Former California Governor Ronald Reagan, in a signed article in the London newspaper Daily Telegraph, said Communist efforts to undermine Western security had increased under detente and he urged quick action to improve the military and political positions of the West. Reagan said Communist expansion in Indochina, the Portuguese coup and threat of war in the Middle East suggested detente could no longer be considered irreversible.
Portugal’s Socialist party, concerned over what it fears is the erosion of its freedom and power, made its most open challenge yet to the Armed Forces Movement, which rules the country. At a news conference, the party’s leader, Mario Soares, accused the Armed Forces Movement of discriminating in favor of the Communist party and said that if such one-sidedness did not end the Socialists would quit the coalition cabinet. Nearly 50,000 supporters of the Socialists marched through downtown Lisbon in one of the biggest public demonstrations since the revolution last year. Meanwhile, the ruling council of the Armed Forces Movement held another meeting and made an emergency appeal for unity by all Portuguese political parties. It ruled out any form of political dictatorship.
A prototype of the new F-16 fighter plane flew nonstop from Pease Air Force Base, New Hampshire, to Ramstein Air Base in West Germany to take part in the 1975 Paris air show Tuesday, the Air Force said. The flight took seven hours and 35 minutes. A consortium of Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Norway is expected to decide soon whether to order the F-16 or the French Mirage F-1 to replace 350 aging Starfighters at an estimated cost of more than $2 billion.
Opposition Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher called on Britain’s Labor government to stop nationalization plans, cut public spending and find new agreements with trade unions to fight the nation’s economic crisis. The comments were also in the form of a motion to the House of Commons. The motion was almost certain to be defeated.
Rightists supported by police demonstrated in downtown Madrid and demanded the immediate resignation of Premier Carlos Arias Navarro and his government on charges they could not control Basque separatism. The protest followed a memorial mass for 35 victims of ETA, the Basque guerrilla organization. Pamphlets demanded a change in government before the visit of President Ford to Spain May 31.
Lebanese security forces in armored cars and trucks set up a buffer zone between right-wing militiamen and Palestinian guerrillas to break up a running three-day battle that has claimed at least 20 lives on the eastern fringe of Beirut. A statement on Beirut Radio said the troops were given orders to shoot armed men who refused to cease fire. In Israel, the army reported that a patrol was fired upon from Jordanian territory, leaving one Israeli soldier slightly wounded.
King Hussein of Jordan, who lived in virtual isolation in the Arab world for years, now has good relations with Syria and Iraq as well as with Egypt and the conservative Arab countries of the Persian Gulf. His new standing is most dramatically reflected in the cooperation that the King has established with President Hafez al‐Assad of Syria, who in turn is closer than any other Arab leader to the Palestinian guerrilla movement. The Syrian‐Jordanian move to better relations has caused concern in Israel. Jordanian officials in Amman readily conceded the other day that military staff talks had taken place between Jordanian and Syrian commanders. But they denied that the Jordanian armed forces had made significant troop movements in the Jordan Valley, as charged by the Israeli Defense Minister, Shimon Peres, and Israeli newspapers.
King Hussein still takes the position that he will not enter into a new Arab‐Israeli war uniess Jordanian territory is attacked by the Israelis, the diplomats said. They added however, that the King believed such an attack had become more likely. A Jordanian official, asked about this, said that there was a growing conviction in Amman that in another war the Israelis would not attempt a frontal thrust against Damascus but would strike eastward into Jordan, then swing north and drive on the Syrian capital from the southeast through easier terrain. “We are taking precautions against such a contingency,” the official told a correspondent. He added that the Jordanian reaction would not be defensive only but would also include offensive moves against, the western bank.
The Saudi Arabian government announced a multibillion dollar economic development program designed to turn the desert kingdom into an advanced nation in five years and minimize its dependence on oil as a source of income. The plan, which will cost $142 billion, aims mainly at giving a major boost to the country’s fledgling industry and agriculture and improving public services.
Cairo’s leading newspaper said today that the Soviet Union had promised to supply Libya with $4‐billion in military equipment in exchange for permission to set up land, sea and air bases on Libyan territory. In a dispatch from Beirut, Lebanon, that did not quote any source for its information, the semi‐official Egyptian newspaper Al Alumm said the agreement was reached by the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar el‐Qaddafi, and Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin during his visit to Libya last week. Al Ahram added that under the accord a large number of Soviet military experts would be sent to Libya. If true, the report would mean that Libya would emerge with a far larger military arsenal than her small armed forces could be expected to handle and the Soviet military presence in the Mediterranean would be significantly strengthened. U.S. State Department experts on Middle Eastern affairs expressed doubt today that Libya had agreed to the establishment of Soviet bases on her soil.
