Secretary of State Kissinger said in Damascus that he and Syrian leaders had gone from the general to “a detailed and complete examination” of all issues in a Syrian-Israeli agreement on troop separation, but that an accord still eluded them. Although he has narrowed the difference between Syria and Israel during his 15 days in the Middle East, the unresolved issues may prove too formidable in the period Mr. Kissinger has allotted himself for achieving the agreement — roughly this week. Speaking to newsmen before shuttling back to Israel for renewed talks tonight with senior Israeli officials here, Mr. Kissinger said “some progress” was again achieved in his third trip to the Syrian capital on this Middle East journey. Mr. Kissinger and his top aides met with Premier Golda Meir and other Israeli officials for more than two hours at her office tonight.
A meeting between the Israeli negotiators and Mr. Kissinger’s team was set for tomorrow afternoon after the Cabinet meeting. American officials said that Mr. Kissinger hoped that Israel would make the additional compromises needed to help him bring about a disengagement accord when he returns to Damascus on Tuesday. Mr. Kissinger told newsmen outside the Premier’s office that the talks tonight were “very detailed” but he declined to, predict whether an agreement was possible. After almost daily conversations with Israeli and Syrian officials, Mr. Kissinger knows by now what compromises would be necessary to resolve the disengagement negotiations, American officials said.
American officials acknowledged, without going into details, that the main problem remained the location of the demarcation line in the Golan Heights between the two sides. The Israelis have agreed to return some territory taken in the June, 1967, war, as well as most, if not all, of the salient seized last October. But Israel has insisted on controlling, for security reasons, the three hills near the uninhabited town of El Quneitra, sought by the Syrians. The Syrians have asked for control of the hills, although some Arab newspapers in Beirut, Lebanon, have speculated that Syria might accept a United Nations’ presence on one or more of the hills, instead of Israeli control.
Labor Minister Yitzhak Rabin is expected to complete negotiations this week on the formation of a new coalition government embracing two smaller parties that would give him a narrow majority, with 61 seats in Israel’s 120‐seat Parliament. Although the composition of the new government has yet to be decided, Information Minister Shimon Peres is widely regarded as the leading candidate to succeed Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defense. Close associates of Mr. Rabin said tonight that the former Chief of Staff and Ambassador to Washington would make “maximum effort” to complete the delicate interparty negotiations this week.
Despite the increasing influence of the United States in Egypt, the Soviet Union’s assets in the Arab world remain large and numerous. The visit to Damascus of Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko of the Soviet Union is regarded as a new sign that the Russians intend to protect these assets and to meet the American challenge, but without endangering good relations with Washington. Western diplomats are convinced that Mr. Gromyko, while temporarily dwarfed by the role of Secretary of State Kissinger, will come into his own again when the Geneva conference reconvenes.
Prime Minister Abdel Salam Jalloud of Libya met with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat after arriving unexpectedly in Cairo for a visit believed aimed at ending deteriorating relations between the two countries.
The Republic of Iraq executed five Kurdish activists by hanging, including Leyla Qasim, after the group had been convicted in a nationally televised trial on charges of attempting to hijack an airplane and to kill President Saddam Hussein.
Three Cambodian provincial capitals, including the vital seaport of Kompong Som 147 miles southwest of Phnom Penh, were being seriously threatened by new insurgent drives, field reports said. Nine government outposts near Kompong Som have fallen in the past week and insurgents were reported moving heavy weapons and mortars into jungled hills overlooking the town and its airport, Cambodian officers and refugees said. Civilians who straggled out of the hills to government lines Sunday said thousands of government soldiers and civilians were killed trying to break out of a Khmer Rouge encirclement along Highway 4 northeast of Kompong Som. Other insurgent attacks have been centered on the provincial capitals of Kompong Thom, 90 miles from Phnom Penh, and Prey Veng, 29 miles east of the capital.
A still-secret report on the fatal crash of a Soviet supersonic jetliner near Paris last June 3 indicates that its crew handled it so recklessly during a spectacular demonstration the day before that its controls were worn out, a French newspaper said. The newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, said the investigation by French and Soviet experts into the crash of the Tupolev 144 will not be made public at the Russians’ request. The plane crashed in the suburb of Goussainville, killing eight persons on the ground and all six Soviet crewmen during the Le Bourget International Air Show.
The “Chronicle of Current Events,” the underground newsletter that was once the focal point of the Soviet dissident movement, ha: been revived in Moscow 18 months after a crackdown by the secret police forced it to halt publication. The recent appearance of three successive issues of the typewritten newsletter was taken as an indication that some dissidents had resolved to reassert themselves in organized fashion despite the expulsion of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn in February and the scattering of other prominent dissidents through emigration of prosecution by Soviet authorities. When the last issue appeared in October, 1972, The Chronicle was already the target of vigorous crackdown by the Committee for State Security, or K.G.B., as it is known from the initials of its name in Russian. The newsletter’s disappearance after its 27th issue had led many observers in Moscow to conclude that the K.G.B. had succeeded in suppressing it and dispersing the small band of dissidents.
