The Soviet Union has made a proposal that could extend an agreement for on-site inspection of peaceful nuclear explosions to a ban on all underground nuclear weapons testing. U.S. officials said. Officials said the Soviet Union had now proposed. somewhat ambiguously in a memorandum to the United Nations, to extend inspections on a voluntary basis.
The Central Intelligence Agency predicts that the Soviet Union will continue its long-term growth in military spending, although perhaps at a more moderate pace because of its lagging economy. In testimony given to Congress Iast May and made public today, the C.I.A. said that a balanced development of the Soviet economy had clearly been “impeded” by the high rate of defense spending, thus presenting the Soviet leadership with a “contentious” and “painful” issue. At the same time, however, the C.I.A., which last spring substantially increased its estimate of Soviet defense spending, said “it is clear that the Soviets are far more willing than we had thought to forgo growth in the civilian sector (and consumer satisfaction) in favor of expanding military capabilities.” The testimony was by the Director of Central Intelligence, George Bush, and other agency specialists on the Soviet Union before a joint economic subcommittee headed by Senator William Proxmire, Democrat of Wisconsin.
The Soviet Union has begun to make clear its policy of giving preferential treatment in foreign aid to those underdeveloped countries that embrace socialism and support Moscow’s positions in world affairs, and of denying help to those considered hostile. The policy itself may not be brand new, but the candor with which it has been explained in a recent. series of public statements is a new confirmation of the pragmatic political purposes that underlie Soviet economic aid programs. The Russians have rejected the thesis that as an industrialized state the Soviet Union shares with capitalist and former colonial powers an obligation to aid underdeveloped countries. At the United Nations yesterday, a Soviet Government statement declared that “there cannot be any grounds for presenting the Soviet Union and other socialist countries with those demands that the developing countries present to developed capitalist states, including the demand for mandatory transfer of a fixed share of gross national product to the developing countries by way of economic assistance.”
President Antonio Ramalho Eanes accused Portugal’s political parties of having the same faults which led to the imposition of a rightist dictatorship in 1926. Speaking at a ceremony marking the 66th anniversary of the first Portuguese republic, which was overthrown by a military coup. he said parties in that era were weak and indulged in maneuvers and shaky alliances. “Many of these characteristics are political reality today.” he said.
The two leaders of Northern Ireland’s Women’s Peace Movement asked Americans last night to stop contributing money to groups in Northern Ireland because this only added to violence in the British province. The women; Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan; were interviewed on the Public Broadcasting System’s MacNeil Lehrer Report, and their remarks were carried by the Reuters news agency. They appeared live from New Orleans, where they had recorded a television interview earlier in the day.
An Irish fisheries protection vessel shot at and hit a Soviet trawler fishing within the Irish Republic’s 12-mile limit last week, a court was told. Lieutenant Commander Patrick Cavanaugh, skipper of the naval vessel Granine, told the Cork district court he opened fire on the 2,700-ton trawler Belomorye when the trawler refused to heave to.
Syria asserted firmly today that it would continue its military intervention in Lebanon until its objectives there had been achieved. The Syrian attitude, expressed in an editorial in Al Thawra, the official newspaper, also said that “no pressure or influence” would make this country change its course of action. While the source of possible pressure was not specified, some diplomatic analysts here felt the statement was meant to advise the United States, the Soviet Union and France that Damascus would not welcome proposals from outside the Arab world for Syrian withdrawal or negotiations. The Syrian statement was also felt to be an expression of the determination of the Government of President Hafez al-Assad not to grant significant concessions to the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Lebanese Muslim leftists in any possible negotiations. Syria’s position has been steadfast in recent weeks. The position is that the Palestinians and Lebanese leftists must agree to a cease‐fire, with the Palestinians returning to their camps under the terms of the 1969 Cairo agreement regulating their residence in Lebanon.
