News stories from Saturday June 29, 1974

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

President Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev signed a 10-year economic agreement in Moscow and then flew to Yalta in the Crimea to continue their talks on arms control. In a session with the Soviet leaders in the Kremlin, Mr. Nixon was understood to have called for concessions on issues of human contact to achieve agreement for a meeting at the heads-of-government level concluding the European security conference. The trade agreement had been expected. It includes provisions for exchange of economic information and commitments to facilitate working conditions for American businessmen, who have often encountered bureaucratic delays in the Soviet Union. [New York Times] Senator Lowell Weicker, a Republican member of the Senate Watergate committee, charged that "every major substantive part of the Constitution was violated, abused and undermined during the Watergate period." He declared in a personal, 146-page report that members of President Nixon's administration and campaign organization were responsible for some 370 abuses of law or the Constitution in the making of the Watergate scandals. His report, based on evidence presented to the committee over the last 20 months, was made public in anticipation of the full committee's formal report, which was presented to the Senate on Friday and is expected to be made public in early July. [New York Times] With the work it started 20 months ago just about over, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, better known as the Senate Watergate committee, will be officially dissolved tomorrow. [New York Times] The federal energy administrator, John Sawhill, accused 15 major oil companies of "foot-dragging and calculated resistance" to the government's plan for the companies to share their relatively cheap crude oil supplies with independent refiners. In his first general criticism of the oil industry, Mr. Sawhill said that the program, however distasteful it was to the major companies, was explicitly mandated by Congress to protect the smaller companies. [New York Times] Vannevar Bush, the engineer whose work in marshaling American technology in World War II was regarded as a decisive contribution to the Allied victory, died at his home in Belmont, Mass., at the age of 84. He also had a long association with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had been its chairman. [New York Times] A landslide that covered a section of a highway about 95 miles east of Bogota, Colombia, killed at least 200 persons, Colombian officials reported. The country's civil defense director said that "We'll never know exactly the number of victims of this national tragedy." Six loaded buses were among the vehicles engulfed by the cascade of earth and rocks. There was a threat of more slides. [New York Times] As many as 20 people were reported dead and 17 wounded in gun battles between rival Palestinian guerrilla factions in and around Beirut. The fighting between two rival Marxist groups, the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, was intense. [New York Times] Vice President Maria Estela Martinez de Peron took over as acting President of Argentina so that her husband, Juan Domingo Peron, could continue treatment for what doctors said was infectious bronchitis with heart complications. Mr. Peron, 78 years old, was ordered to take an "absolute rest." Mrs. Peron, a 43-year-old former dancer, ran the country under a similar mandate for two days when her husband took trips to Uruguay and Paraguay. [New York Times]