Thousands fled their homes in panic when the southern Yugoslavia city of Skoplje was hit by a strong earthquake. The Tanjung news agency said there were no immediate details of damage and made no mention of casualties. Skoplje, a city of about 400,000, was destroyed by a quake in 1963, when more than 1,000 persons were killed and 4,000 injured.
Voters in Italy overwhelmingly favored keeping the right to divorce as they went to the polls in the first referendum in the history of the Italian republic. In balloting on Sunday and Monday, voters were asked to vote yes or no on the question, “Do you want the Law of 1 December 1970, No. 898, on the regulation of cases of dissolution of marriage, to be abrogated?”, and although more than 13 million voted yes, over 19 million voted no, and the matter failed by a margin of 59% to 41%.
If you are more than 15 years old — and less than 24 — there will be $50 waiting for you in Amsterdam after June 1, but you will have to answer a few questions. Or, if you are under 24 and are willing to throw away a valid airline ticket between Toronto and New York, you can save up to $350 on the price of a ticket from New York to Europe this summer. These are among the oddities of air travel at the start of the annual summer tourist rush to Europe — which promises to be more of a trickle than a flood this year.
Fifty-five people were rescued from a small rock in the Atlantic Ocean where they landed, after the Bahamian freighter they were on ran aground and began breaking up in rough seas, about 27 miles southeast of Nassau. U.S. Coast Guard helicopters plucked them off the 30-by 20-foot rock. Asked how the helicopters had managed to land on a rock that small, a Coast Guard spokesman said, “Very gently.”
A motorcade carrying the son of French presidential candidate François Mitterrand was fired on during a campaign tour on the Indian Ocean island of La Reunion, police said. Neither Christian Mitterrand, 25, nor anyone else in the motorcade was hurt. Police said a shotgun blast hit the front car driven by Paul Verges, the Communist Party leader and Mitterrand’s leading supporter on the remote French island. The overseas territories have mainly backed Gaullist candidates.
At dawn hundreds of people wait in bread lines. Elderly men and women pick through garbage. Thieves harvest vegetables and rice in the countryside. Although the earth is bountiful in Sri Lanka, which was formerly Ceylon, the nation of 13 million has a critical food shortage. Moreover, it is going broke, jolted by inflation, torn by internal dissension and plainly alarmed about the future. Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, a tough politician and a Socialist, said recently that the economic crisis had “almost squeezed the breath out of us — we are literally fighting to survive.” Mrs. Bandaranaike, who is the target of bitter attack, repeatedly pronounces a single, stark slogan for her nation: “Produce or perish.”
More than 500 Nigerians have been expelled from Sudan in a crackdown on foreign Africans, according to the Lagos Sunday Times in Nigeria. The report said the refugees are stranded in Chad, which neighbors Sudan and Nigeria, and are living in makeshift camps until they can be repatriated.
There were a number of indications that President Nixon, whatever he may decide in the future about relinquishing his office, is now acting as if he has made up his mind to let the constitutional impeachment process in Congress run its course. The President returned to the White House this morning after an Oklahoma speaking engagement in which he reiterated, in response to new rounds of rumors that he would resign, his determination not to quit.
J. Fred Buzhardt, President Nixon’s counsel, said that the publication of some of the President’s privately spoken reportedly ethnic references were part of a “concerted campaign . . . to poison the public mind against the President by any means, fair or foul.” Mr. Buzhardt, interviewed on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation”, said he had listened to nearly 40 White House tape recordings and added, “I have heard nothing that I would consider an ethnic slur.”
The Providence (Rhode Island) Sunday Journal said in an editorial today that President Nixon should resign as a last service to the nation. Citing the “moral tone of Mr. Nixon’s Administration as exemplified in the released transcripts of conversations in the Oval Office,” the editorial said The Journal, a morning daily, and the Evening Bulletin, an afternoon newspaper published by the same company that owns The Journal, “must add their voice to the growing number of those who see Mr. Nixon’s last best service to his country to be his resignation.”
The Charlotte Observer said today that Mr. Nixon’s resignation would be “the best outcome for the country.”
The Des Moines Sunday Register urged the President in an editorial today to remain in office, saying the process of impeachment should be carried forward.
Elliot L. Richardson, who resigned as Attorney General because of a dispute with President Nixon over the Watergate scandal, said today that he thought the chances of Vice President Ford’s becoming President before 1976 were “a little better than even.” But he said he did not think Mr. Nixon should resign but should face the constitutional process of impeachment.
Six months after President Nixon penciled “Project Independence” into his November 7 energy speech, several hundred people in a dozen Federal agencies Are involved in the most ambitious exercise in peacetime economic forecasting, planning and policy making in the history of the United States — trying to develop a working definition. As now conceived, the effort—centered in the Federal Energy Administration — will be a continuing exercise, refined from year to year in light of changing conditions. At the moment, then, Project Independence is little more than an idea. Even Mr. Nixon’s more limited; initial use of the phrase — “the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign sources” — lacked clear content.
In sharp contrast to the racially polarized Newark Mayoral campaign four years ago, the contest among the five contenders in Tuesday’s election was phased down in low-key amity. The issues are general and broad — the crime rate, the tax structure and, most of all the personalities of the two principal antagonists — state Senator Anthony Imperiale and the incumbent Mayor, Kenneth Gibson.
