The Turkish Federated State of Cyprus was proclaimed by Rauf Denktaş, who had formerly been the Vice-President of the Republic of Cyprus until war divided the predominantly Greek southern half from the mostly Turkish northern part. The Turkish Cypriotes proclaimed a separate state in the Turkish-occupied northern part of Cyprus and offered to join with the Greek Cypriote community in a federation. “This is not a unilateral declaration of independence,” Rauf Denktaş, the Turkish Cypriote leader, told newsmen. He said the proclamation was issued “because it was necessary for the existence of our community,” and that “there is no other way for a Cyprus solution than a federal state.” Denktaş would proclaim full independence of the area on November 12, 1983.
Greece denounced the proclamation of an independent Turkish zone on Cyprus as an “arbitrary and illegal” act that “endangers the peace in this delicate region.” There was no sign, however, that Greece would try to intervene militarily in Cyprus.
Another leading member of Greece’s former military junta, retired Brigadier General Antonios Lekkas, was remanded to custody on charges of high treason and insurrection in connection with his role in the army coup of April, 1967. Lekkas had pleaded not guilty to an investigating judge at a hospital where he is being treated for a heart condition.
NATO nations rejected a Warsaw Pact proposal in negotiations in Vienna for an immediate military manpower freeze in Central Europe: Western diplomats said the freeze would legalize existing imbalances that give the Communist alliance a 20% manpower advantage in the area. NATO submitted a freeze plan last summer, but said it should take effect only after manpower reductions.
Leonid I. Brezhnev, smiling and looking fit, emerged today from seven weeks of seclusion to greet Prime Minister Harold Wilson of Britain when he arrived at the Kremlin on an official visit. With his robust appearance and a few jokes, the Soviet party chief deftly demolished much of the speculation about his physical and political health since he was last seen in public on December 24. He offered no immediate explanation for his long absence. At 6 PM, Mr. Brezhnev, wearing three medals on his dark suit, strode into St. Catherine’s Hall carrying a red leather portfolio that indicated he would lead the Soviet delegadon at the talks. He exchanged quips with the Prime Minister, who arrived only two hours earlier on his 19th visit to the Soviet Union.
East Germany commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Allied air raid on Dresden during World War II which killed 35,000 people. East German newspapers described the raid as senseless destruction, saying that the Soviet army was only 60 miles from the city and had already “sealed the victory over Hitler fascism.” Thousands of people laid wreaths at the Heide Cemetery in Dresden where raid victims are buried.”
A proposal for a common minimum price for oil imports lower than what the United States is suggesting was presented today to a meeting of energy ministers of the nine European Common Market countries.
The Pentagon has notified Congress that the United States plans to sell 24 jet planes to Spain at an estimated price of $203 million. The sale would include 24 F-4E Phantom jet fighters and six RF-4E reconnaissance planes plus spare parts and support equipment. The planes are built by McDonnell Douglas.
General Francisco Franco has granted a full pardon to three Croatian antiCommunists serving 12-year prison sentences for the hijacking of an airliner, the official state bulletin said. The three Croats hijacked a Scandinavian Airlines System plane on a domestic flight in Sweden in September, 1972, and demanded the release of nine fellow Croats in Sweden for political offenses. They then ordered the crew to fly to Madrid, where they surrendered to Spanish police and asked for asylum.
American opera singers Mrs. Gloria Bentley and Miss Anne Waterman were expelled from Yugoslavia and banned from returning for five years for distributing anti-Yugoslav propaganda while on an East European tour. A government official said they. had mailed hundreds of brochures given to them by a Yugoslav emigre in Chicago who also gave them address labels. The women said they did not understand the leaflets, which were written in the Cyrillic alphabet.
Italian police have arrested the second of five men wanted in connection with last week’s theft of three priceless Renaissance paintings from the Ducal Palace in Urbino. Three men are still being sought and there is no sign yet of the paintings.
Government officials in Egypt said they were encouraged by their talks with Secretary of State Kissinger, but emphatically reiterated their position that Egypt will not give a pledge of nonbelligerency to Israel in exchange for a second-stage withdrawal in Sinai. President Anwar el‐Sadat expressed this refusal clearly to Mr. Kissinger yesterday, the officials said. They indicated that there was discussion of other possible means by which Egypt could make her policy of peaceful intentions more explicit. The officials noted that during Mr. Sadat’s recent visit to Paris and in several newspaper interviews he declared that Egypt would not start a war as long as there was a reasonable rate of progress toward peace. On one such occasion Mr. Sadat said he was speaking also in the name of the Syrian Government.
