[No location given; I suspect this is materiel captured by Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973.]
Delegates to the United Nations General Assembly’s special session on raw materials and development brushed aside a last-minute United States proposal for a $4 billion aid program for poor countries, and instead gave enthusiastic approval of a package proposal by the developing countries that would establish a special fund to aid impoverished lands and create a new economic relationship between rich and poor nations.
South Vietnamese government forces lost 20 dead but claimed killing 251 Communist soldiers in a two-day battle around Đức Huệ, 35 miles northwest of Saigon. The high command in Saigon denied that any government troops had crossed into Cambodia, only two miles from Đức Huệ, as some military sources had reported. South Vietnamese infantrymen backed by tanks and planes have made incursions into Cambodia at two points along the border west of Saigon, according to military sources and reports from the field. The incursions, if they took place, were in violation of the Paris cease‐fire agreements signed 15 months ago.
The Saigon military command denied that any South Vietnamese forces had crossed into Cambodia or that any of its bombers had carried out attacks on the other side of the border. But soldiers in the field told newsmen that South Vietnamese forces had crossed into Cambodia Monday at points near Go Dau Ha, on Route 1, about 35 miles northwest of Saigon. The reports said that the attacks had been carried out in an effort to cut North Vietnamese supply lines and knock out big guns. The troops said that about 400 rangers backed by tanks had met heavy resistance from elements of the North Vietnamese Fifth Division for two days and that two tanks had been knocked out by rockets.
Farther south along the border, at a point about 50 miles west of Saigon, other South Vietnamese infantrymen and armored vehicles crossed two and a half miles into Cambodia yesterday in a raid against gun positions from which the North Vietnamese were bombarding Government outposts on the Vietnamese side of the border, military sources said. They said the troops had withdrawn after the raid. Military sources said that the raids had been made in “hot pursuit” of the North Vietnamese. The Saigon command said earlier that its forces reserved the right of hot pursuit into Cambodia. The Saigon command reported that more than 300 North Vietnamese troops had been killed in three days of fighting along the frontier. Government losses have been reported as 35 killed and 63 wounded.
Four thousand civilians were reported to have fled a village on the frontier 50 miles west of Saigon after it was heavily shelled by the North Vietnamese. South Vietnamese officials said that more than 300 homes had been destroyed or damaged by hundreds of shells and that the village’s church and market place had been left burning.
Cambodian troops killed 108 insurgents and captured another seven in an ambush near the besieged town of Prey Veng, 30 miles east of Phnom Penh, the military high command reported. Meanwhile, rebel forces shelled the isolated government garrison of Long Vek, 21 miles northwest of Phnom Penh, and a Cambodian field officer said its chances looked worse every day.
In Seoul, an intoxicated South Korean Army paratrooper, Private Kim Won-je, shot and killed six fellow soldiers and three civilians. He held 200 troops and police at bay for two hours before killing himself. Private Kim’s motive had apparently been his anger and being informed that he was being recalled to the army barracks.
Death sentences have been commuted to life imprisonment for two Palestinian terrorists convicted of killing five persons and injuring 55 in a bomb and gun attack at Athens airport last August, a government spokesman said. Arid el Shafik, 22, and Khantouran Palaal, 21, both Jordanian-born Palestinians, were sentenced to death on conviction of premeditated murder last January.
U.S. Senator Henry M. Jackson said yesterday that the Soviet Union should withdraw its military personnel from Syria if it wanted to show cooperation in working out a Syrian‐Israeli agreement. The Washington Democrat, who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said there were more than 2000 Soviet military personnel in Syria, 500 of them operating a dense network of surface‐to‐a missiles. Secretary of State Kissinger met in Geneva earlier this week with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko as part of efforts to involve the Soviet Union in the negotiations. “If Mr. Gromyko wishes to demonstrate that his government will cooperate in bringing about a disengagement, he might well begin by disengaging the Russian army and air force from Israel’s northern border,” Senator Jackson said in a speech prepared for delivery at a dinner of the B’nai Brith Anti‐Defamation League.
In Portugal’s first May Day holiday in half a century, millions of citizens poured into the streets of Lisbon and other cities to celebrate the overthrow last week of the authoritarian government of Premier Marcello Caetano. The Portuguese left, mainly Socialists and Communists, demonstrated impressive strength during the celebrations. General Antonio de Spinola, head of the seven‐man military junta that took power last Thursday night, is now forming a provisional government. He was hailed today as a hero of the revolution, but he was faced with the hard choice of deciding whether to allow the Communists into the government. If he bars them, he is unlikely to get cooperation from the Socialists, who have said they would be unwilling to allow the Communists virtually to monopolize the opposition.
