Criticism of the tentative arms control agreement reached by President Ford and Leonid Brezhnev has begun to develop in Washington, with some administration officials expecting a fight in Congress. The chief focus of the critics was on letting each side place multiple warheads on more than 1,200 of its missiles. Since the Russians have developed larger land-based missiles than the United States, some experts said that with multiple warheads they might be able to endanger American missile sites.
In Moscow, plainclothes agents took Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Tverdokhlebov, the secretary of the Soviet branch of Amnesty International, into custody as he walked home with a friend from a movie. Agents also searched Tverdokhlebov’s apartment. The following day, Tverdokhlebov would issue a statement about the search of his apartment and the confiscation of various items, concluding, “However, they have not yet taken away my fountain pen.”
Two bombs exploded in central London, injuring six persons, hours after Parliament began considering tough new legislation to combat terrorism. Both bombs went off in the Chelsea district, one in a curbside mailbox, the other outside the Chelsea army barracks. The legislation under study would outlaw the Irish Republican Army but its passage may be delayed by a clamor to restore hanging for bombers.
The West German Government today proposed new laws to supervise lawyer-client relationships in radical terrorist cases. The action came a day after a nationwide police sweep that led to 24 arrests, including that of at least one lawyer defending alleged anarchists.
The strains between the Government of President, Valery Giscard d’Estaing and the news media grew today when Premier-Jacques Chirac said he had ordered the police to oust striking newsmen from the national radio-television system’s headquarters.
The Communist party leader in the American republic, where a series of nationalist trials has been stages lately, has been removed from his post.
Secretary General Waldheim said in a report to the Security Council today that the continued presence of the international buffer force separating Israeli and Syrian troops in the Golan Heights “is essential not only for the maintenance of the present quiet in the area, but also to assist any further efforts toward establishment of a just and durable peace in the Middle East.”
Shafiq al-Hout, who heads the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Beirut, announced that the organization had arrested 26 persons in Lebanon and other Arab countries on suspicion of involvement in the hijacking of a British airliner to Tunis last weekend. He said at a news conference that they would be tried in open court and that such incidents harmed the Palestine cause.
Troops were reported moving into the troubled northern Ethiopian province of Eritrea today.
The United Nations General Assembly today addressed a “solemn appeal” to Ethiopia’s military rulers to spare the lives of detained persons.
In Punjab, India, about 100 people were injured in a clash between police and 6,000 student demonstrators.
By a 56 to 54 vote, the General Assembly decided to let the Cambodian government of President Lon Nol keep its seat in the United Nations in the face of a campaign to seat the representatives of Prince Sihanouk’s rival government-in-exile.
Hundreds of riot policemen in Saigon smothered attempts by anti‐government Roman Catholic demonstrators to march from outlying parishes to downtown Saigon early today. The police encircled activist parishes at dawn before the lifting of curfew, setting up triangular barbed‐wire sawhorses and closing off streets with vehicles and men. They appeared to have prevented many people from rallying as planned around churches. But by late morning, rockthrowing and street fighting had broken out in at least two neighborhoods on the edge of the capital. Near the Three Bells Church several hundred youths rampaged through a block‐long area and threw rocks at policemen, who defended themselves with wicker shields. There were also reports of scattered violence in another neighborhood. Unconfirmed reports said that a parish priest and an opposition member of Parliament had been injured.
Lê Đức Thọ, who was North Vietnam’s chief negotiator in the Vietnam peace talks, said here today that his Government would press successive American Presidents for the debt due for “U.S.‐inflicted war wounds.” “President Nixon has not paid and President Ford probably will not either,” Mr. Thọ said at a new conference. “But we will continue to press all future American Presidents.” The North Vietnamese Politburo member, who is Paris on a week’s visit at the invitation of the French Communist party, referred to the provision of the Vietnam accord of January, 1973, that said the United States would “contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction” in North Vietnam and throughout Indochina. Talks on economic aid were begun last year but suspended when the United States charged that North Vietnam was violating the cease‐fire.
China accused the Soviet Union of plundering resources of Outer Mongolia and turning it into an “economic appendage of Soviet revisionism.” At the same time, the Soviet news agency Tass reported that the Soviet Union and Mongolia signed an agreement on further economic cooperation during the visit of the land-locked country by Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid I. Brezhnev, who has returned to Moscow.
Secretary of State Kissinger today resumed talks with Chinese leaders. Spokesmen said the five-hour discussion was held in “a very good atmosphere.” Mr. Kissinger has spent a total of nine hours in meetings since he arrived Monday for his seventh visit to China. Most of the talks have been with Deputy Premier Deng Xiao-ping and the new Foreign Minister, Chiao Kuan-hua.
