Generalissimo Francisco Franco rallied from his gravest crisis yet but his doctors reported that the prognosis had not changed. This was taken to mean that his condition remained “extremely grave.” With transfer of power from Spain’s 82-year-old Chief of State still held up, there was political confusion in Madrid. An Algerian delegation arrived, adding a new and critical dimension to negotiations on the claims of Morocco to Spanish Sahara.
A bomb exploded at an Italian restaurant in London’s fashionable Mayfair district, injuring at least 18 persons, including four Americans, Scotland Yard said. Alan and Ruth Ward of Riverside, California were among seven persons detained in a hospital overnight. Police said the bomb had been planted at the Trattoria Fiori restaurant near the U.S. Embassy. No warning was given before the explosion.
Bombs apparently planted by extreme right-wingers blasted two cars in the northern city of Oporto today and radical leftists charged that the air force was planning a counterrevolutionary coup. One bomb destroyed a vehicle belonging to a Communist and the other damaged a car belonging to a conscript officer active in recent left‐wing unrest in the army. No one was injured, but eight windows were broken by one of the bombs, which went off just before dawn. The explosions and the allegations of coup plans helped maintain feverish political tension caused by fears that Admiral José Pinheiro de Azevedo’s center‐left government might be overthrown by force.
There was no sign of a break in the marathon ordeal of Dutch businessman Tiede Herrema, kidnaped October 3 near his home in Limerick, Ireland, by a gang that demanded the release of three Irish Republican Army prisoners. Soldiers and police tightened security still more around the house in Monasterevin, where Herrema was being held at gunpoint for the ninth day by a man and a woman.
Finnish President Urho Kekkonen asked Center Party member Martti Miettunen, 68, to form a new government after last month’s inconclusive general elections. The appointment came as a surprise as Miettunen has not been involved in politics for five years.
The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano published a pastoral letter attacking practicing Catholics who support the Communist Party. The letter by Bishop Cesare Pagani took up more than a full page of the paper. Bishop Pagani’s diocese is in the Communist-controlled Umbria region of central Italy.
The USSR performs a nuclear test at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeast Kazakhstan.
Premier Rashid Karami yesterday continued his attempt to bring about a cease‐fire in the factional fighting that has turned much of Beirut into a battlefield. On Tuesday, Mr. Karami summoned nine traditioal political chiefs to his office in downtown Beirut, but three major figures — Interior Minister Camille Chamoun, Foreign Minister Phillip Takla and Pierre Gemayel, who is head of the strong right‐wing Christian Phalangist party, did nor appear. The Premier, a Muslim with broad support, said the leaders should make decisions for a firm cease‐fice and that he would then “denounce before public opinion any party that did not adhere to the decisions.” Shortly before midnight, Premier Karami announced a cease‐fire that was said te include arrangements for armed men to withdraw from the contested Kantari area by sunset today. There was no indication whether this, the latest of many cease‐fires would be observed.
On the battlefield in Beirut, Muslim forces appeared to move forward somewhat in the area of luxury hotels near the Mediterranean. Gunmen of the Phalangist militia were reported to have withdrawn from Clemenceau Street, on a hill above the hotels. About 160 people were escorted by an armored convoy out of the rocket‐damaged Holiday Inn, where they had been trapped for three days. Phillip Caputo, correspondent of The Chicago Tribune, was rescued from the besieged Trad Hospital, where he had been for three days after being wounded.
President Anwar Sadat formally asked the United Nations to help reconvene the Geneva conference to make use of “a unique opportunity for peace” in present circumstances in the Middle East. Addressing the General Assembly, he appealed to Secretary General Waldheim, the United States and the Soviet Union to start consultations for an early resumption of the peace talks. Such consultations, the Egyptian President said, should be considered with all the interested parties including the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Five Japanese Red Army terrorists who seized the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in August, and the five others freed from Japanese prisons at their demand, are still in Libya, according to Libya’s vice interior minister, Younes Abulgasem Ali. Ali, who is visiting Japan, said the 10 terrorists are under restraint. He said he could not say whether his country intends to hand them back to Japan.