Secretary of State Kissinger presented Egypt’s detailed views on a new Sinai agreement to Israeli leaders tonight, in the hope that this would spur Israel to take a more flexible approach when he returned to the Middle East in a few weeks. With his current “exploratory” Middle East mission nearing its end, Mr. Kissinger confirmed this morning that he would return to the area early next month to seek, through another effort at “shuttle diplomacy,” to mediate an Egyptian‐Israeli accord. “We’re still in business,” Mr. Kissinger told reporters aboard his Air Force Boeing 707 after leaving Cairo this morning, on his way to Syria and then to Israel. But Mr. Kissinger’s relatively optimistic comments in public have been tempered by expressions of concern in private that his endeavors might fail.
A Thai nobleman who served as ambassador to the United States at the outbreak of World War II was elected prime minister over a military-backed candidate. Seni Pramoj, 69, whose confirmation by King Bhumibol, a distant cousin, was considered a formality, was hoisted to the shoulders of jubilant demonstrators as he left the Parliament building. When ordered by his Japanese-occupied homeland to declare war on the United States in the early 1940s, he ignored the order and organized the World War II Free Thai resistance.
President Park Chung Hee suggested today that he would seek reconciliation with his opponents in the political parties, the Christian churches and the universities. For the President, who has proclaimed martial law and forbidden political dissent on pain of death, among other stringent measures of recent years, the statement indicated a major change in policy.
Three gunmen opened fire in a hotel bar in the Montreal suburb of Brossard, killing four persons and wounding at least four others, police reported. The motive for the shootings was not immediately known.
Twenty-one people were killed today when loyal forces overran a camp held by rebel paramilitary police accused of having assassinated Madasgascar’s head of state Tuesday.
Foreign ministers from black and Arab African countries opened a meeting of the Council of Ministers of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia today without a mention of the organization’s principal founder, deposed Emperor Haile Selassie.
President Ford appealed to the Democratic-controlled Congress for a return to “nonpartisanship” in setting the nation’s foreign policy. He asked for “an open-minded spirit of enlightened national concern to transcend any partisan or internal party politics that threaten to bring our successful foreign policy to a standstill.” Mr. Ford spoke in New York last night at a $175-dollar-a-plate dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, sponsored by the New York State Republican Committee in honor of Vice President Rockefeller.
President Ford, expressing “tough-minded optimism,” said that he did not think the unemployment rate would reach the “magnitude” of 9 to 10 percent, as some economic analysts have been predicting. He told a meeting of the New York Society of Security Analysts that the nation’s unemployment rate would stop rising by the end of 1975, “and we’ll be starting in a more optimistic direction.”
The White House announced that President Ford would nominate a woman, Carla Anderson Hills, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and if her nomination is confirmed by the Senate, she will be the third woman in history to hold a cabinet post. Mrs. Hills, 41 years old and the wife of a lawyer, is Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division of the Justice Department. Her nomination is already opposed by the head of the Senate committee that must confirm it.
Senator Henry M. Jackson, an announced Presidential contender, expressed today basic agreement with the Ford Administration on stand-by authority to deal with another oil embargo and said he would “move promptly” to send a bill to the Senate floor.
The Federal Reserve Board reported that industrial production underwent an exceptionally large decline of 3.6 percent last month, following a drop of 3.1 percent in December, providing further confirmation that the nation is in its deepest recession since World War II. The principal causes of last month’s steep decline were a reduction in consumer purchasing, the slump in housing starts and a general effort by businesses to reduce excessive inventories.
After two years of experience without the draft, the Defense Department concluded today that for the foreseeable future it could meet its military manpower needs with volunteers.
An intense fire broke out on the 11th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center shortly after midnight, then spread across six floors, from the 9th to the 14th, before being brought under control. There were no serious injuries, but 16 firemen were treated for smoke inhalation. Only fifty people, all maintenance employees, were present in the towers and were safely evacuated. New York City Councilmen Howard Golden and Stephen Kaufman, citing the need for mandatory installation of sprinkler systems, wrote in a joint statement, “Had that fire erupted during the working day, we could have had another Triangle Shirtwaist disaster.”
