Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger today championed tactical nuclear weapons as indispensable to the defense of Western Europe and reportedly blocked a Dutch proposal that the weapons be de‐emphasized. The proposal, made at a meeting here of defense ministers of North Atlantic Treaty Organization, countries, called for the weapons to be bargaining counters in the current East‐West talks on reducing forces in Central Europe. At a news conference at the close of the two‐day session, Mr. Schlesinger said that the defense ministers had done no more than agree to explore the Dutch proposal, made by Defense Minister Henk Vredeling. Another participant in the session reported that there had been no support from other ministers for Mr. Vredeling’s suggestion.
Roy Mason, Britain’s Defense Minister, warned the meeting that a reduction in Western tactical nuclear weapons would lower the nuclear threshold and accelerate the use of strategic nuclear weapons to defend Western Europe. Britain, Mr. Mason said, would “go along” with any American reassessment of the tactical nuclear stockpile in the interests of greater accuracy and economy of warhead yield. But such an exploration should not affect the conception of tactical nuclear weapons as an essential element in the NATO deterrent, he said. Approximately 7,000 American tactical nuclear weapons are in Europe. Two‐thirds of them are for Allied use in war. The Soviet Union is said to have about 3,500 weapons in the area.
The U.S. House of Representatives tonight approved by a vote of 201 to 190 a $2.6 billion foreign aid authorization bill that reduces military assistance to Cambodia and extends the present cutoff of military aid to Turkey until June 30.
The Senate voted 68 to 27 to extend U.S. fishing rights from 12 to 200 miles offshore but the bill apparently is already doomed in the House of Representatives. President Ford is opposed, and Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan), chairman of the House fisheries subcommittee, has said he will not call it up for action this year.
European officials expressed gratification today over the ease with which leaders of the European Common Market countries had agreed this week on a series of measures to strengthen the market’s institutions. At the same time they admitted with new candor that they had failed to advance on the crucial economic front during their two‐day conference, which ended last night. A communiqué issued late last night showed that the government heads were able to move forward on a number of political points that had been the focus of highly emotional deadlock for over a decade. It proved, in the words of French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing that “Europe Lives” —but also, as his spokesman said today, that the Common Market has been unable to settle its deepest problems, now summed up in the words “recession, inflation, energy.”
After day‐long debate stemming fron increased terrorism in England by the Irish Republican Army the House of Commons tonight rejected a move to restore the death penalty. In the first such test of opinion in 18 months, the House voted, 369 to 217, against return of the gallows. The rejected motion urged hanging those convicted of “acts of terrorism causing death.” Two hours before the vote, a bomb was thrown through window at the Naval and Military Club in London’s Piccadilly but no one was hurt. Shots were fired at three taxi‐drivers who chased two men after the explosion. They were not hit. Most of the pressure for restoration of the death penalty came from the Opposition Conservative party. But all party leaders regarded the issue as matter of conscience and allowed members to vote freely without the restraints of party discipline.
About 90,000 workers staged illegal strikes throughout Spain and demonstrators clashed with police in the Basque country, according to labor sources. Anti-government demonstrations were reported in San Sebastián, Hernani, Renteria and Tolosa. Strike action centered on the Basque provinces in northern Spain where underground left-wing groups called a one-day general strike to protest rising prices and the treatment of political prisoners.
Premier Konstantine Karamanlis told the Greek people tonight that they faced a year of austerity and sacrifice as his new government tried to battle the problems of inflation and stagnant industrial growth. The 67‐year‐old Premier made his remarks in a speech to Parliament outlining his government’s program. The meeting of the 300‐member chamber, which was elected three weeks ago, formally marked the “death of tyranny” and the beginning of “a new phase of our national life,” the Premier said.
Angry French fishermen blocked the estuary of the Seine River, cutting off the port of Rouen in protest against increasing pollution which they claimed was jeopardizing their livelihood. About 60 boats took part in the blockade, which was to last for 24 hours. They came from Deauville, Trouville, Dives, Ouistreham, Honfleur and Le Havre.
A joint Senate-House committee reached agreement on a $300 million ceiling for loans to the Soviet Union in a bill extending the life of the U.S. Export-Import Bank for four years. The action came as Senate leaders maneuvered to win passage for the trade reform act which would reduce tariffs placed on Soviet products shipped to the United States. The bank measure, which must be passed by both the House and Senate, contains a provision blocking all Soviet loans pending approval of the trade bill, which is tied to Soviet emigration policies.