A train derailment at Sidi Yahya El Gharb, in Morocco, killed 50 people and injured another 200.
The Ford Administration is facing an open challenge from Senator Mike Mansfield over whether the United Stats in the period after the Vietnam war, should establish a military presence in the Indian Ocean by constructing a naval and air base on the island of Diego Garcia. To the Administration, the issue is whether the United States’ ability to support military operations in the Indian Ocean should be enhanced by what it describes as a “modest naval facility” on the small British island 1,000 miles south of India. To Senator Mansfield, who has been pressing for a reassessment of American foreign policy, the proposed base presents a symbolic test of whether in the post‐Vietnam period the United States is going to extend or contract its global commitments.
The United States, at the request of the Laotian government, has agreed to end all activities of the Agency for International Development in Laos outside of Vientiane and to negotiate for the complete termination of the agency’s programs. Late today, United States Embassy officials said that student demonstrators in the southern town of Savannakhet had released the 14 Americans they held under house arrest for eight days. It was not known whether the accord on aid programs had any connection with the release.
A Provisional Government order prohibiting the sale or possession of literature published “under the former regime” closed down virtually all bookstores and stalls in Saigon today.
Cambodian Communist troops have captured a cliff along the Thai border, overrunning a small force of Anti‐Communist soldiers holding out since the collapse of the Phnom Penh Government last month, Thai officials said today. They said that the Cambodian forces pounded the top of the cliff with heavy artillery fire, scaled it and drove out the defenders. The Cambodians had previously launched several unsuccessful assaults against the holdouts. The Thai officials said that the final attack against the anti‐Communists, who had been holed up in a Buddhist shrine atop the cliff, began early yesterday, and that the position had been seized by the end of the day.
During the last two weeks of the Vietnamese campaign, the North Korean high command moved elements of two armored divisions into position close to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. These units have not been withdrawn, according to United States military analysts, and must be regarded as reinforcement of the North Korean troops deployed there. The troop movements were accompanied by an extension of the North’s tunneling operations. Qualified South Korean sources report that 17 tunnels have been identified by sensors. The assumption is that all or most could be blocked in the event of an attack but that some North Korean assault forces would break from the tunnels into South Korean territory.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato was taken to a Tokyo hospital after staying more than three days in a Tokyo geisha restaurant where he had suffered a stroke and undergone a tracheotomy operation to ease his breathing difficulty. Doctors, who had refused to move Sato to a hospital because of his condition, changed plans when he had a convulsive fit after the emergency operation. His condition was described as stable but critical.
Ellsworth Bunker, the chief United States negotiator for a new Panama Canal treaty, said tonight that armed conflict in the Canal Zone is a likely possibility unless Panama is given a voice in the canal’s operation and defense. Mr. Bunker said the treaty negotiations are being conducted against a background of rapidly diminishing Panamanian tolerance for continued American exercise of exclusive jurisdiction over the zone. In his first major address on the treaty negotiations since he was assigned to the task 18 months ago, Mr. Bunker said in a speech prepared for the Rainier Club of Seattle. “We no longer can be — nor would we want to be — the only country in the world exercising extraterritoriality on the soil of another country.” Without a modernized treaty relationship with Panama, he said, “We would likely find ourselves engaged in hostilities with an Otherwise friendly country —a conflict that, in my view, the American people would not long accept.”
The language of the ancient Incas will join Spanish as the official language of Peru, according to President Juan Velasco Alvarado. The President made the surprise announcement during an interview yesterday with a peasant leader, a speaker of the language, Quechua. General Velasco said a law elevating Quechua, which is still spoken by millions of Peruvians, to the status of an official language would be promulgated next Tuesday.
The U.S. Senate began debate on a $30.3 billion weapons bill with Senator John C. Stennis (D-Mississippi) arguing against a military letdown in the aftermath of South Vietnam’s loss to Communists. Stennis, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, “The Communists are not going to rest on their laurels.” He spoke after Senator Alan Cranston (D-California) said that “excessive military spending is heading us toward financial bankruptcy or a nuclear war.”
The dollar was battered anew and the price of gold rose sharply as fresh turbulence struck European financial markets. Gold jumped $4 in London, closing at $174.50 an ounce, partly reflecting lack of confidence in the dollar, which fell against all major currencies, even the shaky British pound. Both the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of France were reported to have entered the money markets to stem the dollar’s slide. In West Germany, the Bundesbank lowered two principal lending rates in an attempt to speed economic recovery.
