The meeting of seven leaders of the Soviet bloc scheduled for November 24‐25 in Bucharest is expected to produce a new call for East West disarmament moves and troop reductions, Eastern European diplomats report. They say the call will be addressed primarily to President‐elect Jimmy Carter and to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, whose party won the West German election last month. The diplomats said the disarmament proposal by the Warsaw Pact, as the bloc is known, would be a signal that the Soviet Union wished to complete a second-stage agreement with the United States on the limitation of strategic arms as soon as possible. The troop proposal would be aimed at invigorating the four-year‐old 19‐nation negotiations in Vienna on mutual East‐West troop reductions in Central Europe. Ford Administration officials familiar with Eastern European affairs echoed the expectation that fresh disarmament and troop proposals would be dominant themes at the Bucharest meeting. The last such meeting took place in Warsaw in April 1974.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s latest book gives details of a bloody uprising in the Soviet Union in 1962 in which troops killed 70 to 80 persons. The exiled Russian writer said the Soviet authorities tried to keep secret the revolt by workers in Novocherkassk, a city of 168,000 on the Don River near Rostov, following an announcement of price increases and wage cuts. Despite Soviet secrecy, there were reports in the Western press about the uprising and its suppression several weeks after it occurred in early June. Mr. Solzhenitsyn presents a detailed account in his third and final volume of “The Gulag Archipelago,” which deals with the Soviet Union’s secret police, prisons and labor camps. The volume has just been published in German. At a news conference September 28 in Paris, another Russian exile, Andrei Amalrik, also mentioned the hushing‐up of the Novocherkassk uprising.
A leader of Northern Ireland’s peace movement, Mrs. Betty Williams, told 6,000 sympathizers in Bristol, England, that the campaign will start a new phase after a rally in London November 27. “We will have a few surprises up our sleeves,” she said, adding that the London rally would mark the end of a series of marches that the peace movement has held throughout Britain. The new phase will be based mainly in Northern Ireland, she said, but did not say what it would consist of. Mrs. Williams said that another trip was planned to the United States and Canada to persuade people to stop sending money to paramilitary groups in the sectarian war.
East German cargo ships will be allowed to dock in American ports for the first time, the State Department announced. Previous restrictions are being removed in order to increase East German purchase of U.S. grain, officials explained. Negotiations to liberalize trading between the United States and East Germany have been under way since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two nations two years ago.
Offices of the (Italian) Christian Democratic Party in Florence and Genoa were attacked with firebombs during the night, the police reported this morning. The police said the doorway of a Christian Democratic building in Florence was damaged slightly. Limited damage was also reported after firebombs were thrown against a Christian Democratic office in the northern port city of Genoa. No injuries were reported in either attack.
A Yugoslav constitutional court, ruling in favor of a worker denied an apartment for political reasons, has challenged the party patronage system under which special benefits are reserved for the most active Communists. Though the court decision affects only one enterprise in the constituent republic of Serbia, it may have a far‐reaching impact. The case involves Nada Marie, a 30 year‐old typist at the government’s of products concern Jugopetrol, who had been seeking housing for years. Housing of any kind, especially in Belgrade, is scarce, in common with the other Communist countries.
In response to deep concern over the threat of terrorist acts in such places as Ireland, the Basque country and Corsica, the Council of Europe has formulated a convention for the suppression of terrorism. In essence the convention abolishes the legal distinction between politically motivated terrorism and ordinary crime. It stipulates automatic extradition of terrorists to the country where their act was committed or, alternatively, prompt trial in the country where they took refuge and were caught. It also calls for collaboration in tracking them down. However, one clause in the convention exempts those cases where there would; be “serious reasons to believe” that the request for extradition was motivated by “considerations of race, religion, nationality or political opinion.”
