President Ford proposed in Tokyo that Japan and the United States show the world how to deal with the new difficulties of inflation and recession. Declaring that the United States would remain a trustworthy ally, he said that the two countries share a resolve to maintain stability in East Asia, to aid development in countries needing help and jointly to seek diplomatic and political rather than military solutions.
Kidnappers released the son of one of Italy’s richest men for what sources close to the investigation said might have been a record ransom of more than $10 million. Giuseppe Lucchini, 22, seized by gunmen who staged a car accident on a street in Brescia, was set free near a police station in the center of the northern industrial city. Officials refused to confirm reports that steel magnate Luigi Lucchini paid as much as $10.6 million as his son’s ransom.
French President Valery Giscard. d’Estaing said the nationwide wave of strikes which culminated in a general strike Tuesday in fact had only limited support from French workers. “The mass of workers,” he told a cabinet meeting, “are conscious of the difficulties of France’s economy and have shown they do not want to aggravate the situation by actions not directly linked to their professional concerns.”
Explosives planted in a sewer killed a young Northern Ireland policeman, and a gunman firing a submachine gun killed a bartender. The separate attacks brought the death toll in more than five years of strife in Ulster to 1,121.
John Stonehouse, British Member of Parliament for Walsall North, faked his own death, leaving a pile of clothes on Miami Beach to make it appear that he had drowned. He would be arrested on December 24 in Melbourne, Australia, and later imprisoned for three years for fraud, deception and theft.
Britain, France and Italy urged a Middle East settlement enabling Israel to live peacefully within her pre-1967 war borders. In the United Nations General Assembly debate on the “Question of Palestine,” they reflected the position taken by the European Economic Community and first stated by West Germany in Tuesday’s debate. Britain’s delegate stressed that the right of Palestinians must not infringe or challenge the right of Israel to exist as a state. The Common Market position was first presented to the Assembly by West Germany’s delegate yesterday. Western European diplomats declared themselves gratified today that their governments had been able to reach agreement on the Palestinian issue. Western Europe’s new position, as it emerged in the United Nations yesterday and today, was termed a victory for Common Market forces that advocate a joint policy in important international issues: France, Italy and Ireland reportedly received assurances from West Germany and, possibly, the United States, that they would be backed up in event of Arab economic reprisals.
At the burial in Beit Shean of four civilians killed in Tuesday’s raid by Palestinian infiltrators, grief for the Israeli victims was mingled with shame over the burning of the bodies of three guerrillas killed by Israeli troops and the body of an Israeli mistakenly thought to be a Palestinian. Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren declared that Jewish law prohibited the desecration of bodies even of one’s enemies.
The general conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization adopted a resolution today to withhold aid from Israel because of what it called her “persistence in altering the historical feature’s” of Jerusalem “by undertaking excavations which constitute a danger to its monuments.” The resolution was adopted by a vote of 64 to 27, with 26 abstentions. The resolution had been approved November 7 in UNESCO’s cultural committee by a vote of 54 to 21 with 25 abstentions. Today’s resolution called on the director general of the organization to withhold assistance from Israel in education, science and culture until “compliance with UNESCO resolutions and decisions” by Israel. The United States and most Western European countries, including France, voted against the resolution.
Four Egyptian vessels today corn pleted the journey through the Suez Canal from Port Said to Suez, the first craft to do so since 1967, naval sources in Suez reported tonight.
Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet Communist party chief, has expanded his coming trip to Egypt early next year to include two other Arab countries. Mr. Brezhnev will travel to Syria and Iraq following his visit to Egypt, the Soviet press reported today. The announcement came as Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi of Iran ended a three‐day official visit to Moscow and flew home after discussions with the Kremlin leadership. Tonight, Mr. Brezhnev left Moscow on his way to Vladivostok, where he will meet this weekend with President Ford. There was no indication that the Soviet leadership had been able to persuade the Shah to settle Iran’s differences with Iraq, which have been aggravated by the Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq. At a Kremlin dinner Monday night, President Nikolai V. Podgorny appealed in a speech for “a settlement of Iranian‐Iraqi differences at the conference table.”
As children hurry to school in Damascus in the chilly mornings, Syrian Air Force jets whine in swift flight over this capital. The streets and markets are crowded with soldiers in uniform. Camouflaged military trucks and jeeps are dominant in the city’s traffic. There is a military mood, but Syria, has been in a state of mobilization for so long, since well before the war in October of last year, that civilians here take it all for granted. When war scares spread through the Middle East last week, touched off by reports of Israeli troop movements toward the Golan Heights, Damascus seemed strikingly calm. Western embassies sent their military attachés into the countryside to check on Syrian military movements, but they found no evidence that guns and tanks were being moved toward the cease‐fire line.
