Margaret Thatcher was elected as the new leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party, becoming the first woman to lead a major British political party and the first female Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. Thatcher received 146 votes of the 276 Conservative members of the House of Commons, a majority, and her closest rival, William Whitelaw, received 79. When the Conservatives formed a government in 1979, Mrs. Thatcher, a research chemist and tax lawyer, became the first female British Prime Minister. Britain’s Conservative party decisively elected Margaret Thatcher as leader, succeeding Edward Heath, who resigned after losing to her in an earlier round of the contest. She started her bid last year as an outside challenger from the party’s right wing. Asked after the vote how much she would shake up the party, she promised “a blend of continuity and change.”
The British government announced that it would set up a network of centers in Northern Ireland to maintain contact with Irish Republican Army units to safeguard and monitor the current cease-fire. It was the most formal structure for this purpose that Britain has ever accepted. If the cease-fire holds, the British Army’s presence will become less obtrusive, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland indicated.
A British banker predicted today that the exclusion of Jewish interests from financings involving Arab investors would continue as long as the Arabs wished. Gerald Thompson, chairman of Kleinwort, Benson, Ltd., one of the leading non‐Jewish houses, made it clear that his organization would not resist Arab pressures. His position has implications for the traditional harmony in international banking and for the role of Jewish banks in view of the dollar surpluses accumulating in Arab oil‐producing countries. Some bankers feel that the Arabs’ economic power will grow to such an extent that they will eventually dominate the financial markets. The discrimination against Jewish banking interests is cited as an example.
U.S. Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger said today that the United States planned to build up to the strategic weapons levels permitted by the Vladivostok agreement unless the Russians showed restraint in their program.
The health ministers of the nine Common Market countries agreed in Brussels to let the approximately 400,000 physicians in the member countries practice wherever they want within the European community. The accord, which Denmark has not yet ratified pending formation of her new government, gives 18 months for each member country to change administrative rules to let foreign doctors practice. It was the first such agreement for any profession.
A former Republican senator from Colorado, testifying at his confirmation hearing on his appointment to be US. ambassador to Switzerland, said he was “talking about non-armed aircraft” in an interview suggesting U.S.. efforts to obtain rights to overfly neutral Switzerland to get to the Middle East. Peter H. Dominick told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee there had been no contacts between the United States and the Swiss government regarding overflights by armed aircraft.
A French wartime Nazi collaborator who has hidden from the law and vengeance seekers for 30 years appeared unexpectedly on nationwide television and said he was ready to face justice. Paul Touvier, once a top leader in a militia group that aided the Germans in tracking down Resistance fighters, told a television reporter: “I know that I’m being hunted and that my family is in danger.” Touvier received a presidential pardon but it was annulled by France’s Supreme Appeals Court.
Spanish riot police dispersed 200 students demonstrating outside the Supreme Court building in Madrid where 10 left-wing opponents of the Franco government-including a Roman Catholic priest-were appealing their convictions on charges of belonging to an illegal organization, an underground trade union group. Lawyers for the 10 maintained that they had been wrongly convicted. They had been given jail terms of 12 to 20 years.
Israeli authorities sought today to underscore their reluctance to give up the Mitla Pass and the nearby Gidi Pass in the current round of two American‐sponsored Egyptian‐Israeli negotiations. While Mr. Kissinger was meeting with Israeli leaders in Jerusalem to explore Israel’s negotiating position, the 14 reporters accompanying him on his current Middle East tour were ferried by helicopters to a military strip near here. They were then taken by bus up a winding mountain road to a military observation post about 25 miles from the Suez Canal and about 15 miles from Egyptian forces on the eastern side of the canal. On this slightly overcast day, the canal and the town of Suez could be seen on the horizon. In the foreground, a dozen Israeli tanks practiced desert manuevers, raising clouds of dust. The Israelis’ purpose in arranging the seven‐hour trip was not merely to show the pass but rather to emphasize how important they considered the passes to Israel’s security. President Anwar el‐Sadat has said that he wants to recover the passes in this round of negotiations. Israel has said that they can be turned over only in return for a written longterm pledge of non‐belligerency.
Secretary of State Kissinger ended his first full day of discussions with Israeli leaders in Jerusalem with the comment that he remained optimistic on the prospects of a new interim agreement between Israel and Egypt. He emphasized that he was not attempting actual negotiations on this trip, which takes him to Cairo tomorrow and back to Jerusalem Thursday.
Egypt is ready to demonstrate peaceful intentions toward Israel by agreeing to far-reaching demilitarization measures in the Sinai Peninsula but remains adamant in refusing to make a formal declaration of nonbelligerency, official Egyptian sources said today.
George Habash, the Marxist-oriented Palestinian guerrilla leader has said that his splinter guerrilla group will do everything it can to provoke a new Middle East war, according to an interview printed in Beirut today.
