News stories from Saturday July 14, 1973

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

President Nixon and Senator Sam Ervin are planning to use each other's past statements as legal weapons at their forthcoming confrontation over the issue of the President's cooperation with the Watergate inquiry. Mr. Nixon has indicated to the Senator, an acknowledged authority on constitutional law, that he plans to argue his case for the privilege of the President to remain silent by citing some Ervin pronouncements as precedent. [New York Times] Government investigators say that they are finding a pattern of high-pressure solicitation for very large contributions to President Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign among executives in the country's most powerful corporations. Following the footsteps of Maurice Stans and Herbert Kalmbach, Mr. Nixon's principal fund raisers in last year's record harvest of some $55 million for the Republican presidential campaign, investigators on both the Senate Watergate Committee and a special Watergate prosecution team say they expect to find that the aggressive Nixon money drive may have led to further violations of the federal election law. [New York Times] Hal M. Knight, a former Air Force major, has told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he in early 1970 participated in widespread falsification of records to hide the fact that United States B-52's were bombing Cambodia, Senate sources said. The sources said that Mr. Knight, now a graduate student in Memphis, has been summoned to testify in an extraordinary public session of the committee on Monday morning. [New York Times] Sadaam Hussein, the leading political figure of Iraq's left-wing government, said that the security of America's oil supplies from the Middle East would be better served by developing friendly relations with Arab producers than by arming Israel and Iran. In an interview with three Western correspondents, Mr. Hussein said Iraq would welcome moves by the United States and Britain that would lead to normalization of relations with Iraq, which has severed diplomatic relations with both countries. [New York Times] President Nixon was reported to have made a "very slight improvement" in his bout with viral pneumonia. Dr. Walter Tkach, the President's personal physician, said at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md., that Mr. Nixon's temperature had fallen to 100 from 102 degrees, that he had slept for six and a half hours, as against four the night before, and that his chest pains were less severe. "But the President is still a sick man," the doctor said. [New York Times] For the first time since Henry Ford began mass-producing Model T's in 1908, the automobile-based way of life is being directly challenged by official action. With the expressed aim of reducing air pollution, the federal government has proposed to restrict automobile traffic in some metropolitan areas across the country. Many American are viewing this prospect with, at the least, considerable skepticism, and at the most outright defiance. [New York Times] Laos has essentially liquidated her share of the Indochina war, despite the absence of any formal settlement between the warring sides during the last five months of negotiations. "Laos has shown the way," a Western diplomat said. "If only Cambodia and Vietnam would now copy the Laotian model, there would be peace," he said. "All it takes is the will to stop killing." [New York Times] The most important Argentine labor leader pledged trade-union support for the return to power of former President Juan D. Peron. "We proclaim here and now and irrevocably the candidacy of Gen. Juan Domingo Peron for the Presidency of Argentina," the labor chief, Jose Rucci, said in a national television broadcast. He is general secretary of the General Confederation of Labor, which controls most organized workers in the country. [New York Times]