The United States and Russia said the 1968 nuclear nonproliferation treaty has helped improve international security. The remarks came at the opening meeting in Geneva of a 26-nation group preparing next year’s conference to review the operation of the accord. The U.S. delegate said there had been no spread of nuclear weapons following the pact.
Fifteen months after her entry into the Common Market, Britain met in Luxembourg with her European partners to tell them that unless major changes were made, she might put the question of withdrawal to a popular vote. The warning, which derived from the new Labor government’s election promise to renegotiate the terms of entry into the European Economic Community, was made by her Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, in an address uncompromising in tone.
The new British Labor Party government is growing increasingly worried about the upsurge in violence in Northern Ireland and is considering new measures to counter it. The terrorism that killed six people and injured about 30 over the weekend touched off a series of urgent meetings today involving Prime Minister Wilson and his Cabinet. Mr. Wilson said his month-old government was “determined to resist those who try to advance their aims by violence.” Brian Faulkner, the head of the Northern Ireland executive, discussed the deteriorating situation with Mr. Wilson here today. He underscored the fragility of the framework set up for governing Ulster through power‐sharing between Protestants and Roman Catholics and urged tougher steps to combat terrorism.
British officials said that the violence, much of it attributed to the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, seemed to be aimed in part at testing the will of the Government. They said the terrorists were determined not only to upset the power‐sharing arrangements but also to stimulate demands in Britain to bring British troops home. Like the defeated Conservatives, the Labor party is committed to the concept of power-sharing as outlined in the Sunningdale agreement. Sunningdale, a village in Berkshire, near London, was the site of the meeting late last year at which Britain, the Irish Republic and moderate Protestant and Catholic groups agreed on the new framework for administering the province.
In England, “Local Government Act 1972” redraws the administrative map and creates six new Metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties; Newport and Monmouthshire transferred from England to Wales.
Though West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Government has been at the heart of recent efforts to smooth over the dispute between Secretary of State Kissinger and the Europeans about “consultations,” the West German leader himself has been preoccupied for week with serious domestic political problems. A series of local election results have deeply disturbed Mr. Brandt and the upper echelons of his Social Democratic party, which lost its historic majority in the Hamburg legislature on March 3 and has been losing ground elsewhere — most recently in district elections in the states of Rhineland‐Palatinate and Schleswig‐Holstein — to its conservative opposition, the Christian Democrats. The Christian Democrats are divided themselves, however, and are not even close to agreement now on who should lead their party against Mr. Brandt in 1976. As one leading Christian Democrat, Walther Leisler Kiep, said in a conversation: “Nobody seems to know quite how to take advantage of this. There’s a sort of general bafflement.”
J. Paul Getty III will be asked to try to identify his kidnappers, police sources in Rome said. Seven Calabrians have been charged with the abduction of the 17-year-old grandson of the American oil billionaire. The sources said young Getty had been summoned to Lagonegro, where six of the men are in custody, and would be asked to try to pick them out of a lineup. The seventh suspect is still sought.
Government troops supported by artillery, air strikes and armored personnel carriers began a counteroffensive yesterday to recapture the old royal capital of Phsar Oudong, which has been overrun by Communist forces, the command announced today.
The commander in chief of the pro‐Communist Khmer Rouge forces in Cambodia charged today that the United States was as much in= volved as ever in the Cambodian war, and he ruled out any compromise. The commander, Khieu Samphan, here on an official visit, said at a state banquet that the United States and the Phnom Penh Government of President Lon Nol had resorted to “such vicious maneuvers as sham cease‐fire, sham talks and sham peace.” The insurgent leader, who has emerged as a key figure in the Cambodian war, asserted that the United States was still directing the war effort, with 3,500 military advisers disguised as civilian personnel. He said Washington was planning to increase the number of advisers to 10,000 by the end of 1974. He added that his forces would fight on until complete victory — meaning the withdrawal of the United States from Cambodia and the end of aid to the Phnom Penh Government.
Communist gunners fired about 300 rockets and mortar rounds into the South Vietnamese Government’s 25th Infantry Division base camp at Củ Chi, while consolidating their siege of the Đức Huệ ranger camp, Saigon reported. The shelling hindered government troops from Củ Chi in attempts to reinforce Đức Huệ base, 18 miles west.
Prince Souphanouvong, head of the Communist Pathet Lao rebel forces, is expected to arrive in the Laos capital of Vientiane soon to conclude an agreement ending 20 years of civil war, government sources said. A spokesman for the Communists said talks on a new coalition government were “nearly concluded.”