Irish Republican Army gunmen attacked an isolated British army post with rockets and machine-gun fire near the border of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. No casualties were reported in the 15-minute attack on the 40-man post at Crossmaglen in County Armagh.
Edith Irving will be released from a Swiss prison Friday, her lawyer said, and will go to her home on the Spanish Island of Ibiza. She was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in March, 1973, for using forged identity papers to deposit in Swiss banks $650,000 received for a fake Howard Hughes autobiography written by her husband, Clifford. The court deducted time for good behavior and two months spent in a New York jail.
American jazz drummer Buddy Rich was fined $50 in Hobart, Australia, for possession of marijuana. The judge also ordered the forfeiting of $500 bail when Rich did not appear for the hearing. Rich, 56, was charged after a police raid on his Hobart hotel room in November, 1973.
The Organization of American States ended a two-week conference in Atlanta with a reaffirmation of Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger’s commitment to his new dialog with the countries of the hemisphere. Asst. Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Jack Kubisch said Kissinger asked him to make a special visit to express his determination to improve hemispheric ties.
During International Workers’ Day celebrations on May Day in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo, President Juan Perón denounced the Montoneros, his left-wing guerrilla supporters, implicitly blaming them for the assassinations of conservative trade union leaders. As thousands of policemen patrolled the streets of Buenos Aires to prevent violent clashes between rival Perónist factions, President Juan Domingo Perón of Argentina faced a tense May Day crowd of 100,000 followers and gave full backing to his conservative supporters while denouncing the left wing of his movement.
Uruguayan security forces fired tear gas from helicopters to disperse hundreds of workers defying a government ban on May Day rallies in Montevideo. President Juan Maria Bordaberry, who seized dictatorial powers last year, has promised presidential elections in 1976. The demonstrators in Montevideo were protesting his regime.
At least 300 people were reported dead and more than 200,000 homeless after three weeks of flooding in Brazil’s northeast. The latest tolls came from state governments only a month after other floods left an estimated 2,000 people dead and 300,000 homeless in the southern part of the country.
By order of the new Portuguese government, the colonial administrators of Mozambique released 554 political prisoners incarcerated at the Machava Prison. The release was supervised by the new head of the colonial police, Colonel Antonio Maria Rebelo. On the same day, Portugal closed the Tarrafal concentration camp, located on Santiago Island at Cape Verde, where hundreds of Portuguese and African political prisoners had been confined for life.
The staff of the House Judiciary Committee said it had found discrepancies, perhaps minor, between parts of the White House transcripts and transcripts of the same conversations prepared by the staff. John Doar, the committee counsel, cited the discrepancies in urging the committee to insist that the President yield the actual recordings, to comply with the panel’s subpoena.
President Nixon’s special counsel, James St. Clair, indicated that the President would resist the Judiciary Committee’s request for additional White House materials sought for the impeachment inquiry. Mr. St. Clair’s statement left the clear impression that President Nixon would give no further material to investigators.
President Nixon repeatedly warned the Justice Department that any inquiry into his personal involvement in the Watergate cover-up would be “dangerous to the presidency,” according to edited White House transcripts of presidential conversations during April, 1973. The transcripts reveal that Mr. Nixon won a pledge from Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen that “we have no mandate to investigate the President.”
Among the most riveting conversations included in the edited White House transcripts are those for April 16, 1973, the day Mr. Nixon apparently fit together the pieces of what he called a “scenario,” to insulate himself from being implicated in the Watergate cover-up. The transcripts show the President leading John Dean through a careful, step-by-step interrogation, evidently designed to construct a record of the President’s innocence.
The transcripts of presidential conversations released by the White House indicate that of the many options discussed by Pres-dent Nixon and his top advisers for dealing with their Watergate problems in April, 1973, one that was only rarely mentioned and invariably discarded was to tell the full truth about the cover-up.
Demonstrating a marked aversion to government economic controls, the Senate voted decisively against a proposal that would have given the administration authority to re-impose wage-price controls.
Seven black men were arrested on murder charges by the San Francisco police, and Mayor Joseph Alioto promptly announced that he was satisfied that “we have the men,” who killed 12 white persons in a series of random slayings. In San Francisco, seven African-American men were arrested in the Zebra murders case. Four of the men were released for lack of evidence on May 3. The other three — J. C. Simon, 29; Larry Green, 22; and Manuel Moore, 23 — went to trial along with Jessie Lee Cooks, who had been arrested earlier, and all four would be convicted of murder in 1976 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold said 117 persons have been indicted in connection with a $1 billion a year gambling operation with ties to organized crime. Court authorized wiretaps were used to monitor 63 wire rooms where bets allegedly were placed, handling up to $200,000 in bets daily. Gold said a byproduct of the investigation was the breakup of an international $5 million wholesale drug smuggling ring, which apparently was financed by the gambling operation. He named five organized crime “families” as controlling the rooms.