Machine-gun fire riddled the car of the top Arab League mediator in Lebanon, and he had to run for cover as his vehicle tried to pass from the Muslim to the Christian sector of Beirut. Hassan Sabri Kholi was on his way to a meeting with Lebanon’s new president. Elias Sarkis. He was being escorted to the Christian lines by Palestinian guerrillas and Lebanese leftists.
Lebanese leaders and Western diplomats in Beirut are perplexed by American policy in Lebanon. The United States, alone among the major powers, has given up all efforts to exert direct diplomatic influence and to obtain direct political and military information there. All American diplomats have moved into their embassy in Beirut and rarely leave it.
French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing and the Shah of Iran met for nearly two hours in Tehran. A French delegation spokesman said that Giscard d’Estaing told the shah that France was willing to host a round-table conference on Lebanon but only if Arab nations unanimously agreed to it. Giscard d’Estaing also told the shah that France would support Iran’s move to win special treatment for its exports among Common Market nations, the spokesman said.
Lawyers for the Indian Express newspaper sought a hearing to have the sealing of the paper’s presses by the New Delhi municipal authorities declared illegal. Express Newspapers Ltd. filed a writ in the Delhi High Court alleging that the action was in contempt of previous court orders. The presses were sealed for alleged nonpayment of property taxes, but the firm denied owing any property tax.
The sluggish brown waters of the Ganges, which flow from India through Bangladesh and into the Bay of Bengal, have become the focus of a bitter political dispute between the two South Asian neighbors, as they were between India and Pakistan. At issue is a $200 million barrier that India has built at the town of Farakka, 11 miles upstream from the border, to divert some of the water into another river to flush silt out of the port of Calcutta, 150 miles to the south. Bangladesh, asserting that the diversion has had a devastating effect on agriculture, industry and navigation on its side of the border, terms the operation of the Farakka Barrage, which was completed early last year, “an act, of aggression on the economic sovereignty of Bangladesh.” “India cannot unilaterally withdraw waters from common rivers without due regard to the consequences downstream,” the Bangladeshis declared in one of the documents prepared to explain their case at the current session of the United Nations General Assembly.
The Ford administration was accused of not having used all diplomatic approaches before it launched an attack against Cambodia last year to rescue the cargo ship Mayaguez and her crew. The conclusion was reached in a congressional-sponsored study made public by the General Accounting Office. It said that while the administration had undertaken some diplomatic initiatives, “little weight appears to have been given to indications that the Cambodians might be working out a political solution.”
The foreign ministers of Cambodia and Laos indicated today that anti-Communist forces were active in the two Indochinese states more than a year and a half after Communist governments had gained power. Ieng Sary of Cambodia told the General Assembly: “Since their defeat, the American imperialists, their valets and other reactionary forces continue without letup their harassment against our land, our people and our revolution.” He said these forces were trying to reassemble the “debris of the forces of treason to conduct acts. of subversion, provocation, division and sabotage” in Cambodia since the Communist takeover in April 1975. Phoune Sipraseuth of Laos, told the Assembly that the new Government “had been exposed to sabotage by imperialism.” He said “Thai reactionaries” had infiltrated parts of the country “to sow discord and encourage acts of provocation on the Thai frontier, with the aim of creating economic and, financial difficulties” for Laos. Both men spoke in the general debate. Neither gave any further details on their charges, but their speeches seemed to jibe with reports reaching Thailand and elsewhere that some forms of resistance were continuing in parts of the Indochinese area.
Thai policemen firing machine guns; grenades and antitank weapons stormed a university campus today where several thousand students were demonstrating against the presence in Thailand of the former military ruler, Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn. The police reported that at least 15 persons, most of them students, had been killed and more than 10 seriously wounded. Reporters at the scene said the casualty toll could well go far higher. Earlier, a mob of angry right‐wing students, mostly from vocational schools, had exchanged fire with the demonstrators, from Thammasat University. The rightist students hanged two rival students from a tree near the campus. It could not be determined whether they were dead before being hanged. The mob then set upon the corpses with sticks, gouged out their eyes and cut their throats.