L. Dean Brown, director of the Administrator’s interagency task force on Indochina refugees, said today that about 1,000 Vietnamese who left their country in the last month now wanted to return to South Vietnam. The number is “smaller than we expected,” another task force official said, adding, “Maybe the number will increase later.” In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Mr. Brown also said that about 1,800 of the more than 130,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees now under American authority had expressed a wish to go to countries other than the United States.
The Internal Revenue Service announced that tax-exemption would henceforth be denied church affiliated primary and secondary schools that refuse to accept children from all racial and ethnic groups. Tax-exempt status will be denied even when the denomination running the school claims that its exclusionary policies are required by its religious beliefs.
Governor George Wallace of Alabama is attracting more campaign money as an unannounced candidate for president than five declared Democrats put together. His appeals, mostly through the mails, have brought in more than $3.5 million. It appears, however, that the fundraising effort is an unusually expensive one, operating in what some professional fund raisers and election officials consider a murky gap in the new campaign-financing law.
President Ford, who has set his sights much higher these days, confessed to 145 former members of Congress that his ambition while he served in the House was to be Speaker. “Well, I never made it,” he said, confirming an ambition he long was rumored to have had. The congressional alumni, holding their fifth annual meeting in Washington, met at the White House to hear remarks by Mr. Ford, a representative for 25 years, and to be his guests at a closed reception.
American Airlines has agreed to pay a $150,000 civil fine as part of a proposed settlement with the Civil Aeronautics Board, which charged the airline last March with illegally disbursing $275,000 in corporate funds to elected officials between 1964 and 1973. The CAB has yet to approve the settlement but is expected to do so shortly. The fine will be the largest in the history of the board.
Rep. Robert L. F. Sikes (D-Florida) said there was no conflict of interest in his investments in a local development despite published reports he was profiting from his own legislation. Sikes’ office in Destin, Florida, issued a statement in which he said his land investment was “not affected by and did not profit by” any legislation in which he took part. The New York Times and the Pensacola Journal reported that Sikes made thousands of dollars over the last 12 years and stood to profit more from land which increased in value as a result of his legislation.
The Senate rejected a subpoena for confidential financial records of former Sen. Edward J. Gurney (R-Florida), now on trial on bribery, perjury and conspiracy charges. The subpoena was issued at the request of Harvey E. Schlesinger, the U.S. attorney for the middle district of Florida, and was served on U.S. Comptroller General Elmer B. Staats. A Senate resolution gave Staats permission to appear in court in response to the subpoena but directed him not to take any of the requested financial records with him. The material in question could include statements of client fees, business connections and property interests.
The nation’s dentists have been told to stop using an ultraviolet light appliance because leaking radiation has injured both dentists and patients, the Food and Drug Administration announced. There have been reports of at least 31 injuries among persons burned about the face, eyes or mouth, the FDA said, and the actual count could be much higher. The device is called the Nuva-Lite Activator Light. It resembles a soldering gun with a quartz rod in the shape of a hook jutting out the front. The dentist uses it inside the patient’s mouth to harden and make permanent plastic resins used to build up teeth. The company has been ordered to modify the devices.
A national commission has recommended that Congress immediately end its ban on research involving living human fetuses. The legislatively created panel, with one dissent, said that “ethically acceptable research which might yield important biomedical information has been halted” because of the moratorium imposed by the National Research Act of 1974. “For this reason, it is considered in the public interest that the moratorium be lifted immediately,” the 11-member commission said in its report to the secretary of health, education and welfare, who controls federal biomedical research funds.
The family of a woman who died after becoming pregnant while using an intrauterine birth control device has been awarded $425,000 in a settlement with A.H. Robins Co. of Richmond, Virginia, the pharmaceutical firm that manufactured the device. Judge Ignatius Lester signed the settlement order in Key West, Florida, under which Lawrence Meggs, widower of Maria Ida Meggs, agreed to the offer. Mrs. Meggs, 29, died April 4,1974, at a local hospital from shock caused by bacteria in the blood associated with her pregnancy and the IUD, a medical report said. The company has stopped manufacturing the device, called the Dalkon Shield.
Playing in Louisville, the Kentucky Colonels won the 8th championship of the American Basketball Association, beating the Indiana Pacers, 110–105, to win the series 4 games to 1.
“The Howells Medal is a great honor, and, being gold, probably a good hedge against inflation too. But I don’t want it.” Thus, author Thomas Pynchon, noted for his complex and erudite novels, turned down the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ most prestigious award. The academy, which honored Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” as the best fiction published during the last five years, said it would keep the medal for him should he change his mind. Pynchon, 38, who sent his note before the awards were announced publicly, gave no other explanation for his action. The academy said it “considered the work merited the medal and decided nevertheless to announce its decision.”
