News stories from Saturday May 9, 1970

Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:

A crowd of between 75,000 and 100,000, drawn mostly from the nation's campuses, demonstrated peaceably near the White House. After the rally ended, small bands of militants crashed through barricades on nearby streets, disrupting traffic and throwing missiles. The police used tear gas to break up the most threatening crowds. [New York Times] Unable to sleep, President Nixon left the White House and drive to the Lincoln Memorial shortly before dawn to spend an hour talking with antiwar protesters. Mr. Nixon asked the group, which grew from eight to about 50 young people, "to try to understand what we are doing." [New York Times] Robert Finch, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, told a group of demonstrators that the rhetoric of Vice President Agnew and Gov. Ronald Reagan of California had contributed to "heating up the climate in which the Kent State students were killed." [New York Times] Several thousand demonstrators marched on the United States Embassy in London. The demonstration was generally peaceful, but a few militants struggled with police and broke windows in some cars. Scotland Yard reported that 12 demonstrators and 25 policemen had been injured. [New York Times] Administration economists are puzzled by the recent sharp rise in unemployment because the rest of the economy is behaving just about as they thought it would. Herbert Stein, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, said the puzzling thing was that unemployment was going up while the same number of people kept their jobs just as the administration expected. [New York Times] The governors of 17 states and two territories joined in an effort to combat environmental problems through multistate agreements. The group, an offshoot of the Southern Governors' Conference, was largely the work of Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. The group will begin by asking Washington for permission to form multistate agreements to work on specific environmental problems. [New York Times] White House officials announced that allied forces in Cambodia had captured more ammunition than the enemy had expended so far this year. They also said that in the long run the operation might enhance prospects for negotiations not only with Hanoi, but also with Moscow. [New York Times] Allied military spokesmen in Saigon announced that about 90 South Vietnamese and American river gunboats, supported by United States air power and South Vietnamese ground forces, had moved up the Mekong River into Cambodia. Sixty South Vietnamese boats had been massed at the border amid reports that they might go all the way to Phnom Penh. [New York Times]