North Korea accused the United States of sending high-altitude reconnaissance planes to spy on the country. The North Korean Central News Agency said that a strong protest was lodged at a military armistice commission meeting in Panmunjom.
The Communist nation of North Korea officially abolished the levying of income taxes, with national leader Kim Il-sung calling taxes “remnants of an antiquated society,” raising revenue instead through user fees and deductions from profits on all of the nation’s state-owned enterprises.
Israeli intelligence reported over the weekend that two Soviet merchant ships were unloading aircraft, apparently MIG‐23’s, in Syria, according to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. The introduction of the jets, more advanced fighters than the 200 MIG‐21’s now in. Syria, would have an important effect on the balance of air power, in the Middle East, Mr. Dayan said in an interview on Sunday. Later in the day, on the Meet the Press television program, Mr. Dayan said he considered the arrival of the MIG-23’s to be part of a general buildup of Arab forces that included the deployment of Cuban brigade, approximately 3,000 men, in Syria. “Can’t you keep those Cubans busy over here?” Mr. Dayan asked an American friend. “We have enough to deal with as it is.” The Defense Minister discussed the situation in the Middle East before beginning talks yesterday with Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger on military assistance to Israel.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calls for an Islamic Republic in Iran.
Four thousand students took to the streets in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as protests against the new government of Prime Minister Endalkachew Makonnen spread across the nation. The students were demanding a speedup in promised reforms. Three hundred high school students joined the march in Addis Ababa and police beat up some of them.
U.S. authorities refused to comment on a newspaper report that a ransom note left by kidnapers of U.S. Vice Consul John Patterson, 31, threatened to kill one foreign diplomat or a member of his family every week if ransom instructions were not followed. The instructions included a $500,000 ransom demand and a warning against making comments on the Hermosillo, Mexico, case.
Starving survivors walked through destroyed cities and towns in the wake of Brazil’s worst floods which have left more than 300,000 persons homeless. Receding waters in 10 stricken states left a grim picture of wrecked homes and bodies. buried in mud. Officials said the death toll could reach 4,000.
A new three-year contract between Seafarers’ International Union and Canadian Lake Carriers Association ended a 16-day shipping strike on the St. Lawrence Seaway. The pact gives the employees a 10% wage increase in the first year and 12% in the second.
Members of the House Judiciary Committee are considering a timetable of proceedings that schedules the start of hearings on impeachment evidence by May 1 and the completion of committee action by mid-June. Some of the hearings are expected to be open to the public, and the possibility of television coverage is being discussed.
Stanley Sporkin, a Securities and Exchange Commission official, testified at the Mitchell-Stans trial that he had been under considerable pressure from his superiors to avoid doing anything that would be “politically embarrassing” to President Nixon. Judge Lee Gagliardi, who is presiding at the trial in Federal District Court in New York, denied a motion to quash a subpoena issued to Donald Nixon, the President’s brother, who is now expected to testify this week.
Congressional staff investigators have completed their examination of President Nixon’s tax returns for the years 1969 to 1972, but it was not clear how soon the public would learn what they have found. The staff’s report, which was taken under armed guard to the section of the government Printing Office that deals with secret documents, is scheduled to be examined at a closed meeting tomorrow of the congressional Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation.
The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the controversial Bank Secrecy Act, overriding charges that the privacy of depositors is invaded by reports required under the act. It requires recordkeeping by banks and reports of certain domestic and foreign transactions to the Secretary of the Treasury. The 6 to 3 decision was a victory for congressional proponents of law enforcement who insisted that bank records were needed to help the government catch criminals and tax dodgers at home and to detect the existence of secret bank accounts abroad. But the Court’s decision was a defeat for civil libertarians who maintained that giving the government access to an individual’s bank statement was as much an invasion of his privacy as tapping his telephone.
The Supreme Court also upheld the authority of a Long Island village to bar six unrelated college students from sharing a rented one-family house, rejecting the students’ contentions that their constitutional rights of privacy and freedom of association were being violated. The Court, ruling 7 to 2, held that Belle Terre, a Suffolk County community of 700 population, had acted reasonably in zoning out all but one-family homes and forbidding their occupancy by more than two people who were not related by blood or marriage.
The Justice Department announced that the composition of a number of legislative districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn and one Brooklyn congressional district violate the Voting Rights Act of 1970 and will have to be redrawn to eliminate the resulting racial discrimination before elections can be held in the districts.