In a bitter rebuke to Soviet “expansionist” strategies, China rebuffed cautious Soviet moves to resume normal diplomatic relations following the death of Mao-Tse-tung. In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Foreign Minister Chino Kuan-hua quoted heavily from Chairman Mao and seemed eager to stress a continuing consistency by the new Peking leadership with Mao’s policies.
The Japanese tax administration agency said it would levy taxes and penalties totaling $1.88 million on an alleged bribe of $1.831 million from Lockheed Aircraft Corp. to former Prime Minister Kauei Tanaka. Tanaka faces trial on charges he received the money from Lockheed to use his influence to help Lockheed sell TriStar air buses to All Nippon Airways. Conviction on the bribery charge could mean confiscation of the money and cancellation of the taxes and penalties.
A senior Panamanian source reported that Panamanian authorities have called on President Ford’s Administration to resume long-stalled negotiations to revise the 1903 canal treaty before the November 2 presidential election. The informant, who did not want to be identified, said the Administration promised to consider the request. But he added, “We have heard nothing.” Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, chief U.S. negotiator, was not available for comment.
An outbreak of Ebola virus disease, as yet unnamed, has occurred in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The World Health Organization has sent a team of doctors to northern Zaire and the Sudan in Africa to begin an investigation of an as yet unidentified disease that has killed more than 150 people, including four Belgian missionaries, in recent weeks, according to an American health official. First reports from European missionary officials, businessmen and journalists indicate that there have been several hundred cases of the disease, with a very high death rate. United Press International reported that one area involved was Yambuku, north of Bumba in northern Zaire.
The strongest campaign charges to date about Watergate were made by Senator Walter Mondale. Speaking to students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate accused the Ford administration of “a fundamental failure to heed the lessons of Watergate.” starting with the pardon of Richard Nixon and continuing its present policies.
Preparations were being speeded for the second television debate between President Ford and Jimmy Carter. The TV confrontation will take place tomorrow night in San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, an extravagant blend of romantic and classical architecture. A colonnade of huge Corinthian columns topped by weeping nymphs stands
outside the theater where the debate will be staged. It is a diverting but purely incidental feature of the encounter, for what the national television audience will see will differ in no noticeable detail from what it saw two weeks ago when the first debate was staged in Philadelphia.
Eugene J. McCarthy was rebuffed by the Supreme Court today in a move designed to block tomorrow night’s scheduled Presidential debate from going on the air without him. In a one‐sentence order, the Court refused to bypass the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and hear Mr. McCarthy’s appeal from a decision earlier in the day by the Federal Communications Commission rejecting his contention that excluding him from the debates violates the fairness doctrine. Mr. McCarthy, an independent candidate, and Lester G. Maddox, the American Independent Party candidate, had both sought equal debate time. They argued that the Presidential debates were not bona fide news events, as required by F.C.C. rules to qualify for exempting from the equal time rule. The F.C.C. ruled against both of them.
Congressional aides said today that they expected President Ford to sign a bill permitting Federal courts to award lawyer fees to the prevailing party in suits brought to enforce civil rights laws. The measure was passed, 57 to 15, by the Senate last Wednesday after a filibuster by supporters, because of a 1975 Supreme Court decision that Federal courts did not have the power to award lawyer fees to a prevailing party unless authorized by Congress.
President Ford characterized the 94th Congress today as one marked by “weak compromises and evasions” and said he hoped that its adjournment last week marked the end of an era of legislative malaise. “Few Congresses have been presented with such a clear challenge to deal forthrightly with the nation’s problems,” the President said. “Few Congresses have fallen so short of meeting the challenge.” Mr. Ford made the sharply negative assessment of the predominantly Democratic Congress in a statement issued from the Pacific Heights mansion here where he was preparing for his televised debate with Jimmy Carter tomorrow night. Mr. Ford made no reference in the statement to the Democratic Presidential nominee.