In the ruins of the downtown port area of Beirut, the Mediterranean is visible in blue patches framed by smashed buildings and holes in walls. But along the major street running up the hill from the port, the gunmen are not looking at the sea and the shooting continues even though the end of the 19‐month civil war seems to be approaching. On the south side of the street, Palestinian guerrillas crouch behind barriers to avoid gunfire and mortar explosions coming from the rightist Christians a few hundred yards away. The Palestinians poke their own machine guns through windows of a burned‐out office building that once housed the Haddad Bank and shoot back. They do not consider that they are violating the cease‐fire. They are responding, they say, to violations by the other side. There is some nervous comic relief at a barricade of rocks, sand and wooden doors set up by the Palestinians across Allenby Street. A guerrilla advises four Western correspondents that the safest way to cross behind the barricades is to run in a low and fast duck waddle. One of the correspondents slips on a loose stone or empty cartridge and sprawls on the ground, losing his eyeglasses and scraping an ankle. He crawls the last few yards to safety and as soon as his colleagues realize he has not been shot, the ankle scrape becomes a joke, a testament to clumsiness. Later, a Palestinian guerrilla laughs and says that a week ago a rigthtist sniper killed a Palestinian at the same barricade.
President Anwar Sadat told a group of U.S. senators visiting Cairo that he thought the United States had an obligation to sell weapons to Egypt because he had cooperated with Washington on Mideast policy. “I don’t know whether Congress will agree if I ask the United States for arms.” Sadat said. Earlier this year. Congress approved the sale of six C-130 military cargo planes to Egypt, but only after Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger said there would be no further requests for Egypt this year. Egypt reportedly wants antitank missiles and jet fighters.
When Saddam Hussein, the operating head of the Iraqi leadership, went out for strolls in Baghdad not long ago, Baghdad intellectuals report, he was accompanied at a respectful distance by a half-dozen guards. But later, the informants say, It was decided that even in this well‐policed capital the strolls might somehow expose Mr. Hussein to danger. The strolling quietly stopped. Eight years after taking power, the radical Baghdad leadership is still wary, vigilant and belligerently convinced that, as one Iraqi official put it recently, it is “surrounded by enemies.” The Iraqi leadership, which espouses the fervently Arab nationalist doctrines of the Baath Party, is calmer now than it was early in 1969, when after accusations of spying 11 Iraqis, nine of them Jews, were hanged and their bodies put on public display. But Mr. Hussein, himself a clandestine political plotter in his youth, and other Iraqi leaders are still inclined by experience, ideology and their view of some recent events to want to confront opponents that they see or fear.
Optimism over the prospect of future American-Vietnamese negotiations was expressed by French diplomatic sources despite an American statement that no progress was made at a Paris meeting Friday. The French cited a Vietnamese communique saying that Hanoi was willing to meet fully its obligations to account for all missing American servicemen and to find and return bodies of those killed. The United States has demanded a full report on the missing as a precondition for the much broader talks on “normalization of relations in the mutual interest of both parties” that the Vietnamese say they want. This condition somewhat puzzles the Vietnamese negotiators, according to neutral sources, since it arbitrarily provides them with bargaining cards they would not otherwise hold. They are presumably aware that the United States has the ability to remove the issue when it chooses. This is because it is generally believed by American officials that all living American prisoners have been returned and that those listed as missing are almost certainly dead. A reliable source said that the Department of Defense has been considering an announcement that the 800 listed as missing must be presumed dead. Such a move was being prepared by the Pentagon and would probably have been taken late this year had President Ford been re‐elected. Now the decision is expected to be left to President‐elect Carter.
The Cambodian Government, which has apparently chosen music as a key propaganda and teaching tool, is broadcasting its revolutionary message in song and rhyme. Refugees from Cambodia say that they have seen no newspapers in the country but that broadcasts by the Phnom Penh radio are piped into rice fields over loudspeakers. Music and poetry take up about half the six hours of broadcasting daily. The constantly changing repertoire includes children’s voices singing about the country’s leadership and its nonaligned foreign policy. One ballad tells of the United States helicopter evacuation of Americans from the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh in 1975, with Americans “shaking with fear, weeping and losing face.” One song tells children not to miss their parents too much. And meanwhile, the work of the Killing Fields continues.
A second earthquake struck the Chinese city of Tangshan, which had been destroyed by an earthquake on July 28.
