President Nixon’s departure tomorrow for a nine-day trip to the Middle East will mark the first time an American President has toured the Arab countries and Israel while in office. The Arab countries reportedly look upon his trip with expectation. American officials believe that Mr. Nixon will further accelerate the improvement of Arab-American relations, and that he will give a new pledge of continued American support for Israel when he meets the leaders of the new Israeli government.
The field commander of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force stood at a point between Israeli and Syrian front, lines today and said that the separation of the two armies and their equipment was “going smoothly.” The commander, Colonel Tauno Kuosa of Finland, declined to give specifics on the actual progress of the disengagement, which was stipulated in the agreement signed by the two sides in Geneva 10 days ago. But he said that in the two days he had been supervising the separation, under the command of Brigadier General Gonzalo Briceno of Peru, he had noticed “no problems.” His assessment of the withdrawal was confirmed, in effect, by Brigadier General Adnan Tayara of Syria, who signed the agreement in Geneva and who is in charge of Syrian fulfillment of it in the field.
Meeting in Egypt, the Palestinian National Council, legislative body for the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization, voted to adopt the “Ten Point Program”, including the establishment of an Arab-Palestinian state in the entire region of Palestine within the pre-1948 borders, and the return to their original hoes of all Palestinian refugees who fled Israel.
Israeli and Lebanese military actions since the May 15 massacre of Israeli students at Maalot by infiltrators from Lebanon have sharply curtailed Arab guerrilla activities across the northern border, a high‐ranking Israeli Army officer said today. The Lebanese have restricted, the freedom of the terrorists along the border “to prevent things from getting out of hand,” he said, and “a great part of the guerrilla presence in the area disappeared.” The officer asked that his identity be withheld. While acknowledging measures taken by the Lebanese, he said the Israelis had been mainly responsible for the relative tranquility now prevailing. He said the punishing Israeli air strikes against terrorist concentrations and hiding places as well as the Israeli patrols on both sides of the border had made it difficult for the terrorists to operate.
The officer noted a sharp drop in the number of rocket and bazooka attacks across the border as well as attempted minings. Some murder squads have apparently made their way from deep inside Lebanon and crossed the border but in all cases since May 15 they have been killed, captured or forced back before they could carry out their missions, he said.
Israel’s version of the Nobel prizes — the Harvey prizes — were awarded to Sir Alan Howard Cottrell, a former chief scientific adviser to the British government and now master of Jesus College of Cambridge University, and Gershom Scholem, professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Cottrell, a metallurgy specialist, was cited for work on the mechanical properties of materials. Scholem has contributed what has become a standard text on the cabala and esoteric texts of Jewish mystics. The awards are named for Los Angeles businessman Leo Harvey who donated $1 million to set up the annual award, totaling $35,000 this year.
Ten civilians were killed and eight others wounded when they were hit by Communist gunfire while fishing on the Bassac River five miles south of Phnom Penh, field reporters said. North of the Cambodian capital, rebel troops stepped up their siege of two government garrisons at Long Vek, killing six defenders and wounding 36, according to reports.
Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wisconsin) said he has found evidence in recent Pentagon testimony to Congress of four direct U.S. violations of the Vietnam peace agreement. He said all four violations involved providing planes to the Saigon government that were superior to those it had when the agreement was signed 17 months ago. Pentagon spokesmen said that in general the United States had given Saigon only planes that had roughly the same capability as those lost, destroyed or worn out by the South Vietnamese, as provided in the accords.
In the two months since the formation of the new coalition Government in Laos, the Communist‐oriented Pathet Lao has taken a clear lead over its disorganized rightist and neutralist competitors. Already the Pathet Lao is sounding like the dominant partner of the new arrangement as many of its erstwhile enemies begin—as one diplomat put it— “trimming their sails to strong winds out of Samneua.” Samneua is the Pathet Lao’s administrative capital. The town, and the four‐fifths of Laos that the Pathet Lao controls with its North Vietnamese allies, remain out of bounds to neutralist and rightist officials from Vientiane. In contrast, the Pathet Lao has virtually taken military control of the up‐country royal capital of Luang Prabang and, here in Vientiane, has people at ministerial or subministerial levels in the most important Government agencies.
The lopsidedness of the February 21, 1973, peace agreement, which reflected the Pathet Lao’s preponderant military position at the time, was always apparent on paper, but some rightists find it much more galling in reality. “We are losing, we are losing,” lamented a prominent rightist Cabinet minister, surveying an elaborate, colored organizational chart that showed the Pathet Lao’s movement into places of power. “They have taken the National Assembly, the economy, they are in the Ministry of Defense — and what do we have of theirs? Nothing.” The eclipse of the National Assembly, a collection of mostly right‐wing, reputedly venal but freely elected deputies, was the clearest sign of Pathet Lao power in the new coalition.