A tall, bearded gunman and known narcotics user shot and wounded five policemen, two critically, in the Chicago suburb of Harvey. Police Chief L. L. Lower said Timothy D. Johnson, who has a record of armed robbery and drug convictions, was carrying a pistol and a carbine and he warned residents that the fugitive was “very dangerous. Police were searching with the aid of a canine unit and a helicopter. Authorities said Johnson, 36, first shot a patrolman when his car was stopped for a routine traffic violation. The others were shot when police cornered him in a house and Johnson came out shooting.
The jury hearing the abortion-manslaughter trial of Dr. Kenneth C. Edelin was urged today to find the physician guilty of “the white coat killing” of a fetus in a legal abortion.
The scheduled sale of fugitive financier Robert L. Vesco’s luxurious Boeing 707 jet to rock star Elvis Presley fell through when a telegram reportedly sent by Vesco warned that the plane could be seized if it landed in some foreign countries. Presley, who had planned to buy the customized aircraft in the bankruptcy sale of Fairfield General Corp., one of Vesco’s old companies, said through his attorneys that he was calling off the deal because of the threat. He had advanced $75,000 as a down payment on the $775,000 purchase price. Judge Irwin F. Kimmelman, in Newark, New Jersey, whose court claims jurisdiction over the plane, ordered Fairfield General to hold Presley’s $75,000 down payment until the question is decided at a later hearing.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, complying with a federal court order, invited comments from the public on a petition to ban the sale of handgun ammunition. The commission said statements should be mailed by April 15 to The Secretary, Consumer Product Safety Commission, P.O. Box 8137, Washington, D.C. 20024. The petition submitted last June by a Chicago group calling itself the Committee for Hand Gun Control, Inc., asked for the ban, calling bullets “hazardous substances” presenting an unreasonable risk of injury.
Two Cook County (Chicago) commissioners, one of them the county Republican chairman, and the county’s zoning administrator were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that they extorted money from the owner of the Chicago Fire of the World Football League. The indictments named Floyd T. Fulle and Charles S. Bonk, commissioners, and Bernard J. O’Brien; zoning administrator. The indictments stemmed from rezoning in 1970 of a 96-acre tract in the northwestern part of the county. The land was owned by Thomas Origer, owner of the Fire. Indictments said Fulle, Republican county chairman, took $10,000 from Origer and his company, Origer Builders.
A fund cutback proposed by President Ford would “thwart the biggest push we’ve seen in heart research in many years,” said Dr. Eliot Corday of Los Angeles, a past president of the American College of Cardiology. But Dr. Theodore Cooper, a deputy assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, disagreed, saying it would merely defer some projects. Corday said some jeopardized research was near the point where it might greatly reduce deaths from heart disease and cutbacks would force some of the best researchers into unemployment or different jobs. The President would eliminate $37.7 million of a $324.1 million appropriation for the National Heart and Lung Institute.
Aristotle Onassis was reported improving at the American hospital in Paris. He was visited by his wife Jacqueline and his daughter Christian. Onasis was operated on Sunday for gallstones.
Mass transit systems may not result in much less air pollution if commuters use cars to get to and from stations, according to a study by the Transportation Research Board. The board, which is, affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences, found that 50% of hydrocarbon emissions and 25% of carbon monoxide emissions result when engines are started cold and from gas tank evaporation. The board’s report said these emissions can “significantly impair the emission-reduction effectiveness of transit improvements… that rely on the automobile for residential collection and distribution.”
Three weeks of meetings by Soviet and American technical groups, ended in Houston today with statements of mutual confidence that the Apollo‐Soyuz rendezvous and docking mission will occur as planned next July.
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Born:
(Álvaro) “Tony” Dalton, American actor in Mexican and American productions (“Better Call Saul”; “Flor Salvaje”), in Laredo, Texas.
Ben Collins, English auto racer (ASCAR Racing Series 2003) and stunt driver (former “Top Gear” ‘Stig’), in Bristol, England, United Kingdom.
Brad Norton, NHL defenseman (Florida Panthers, Los Angeles Kings, Washington Capitals, Ottawa Senators, Detroit Red Wings), in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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