News stories from Sunday April 14, 1974

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

Senator Hubert Humphrey, Minnesota Democrat, has resumed a full schedule of work, travel and speech making after an ordeal of severe pain that he said was "the most terrible experience of my life." In November and December he underwent six weeks of daily treatment by heat X-ray for a possible cancer of the bladder. He has regained his vigor and exuberance, but he will return to Bethesda Naval Hospital on April 25 to find out whether the radiation therapy arrested the small tumors that worried his physicians. [New York Times] Vice President Ford said that he sought to work out a compromise last week between the White House and House Judiciary Committee to avoid a confrontation over tape recordings sought by the impeachment panel. This was the first indication that Mr. Ford had been involved in trying to head off the committee's subsequent decision to subpoena the tapes. [New York Times] Russell Train, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said there should be "very careful advance planning" prior to federal leasing of offshore oil drilling sites in the Gulf of Alaska and along the East Coast, as proposed by the White House Council on Environmental Quality. In an interview on the television program "Face the Nation," Mr. Train said his agency expected "to participate in and comment on any plans -- absolutely." [New York Times] The launching of Westar 1, the first United States communications satellite, signals fierce competition in the next few years that could drastically reduce the cost of private voice circuits and long-distance transmission of television programs and computer data. Westar, developed by Western Union, is expected to be placed tomorrow in a stationary position 22,300 miles above the equator. It is destined to be followed by at least seven more similar craft. [New York Times] New Yorkers were the victims of violent crime considerably less frequently than the residents of Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Philadelphia and eight other smaller cities during 1972. That New York City, which has international notoriety as a city of crime, was the least violent of all the 13 cities surveyed, is the most startling finding in a complex federal study. [New York Times] Israeli and Syrian forces fought their biggest battle since the October war atop strategically vital Mount Hermon. After several hours of bitter fighting in which the Israeli air force was called in to pound the Syrian positions, the Israelis reported they had driven off a Syrian commando force that had occupied Hermon's peak. [New York Times] Secretary of State Kissinger handed over to Israeli's Ambassador to the United States, Simcha Dinitz, the latest Syrian plan for troop separation in the Golan Heights and then flew from Washington to New York to hold his first extensive exchange of views with a senior Chinese official in five months and to address the United Nations General Assembly. [New York Times] Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist, joined Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer, in calling on the Soviet leadership to renounce Marxism as its ideology and to give up hegemony over Eastern Europe and over non-Russian republics within the Soviet Union. But Mr. Sakharov declared himself at odds with "the nationalistic and isolationist direction" of the proposals Mr. Solzhenitsyn made in a recent letter to the Soviet leadership, and said that emphasis on Russian nationalism and withdrawal from world trade and international cooperation was wrong and "potentially dangerous." [New York Times] Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia unexpectedly named one of his grandsons as the eventual successor to the throne. In an Easter speech to a large group of notables in Addis Ababa, the Emperor, who is 81 years old, said his successor would be Prince Zara Yacob, "either as acting Crown Prince or Crown Prince." Zara Yacob is the son of Crown Prince Asfa Wossen, the Emperor's only living son, who suffered a severe stroke more than a year ago. [New York Times]