A senior Japanese economic official said this week that Japan’s economic activity would decline by 1 to 2 per cent, the poorest performance in more than two decades, and that accurate forecasts for next year are impossible to make. Fumio Takagi, Vice Minister of Finance and one of the most powerful men in the Japanese bureaucracy, said “we are still groping for some reliable estimate” for the future growth rate.
Typhoon Irma, with peak winds of 137 m.p.h., dumped heavy rains along the Philippines’ coconut-producing eastern coastal areas and threatened to unleash its full force on the populous Manila area. Weathermen called it the strongest storm to hit the country in four years. It was expected to pass about 60 miles north of Manila by midday today.
A 67-year-old American real estate dealer living in the Mexican town of Cuernavaca awaited news of his kidnaped wife, whose captors have demanded a ransom of $800,000 in foodstuffs to be distributed among Cuernavaca’s poor. Mrs. Sara M. Davis, 50, disappeared from her Cuernavaca home November 14. There was no word about her until Tuesday when two communiques were found in a Mexico City subway station, signed by a Mexican guerrilla group. The group also demanded the division of some of the land supposedly owned by the Davis couple into 1,000 lots for landless families.
A British Airways Boeing 707 carrying Peruvian Foreign Minister Miguel Angel de la Flor Valle among 98 passengers landed safely in Bogota, Colombia, after being diverted following a bomb warning. The jet was on a flight from Lima to Caracas when an anonymous telephone caller in the Peruvian capital said a bomb had been placed aboard. A suspect box was found on the plane, but it was empty.
Leftist university students attacked the American-owned Sheraton Hotel in Lima, Peru, with fire bombs and rocks, smashing its ground floor plate glass windows. No injuries or arrests were reported.
The State Department has instructed the U.S. Embassy in Chile to investigate allegations by an American art teacher that she was tortured while being questioned by Chilean military officials. The department is acting on reports that Amy Conger O’Flaherty, 31, of Chicago, had been tortured by members of the Chilean air force until she signed a confession that she knew “undesirable Chileans.”
Scores of offers to pay for the burial of South Africa’s latest heart donor, 10-year-old Jennifer Schrickker, poured into Cape Town from across the country and even from the United States. Jennifer died in a car accident Sunday but her heart was kept beating in her clinically dead body until it was transplanted Monday into a 58-year-old man in an unprecedented operation that left the patient with two hearts. The offers came after press reports that Jennifer’s parents were struggling to raise funds for the child’s funeral.
Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, predicted a “permanent decline of our nation’s economic and political power” unless world oil prices could be forced down, mainly through a new oil conservation effort in this country. In grim testimony before a congressional committee, he suggested as possible approaches to energy conservation “a sizable tax on gasoline, or on imported oil, or on automobiles according to their weight or horsepower.”
James Neal, chief prosecutor at the Watergate cover-up trial, wound up his long and often bitter cross-examination of former Attorney General John Mitchell with the charge that he was “stonewalling” and hiding the truth. Mr. Mitchell heatedly denied the charges. In answering many questions, he said that he could not recall; to others he said that some allegedly perjurious testimony was “literally true.”
The House Judiciary Committee was accused of moving both too rapidly and too slowly on the nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller as Vice President. Rep. Bella S. Abzug (D-New York) said the Rockefeller family finances should be investigated more fully and a vote put off until next year. But other witnesses said wealth should not disqualify someone from office and said the time already expended had raised a question of whether the 25th Amendment was a practical way to fill a vice presidential vacancy. Chairman Peter W. Rodino Jr. (D-New Jersey) rejected both views and said he would hold to the original schedule, which calls for four or five more days of hearings and a House vote probably during the week of December 16.
The House Judiciary Committee, acting on a request by Attorney General William B. Saxbe, approved a bill to exempt state lotteries from federal anti-gambling laws. Saxbe told officials from 12 states on September 6 that their lottery systems violated federal laws prohibiting transportation of lottery information across state lines. The new bill would allow publication and broadcasting of advertising, lists of prizes and winners and other information. Mailing of tickets, however, would be confined to the particular state. Similar legislation is pending in the Senate.
A bill limiting the Secret Service to providing full security at only one private residence of a President or Vice President was approved on a voice vote by the House Judiciary Committee. The bill would also limit expenditures to items requested in writing by the Secret Service director. Costs could not exceed $10,000 for each additional private residence. The legislation was prompted by disclosures of Rep. Jack Brooks (D-Texas), author of the bill, that the government had spent nearly $17 million on salaries and improvements — including swimming pool, shuffleboard and landscaping — at the private homes of former President Richard M. Nixon.
Arnold R. Miller, the president of the United Mine Workers of America, flew home to the West Virginia coal fields today to join in the union leadership’s campaign for a favorable membership vote on a tentative contract with the coal industry.
