News stories from Sunday April 29, 1973
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- William Sullivan of the State Department met with North Vietnamese officials in Paris to discuss the Vietnam truce agreement. [NBC]
- Heavy fighting continued near Phnom Penh, Cambodia. [NBC]
- Bombs destined for Cambodia blew up near Roseville, California, while being shipped to a West Coast port; nobody was killed. The railroad boxcars burned all night, and the lack of casualties was only due to the fact that no houses are nearby. Centers have been set up to handle the 30,000 people who were evacuated from the area. The cause of the explosions is unknown. [NBC]
- It will be two more weeks before the Mississippi River falls below flood level. A 14-year-old girl died in St. Louis after falling from a truck during sandbagging operations. Student volunteers are working around the clock sandbagging in efforts to ward off flood waters. Local residents praised the students' efforts. [NBC]
- There are many more poor whites in America than poor blacks. Appalachia is a hard-core poverty area. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both tried to reduce poverty here, but little progress has been made. In 1963, President Kennedy began a program of aid to the depressed Appalachian area. In the 1950's many coal mines in the area closed due to the reduced demand for coal. Other mines became mechanized and many coal miners were left unemployed. Government programs have helped somewhat. New roads have opened and factories and vocational schools were built in order to try to improve the area's economy.
Now President Nixon wants to kill the Office of Economic Opportunity. With the death of the OEO will come the closure of some government factories. The Appalachian area still desperately needs help from the government: half of the children in the area drop out of primary school, one-third of the houses have no plumbing, the death rate is twice as high as the national average, unemployment in some areas is 60%. To drop OEO programs here would be a crime.
[NBC] - The people of Williamsburg, Michigan, voted to ask the government for stricter controls on oil and gas well drilling. Natural gas eruptions have caused Williamsburg residents to evacuate their homes. Craters of methane gas, which is highly explosive, have been erupting in Williamsburg. It is believed that drilling by the Amoco Gas Company was the cause of the problem. Township supervisor Herman Smith advised people to keep records of expenses they incur as a result of the gas eruptions, in hopes that Amoco will reimburse them. Williamsburg is a fishing resort, but the gas may have polluted waters in the area. [NBC]
- Pressure is growing on President Nixon to appoint independent attorneys rather than using the Justice Department to investigate the Watergate case. Republican Senator Charles Percy will introduce a resolution calling on President to do so. The president of the American Bar Association called for the same thing. A.B.A. president Robert Meserve stated that public confidence would be greatly increased if nobody in the Nixon administration was involved in the Watergate investigation. Meserve noted that President Coolidge set the precedent by having independent attorneys investigate the Teapot Dome scandal.
Most of the information received by the press about Watergate comes through leaks by unnamed administration officials. The Washington Post reported an anonymous White House source as saying that presidential aide John Dean is ready to swear that he made progress reports on the cover-up of the Watergate bugging to H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.
[NBC] - E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy are convicted Watergate spies who were linked to the Pentagon Papers trial of Daniel Ellsberg last week. A report stated that the two men broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to get Ellsberg's records. Time magazine now reports that Liddy and Hunt were both on the White House payroll at the time of the burglary. [NBC]