An appeals court today approved four proposed witnesses in the first day of the retrial of 18 prominent dissidents, but withheld a decision on whether to summon President Park Chung Hee and eight Others. The three‐judge appeals panel said the four approved witnesses would he allowed to testify at the next hearing, next Saturday. They included Dr. Yu Chin O, a Korean constitutional authority, and a noted civil rights leader. Chun Kwan Won, former editor of South Korea’s largest newspaper. The dissidents include former President Yun Po Sun and an opposition presidential candidate, Kiln Dae Jung. They were convicted of inciting rebellion for signing a “manifesto for democracy” March 1 that demanded President Park’s resignation and political reforms. The defendants seek to overturn prison terms of from two to eight years that were imposed August 28 after their trial in Seoul district criminal court.
Nationalist Chinese (Taiwan) Premier Chiang Ching-kuo assured the ruling Kuomintang Party that his government would not deal secretly with the Communist regime in Peking. “Except for battlefield contact in the shape of a bullet, we shall have nothing to do” with the mainland Chinese leadership, Chiang told 3,000 delegates at the opening of the Nationalists 11th party congress in Taipei.
The leader of the left-wing Nicaraguan guerrilla movement. Carlos Fonseca Amador, has been killed in a clash with government troops, a representative of his group, Jose Escobar, announced in Havana. Escobar said Fonseca was killed last Monday. He also accused the United States of supporting the Nicaraguan regime with 1.100 specially trained troops that he said had begun operating 20 months ago because President Anastasio Somoza’s forces had been unable to crush the guerrillas.
Argentina’s war against left-wing subversion has intensified with nearly 100 suspected guerrillas killed in the past two weeks. But political assassinations and bombings contributed to continued insecurity in many sectors. The killing of six suspected guerrillas last night in La Plata, capital of Buenos Aires Province, raised the death toll in political violence this year to 1,230. Hundreds more have disappeared in mysterious arrests or abductions. Highly placed security sources said the military operations against urban guerrillas concentrated in major industrial centers are going very well for the Government. But the fight is clearly far from over. The discovery of two clandestine arms factories in the industrial suburbs of this capital showed that guerrilla organizations are manufacturing thousands of automatic pistols and grenades in secret shops.
Lieutenant Colonel Edouard Nzambimana was named as the new Prime Minister of Burundi. Colonel Nzambimana, 30 years old, attended the Royal Military School in Brussels before returning to Burundi in 1971. He was Transport and Public Works Minister for a time in the deposed Government. He is a member both of the revolutionary council set up after the coup and of its executive committee.
Angola’s National Museum of Anthropology was opened in Luanda to preserve Angola’s heritage.
A threatened confrontation between black and white delegations that could halt the conference on the future of Rhodesia has been put off in Geneva until at least Monday. The meeting was demanded by two of the four black faction leaders in the talks, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe. They had threatened to call for indefinite adjournment unless British chairman Ivor Richard endorsed their demand for black majority rule within a year. Britain proposes 15 months while the white regime insists on 24 months.
Accounts of beatings, torture by electrical shocks and assaults by bands of white youths were related by dissident black youths released from jail in South Africa after confinement since September. They said one prisoner. Isaac Dumisani Mbatha, 16, died as a result of mistreatment. Police, however, said Mbatha became ill in his cell and died en route to a hospital. The 116 students released were among 159 arrested September 23 for marching in the streets of Johannesburg.
Improper South Korean lobbying in Washington was not significantly acted on by senior Nixon administration officials because they did not want to jeopardize Seoul’s commitment of 52,000 troops to the Vietnam War, according to a former State Department official in charge of Korean affairs. He said in an interview that Nixon administration leaders did not want to embarrass an ally. Donald K. Ranard, director of the Office of Korean Affairs from 1970 through 1974, said that William P. Rogers, then Secretary of State; Henry A. Kissinger, then Presidential assistant for national security affairs and currently Secretary of State, and William B. Saxbe, Attorney General in the latter days of the Nixon Administration, had been informed on the Korean operation. The former Secretary of Defense, Melvin R. Laird, said this week that he had been aware of an improper Korean lobby and had warned the State Department about it. He also said he had warned the South Koreans that it was harmful.
