News stories from Saturday March 13, 1971
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- South Vietnamese officers predict that the Laos operation will end in two weeks; South Vietnamese forces are moving back toward the border. [CBS]
- While a Saigon force repulsed an attack today in the Tchepone Valley of Laos, South Vietnamese troops near the junction town of Tchepone began redeploying to avoid becoming trapped by a large North Vietnamese force that was believed to be nearby. The move eastward from Tchepone was partly to protect Route 9, potentially a vital resupply route. [New York Times]
- President Nixon will attend the funeral of Whitney Young. [CBS]
- Last Saturday, foreign affairs adviser Henry Kissinger met with three conspirators in the alleged plot to kidnap him. Peace activist Tom Davidson said that he talked with Kissinger in the White House situation room about his viewpoints related to Indochina and U.S. policies. Davidson asked about the government "kidnapping" Americans and sending them to Vietnam, and taking South Vietnamese peasants from Western to Southern provinces. Davidson says that neither side convinced the other and it's hard to tell if the meeting did any good; he asked Kissinger to resign. [CBS]
- Senator Mike Mansfield said he has learned that Russian troops have been withdrawn from Egyptian missile sites. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir is proposing international military patrols of the Sinai, including Israeli and Egyptian troops. [CBS]
- Sixteen anti-Castro Cubans chained themselves to a conference table in the United Nations Security Council chamber to demand human rights for political prisoners in Cuba; guards removed the protesters. [CBS]
- Paul Rose was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte. [CBS]
- Six National Guard battalions will spend their two-week summer training periods this year maneuvering with two regular Army divisions at Fort Hood, Tex., in an experiment that "might well be expanded" nationwide, the deputy chief of the National Guard Bureau in the Pentagon said. The highly trained Guard units would then be prepared for action "in lieu of" active units as the Army is reduced in size, the Pentagon official added. [New York Times]
- In a group interview with nine newswomen released in Washington, President Nixon said his wife Pat had "great strength of character" and great sensitivity and was a strict disciplinarian with their two daughters. Mr. Nixon was throught to have shown more emotion, pride and introspection in talking about his feelings for his family than he usually had in the past. [New York Times]
- In a cable to Senator William Proxmire, a prominent French journalist and member of the National Assembly said the joint British-French supersonic transport "looks to us" like "an industrial Vietnam." Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, publisher of the influential L'Express, said the Rolls-Royce collapse last month "already looks small compared to the financial quagmire of the SST" and urged Congress to cancel the American SST. [New York Times]