Recently retired United States Army aviators working for a private American company run by their former commanding officer are providing Iran’s emerging army with the latest tactical training in combat helicopter assault warfare.
The nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise has arrived at the cyclone-ravaged island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean to help with disaster relief, the Pentagon said. The government of Mauritius asked the United States for help after Cyclone Gervaise struck last Thursday.
An American-financed supply airlift from Thailand to hard-pressed Cambodia will be doubled starting in a few days,; the Pentagon announced today. A spokesman said seven additional United States Air Force C-130 transport planes are being turned over to Bird Air, the civilian contractor operating the airlift since last October when the Air Force withdrew Its flight crews. This will bring the number of American-furnished planes used in the airlift to 12, and the spokesman said the number of daily flights would increase from 10 to 20. Bird Air will add 36 more air and ground crewmen for the stepped up operation, bringing the total involved to 96 men. Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, has been under heavy Communist pressure and river convoys of food and other supplies coming in from South Vietnam have been under fire. The Pentagon spokesman said the increase in the airlift will last at least 60 days at an additional cost of $1.9-million, to be charged to military assistance funds allocated to Cambodia by Congress.
It was to honor and to remember the photographers and reporters who still missing in Indochina, and it was also a reunion for many of the journalists who have covered the wars of Southeast Asia. So a hundred or more people went to the International Center of Photography last night at Fifth Avenue and 94th Street to hear some speakers, to see some slides and mainly, it seemed, just by their presence together to show that they have forgotten neither the war nor the people who have not returned from it. There was a slide show, for instance, of photographs taken by Larry Burrows, Charles Eggelston, Robert Ellison, Sean Flynn, Henri Huet, Hiromichi Mine, Kent Potter, Kyiochi Sawada and Dana Stone — all photographers missing or dead in Indochina. Mr. Stone’s wife, Louise, a slight woman, told a hushed audience of her efforts to find out if her husband, missing since April 6, 1970, was still alive. Walter Cronkite, of CBS News, chairman of the U.S. Committee to Free Journalists Held in Southeast Asia, told of the work being done on behalf of the missing journalists by the American committee. It is but a branch of the International Committees to Free Journalists Held in Southeast Asia.
Mexico’s President Luis Echeverría Álvarez decreed that Tiburón Island should be returned to the Seri people, who had lived there and named it Tahejöc.
William Tolbert, the President of Liberia, hosted John Vorster, the Prime Minister of South Africa in what was supposed to have been a secret meeting, as South Africa had been repudiated by most of the rest of the continent because of its apartheid policies. The Times of London broke the story two days later with the headline “Mr Vorster Pays Secret Visit to Liberian Leader”, to the embarrassment of the Liberian government.
Malagazy Republic President Richard Ratsimandrava, recently inaugurated on the east African island of Madagascar, was assassinated as he was being driven through Ambohijatovo Square in Tananarive. Sworn in six days earlier, he had been returning home from a cabinet meeting when he was attacked by machine gun fire, and died of his wounds hours later. Martial law and a dusk-to-dawn curfew were imposed immediately after Col. Richard Ratsimandrava and his heavily armed escort were attacked. He was replaced by General Gilles Andriamahazo. The event nearly plunged the country into civil war between supporters of the military government and former President Tsiranana.
South African Prime Minister John Vorster has said in an interview that he is doing his “level best to normalize relations with African countries.” But he said that South Africa’s internal race policies were “immaterial to the subject.”
Tanzanian President Julius K. Nyerere has declared that black guerrillas will not start a racial war in white-controlled southern Africa as long as they are convinced that peaceful progress can be made toward majority rule.
The U.S. Navy has fewer ships now than before Pearl Harbor and risks losing its preeminence on the seas to the Soviet Union, Navy Secretary J. William Middendorf II told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We are at the crossroads of naval construction history,” he said, in testifying in support of a $33.7 billion Navy budget for the next fiscal year that included $3.18 billion for building 23 new ships.
Senator Henry M. Jackson pressed Central Intelligence Agency Director William E. Colby to report whether the Russians are violating the 1972 Soviet-American strategic arms accord. Colby testified in a closed session of the Washington Democrat’s arms control subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Jackson disclosed this to the press before the meeting. No details were released afterward.
President Ford announced the release of up to $2 billion in impounded highway funds to help stimulate the sagging economy. Addressing a joint session of the Kansas legislature in Topeka, he said he had made the decision on the recommendation of a number of state governors who assured him the money would he spent by June 30 on pending projects including mass transit. White House officials estimated that the money, with lesser amounts of matching state funds, would lead to 125,000 new jobs.
President Ford said tonight that he would have no objections if Congress enacted a much smaller tax on the “windfall profits” of oil producers than the one he proposed four weeks ago.