The Navy said Gordon W. Rule, its top civilian procurement official, was not competent to judge an expensive ship building program that Rule has claimed was moving toward disaster. At issue were 50 new patrol ships worth $70 million each. Rule said they should be delayed pending full testing of a rapid-fire Italian-made gun system and a Dutch fire-control system. The Navy, however, in an unusual personal attack on one of its senior civilian officials, said Rule’s criticism “gets into highly technical questions outside his field of expertise.”
Paul Gilly, one of the gunmen convicted of killing United Mine Workers insurgent Joseph A. Yablonski, testified he had been told the assassination orders came from W. A. (Tony) Boyle. Boyle, 72, former UMW president, is on trial in Media, Pennsylvania, charged with plotting the murders of Yablonski, his wife and daughter at their Clarksville, Pennsylvania, home on Dec. 31, 1969.
A bank official and his wife were held hostage overnight in their Orland Park, Illinois, home by two men who demanded $60,000 ransom. But the scheme failed and the couple got free unharmed, the FBI said. Authorities said W. R. Schussler, 76, and his wife, Lou Ella, 69, were taken captive and Schussler was dispatched to the Orland State Bank, where he is executive vice president, for the money. But authorities said Schussler was unable to understand instructions transmitted to him over a citizens band radio and could not deliver the ransom. His wife was later found unharmed. A manhunt was begun for the abductors.
A federal judge dropped H. R. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman and Robert C. Mardian as defendants in a $26 million civil damage suit filed in New York City by the Socialist Workers Party, which alleged harassment. Judge Thomas P. Griesa said the party had failed to connect Haldeman and Ehrlichman, both former White House aides, and Mardian, a former assistant attorney general, with any illegal action in New York. The remaining defendants include President Nixon, former Attorney General John N. Mitchell and ousted White House counsel John W. Dean III.
Millions of needy Americans will get additional food stamps beginning July 1 to help with soaring grocery costs, the Agriculture Department announced. The increase will be about 5.6%, to $150 a month, for a family of four. Also beginning July 1, a four-member family can have an income of up to $500 a month still qualify.
The Public Citizen Tax Reform Research Group, a Ralph Nader organization, reported that special interests “receiving favorable legislative treatment” from the House Ways and Means Committee financed more than half the cost of committee Chairman Wilbur D. Mills’ 1972 presidential campaign. The milk and oil industries and financial groups benefiting from the Arkansas Democrat’s tax-writing committee were the biggest givers, the report said. Milk interests gave $60,100, or 26% of the campaign cost of $274,836.13, the Nader group said.
Pioneer Hall opens at Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort & Campground, Florida.
Five days after the Mariner 10 interplanetary probe made findings that suggested that the planet Mercury had a satellite, tentatively named “Charley” by astronomer A. Lyle Broadfoot of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, Broadfoot declared that the change in ultraviolet radiation intensity turned out to have been from a distant star, 31 Crateris, located 3,000 light years from Earth.
The first spadeful of earth was turned in a ceremony in Florida for a $22‐million runway on which American space shuttles are to land after journeys into orbit scheduled to begin in 1979. The $5.2‐billion program to develop the shuttle is designed to send a delta‐winged “orbiter” aloft from Florida, riding piggyback on recoverable solid-fuel rockets and a disposable liquid‐fuel tank. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration intends that the shuttle will carry out hundreds of orbital missions in the 1980’s at costs well below those of today’s single-use rocket flights.
Work began on the concrete runway after a brief ceremony at the site northwest of the vast vehicle assembly building of the, Kennedy. Space Center at Cape Canaveral, where moon rockets were once assembled and the rockets will be. Completion of the runway, which is to be 300 feet wide, 15,000 feet long and 16 inches thick, is scheduled for July, 1976. Before concrete can be poured on the low‐lying terrain near the Atlantic coast, now covered with scrub palmetto and sawgrass, the land must be cleared and land fill from adjacent “borrow trenches” must be built up to an average height of 9.5 feet above sea level.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 843.48 (-3.20, -0.38%).
Born:
Sandra Völker, German swimmer (world record 50m backstroke, 28.71s, 1999; World Championship gold, 4x100m relay, 2001), in Lübeck, West Germany.
Jason MacDonald, Canadian NHL right wing (New York Rangers), in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
Richard Christy, American heavy metal drummer (Charred Walls of the Damned), and radio personality (The Howard Stern Show), born in Fort Scott, Kansas.
Died:
Hal Boyle, 63, U.S. journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner.
History Diaries 