 miners remained idle. Some picketing was reported, apparently preventing many workers from returning to the mines. Mr. Moore suspended for 30 days yesterday the “quarter tank” rule, which limited fuel sales to motorists with tanks three‐quarters empty. The Federal Energy Office had indicated that the state would receive adequate supplies for March.
The evaporating gasoline shortage has produced a new worry for service station operators: price wars. With the end of the Arab oil embargo not yet confirmed officially, motorists are already becoming increasingly price conscious and they have a wide range of prices to choose from.
Another leak of radioactive material has been discovered at the Atomic Energy Commission’s Hanford Reservation in southeastern Washington-the 17th such leak since 1958. About 2,500 gallons of highly radioactive liquid waste seeped into the soil before the leak was stopped More than half a million gallons of radioactive liquid have leaked from the underground tank farm at the reservation in recent years, but the AEC maintains that the material has been trapped in the soil and poses no threat to public safety.
Alex Pompez, one of the most important figures in the history of the Negro leagues, dies in New York City. Pompez owned the Cuban Stars of the Eastern Colored League, and later the New York Cubans of the Negro National League. Following the demise of the Negro leagues, Pompez was hired as a scout for the New York and San Francisco Giants, where for 25 years he worked to open the door for Caribbean players to enter the major leagues. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2006.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 889.78 (-1.88, -0.21%).
Born:
Grace Park, Canadian TV actress (“Battlestar Galactica”, “Hawaii Five-O”), in Los Angeles, California.
Patrick Traverse, Canadian NHL defenseman (Ottawa Senators, Might Ducks of Anaheim, Boston Bruins, Montreal Canadiens, Dallas Stars), in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Jeff Shevalier, Canadian NHL left wing (Los Angeles Kings, Tampa Bay Lightning), in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.
Died:
Alex Pompez, 83, American Baseball HOF executive (owner Negro League Cuban Stars [East] 1923-28; New York Cubans 1935-51).
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