Foreign Minister Yigal Allon of Israel said today that his country would use its veto to prevent the Palestine Liberation Organization from taking part in the Geneva conference on the Middle East if it ever is reconvened. Asserting that a new participant can be admitted to the conference only by unanimous vote of all the regular parties, Mr. Allon told the Overseas Writers Club that “we shall not allow the P.L.O. there.” His statement, in answer to a question at the luncheon seslion, affirmed Israel’s lack of interest in a Geneva conference and her opposition to dealing with the Palestinian group, whose prestige has risen since the Rabat conference of Arab leaders in October and the appearance of the group in the United Nations General Assembly last month. Israeli officials have said in the past that they would not negotiate with the Palestinians.
Delegates from Arab and other developing nations to the United Nations General Assembly rejected American charges that it is shackled by a “tyranny of the majority.” The delegate of Southern Yemen accused the United States and its allies of “duplicity, double standards and self-righteous statements.” Guinea’s delegate accused the Western powers of blackmail and intimidation. China’s chief delegate praised the third world bloc as the main force opposing colonialism, imperialism and what he called “manipulation by the superpowers.”
Iranian Oil Minister Yamshid Amouzegar said he does not expect crude oil prices to increase sharply for 1975. Saudi Arabia Oil Minister Ahmad Zaki Yamani said today’s meeting of oil countries should not increase prices at all. Both were speaking on the eve of a ministerial meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries today in Vienna to decide on next year’s prices.
Rock-throwing youths rioted in Rangoon after troops and policemen invaded the university campus and removed the body of U Thant from a student-built mausoleum. The Burmese government declared martial law as troops in battle gear took to the streets. Smoldering student and Buddhist resentment of the rule of President Ne Win turned into the most dramatic protest in his 12 years in power. He overthrew Premier U Nu, a political mentor of Mr. Thant, the retired United Nations Secretary General, who died November 25 in New York. Students and workers roamed the streets of Rangoon, setting fire to public buildings, but withdrew when the Burmese government sent convoys of troops to back newly declared martial law, a U.S. Embassy official reported. The fires were set after troops retook the body of former U.N. Secretary General U Thant from dissident students in Rangoon.
Bitter fighting over the Mekong Delta rice crop has killed or wounded more than 11,000 South Vietnamese government and Communist troops in the past six days, Saigon military headquarters said. The toll would put total casualties on both sides since the stillborn cease-fire two years ago at well over half a million on the basis of official figures. But the government figure for Communist casualties is believed to be vastly inflated. One regiment of the North Vietnamese Fifth Division has reportedly broken past Government armored cavalry units in Kiến Tường and moved into northeastern Định Tường Province, which had been relatively quiet in recent months. There, according to some analysts, it is expected to coordinate its movements with three independent, nominally Việt Cộng regiments in Định Tường to harass Route 4, Saigon’s lifeline to the lower delta. If the Communists could cut, or limit, movement on Route 4, they would put another severe crimp in the enfeebled South Vietnamese economy at a time when a major portion of the winter rice harvest should begin moving up to Saigon.
Former Japanese Premier Eisaku Sato, joint winner of the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize, urged in a Nobel lecture in Oslo that the nuclear powers abandon their arms race and develop their nuclear resources for peaceful purposes.
A clandestine left-wing extremist group claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s bomb blast in central Tokyo which injured nine people. Police said the group, calling itself “The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, Fang of the Earth,” made the claim in a statement sent to newspapers and the Japanese Broadcasting Corp. The bomb went off on the ground floor garage of the Taisei Construction Co. head office following telephone warnings.
Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos has ordered the release of 622 of the 5,234 people arrested since he proclaimed martial law in September, 1972.
The House foreign affairs subcommittee heard testimony by an American Methodist minister on how he was tortured in Brazil with electric shocks to various parts of his body and hung by handcuffs on his cell door at night. The Rev. Fred Morris, who said he was arrested in Recife last September, reported that his inquisitors tried to persuade him to say that he was a link between the Brazilian Communist Party and Bishop Helder Camara of Olinda and Recife.