Radioactive fallout from a nuclear test in China 10 days ago, sweeping across the Pacific Ocean, has been found along the East Coast, the federal government reported. Radiation has been detected in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, including high readings in parts of Long Island and upstate. As laboratory testing continued, the government said that “at the levels reported thus far,” the radiation was far below the danger mark.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) entered into a new labor contract with the Ford Motor Company, three weeks after the UAW’s 163,000 Ford Motor employees had gone on strike, in what was called “a ‘toe in the door’ to a four-day workweek in American industry” by labor analyst Arvid Jouppi, in that it provided for 11 of 52 weeks to have paid holidays in 1978 and 13 weeks by 1979 (seven new days off plus six holidays).
The Allied Chemical Corporation was fined the maximum sum of $13,375,000 in Federal district court today for polluting the James River for nearly four years with the persistent, highly toxic insecticide Kepone. Judge Robert R. Merhige Jr. said that he had given the company “no credit” for having pleaded no contest — which has the same effect as pleading guilty — to 940 counts of knowingly dumping Kepone-laden process water and other chemical discharges into the river, and thence into the Chesapeake Bay, from its chemical plant in Hopewell, Virginia, just south of here. The United States attorney here, William B. Cummings, charged in a series of indictments last summer that Allied officials in Hopewell had conspired to withhold from the Federal Environmental Agency information about the toxic discharges—data that would have alerted the Government earlier to what the prosecutor called “this greatest disaster of the environmental decade.”
Michael McPherson, a former administrative assistant to Rep. William Clay (D-Missouri) pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington to two counts of mail fraud. The prosecution recommended that the remaining 32 counts of mail fraud and making false statements be dropped and that McPherson be sentenced to the maximum five years and fined $2.000. No date for sentencing was set. According to the indictment, McPherson placed his sister-in-law, Loretta V. Sanderson, on Clay’s payroll while she was a school teacher in Los Angeles. It said the McPhersons deposited 22 checks worth $32,546 in their personal bank accounts.
Hundreds of thousands of letters from congressmen seeking reelection are being mailed to voters at public expense. It is the latest instance of what critics say is use by congressmen of the free mailing privilege to win votes. Congressmen are prohibited from making mass mailings to their constituents within 28 days of an election. That meant Monday was the deadline and congressional mail facilities were jammed. “We’ve been working nights and weekends for three weeks,” said one House employee pushing a filled hamper to a loading dock. Congress reimburses the Postal Service for delivering franked mail. In fiscal 1975, about 317.4 million pieces of “free” mail were sent at a taxpayer cost of $34.5 million.
Legal actions were instituted in both Federal and state courts in Maryland yesterday against Spiro T. Agnew, according to The Associated Press. A request for a show‐cause order seeking to revoke the former Vice President’s probation was filed in Federal Court in Baltimore by Sam Polur, a lawyer from Miami. Federal District Court Judge Roszel C. Thomsen set a hearing for Friday on Mr. Polur’s request. Mr. Agnew was placed on unsupervised probation for three years after resigning as Vice President and pleading no contest in 1973 to a single count of tax evasion. The probation will expire next Sunday.
Former Army Secretary Howard H. (Bo) Callaway’s efforts to expand a Colorado ski resort in which he had a financial interest “raise serious questions of impropriety,” a narrowly divided Senate subcommittee said. The five Democrats concluded that a July, 1975, meeting between Agriculture Department officials and Callaway laid the groundwork for pressure from then-Agriculture Secretary Earl L. Butz for approval of the expansion. But the four Republican members of the subcommittee said they found “no testimony or evidence” that Callaway used pressure. The Democrats did report, however, they could find no evidence that final permission to expand the resort resulted from pressure from Callaway or Butz.