The United States government is slowly approaching an agonizing decision on whether to give away more food to nations approaching starvation at the risk of starting a new surge of food prices at home. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz recognizes the problems involved, but does not believe they are imminent because of the enormous American harvest in prospect this year. He believes that the harvest would permit some increases in food aid in the coming 12 months, above what had been planned, without any important effect on domestic prices. Other officials are less confident.
Forty youths were arrested in Athens, Ohio, over the weekend after, authorities said, a group of up to 700 young persons pelted policemen with stones and bottles in the early morning. Most of the arrests occurred Sunday during four hours of sporadic clashes between the group and 60 policemen brought to the university city from surrounding communities. Twenty persons were treated for injuries, police said. The trouble began each night about an hour after a folk festival ended at Ohio University. About 11,000 persons attended the annual two-day music session. One officer said the trouble occurred because the university prohibited persons from camping overnight on school property.
Americans for Democratic Action concluded its 27th annual convention in Washington, D.C., by backing off from its previously solid support for legislation denying special trade status to the Soviet Union. The politically liberal organization split over the question of election campaign financing and finally decided to support partial campaign financing as proposed in legislation now pending in the Senate. On the Soviet trade status question, ADA said it now believed “that because it is presented as an ultimatum, it is less effective in achieving its laudable purpose than a more flexible approach.
The Gay Student Organization of the University of New Hampshire in Durham, which Governor Meldrim Thomson Jr. is trying to ban, bid $1,025 in an unsuccessful effort to win a pancake breakfast at the governor’s mansion and show Thomson “that we are not deranged and sex-perverted.” The group was outbid by William Durkee of Hampton, a Thomson supporter, who went to $1,075 to win breakfast for eight. Louis C. Kelly, an officer of the gay group, charged that the auction officials of the fund raiser for the state’s public television network had discriminated against his group by closing the bidding prematurely. He said he had been prepared to go to $2,000.
The editor of Overdrive magazine, Michael Parkhurst, tried to get wider support for another nationwide shutdown by independent truckers but it appeared that the call for a strike at midnight would bring only scattered results. The majority of the independent driver groups, which sprang up in February during a strike for lower fuel prices and higher freight rates, said they did not plan to strike. Many said they were in sympathy with continuing demands for a fuel price rollback and higher speed limits but either could not afford to shut down or didn’t think it would do any good. Parkhurst said the major issue was getting lower diesel fuel prices and contended that a shutdown was the only way to get public support for. congressional action.
Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley told 300 Oral Roberts University graduates in Tulsa that the Watergate scandal may signal the end of political leaders who “check their ethics at the door. Public profession of piety does not mean leadership.” Bradley added that “prayer breakfasts at the White House and invocations at football games” were no substitute for real religious and ethical beliefs. Bradley was presented an honorary doctor of laws degree by the Rev. Oral Roberts, university founder and president.
Federal investigators believe that someone last week drugged the chief prosecutor in the extortion-conspiracy trial of a Long Island congressman, Representative Angelo Roncallo. The prosecutor, Assistant United States Attorney Peter Schlam, has been put in the protective custody of United States marshals.
Australian John Newcombe won the $50,000 World Championship of Tennis (WCT) final over Swedish teenager Björn Borg, after losing the first set and then sweeping the next three of the best 4-of-7 match. The score was 4–6, 6–3, 6–3, 6–2.
Brazilian driver Emerson Fittipaldi won the 1974 Belgian Grand Prix at Nivelles-Baulers.
In Cincinnati, Clay Kirby twirls a 2-hitter to give the Reds a 4–2 win over the Astros. Cincinnati fans hurl beer, ice, cups and insults at an injured Bob Watson after the Astros left-fielder crashes head-first into the fence. It happens in the nightcap of a doubleheader Houston loss at Riverfront. Watson’s glasses shatter. He gets twelve stitches to his face at a local hospital.
With the best four of seven championship of the National Basketball Association tied at 3 games apiece, the Boston Celtics defeated the host Milwaukee Bucks, 102 to 87, in Game Seven to win the NBA title. It was their 12th title in 18 years, but their first since 1969. As always, the Boston victory was a team effort full of defensive all‐court pressure, a greyhound offense and tons of hustle. Standing out, though, was Dave Cowens, the 6‐foot‐9‐inch center, who led both teams with 28 points and 14 rebounds and survived the test of the fourth quarter with five personal fouls. Today he was more than the equal of Kareem AbdulJabbar, who — although ignored by his teammates on offense for a long period—still tallied 26 points and grabbed 13 rebounds.
Born:
Manoj Gajurel, Nepalese comedian and TV star; in Khebang, Nepal.
Died:
Trudy Goth, 60, German-born American dancer and writer, died of cancer.
Georges Hirsch, 79, former and director of the Paris Opera.
Wayne Maki, 29, Canadian NHL player for the Vancouver Canucks, whose career had ended during the 1972–1973 NHL season when he was diagnosed with brain cancer.
History Diaries 