Police were put on a state of alert when a wave of sabotage that has crippled Puerto Rico’s water supply spread to the electric service. A bomb damaged a power substation in the San Juan area and another damaged a sewage treatment plant, police reported. The new incidents came as some sections of the San Juan area remained without water for the second day. The Aqueducts and Sewers Authority has reported almost daily acts of sabotage against the water system since its 3,000-member independent union went on strike a month ago.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People vowed at a conference that ended in Topeka, Kansas yesterday to concentrate on Northern school segregation, with a goal of complete desegregation in five years.
Dr. Christiaan Barnard, the South African heart transplant surgeon, is encouraged but not yet reporting success for the operation on Monday in which he gave a patient a second heart. In a telephone interview at his Cape Town home, he said he was eager to do the same operation on a waiting patient as soon as a suitable donor is found. He said the two hearts beat independently at different rates.
Burton Pugach, who was convicted 13 years ago of hiring three thugs to blind his girlfriend, Linda Riss, so that “no one else will want you,” married her today. She had terminated their engagement when she found out that he was married. While he was in prison his wife divorced him. Released in March, he proposed marriage to Miss Riss on a television program she saw. The lye attack left her legally blind but she reportedly has some sight in one eye.
In one of the closest elections in the history of the United States Congress, a recount showed that Democrat John A. Durkin — initially declared to have lost the November 5 race for U.S. Senator for New Hampshire to Republican Louis C. Wyman by 355 votes (110,716 to 110,361) — was found to have actually won the race by 10 votes (110,924 to 110,914). Wyman filed an appeal to the state’s Ballot Law Commission and on December 24, the second recount would show an even closer election.
A “statistically significant” number of cancerous tumors were found in rats fed large amounts of the chemical NTA, or nitriolotriacetic acid, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare announced. The chemical once was expected to replace phosphates, which have caused serious pollution problems, in detergents. The industry voluntarily stopped using NTA four years ago after scientists questioned its safety. Now a two-year study at the Stanford Research Institute has disclosed a large number of urinary tract tumors in rats that were fed extremely large dosages over their lifetimes. HEW said, however, it could not estimate the significance of the findings to humans.
The federal government expressed interest in a new engine developed by two Vermont brothers, which they claim radically reduces gasoline consumption while meeting antipollution standards. Edward and Robert LaForce of Richmond, Vermont, are now demonstrating the engine at various spots along the eastern seaboard. Their supporters claim it cuts gasoline consumption by twothirds. The engine was demonstrated most recently at a racetrack in Dover, Delaware, with federal officials present. U.S. Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tennessee) said Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Russell Train has agreed to test it at the EPA facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The Tennessee Valley Authority will have to charge more for electric power soon because of a drop in the use of electricity, an official said as TVA directors prepared to meet in Chattanooga. James Bradshaw, head of the TVA power marketing division, said conservation measures had resulted in a “worsening financial picture” for the giant government-controlled power producer. At the same time, TVA announced that it may cut power to its customers by as much as 30% within three to five weeks.
A public hearing on possible storage of high-level nuclear wastes in Nevada will be held December 12 in Salt Lake City, an Atomic Energy Commission spokesman said in Las Vegas. He said Salt Lake City was selected because it is located roughly equidistant among three sites under consideration for storage of the wastes — the Nevada test site, the National Engineering Laboratories in Idaho and the Hanford Reservation in Washington state.
Miss South Africa, 19-year-old Anneline Kriel, took over as the new Miss World after Helen Morgan renounced the title because of undesirable publicity that she said might affect her 18-month-old son. Miss Kriel was a runner-up in last Friday’s contest in London. Miss Morgan, who entered as Miss United Kingdom, was the first unmarried mother to win the title. A source said the Welsh-born beauty had been upset and distressed by the constant questioning of reporters about her private life.
At W. K. Kellogg Airport in Battle Creek, Michigan, five members of the U.S. Navy were killed in the crash of a Navy plane on a training mission from Pensacola, Florida.
St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Bake McBride wins the National League Rookie of the Year Award.
Bowie Kuhn suspends New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner for 2 years as a result of Steinbrenner’s conviction for illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon and others.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 619.29 (+2.03, +0.33%).
Born:
Nick Ferguson, NFL safety (New York Jets, Denver Broncos, Houston Texans), in Miami, Florida.
Rashod Swinger, NFL defensive tackle (Arizona Cardinals), in Paterson, New Jersey.
Charles Kirby, NFL fullback (Tampa Bay Buccaneers), in Cairo, Georgia.
Ken Ray, MLB pitcher (Kansas City Royals, Atlanta Braves), in Atlanta, Georgia.
Jennifer O’Dell, American actress (“The Lost World”), in Ridgecrest, California.
Wendy Houvenaghel, Northern Ireland-born British Olympic racing cyclist; in Magherafelt, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.
Died:
Louis B Russell Jr, 49, American longest living heart transplant.
Agnes de Lima, 87, American writer on education.
History Diaries 