The outskirts of Damascus and the hills to the west are heavily fortified. Travelers coming from Lebanon see tanks dug into defensive positions and anti‐aircraft guns on the hills. Many antitank ditches have been dug in the fields toward the front. The network of SAM anti‐aircraft missiles ringing Damascus has been expanded. One Western military observer said that Syrian ground forces had been supplied with large number of Soviet‐made wire‐guided antitank missiles. The observer expressed the opinion that an Israeli tank force trying to drive on Damascus through these defenses would be exposed to “very severe losses of equipment and heavy’ casualties, even with air superiority.” Most diplomatic observers here conclude that Syria has concentrated since the war last year, in strengthening defenses rather than offensive ability.
Ships from the United States, Great Britain, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey, including the 60,000-ton American carrier USS Constellation, are participating in the largest naval exercise ever held in the Indian Ocean.
An explosion killed two members of a team investigating a tunnel in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, U.S. Navy Commander Robert M. Ballinger and a South Korean officer, and injured six other military personnel, five American and one South Korean. The tunnel had been discovered five days earlier.
Filipino law clerk Napoleon Lechoco, now an inmate at a Washington, D.C., mental institution, realized his anguished dream of seeing his eldest son in America. The sudden journey from Manila of 16-year-old Napoleon Lechoco Jr. was agreed to by the Philippine government in exchange for the peaceful surrender of the elder Lechoco early Tuesday after he had held Ambassador Eduardo Z. Romauldez at gunpoint for 11 hours. Before visiting his father, the Lechoco youth paid a call on Romauldez and expressed his regret over the incident.
A Honduran health official says that a Cuban medical brigade that spent 55 days in Honduras helping victims of Hurricane Fifi was expelled for spreading Communist propaganda. “The Cubans were involved in openly subversive activity,” said Dr. Humberto Pineda Santos, adding that they distributed two Cuban newspapers that the military considers propaganda.
Eight alleged left-wing guerrillas serving prison sentences for bank robberies and other assaults will be released Friday, a military tribunal announced in Quito, Ecuador. The eight include six men named as “political prisoners” by Amnesty International, the London-based civil liberties group.
A high-ranking member of Chile’s most important clandestine Marxist resistance movement was shot and killed in a downtown Santiago gunfight. The man, described as a member of the Revolutionary Left Movement, had just been picked up by security men on a street when he whipped out a pistol. In the ensuing gun battle, the captive, who was not identified, was fatally wounded.
Argentine Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Ibarzabal, kidnaped by leftist guerrillas of the People’s Revolutionary Army 10 months ago in a raid on a tank garrison, was shot to death in a “people’s jail” cell fitted into the back of a pickup truck just as police closed in on it, police said. They arrested one man after the shootout with an undetermined number of guerrillas in a Buenos Aires suburb. Two cars accompanying the truck escaped. Police in Cordoba province reported killing four suspected guerrillas in a shootout.
Lufthansa Flight 540 crashed in Nairobi, Kenya, due to a mechanical failure, killing 59 of its 157 passengers. The Lufthansa airliner crashed and burned shortly after takeoff from Nairobi, in Kenya, going from Frankfurt to Johannesburg. There were 59 persons killed and 98 who survived the first fatal crash of a Boeing 747 jumbo jetliner. Most passengers were Germans. The airline said the survivors included 12 American citizens.
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly overrode President Ford’s vetoes of two measures — for vocational rehabilitation and for making government information more accessible to the public. The Senate is expected to take similar action by less dramatic margins. On a third measure, to compensate two reporters accidentally wounded by United States marines in 1965, the House vote failed to override by 31 votes.
The Senate Rules Committee, due to vote today on the Vice‐Presidential nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller, delayed action until Friday because three of its members were unable to be present. This report came from Senator Howard W. Cannon of Nevada, chairman of the committhat concluded on Monday seven days of hearings on the nomination, in two sessions some seven weeks apart. Mr. Cannon said also that the House Judiciary Committee, which starts its hearings on the nomination tomorrow, had nothing concerning Mr. Rockefeller “that we do not already have.” The full nine‐member Senate commitee, he said, is expected to vote Friday morning to report the nomination to the full Senate and to recommend favorable action. He said it was a “fair assumption” that the vote would be favorable, adding, “though I’m not sure it would be unanimous.” Mr. Cannon himself has said that he will vote in favor of confirming the nomination, and he added, “I would assume that all of the Republicans would.” Of the remaining four Democrats on the committee, he said, “A couple might not vote for the nominee.”
White House tapes played at the Watergate cover-up trial included a directive from President Nixon to his aides in April, 1973, to say they had indeed raised money for the original Watergate defendants to keep them from talking to the press, not to the authorities. This was deleted from the edited transcript that Mr. Nixon released last spring.
The United Mine Workers will seek to reopen negotiations in the hope of “adjustments” to make the new contract acceptable to the union’s bargaining council and ultimately the membership. Industry spokesmen said their negotiators would undoubtedly meet but there was no sign they would agree. The delay will mean that the nine-day-old miner’s strike will probably run into December, affecting 400,000 persons in coal-dependent industries.