Mending a break that occurred more than 50 years ago, Portugal and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations. Portugal’s new democratic government, which has begun a general move toward the resumption of relations with Communist countries, agreed to exchange ambassadors. Portugal had withdrawn its ambassador almost 56 years earlier, in 1917, after the overthrow of the monarchy in Russia.
About 200 members of the disbanded Portuguese secret police have been seized in Mozambique in connection with alleged atrocities under the ousted Lisbon regime, officials in Nampula said. The public has been invited to come forward by June 17 to lay charges against the men for specific crimes.
France’s President Valery Giscard d’Estaing fired his Reform Minister, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, for denouncing the government for announcing that it would resume atmospheric nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean. Reform Minister Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber was dismissed from the new French government for criticizing its policy of continuing nuclear tests. He had accused chiefs of the armed forces of virtually forcing the government to start the next series of tests in the Pacific this summer.
Italy is seeking a big loan from the United States or West Germany — probably more than $1 billion — to bail herself out of her financial crisis, diplomats in Rome said. The more than 2,500 tons of gold in the vaults of the Bank of Italy are believed to qualify as collateral.
An Irish Countess said that she and her husband, the Earl of Donoughmore, who was bloodstained and scarred, were “very thrilled” to have been freed after four days of captivity by their kidnappers, who they believe were members of the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army. The couple were abducted from their home near Clonmel, Ireland, and set free in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.
The Soviet Bolshoi Ballet was met by about 50 demonstrators chanting and waving banners in behalf of Soviet Jewry when the ballet arrived at a London hotel. A spokesman for the demonstrators said the protest was but a foretaste of a “spectacular event” that would be staged when the Bolshoi opens its six-week London season Wednesday. He refused to elaborate.
Governor-General Jules Leger, a largely ceremonial representative of the British monarch in Canada, was in stable condition after suffering a stroke in Sherbrooke, Quebec, officials said. Leger, 61, was stricken Saturday night during a dinner at the University of Sherbrooke. He is in University Hospital.
A flood of mud and water swept down a steep valley in the Andes Mountains of Peru in the unleashing of a giant lake formed when a landslide blocked the River Mantaro. Thousands of families were evacuated from the area before the waters destroyed part of the small town of Anco and swept away about 20 small settlements. The landslide six weeks ago killed 450 persons.
The National Security Council, then headed by Henry A. Kissinger before he became secretary of state, was directly responsible for ordering the FBI to end 17 so-called “national security” wiretaps on newsmen and officials in 1971, the New York Times said. It attributed the story to “highly placed sources.” The wiretaps began in 1969 and the last eight taps were stopped in February, 1971, when Alexander M. Haig Jr., then a Kissinger deputy, allegedly telephoned the orders to the FBI. During hearings on his nomination as secretary of state, Kissinger told the Senate that he never dealt “explicitly” with the question of ending the wiretaps.
You come from the heart of America and you have touched our hearts,” President Nixon told 1,400 cheering people who attended a “Citizen’s Congress” in Washington sponsored by the National Citizens Committee for Fair Play to the Presidency. Mr. Nixon said that “I shall do nothing that will weaken this office.” He and all the other speakers attacked the news media.
A report by the staff of the Senate Watergate committee charges that the Nixon administration and the President’s re-election campaign officials attempted, and sometimes succeeded in, efforts to interfere with the lawful functioning of the government for the purpose of rewarding the President’s political supporters and punishing his enemies. “A concerted and concealed” effort by White House officials in 1972, the report said, to divert resources of the executive branch may have been a “conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
A bill proposed by the White House Office of Telecommunications that would have provided long-range financing of public television, has been “flatly rejected” by President Nixon without discussion or explanation, according to sources close to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They said that his terse statement suggested that federal support for public television be decreased.
Federal Mediation and Conciliation W. J. Usery Jr., director of the Service, said the unionization of policemen was increasing and communities that refused to deal with the issue were “asking for trouble.” Police unions “must be recognized and accorded their legitimate rights,” Usery said in a speech for the opening in Washington, D.C., of a symposium on police-labor relations.
Senator Charles H. Percy (R-Illinois) called for a government crackdown on the hearing aid industry that would limit sales to prescriptions only and bring an end to what he called immoral prices and profits. Industry spokesmen retorted that Percy, who wears a hearing aid, was trying to further his 1976 presidential hopes with a “biased… and inaccurate” appeal. Percy, in a letter to the Food and Drug Administration, said that many of the 15,000 dealers and salesmen “are not medically qualified nor adequately equipped to diagnose and treat acute ear disorders.”
Members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union began voting tonight on a proposed three-year contract. If the union’s 110,000 members ratify the tentative agreement, the strike they started June 1 against 750 manufacturers will end, and they could return to work Wednesday.
