News stories from Sunday March 17, 1974
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- President Nixon's public appearances about the country are taking on the flavor and scope of a national political campaign. He has stepped up the number and variety of public contacts as he seeks to show himself as a President firmly in control of his job and unperturbed by impeachment proceedings. Some of his appearances, as in Nashville Saturday night, have all the trappings of a campaign stop before an election -- crowds, banners, bands, advance men, controversy and oratory. [New York Times]
- The feast of St. Patrick is normally the grandest day of the year in Boston, but in South Boston, the city's tough, proud Irish neighborhood, the celebration today was overshadowed by tensions building over the issues of schools, busing and race. Mayor Kevin White was at the head of the parade when the booing started. [New York Times]
- A group of militant women are believed to be among the leaders of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the professed kidnappers of Patricia Hearst. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation has refused to identify any of the women, it was learned from usually reliable sources that they come from the Berkeley area near San Francisco, that they have been involved with inmates at various California prisons and that they were associates of both Jack Remiro and Russell Little. The two inmates have been charged with the murder of Dr. Marcus Foster, the Oakland, Calif., schools superintendent the Symbionese group said they killed. [New York Times]
- Arab oil ministers again postponed the expected lifting of the oil embargo against the United States and scheduled another meeting tomorrow. Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi Arabian Minister of Petroleum Affairs, said tonight in Vienna that "you can say categorically the embargo will be lifted" on Tuesday. He also said that oil production will be raised. [New York Times]
- Secretary of State Kissinger has told his top aides that he probably will leave on another trip to the Middle East around April 20 to try to conclude a troop separation agreement between Syria and Israel in the Golan Heights area. The trip -- his fifth to the Middle East since November -- would take place after he holds preliminary talks here with Israeli and Syrian officials. [New York Times]
- The Soviet Union's Communist party newspaper, Pravda, ridiculed the Mideast diplomacy of Secretary of State Kissinger as a modern "mountain that produced a mouse," noting with approval that the Arab leaders completed their meeting in Libya without announcing the end of the oil embargo against the United States. Pravda also asserted that the Nixon administration's latest criticism of Western Europe "threatens to sink" the expanded European Common Market. [New York Times]
- South Vietnamese and Communist troops battled in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam over the weekend and there were more than 500 casualties reported on both sides, the Saigon command said. If the casualty figures are found to be true, it would be the heaviest fighting in South Vietnam since the Vietnam cease-fire agreement went into effect a little more than a year ago. [New York Times]
- The coming decade should see a "revolution" in conventional warfare possibilities brought about by a new generation of "smart bombs" that will fulfill the age-old military dream of a weapon so precise that one shot will destroy a target. This is the conclusion of Defense Department officials who foresee precision-guided bombs revolutionizing warfare in much the same way that tanks changed ground combat in World War I and radar altered air defense in World War II. [New York Times]