The Department of Justice filed an anti-trust suit in federal court in Washington against the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the world’s largest privately owned corporation. Alleging an illegal monopoly of the telecommunications business, the suit seeks to force A.T.&T. to divest itself of its manufacturing subsidiary, the Western Electric Company. It would also require A.T.&T. to get out of much of the long-distance telephone business or else rid itself of some or all of the 23 local telephone companies owned in whole or in part.
The federal bill to aid mass transit, on which hopes for saving the 35-cent fare in New York City are riding, cleared the Rules Committee of the House of Representatives by an overwhelming voice vote. The motion, reversing a previous action bottling up the bill, came from the panel’s senior Republican, who said he had been prompted by a telephone call from President Ford.
Lack of discipline again was named by adults and students alike. in a Gallup Poll as the top problem facing public schools. It has been named the No. 1 problem in the last five of six annual surveys. An important aspect of discipline concerns what to do with the student who is not interested in school work. Many educators have suggested that such students be permitted to leave rather than waste their time and that of other students. But the public has not accepted that point of view, chiefly because no agency is prepared to take responsibility. for those released.
Amtrak President Roger Lewis, 62, advised the board of directors that he wanted to be relieved of the post “as soon as possible after a new president can be found.” He cited personal reasons for quitting the $60,000-a-year post. But Lewis “presumably” is staying on as chairman of the board of Amtrak, said Brian Duff, news director. Members of the board are presidential appointees. In his statement, Lewis said he had directed the national rail passenger company for 32 years and the organizational work had been largely completed.
Negotiators were cautiously optimistic that a settlement could be reached soon in the strike which shut down the nationwide operation of Greyhound Bus Lines last Monday. About 16,000 drivers and other workers were affected. Since the strike, neither side has indicated what the union now wants and what Greyhound has offered. The main stumbling block, however, is understood to be money.
Americans are being urged to fast today as a practical and symbolic gesture of concern over the starvation that threatens to claim millions of lives this year. Spokesmen for Oxfam-America, the U.S. branch of the British-based Oxford Famine Relief Committee, estimated that at least 200,000 persons would participate. It was suggested that they limit themselves to coffee, tea, fruit juice or broth for 24 hours and donate the money they normally would spend on food to an Oxfam fund for the hungry.
A jury ordered the death penalty for two young airmen it found guilty in the April 22 torture slayings of three persons in a stereo shop robbery at Ogden, Utah. The District Court jury returned its verdict in Farmington, Utah, against Dale S. Pierre, 21, Trinidad, and William A. Andrews, 19, Jonesboro, Louisiana, who had been stationed at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. Pierre and Andrews were convicted of killing three persons in a $24,000 holdup. Authorities said the three victims were shot in the head and had liquid drain cleaner poured down their throats.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed a class action lawsuit against NASA and the U.S. Civil Service Commission over alleged discrimination against African-Americans and women in hiring and promotion at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Two black employees of the Johnson Space Center in Houston were named plaintiffs but the suit also was brought as a class action. It includes all women and blacks employed or who sought employment by the federal government.
The Environmental Protection Agency has called on the Atomic Energy Commission to develop a comprehensive plan for permanent underground disposal of atomic waste. Failure to come up with a plan in the “reasonable future would place the nuclear energy industry in a rather unfavorable light,” according to Dr. William D. Rowe of the EPA. Rowe gave his views during an AEC hearing on a tentative environmental impact statement for aboveground storage of waste from the nuclear power industry in the 1980s.
Senator Norris Cotton (R-New Hampshire) said he would teach a course at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, next spring on “what makes Congress tick.” He should be an authority. At 74, he is retiring in January after 28 years in Congress, 20 of them as a senator. Cotton was sworn in with Richard M. Nixon as a freshman congressman in 1947 and has remained long-time friends with the former President.
The first survey of deafness ‘in the United, States in 40 years has found that the impairment is twice as prevalent among Americans as was previously believed.
Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert F. Kennedy, and four of their children attended a brief Mass at the late senator’s gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery. They were accompanied by Joan Kennedy, wife of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and her children. It was the 50th anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s birth.
Jeff Burroughs, the Texas Rangers outfielder who batted .301 with 25 home runs and a league-leading 118 RBI, wins the American League MVP Award.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 609.59 (-4.46, -0.73%).
Born:
Drew Ginn, Australian rower (Olympic gold medalist, coxless four, 1996, 2000, 2004), in Leongatha, Victoria, Australia.
Tra Thomas, NFL tackle (Pro Bowl, 2001, 2002, 2004; Phildelphia Eagles, Jacksonville Jaguars), in DeLand, Florida.
Jerald Moore, NFL running back (St Louis Rams, New Orleans Saints), in Houston, Texas
Marissa Ryan, American actress (Elizabeth MacGillis-“Major Dad”), in Manhattan, New York, New York.
Kurt Krömer (stage name of Alexander Bojcan), German television presenter, comedian and actor; in West Berlin, West Germany.
Died:
S. Everett Gleason, 69, American historian and intelligence analyst, died of lung cancer.
Ben West (born Raphael Benjamin West), 63, American attorney and politician, former Mayor of Nashville.
History Diaries 