American consumers squeezed by rising food prices went in for home canning in a big way last year, touching off the biggest outbreak of botulism since the depression, the government said. Trying to head off a potentially worse situation this year, the Agriculture Department and Virginia Knauer, President Ford’s consumer adviser, are planning a major educational effort to warn about the dangers involved in home canning. The botulinus bacterium can grow in an airless environment such as a jar of home-canned vegetables if the proper high temperature was not used during the canning process. During 1974, five deaths resulted from botulism caused by home-canned food, one death came from a commercially packed beef stew and one from a food of unknown origin. There were 20 recorded outbreaks involving 30 persons.
Substantially more canned and frozen vegetables are on retail shelves this winter than a year ago. but higher prices are causing many shoppers to pass them by, the Agriculture Department said. “Wholesale and retail prices of processed vegetables rose more during 1974 than in any single year in recent history,” the department’s Outlook and Situation Board said. “Canners and freezers experienced increased costs for all major input-labor, energy, containers and raw products, it said. One expert estimated that 1974 prices were at least 20% above 1973 prices. Other sources said canned beets were up 17.5%, peas, 18.9% and tomatoes, 19.4%
Investigators for the Rockefeller Commission met privately with former White House special counsel Charles W. Colson to probe allegations he has made concerning the domestic operations of the Central Intelligence Agency. Neither Colson nor his attorney, Kenneth L. Adams, was available for comment. Two Administration officials, however, confirmed that Colson had met with “several members of the staff for a couple of hours. In a recent television interview, Colson said it was inconceivable to him that the agency would not have been aware of plans for break-ins at both Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building and the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.
A panel of three federal judges has ruled that it would be too great a burden to make the Central Intelligence Agency prove information in a book about the agency was classified. The judges sent the case back for further action to U.S. District Judge Albert V. Bryan Jr., sitting in Alexandria, Virginia, for further action. The case involves the CIA and à former agent, Victor L. Marchetti, who wrote the book, “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.”
The Justice Department is examining testimony given by former CIA Director Richard M. Helms before congressional committees to determine whether he committed perjury, according to informed sources. Helms, now ambassador to Iran, has acknowledged that he gave the Senate Foreign Relations Committee incomplete information regarding the CIA’s involvement in Chilean politics when he testified before the committee two years ago.
Flipping pancakes as she raced down a 415-yard course in a record 58.4 seconds to claim the 26th annual Shrove Tuesday pancake title was Sheila Turner of Liberal, Kansas. The 21-year-old housewife beat the winner of the Olney, Eng, race, Sally Ann Faulkner, by 15 seconds. The friendly rivalry between the two towns is based on a centuries-old English legend of a housewife in Olney, trying to use up the last of the animal fat by making pancakes before Lent, who forgot the time and when she heard the bells sounding, she raced off to services with the pancake-laden skillet still in hand.
The National Academy of Sciences made public a major study, “Mineral Resources and the Environment,” warning that the world faces shortages, the first perhaps only a few years away, in materials that are vital to modern industrial civilization. The report said it was essentially impossible for domestic oil supplies to replace foreign supplies in the next decade. The chairman of the study panel, Dr. Brian Skinner of Yale, told reporters that all government estimates of total American oil and gas resources have been over-optimistic.
At the first federal hearing on the environmental impact of offshore oil and gas development on the Outer Continental Shelf, Governor Byrne of New Jersey threatened to sue the Department of Interior unless it postponed its call for oil companies to name areas they would like to lease. He said the department had promised to take no action pending a Supreme Court decision in a 1969 federal case involving Maine and 11 other Atlantic coastal states.
The third test flight of the U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber was cut short when two fire warning lights indicated overheating in the aircraft’s electronics system. The warning lights were extinguished after the electronics system was air-cooled, but the plane returned to Edwards Air Force Base as a precautionary measure.
Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, 69, was reported feeling much better and in stable condition at the American Hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Hospital officials said Onassis’ wife, Jacqueline, was not at the hospital. Onassis entered the establishment Friday, reportedly suffering from a muscular disease and a severe case of the flu.
Television drama “Sarah T: Portrait of A Teenage Alcoholic”, starring Linda Blair, premieres on U.S. network NBC.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 707.50 (-0.89, -0.13%)
Born:
Jacque Vaughn, NBA point guard and shooting guard (NBA champions-Spurs, 2007; Utah Jazz, Atlanta Hawks, Orlando Magic, New Jersey Nets, San Antonio Spurs) and coach (Orlando Magic, Brooklyn Nets), in Los Angeles, California.
Andrew “Andy” Lally, American sports car & stock car racing driver, in Northport, New York.
Died:
Colonel Richard Ratsimandrava, 43, Malagasy soldier and head of state for six days, assassinated.
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