Spanish forces abandoned a forward post near the border between Morocco and Spanish Sahara and Spanish officials began leaving the capital of El Aaiun amid signs that the peaceful transfer of power in the territory from Spain to Morocco was imminent. A Moroccan spokesman said talks started in Madrid Tuesday between his country, Spain and Mauritania and that the talks were continuing. Spain is giving up the Spanish Sahara and Morocco and Mauritania are claiming it.
In a rose‐colored 100‐year‐old courthouse in Bangalore, lawyers for and against the federal government are painstakingly arguing the legal theories behind the rigorous state of emergency that has held India in its grip since June. The hearing, in which four of the most prominent political prisoners are seeking their release, goes to the heart of the national emergency, in which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Government has jailed thousands of its opponents. The verdict in Bangalore, balmy industrial city in the hills a few hundred miles from India’s southern tip, could have repercussions all over the country.
Canadian Postmaster General Bryce Mackasey and chief postal union negotiator Jean-Claude Parrot said “real progress” is being made in efforts to end a nine-day-old nationwide strike by 22,000 postal workers. The negotiations will resume today.
The rigorous austerity plan adopted by the military junta to halt Chile’s runaway inflation is making painful progress, but the economy is still hand‐to‐mouth. Drastic measures in effect since March to reduce public spending had by August brought the gap between income and expenditures this year to 12 percent. This ‐compares with a deficit of 30 percent in 1974. In the final, turbulent year in office of the late President Salvador Allende Gossens, who was overthrown by the armed forces in September, 1973, the deficit was 50 percent. The flood of paper money emitted by the Central Bank to finance the deficits of Dr. Allende’s Government pushed inflation to reckless heights. In the final months prices were rising 50 percent monthly.
Gunmen killed an Argentine auto executive in Cordoba in a labor dispute while armed men in Ensenada threatened to kill six kidnaped union leaders if raises were not granted, authorities said. In a third terrorist incident, the bullet-riddled bodies of two men and a woman were found in the Atlantic port of Bahia Blanca, 500 miles south of Buenos Aires. But they apparently were victims of right-wing terrorists.
The United States, Britain and France have made new diplomatic approaches to South Africa on the issue of South-West Africa, a territory governed by South Africa, but which has been declared independent and renamed Namibia by the United Nations. A U.N. statement said representatives of the three powers called on Secretary General Kurt Waldheim to brief him on their governments’ actions, but the statement supplied no details.
U.S. President Ford told the National Press Club that he would veto any legislation for a federal bailout of New York City. The next day, the New York Daily News ran the famous headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”. President Ford said he was prepared to veto any bill to rescue New York City by having the federal government guarantee the availability of funds to prevent a default. He sent Congress, as an alternative, a measure that would let the city maintain essential services while filing for bankruptcy. Congressional Democratic leaders indicated that they would continue to seek loan-guarantee legislation now in committee in both houses. House Democratic leaders met to explore methods of linking the President’s legislation to a loan-guarantee bill.
President Ford’s proposal for New York City’s crisis was denounced by leading New York Democrats and some Republicans. Mayor Beame called it a default of presidential leadership and said it would revive national divisions and prove costly far beyond New York’s boundaries. Governor Carey called it simplistic and self-defeating. State Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz, a Republican, called it “back-of-the-hand treatment.” Nassau County Executive Ralph Caso, also Republican, called it “ill-advised, to say the least.”
The National Security Agency’s director told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that for seven years, until 1973, it had secretly scanned international telephone and cable traffic of both American and foreign individuals and groups. General Lew Allen Jr. said it had acted for six government agencies without obtaining court orders or the specific approval of Presidents Johnson or Nixon or their Attorneys General.
The Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, in a serious setback for Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, restored only $406 million to an appropriations bill that had been reduced $7.6 billion by the House. The bill is expected to win approval of the full committee and Senate passage. Mr. Schlesinger had urged restoration of $2.6 billion of the House cuts.
A man identified as an “old-time bank robber” apparently botched a holdup in Cleveland and then held seven women hostage with a bomb while he negotiated with police for his escape. Authorities identified the man as Eddie Watkins, 56, whose robbery convictions go back to 1938. Two hostages who were ill were released shortly after the gunman took them into a vault area and a third was released about six hours later. Police said he was holding “some kind of hand-trigger device that looks like when you press, it goes off.” Police and FBI agents were in the bank negotiating with Watkins, who had demanded a van to take him and the hostages away.