In Seoul, meanwhile, President Park Chung Hee has secretly dismissed the official of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency who was reported to be in charge of the agency’s network of operatives in Washington. The dismissal was said to have resulted from the official’s failure to warn the President of the dangers of overexposure of South Korean lobbying activities in the United States. The third-ranking official of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, who was reportedly responsible for coordinating activities of Korean operatives in Washington, has been dismissed. The operatives were said to include Park Tong Sun, a businessman, and Pak Bo Hi, a major official in the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.
The Defense Department is trying to work out an arrangement to relieve Jimmy Carter of the need to make a major decision on the future of the B-1 bomber program soon after he becomes President. As described by highly placed Pentagon officials, the proposed arrangement would permit a production go‐ahead for the Air Force strategic bomber but in such a way that it would not “box in” Mr. Carter when he takes office on January 20. Under the arrangement, a commitment would be made to produce the bomber and continue to provide incremental funding until Mr. Carter decided on the future of the program. The Air Force may have to pay a price for such an arrangement. According to defense officials, Rockwell International, the developer, is proving to be somewhat hesitant about entering into such an interim arrangement and demanding a higher price to offset its costs and those of its subcontractor if the program is canceled.
Revising the federal campaign law and liberalizing its fund restrictions is a goal of many congressional activists. One group seeks to widen the subsidy concept, linked to spending limits, to cover all congressional candidates by 1978. There is little or no desire to alter the basic reforms of the new law.
Federal aid programs were discussed by Democratic Governors of seven Northeastern states, who expect favorable policies for the region by President-elect Carter. At the conference in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., more than 100 specialists prepared proposals on welfare, transportation, energy and unemployment that will be distilled by the Governors tomorrow for what Governor Carey called “an agenda for action.”
The government may decide not to try to vaccinate many of the 58 million youngsters aged 3 to 18 against swine flu, in part because most of the vaccine recommended for them has been used up, a top government health official said. Dr. Theodore Cooper, assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, said that he considered children in that age group low risk because, if they are healthy, the consequences of their catching flu would be minimal. Cooper said he would probably announce Monday how much of the children’s vaccine, called “split virus” because it is given in two shots, would be available in the near future and what other plans might be made for protecting the youngsters.
The USS Los Angeles, first of a line of high-speed nuclear submarines, was commissioned by the Navy in Newport News, Va. Speaking at the ceremony. Hollywood actor and Naval Reserve Captain Jackie Cooper said that the new submarine, first of 23 in its class, represented this country’s effort to counter Soviet sea power quantity with U.S. quality. The Los Angeles, with an underwater speed in excess of 20 knots, is specially equipped for antisubmarine warfare. It is the fourth Navy vessel to bear that name. Mayor Bradley attended the commissioning.
The prosecution is expected to rest its case Monday or Tuesday in the political corruption trial of Governor Marvin Mandel of Maryland and four of his friends and business associates, bringing near the first testimony by the star witness, Mr. Mandel himself.
Americans think high school seniors should be required to pass a standardized examination in order to receive diplomas, the Gallup Poll reported. According to the poll, 65% favored such a nationwide requirement, 31% opposed it and 4% were undecided. The results showed a substantial increase in support for the test since 1958, when 50% favored it and 39% were opposed. The findings were based on interviews with 1,549 adults in more than 300 localities.
The pay of many of the nation’s air traffic controllers would be increased under a proposal by the Civil Service Commission. The plan would add a new pay grade for controllers at the busiest airports and would upgrade the ranks of many other controllers. A few controllers would be downgraded. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization labeled the proposal “seriously deficient and… unacceptable.”
The International Association of Machinists has voted to reject a company labor contract and to strike the Deere & Co. Harvester Works in East Moline, Illinois, at midnight Monday, a union spokesman said. Ed Pope, a spokesman for the IAM local, said the company was trying to take away from some employees the privilege of coming to work before 6 AM and collecting a third-shift bonus. A spokesman for Deere said the company was offering the IAM the same contract won after a long strike by the United Auto Workers last month and ratified by UAW members last weekend.