The attorney for five militant Indians on trial at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in connection with a 1973 riot called Circuit Court Judge Joseph Bottum a racist and said he should disqualify himself in the aftermath of Tuesday’s courtroom battle between militants and police. Ramon Roubideaux also said he would immediately demand a mistrial. In Tuesday’s incident, nine persons were injured and five arrested when police tried to carry out an order by Bottum to clear the courtroom when the Indians present refused to stand up for his entrance.
The number of court-authorized wiretaps and bugs used in federal investigations dropped 37% in 1973, the government reported. But overall, the use of court-approved eavesdropping edged upward as state judges and prosecutors reported a 13% increase. The administrative office of the U.S. courts listed the figures in its annual report to Congress. Of the total of 812 wiretaps and bugs installed, 130 were by federal authorities and the remainder by investigators in 17 states and the District of Columbia. Five other states, in which the laws also allow the use of eavesdropping, said they employed no taps or bugs last year.
The first successful nuclear fusion using a laser, (inertial confinement fusion), was achieved by scientists at KMS Industries, backed by Keeve M. “Kip” Siegel at Ann Arbor, Michigan, targeting a deuterium-tritium pellet and collecting the evidence with neutron-sensitive nuclear emulsion detectors developed by physicist Robert Hofstadter. After confirmation of the results, the breakthrough was announced 12 days later, on May 13.
Unemployment in 1973 was highest in regions comprised of Western states — 6.8% in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Hawaii, and 6.7% in Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Alaska — and lowest, at .8%, in a region made up of Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. The figures from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics were based on the 10 federal administrative regions. Of the 19 most populous states, Washington had the highest rate at 7.7% and California second at 7%. San Diego was the highest metropolitan area at 7.7%.
The Senate Agriculture Committee voted to reject an Administration plan to phase out federal donations of meat and other food commodities to school lunch rooms. The committee took the action by approving a bill making permanent and mandatory the Agriculture Department’s temporary power to buy food at market prices for donation. The authority had been scheduled to expire on June 30.
Lower speed limits figured significantly in a continuing decline in traffic deaths on the nation’s highways during March, the National Safety Council says. Traffic deaths dropped 25% in March, as they did in January and February, after speed limits were lowered to conserve gasoline. Council President Vincent Tofany said about 3,200 persons died in March, compared with 4,320 in March of 1973. In the first three months of 1974 there were 8,920 fatalities, down from 11,880 last year, he said.
An explosion ripped through the locker room of the Alitalia terminal at Kennedy International Airport in New York. At least two persons were injured: Police said they thought the blast was caused by a bomb. Two airline employees were injured when the bomb exploded in a locker.
The KVNB Cup for the championship of soccer football in the Netherlands was won by PSV Eindhoven, 6 to 0, over NAC Breda before 38,000 spectators at Feyenoord Stadium in Rotterdam.
Alf Ramsey, the manager of the England national football team since 1963, known for coaching the team that won the 1966 World Cup, was fired by England’s Football Association after England failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup, missing the world championship final tournament for the first time in its history.
Tom Seaver allows only 3 hits and 2 walks, striking out 16 Dodgers in 12 innings, but the Mets lose in the 14th 2–1.
In a 5–3 loss to the Reds, Dock Ellis of the Pirates hits the first three batters with pitches in the first inning, setting a Major League record, and walks another in the frame before being lifted. Dock later reveals that he was high on pep pills at the time. He also said later that hit the batters — Rose, Morgan and Driessen — because the Reds had made disrespectful comments about the Pirates after beating them in the postseason two years earlier.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 853.88 (+17.13, +2.05%).
Born:
Matthew Hatchette, NFL wide receiver (Minnesota Vikings, New York Jets, Jacksonville Jaguars), in Cleveland, Ohio.
Steve Randolph, MLB pitcher (Arizona Diamondbacks, Houston Astros), in Okinawa, Japan.
Lornah Kiplagat, Kenyan-born Dutch Olympic runner, 2007 cross country world champion; in Kabiemit, Keiyo District, Kenya.
Died:
Sir Frank Packer KBE, OStJ, 67, Australian media magnate and owner of the Nine Network and of Australian Consolidated Press.
History Diaries 