The bodies of three Indian men, each bearing multiple stab wounds, were found in a field south of Gallup, New Mexico, McKinley County Sheriff Bob Bass said. The deaths bring to nine the number of Indian males slain in McKinley and San Juan counties since May, 1973. Bass said two of the victims were believed to be Zunis and the third apparently was a Navajo. “We can’t find a motive,” Bass said, but he added that the slayings apparently were not related to the earlier killings.
Five patients, three of them being held in connection with murder charges, escaped from the state mental hospital in Chattahoochee, Florida, and took two hospital employees as hostages but released them unharmed several hours later when their stolen car bogged down in the mud, police said. A hospital spokesman said a manhunt was under way in a wooded area about four miles from the institution. The escapees fled the stalled car on foot.
The Massachusetts National Guard has dropped jail sentences against four men who were court-martialed for not attending drill sessions in Billerica. But the guard would not say why the sentences had been dropped or make any comment on the case. The men had been sentenced to 25 days in the Middlesex County House of Correction but Sheriff John Buckley released the four Friday night after three of them had been jailed about 24 hours and the other for nine days. Buckley called the sentences a “miscarriage of justice.”
The new Northrop YF-17A American fighter jet made its first flight. The next day, it would become the first U.S. jet to break the sound barrier in level flight when not in afterburner. The YF-17 began as an internal development of the F-5 Freedom Fighter, called the N-300, which featured a lengthened fuselage, leading-edge wing root extensions (LERX), twin vertical stabilizers canted outward, and more powerful engines. As that design matured into the P-530 and P-600, the wing was moved to a mid-fuselage position, and the leading-edge extensions were lengthened further until they reached the cockpit, giving the new fighter its characteristic “cobra hood” shape and inspiring its unofficial Cobra nickname. In a carryover from the F-5, the YF-17 was also powered by two engines, in this case General Electric YJ101 afterburning turbofans. For ease of maintenance, the design allowed for the engines to be lowered directly from the aircraft without requiring disassembly of the empennage. The YF-17 also supported partial fly-by-wire control surfaces.
Katharine Cornell, the actress Alexander Woollcott said was “The First Lady of the Theater,” died at her home in Martha’s Vineyard. She was 81 years old. Miss Cornell made her Broadway debut in 1921 in “Nice People.” In that year she met and was married to Guthrie McClintic, then a casting director. Their marriage lasted until Mr. McClintic’s death 40 years later.
The newspaper comic strip “Dotty Dripple,” written by Buford Tune and similar to the older and more popular Blondie, ended slightly less than 30 years after its June 26, 1944, launch.
Although the second round of the World Chess Olympics carried a great number of unfinished games at the end of the first playing session, the Soviet Union scored a quick 4–0 sweep against the Dutch Antilles in Nice, France. The United States had no trouble with Rhodesia, winning 4 to 0. Yugoslavia, another high-ranked contingent, defeated Uruguay 4 to 0.
Sporting CP defeated Benfica, 2 to 1, to win the In the Taça de Portugal.
The South American nation of Colombia was recommended by the executive board of FIFA to host the 1986 World Cup, to be played during the month of June, 1986, after a successful bid by the Federación Colombiana de Fútbol. The decision required full approval of the FIFA delegates, who were meeting in Frankfurt, West Germany, in conjunction with the 1974 World Cup. By 1982, Colombia would have to cancel its plans because of a lack of progress in bringing stadiums in Bogotá, Cali, Barranquilla, Medellin and Bucaramanga and other infrastructure to meet FIFA requirements. The 1986 World Cup would instead be awarded to Mexico.
Jody Scheckter won the 1974 Swedish Grand Prix at the Scandinavian Raceway.
Richie Zisk of Pittsburgh hits for the cycle and drives in 5, Willie Stargell clubs a grand slam, and the Pirates roll over the Giants, 14–1. Jerry Reuss is the winner. Stargell adds a 2-run homer in the 9th to finish with 6 RBIs.
Born:
Randy Winn, MLB outfielder (MLB All Star, 2002; Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Seattle Mariners, San Francisco Giants, New York Yankees, St. Louis Cardinals) and analyst (NBC Sports Bay Area), in Los Angeles, California.
Scarborough Green, MLB outfielder and pinch runner (St. Louis Cardinals, Texas Rangers), in Creve Coeur, Missouri.
Jon Harris, MLB defensive end (Philadelphia Eagles), in Inwood, New York.
Samoth (stage name for Tomas Thormodsæter Haugen), Norwegian guitarist and black metal musician; in Hammerfest, Norway.
Died:
Miguel Ángel Asturias, 74, Guatemalan writer and 1967 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate for “Hombres de maíz.”
Phillips Tead, 80, American character actor (“The Front Page”; “Lightnin’”; “Fighting Blade”; “The Adventures of Superman”).
Katherine Cornell, 81, German-born American stage actress
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