The Interstate Highway System, 20 years old tomorrow, has had a profound impact on American life. The superhighways, with 90 percent financing by the federal government, have drawn regions closer together, changed the nation’s patterns of commerce, work and recreation and speeded the flow of people and businesses far outward from the central cities. About 38,000 of a projected 42,500 miles are now open at a cost so far of $62 billion. No bands will play. No birthday parties are planned. Few people hereabouts are even aware of the occasion — not even in the wide open spaces, where superhighways are not only an inseparable part of the free life but almost an article of faith.
The only prisoner on Death Row in New York state is Joseph Davis, who was convicted last year of killing a Yonkers policeman, Harold Woods, in 1974. The 33-year-old inmate is being held under extraordinary security precautions in Green Haven prison near Poughkeepsie. He may be spared execution under a recent court ruling. In an interview made possible by a court order, he talked of his upcoming appeal and repeatedly insisted “they convicted the wrong man.”
The widow of the slain policeman is bitter over the ruling two weeks ago that New York’s mandatory death penalty for killing policemen is unconstitutional. She called the ruling incomprehensible and said she believed that the convicted murderer should be executed.
An oil rig supply boat carrying five persons sank in 20-foot seas in the Gulf of Mexico. The Coast Guard said two persons had died and three had been rescued by a nearby vessel shortly after the 180-foot State Queen issued a distress call. The cause of the sinking has not been determined, but the National Weather Service reported 35 mph winds in the area, about 75 miles south of Galveston, Texas. The State Queen transported mud used in offshore drilling.
The police said children tossed lighted matches at the driver of their school bus as he tried to pour gasoline into the vehicle yesterday, starting a fire that injured five children, the driver and a woman who came to help. The driver, Willis Osborne, was burned slightly. He pleaded no contest to a charge of drunken driving and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. At least five children suffered injuries to arms and legs when the 53 bus passengers, all of junior high school age, jumped through the rear emergency exit. Mrs. Earline Musgrove, who ran from her house to help, was treated for a burn on her left hand. Mr. Osborne told authorities he was pouring gasoline from a 10‐gallon can when a lighted match thrown from the bus ignited the fuel. He said he threw the burning can away, setting some shrubbery on fire. The bus did not catch fire.
A sale of superstrength but impure heroin killed four persons and hospitalized at least 24 in “the worst overdose epidemic in D.C. history,” the police said today. Captain Houston M. Bigelow, commander of the narcotics division, said metropolitan police knew the general location of one or two suspects, described as sizable dealers previously arrested. Three deaths occurred at District of Columbia hospitals and one in Maryland, with some overdose reports also coming in from Virginia. All the dead were men between 22 and 31 years old. Drug samples voluntarily turned in at area hospitals after the police issued a call for all possible victims to seek treatment were 12.4 percent heroin, five times the potency of samples taken off the streets in September, the officer said. The brown powder also contained black specks he described as “an unknown impurity.”
Snow piled up from the southern Rockies into Texas and Oklahoma, and record cold temperatures were reported in widely scattered sections of the country. Heavy snow warnings were posted in parts of Texas and snow, hazardous driving and other winter weather warnings were in effect in Oklahoma and New Mexico. Plains and Seminole, Texas recorded 10 inches of snow. It was the earliest snowfall in north Texas since a storm in November, 1951. Light snow was reported over western Pennsylvania and eastern New York also.
The first of 18 editions of the celebrity sporting competition “Battle of the Network Stars” premiered on the U.S. television network ABC with 10 TV stars apiece (six actors and four actresses) from the three television networks that existed in the United States at that time (ABC, CBS and NBC) in various sports (tennis, golf, volleyball), racing in running, swimming and bicycling; and a tug-of-war competition at the end between the two network teams that had done the best. The show, hated by TV critics, “drew a surprisingly large audience” as the 12th highest rated program of the week.
Born:
Hiroshi Tanahashi, Japanese professional wrestler (NJPW), in Ōgaki, Japan.
