News stories from Saturday January 26, 1974

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

The Senate Watergate Committee postponed indefinitely the controversial hearings on contributions to the 1972 Nixon campaign that were to have been held during the next two weeks. Senator Sam Ervin, the committee's chairman, said the delay had been agreed upon by the committee "in order to make sure that no prejudice be done to the Mitchell and Stans trial" scheduled to begin next month in the Federal District Court in New York. Former Attorney General John Mitchell and former Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans have been charged with obstruction of justice and perjury. [New York Times] If President Nixon is looking to conservatives for support in his hour of travail, he would have been dismayed by the words that echoed through the meeting rooms of Washington's Mayflower Hotel this weekend. The speakers were participants in a conservative political action conference, and their message was plain: Richard Nixon has done us dirt. "If you took a poll of this group," said F. Clifton White, the political consultant who put together the Barry Goldwater blitz of 1964, "you would find a substantial majority that wishes the President would just go away, just resign." [New York Times] The year that has elapsed since the signing of the Paris peace agreements on Jan. 27, 1973, has not brought peace to South Vietnam. But the war that continued throughout 1973 and into 1974, an essentially military struggle with sharp economic consequences, did not appear to establish a distinct momentum in favor of the Communists or the Saigon government. [New York Times] Three months and a day after they seized the fringe of Suez city and a large area around it in the final months of the October war, the Israelis are about to withdraw. Although the pullout process began formally Friday, the first Israeli positions south and west of Suez will actually be abandoned Monday. The Israelis are committed to complete their evacuation of the western bank of the Suez Canal by Feb. 21. By March 5, they are scheduled to take up new positions some 12 miles east of the canal. [New York Times] The Federation of American Scientists proposed that one way out of the atomic arms race would be for the United States and the Soviet Union to agree on the phased elimination of their land-based missile force. Increasingly, the federation said in a policy statement, land-based missiles are becoming a "destabilizing factor" in the nuclear balance as each side becomes concerned that its missile force is vulnerable to attack by the other. It is a trend that cannot be reversed technologically, the federation believes, nor can it be helped through some agreement limiting the number of intercontinental missiles each side may possess. [New York Times] A 270-foot Bulgarian stern trawler carrying 79 men and a 182-ton catch of mackerel -- a floating fish factory -- was seized in international waters off the Jersey Shore early yesterday by a Coast Guard cutter that gave chase after allegedly sighting her fishing illegally inside the 12-mile coastal limit. Invoking international law, the cutter Unimak overtook the trawler Limoza 131.4 miles off Little Egg Harbor, sent a boarding party onto her decks and, after notifying the State Department, formally seized the ship. [New York Times]