Prime Minister Ian Smith of Rhodesia announced an immediate cease-fire after years of fighting with black nationalists on the northern border, the immediate release of all detained black Rhodesian leaders and followers, and a conference to be held on how the overwhelming black majority can enter the government. In a nationwide broadcast he said that a settlement had not been achieved but that the steps would create the right atmosphere for holding a constitutional conference. A temporary ceasefire was agreed to between the white-minority government of the southern African nation of Rhodesia and guerrillas of the ZANU and ZAPU, after being brokered by South Africa and Zambia. The peace, which lasted eight months, allowed the all-black Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) guerrillas to regroup after the all-white Rhodesian Light Infantry had succeeded in disrupting the nationalists. ZANLA and ZIPRA would eventually triumph in bringing majority rule by the black majority, and the transformation of Rhodesia into the Republic of Zimbabwe.
President Ford told the Business Council that “the economy is in difficult straits” but said he had no intention of introducing any major new anti-recession programs. He ruled out an immediate return to wage and price controls. He saw hope that price pressures were beginning to ease. He said that as conditions changed his policies would be flexible to meet them.
Protesting that he was an unwitting victim who would be wrongly connected with Watergate for the rest of his life, Harry S. Dent pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations in the 1970 congressional elections. Dent, former White House special counsel, was placed on unsupervised probation for a month. Dent pleaded guilty to one count of violating the since-repealed 1925 Federal Corrupt Practices Act by aiding and abetting a political committee set up in the District of Columbia to handle campaign finances without having a chairman or a treasurer. The committee involved a secret fund of $3 million raised by Herbert W. Kalmbach, former President Richard M. Nixon’s former personal attorney, who has pleaded guilty to campaign violations. Dent testified that he had not known about the full workings of the committee.
President Ford’s job rating showed little change from early November, according to the latest Gallup Poll. The rating leveled off at 48% after having slipped from 55% in late October to 47% in a survey taken shortly after the November 5 congressional elections. The President’s meeting with Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev occurred between the two surveys.
A report that the Federal Energy Administration has switched from opposition to “a willingness to live with” the controversial Federal strip-mine control bill delayed action on the measure again today before the House Rules Committee.
Two guards and a medic were released unharmed after being held captive for 26 hours by eight inmates in a cellblock of the state prison at Walpole, Massachusetts. The insurgents, including five convicted murderers, had presented officials with a list of 18 demands — ranging from full amnesty to the installation of pay telephones — after they seized the hostages in a minimum security area of the prison. The two guards were grabbed while conducting a weapons search and the medic was seized when he and a doctor were sent to check on the condition of the guards.
Home buyers must be given 12 days in advance a list of settlement costs they will have to pay in buying a home under a bill sent from the House to President Ford. Such costs include title searches, title insurance, taxes and legal services. The bill bars kickbacks in real estate settlements, such as when a lawyer is paid for referring clients to a title insurance firm.
Racial violence in South Boston, tense over the school busing controversy, erupted when a black youth knifed a white youth in a high school corridor. A white mob surrounded the building and fought with police, who finally evacuated some 135 black students after four hours. The blacks were finally evacuated through a side door as policemen, some of them on horseback and on motorcycles, charged into the crowd. The policemen were pelted with cans and rocks, and skirmishes broke out on street corners. Seven South Boston residents and three policemen were taken to Boston City Hospital. Three white youths were arrested and charged with assault and battery on police officers with a deadly weapon in the bottle and can throwing. Two parked police cruisers were smashed and one of them turned over by the crowd. Today’s outbreak followed days of increasing tension at the old tan brick schoolhouse, according to students, parents and teachers.
For more than an hour, on foot, horse and motorcycle the polce swept into the crowd, which continued to re‐form, cursing, struggling and sporadically breaking into a football cheer — “Here we go Southie, here we go.” The lines held firm as a bus and motorcycle escort rode up to the front entrance and became the focal point of the crowd’s taunts. But the move was a ruse, the black students had been spirited out in four other buses. During another lull, two ambulances pulled into the school yard and two injured whites were brought out on stretchers. Suddenly, the young driver of the lead ambulance pitched over, struck in the head by a rock. The police bundled him into the back of his own ambulance and someone else drove it off. “Nrs, nrs,” people in the crowd shrieked at the police. “You protect the n****r children and look what you do to the whites.”
A liberal-conservative coalition will challenge the 1974 campaign reform law on grounds that it violates the Bill of Rights’ guarantees of free expression and privacv. A challenge will be filed January 2, one day after the statute takes effect, according to an announcement by Senator James L. Buckley (Cons-R-New York), former liberal Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Ira Glasser, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. The three men said they objected to “unprecedented government surveillance over political association” and creation of “broad investigative powers of doubtful constitutionality.”