The International Olympic Committee, under pressure from black African countries, voted 41-26, today to withdraw its recognition of Rhodesia and exclude it from the 1976 Olympic Games.
New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath turned down what would have been the most lucrative contract in pro football up to that time, $4,000,000 to play with the Chicago Winds of the World Football League for the 1975 and 1976 seasons, and the 1977 for a future WFL franchise in New York City.
The Philadelphia Flyers can’t wait to get out of Buffalo. The defending Stanley Cup champions lost their second straight game to the Buffalo Sabres tonight at fog-bound Memorial Auditorium. The score was 4–2, and it evened the National Hockey League’s four-of-seven-game championship series at two games apiece.
Major League Baseball:
The Boston Red Sox, who faced and defeated three successive Oakland left‐handers in their recent series with the world champion A’s ran into the right‐handed slants of Bill Singer of the California Angels last night in Fenway Park and saw their four‐game winning streak come to an end. Singer scattered seven hits in a 6–3 triumph, his fourth against five defeats. Rick Wise took the loss, dropping his record to 4–4. The Red Sox had a 3–2 lead in the third on Fred Lynn’s three‐run homer following two‐out singles by Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice. But the Angels rallied.
The White Sox edged the Orioles, 2–1. Carlos May drove in both Chicago runs with a third‐inning single, and Jim Kaat, with strong relief from Rich Gossage, posted his seventh triumph. Kaat pitched scoreless ball, allowing only two hits until he lost control in the sixth. After a single by Tommy Davis, Kaat walked Don Baylor, Bobby Grich and Lee May to push across the Baltimore run. Chicago got its runs off Mike Cuellar on a walk to Brian Downing, a single by Bob Coluccio, Bucky Dent’s sacrifice and May’s single.
Bill Hands, a former 20‐game winner with the Chicago Cubs, has spent the last two years learning the hitters in the American League. He’s learned so well that he hurled the Rangers into first place in the Western Division on a five‐hitter, blanking the Brewers, 6–0. Hands, now 5–2 with a 2.10 earned run average, allowed just two hits through seven innings. Jeff Burroughs doubled home the first run in the first inning. Texas added four runs in the eighth. Jim Colborn, a former Cub teammate of Hands, took the loss.
The Dodgers routed the Cubs, 8–3, with four‐run spurts in both the sixth and seventh innings, and Burt Hooton, an ex‐Cub, posted his second triumph since being traded to Los Angeles by Chicago on May 2. Hooton gave up three runs and eight hits while striking out 11 in 7 ⅔ innings. Ron Cey started the sixth-inning rally with a two‐run double to put the Dodgers in front. The Cubs had taken a 1–0 lead in the first on Jose Cardenal’s third home run of the season. Hooton (2–4) struck out six batters in a row in the fifth and sixth. He also retired 16 Cubs in succession at one point. Jim Brewer relieved in the eighth and finished the game.
The Pirates downed the Padres, 4–2. Willie Stargell hit a two‐run homer in the fifth inning to break a 2–2 tie as the Pirates snapped a three‐game losing streak. Al Oliver was on base with his third hit of the game when Stargell cracked his sixth home run off Dave Freisleben (3–3). Jim Rooker broke a personal two‐game losing streak by pitching four‐hit ball over seven innings and gaining his third triumph in five decisions. Dave Giusti mopped up with one‐hit relief effort.
California Angels 6, Boston Red Sox 3
Baltimore Orioles 1, Chicago White Sox 2
Chicago Cubs 3, Los Angeles Dodgers 8
Texas Rangers 6, Milwaukee Brewers 0
Pittsburgh Pirates 4, San Diego Padres 2
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 818.91 (+0.23, +0.03%)
Born:
Jaane Niinimaa, Finnish National Team and NHL defenseman (Olympic bronze medal, 1998; 6th, 2002; NHL All-Star, 2001; Philadelphia Flyers, Edmonton Oilers, New York Islanders, Dallas Stars, Montreal Canadiens), in Raahe, Finland.
Barrie Moore, Canadian NHL left wing (Buffalo Sabres, Edmonton Oilers, Washington Capitals), in London, Ontario, Canada.
Died:
Robert “Lefty” Grove, 75, MLB pitcher (Hall of Fame; 6 × MLB All-Star; World Series 1929, 1930; AL MVP 1931; Triple Crown 1930, 1931; Philadelphia A’s, Boston Red Sox).
Torben Meyer, 90, Danish-born Hollywood character actor (“Girl Who Came Back”; “Judgment at Nuremberg”; “Sullivan’s Travels”).
History Diaries 