A special federal prosecutor told a federal court jury that literary appraiser Ralph G. Newman helped get former President Richard M. Nixon an illegal $450,000 tax break by backdating Nixon papers donated to the National Archives. Newman is on trial in Chicago for two counts of lying to the Internal Revenue Service about the papers so that it appeared they had been donated prior to July 25, 1969. The prosecutor, Jay Horowitz, said that the donation came too late to qualify under federal law for a tax deduction.
A former Portland, Maine, policeman was found guilty of an attempt to organize fellow officers in a “death squad” to execute persons they regarded as criminals. Edward A. Foster, 27, was charged with solicitation to murder, a common law misdemeanor, the maximum penalty for which is 11 months in jail. Foster testified that he had made such a proposal but that it was a joke and he never intended to carry out the idea.
Six children who were removed from a house in Grannis, Arkansas, where a group of about 40 persons is waiting for the second coming of Christ, will be placed in foster homes in the community. Authorities took custody of the children under court order to enforce a state school attendance law. The adults in the group had been told by one member of the sect that he had had a revelation from God that the group must stay together until the second coming.
The military promotion policies of Howard H. Callaway when he was secretary of the Army are being challenged by a group of about 500 officers in a suit filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C. They charge that more than 2,300 career officers — captains, majors and warrant officers — were twice turned down for promotions when Callaway urged the Army to promote younger officers instead of captains and majors with experience in an effort to cut back on the size of the officer corps.
Steven Saliah, a former college athlete who became involved with the radical group that reportedly hid Patricia Hearst, was indicted today by a Federal grand jury in Sacramento for an armed robbery in which a death occurred.
Laws to create a federally chartered open crude oil market were suggested by a spokesman for independent domestic refiners in testimony before an antitrust subcommittee of the U.S. Senate. Edwin Jason Dryer, general counsel for the Independent Refiners Assn. of America, said the independents’ chief problem is that the major oil companies, which control most of the nation’s domestic crude oil production, use their profits on crude oil to subsidize their refining and marketing activities. “There is no free, open and competitive market where an independent refiner can buy crude oil which is realistically priced in terms of prices which may be realized on sale of refined products,” he said.
Twenty years ago, some portions of the San Joaquin Valley in California were sinking at the rate of 1.8 feet a year because of the withdrawal of groundwater for irrigation but that phenomenon largely has been halted by the import of water from the California Aqueduct and the Friant-Kern Canal, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report. Sinking problems still exist around Hanford in Kings County, Porterville in Tulare County and El Nido in Merced County, the report said.
The over-the-counter drugs used by millions as sleep aids and sedatives are probably ineffective in the recommended dosages and could be dangerous in larger quantities, according to the testimony of physicians before the Senate Monopoly Subcommittee. Its chairman, Senator Gaylord Nelson, said the industry had failed in more than a dozen years to prove their effectiveness. The Wisconsin Democrat noted that since 1962 the law required evidence of effectiveness and safety for all drugs that are on the market.
Persons with ulcers who drink decaffeinated rather than regular coffee in the hope it causes less stomach acid may be getting just as much acid, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. While caffeine stimulates gastric acid secretion, an unknown ingredient in both kinds of coffee apparently does the same thing. In tests with eight men and women over a six-month period, the report said that acidity responses to regular and decaffeinated coffee were “remarkably similar.”
Major League Baseball:
Boston’s Fred Lynn is the overwhelming choice as American League Rookie of the Year.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 838.63 (-12.83, -1.51%)
Born:
Michael Shur, American television writer and producer (“Parks and Recreation”, “The Good Place”), in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Kelly Lin, Chinese actress (“Reign of Assassins”), in Taipei, Taiwan.
Karim García, Mexican MLB outfielder (Los Angeles Dodgers, Arizona Diamondbacks, Detroit Tigers, Baltimore Orioles, Cleveland Indians, New York Yankees, New York Mets), in Ciudad Obregon, Mexico.
Gary Johnson, MLB outfielder and pinch hitter (Anaheim Angels), in Palo Alto, California.
Scott Randall, MLB pitcher (Cincinnati Reds), in Fullerton, California.
History Diaries 