Government and diplomatic sources in Washington said that Attorney General William Saxbe was expected to be named Ambassador to India soon, succeeding Daniel Moynihan, who has indicated he will return to Harvard University. The announcement is expected to be made after the Indian government approves the appointment. It was reported that when Mr. Saxbe met with the President on Monday they discussed his desire to resign that post.
A bill revising antitrust laws for the first time in two decades was sent to the White House for President Ford’s signature. The bill would steeply increase penalties for antitrust cases settled out of court. Final action on the measure came in the House.
Superior Court Judge Samuel Lerner rejected an appeal by Rubin (Hurricane) Carter and his co-defendant, John Artis, for a new trial on the triple-murder charges for which he had sentenced them to life imprisonment seven years ago. He found in Jersey City that recanted testimony by two former prosecution witnesses lacked the “ring of truth.” Lawyers for both men said they would appeal the ruling.
The recent crash of an airliner into a hillside west of Washington has brought a Government decision that will require the nation’s airlines to install in all jets a cockpit warning device that most experts believe would have prevented the disaster. The best known system of this type repeatedly sounds a loud “Whoop! Whoop! — Pull Up!” if a plane is gliding dangerously low on a landing approach or is heading for a hilltop. Under the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision, alerting devices would have to be in all planes by next December 1. That will be one year to the day after the disaster, in which a Trans World Airlines Boeing 727 crashed less than 100 feet below the peak of a slope 20 miles west of Washington’s Dulles International Airport. All 92 on board were killed.
Joseph McCrane, a former New Jersey state Treasurer, was convicted on four counts of assisting corporations to file fraudulent income tax returns. He was found guilty of giving them phony vouchers that enabled them to disguise contributions to the 1969 gubernatorial campaign of William Cahill as business expenses which were tax-deductible.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reaffirmed today its previous decision that could require busing of school children between Louisville and its suburban areas. The ruling responded to Supreme Court request that the circuit court review its decision in light of a Supreme Court decision against citysuburban busing in a Detroit case. The appeals court reaffirmed a ruling that Louisville and Jefferson County school districts had not done enough to eliminate all vestiges of segregation.
A $1.5 million suit arising from the December 1 crash of a Trans World Airlines jet in Virginia was filed in federal court in San Francisco by the father of one of 92 persons killed in the accident. The suit was filed by John A. Buchanan of Santa Clara, whose son, John A. Buchanan III, 22, died in the crash at Upperville, Virginia. TWA and the Boeing Co., manufacturers of the 727 that crashed, were named as defendants.
California Governor Reagan was honored in Sacramento by the National Welfare Fraud Association, a professional organization of welfare investigators that he helped found. Reagan was presented with the organization’s distinguished service award for his efforts to tighten welfare regulations.
Two baseball greats whose careers ended tragically, Roy Campanella and the late Roberto Clemente, each of whom already occupies baseball’s Hall of Fame, are named today with twelve others to the Black Athlete’s Hall of Fame. The formal induction ceremony will come on March 13th of next year.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 595.35 (+1.48, +0.25%).
Born:
Kevin Devine, NFL defensive back (Jacksonville Jaguars, Minnesota Vikings), in Jackson, Mississippi.
Rey Mysterio (ring name for Óscar Gutiérrez Rubio), American professional wrestler; in Chula Vista, California.
Ben Shephard, English TV personality, in Epping, Essex, United Kingdom.
Died:
Reed Hadley [stage name for Reed Herring], 63, American film, television and radio actor (“Zorro’s Fighting Legion”, “Racket Squad”, “Shock”, “Grand Canyon”), of a heart attack.
Emile John Lussier, 79, American flying ace with 11 victories in World War I while flying with Britain’s Royal Air Force.
André Géraud, 92, French journalist and animal rights advocate who wrote under the pen name “Pertinax”
Walter H. Wheeler Jr., 77, American businessman who led the growth of Pitney-Bowes, the manufacturer of the most-used postage meter in the world.
L. E. Katterfeld, 93, German-born American Communist who co-founded the Communist Labor Party of America after also serving as an official in the Socialist Party of America, the Communist Party of America and the Workers Party of America.
History Diaries 