The Bay Area Rapid Transit system, once hailed as a space age response to traffic congestion, is a “$1.6 billion mistake” that has fallen short of expectations, says a University of California study. Prof. Melvin M. Webber, director of the university’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development, warned Federal funding sources and other metropolitan areas against building “a series of multibillion‐dollar mistakes scattered from one end of the continent to the other.” Frank Herringer, the BART general manager, called the report, which was released yesterday, “intellectually interesting but not really relevant.” The study found that patronage on the 70‐mile system of high‐speed commuter trains was about half of what had been forecast‐131,400 weekday passengers as against 258,600 projected — and that BART had reduced the number of cars on highways in the area by only 14,000, rather than the 48,000 predicted. It concluded that the system was handling only 2 percent of all trips within the district.
Exhaust emission standards of 1977 automobiles must be extended to cover the 1978 models or America’s car makers will be forced out of business, representatives of the manufacturers said at a press conference in Detroit. Congress had been expected to extend the 1977 regulations for a year before it adjourned last week, but did not, and at present the original, tougher 1978 standards are still law. Spokesmen for the companies said they would have no choice but to defy the law and build their 1978 cars according to the 1977 standards, because there is not enough time for them to achieve the higher standards by the time the 1978 cars go into production next summer.
Three voluntary-or private, nonprofit-hospitals were struck in New York City by the Committee of Interns and Residents because of the hospitals’ refusal to recognize the committee as bargaining agent for the physicians-in-training. The walkout affected Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn, Flower-Fifth Ave. Hospital in Manhattan and Albert Einstein Hospital in the Bronx.
Acting on the appeal of a man who claims he needs marijuana to keep from going blind, federal drug regulation agencies have approved human tests of the drug for treatment of glaucoma, government spokesmen said. At first the study will have only one subject — Robert Randall, 28, who is fighting a criminal marijuana charge in a Washington, D.C., court for allegedly growing marijuana at his home. The tests may later involve up to 50 patients to determine the effectiveness of the drug in relieving internal eyeball pressure.
A balloonist lifted off from a grassy spot on the coast near Milbridge, Maine, in an attempt to cross the Atlantic. Edward Yost, a licensed pilot from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was taken aloft by his helium-filled balloon late in the day, catching favorable westerly winds he hoped would carry him over Nova Scotia and on to Europe. The flight, financed in part by the National Geographic Society, had been in the planning for 16 months. Yost, who designs balloons as well as flying them, said the trip would be made at altitudes between 5,000 and 10,000 feet. If Yost succeeds, he would be the first person in history to cross the Atlantic in a balloon.
Major League Baseball:
MLB expansion draft: Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays pick 30 unprotected AL players; Ruppert Jones OF (Seattle) and Bob Bailor OF (Toronto) are first picks
Stock prices dropped and the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 11.22 points to 966.76. The declines occurred amid rising fears of an economic downturn and a possible rise in oil prices. The credit markets, in contrast, reflected optimism. Interest rates on state and city bonds fell as investment bankers bid aggressively to buy $116 million of Massachusetts bonds and several other big issues.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 966.75 (-11.23, -1.15%)
Born:
Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechen rebel and leader of the breakaway Chechen Republic; in Tsentaroy, Chenceno-Ingush ASSR, Soviet Union (now Akhmat-Yurt, Chechnya)
Ronnie Heard, NFL safety (San Francisco 49ers, Atlanta Falcons), in Bay City, Texas.
Mauro Colagreco, Argentine-born French chef; in La Plata, Argentina.
Matt Hamill, deaf American college wrestling and later mixed martial arts champion; in Loveland, Ohio.
Alessandra Sublet, French television host; in Lyon, France.
Died:
Lars Onsager, 72, Norwegian-born American chemist and 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate.
Barbara Nichols (stage name for Barbara Marie Nickerauer), 47, American character actress on stage, film and TV (“Dear Heart”, “Disorderly Orderly”); from liver failure related to earlier auto accidents. She had been in a coma for more than a year.
Prabhu Lal Bhatnagar, 64, Indian mathematician for whom the Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook operator is named.
