News stories from Saturday January 25, 1975
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- The major oil-exporting countries, whose Ministers of Oil, Finance and Foreign Affairs have been meeting in Algiers, agreed to hold a meeting there of chiefs of state in about five weeks, and they postponed until then any decisions on negotiations with oil consumers. "We have agreed to a summit meeting," said Ahmed Zaki Yemeni, Saudi Arabia's Minister of Petroleum, as he left a closed session of the conference of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. [New York Times]
- The Republican party announced that it would undertake a comeback campaign involving a national television series and an intensive voter-registration effort. Plans to rebuild the party, which now has the allegiance of less than a quarter of the electorate, were disclosed at a meeting of more than 40 Republican state chairmen in Chicago. Much of what the political professionals heard about their party's prospects was pessimistic, particularly the results of a series of public opinion studies. [New York Times]
- President Ford was found to be "in excellent health" after an annual physical examination at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. His physician, Rear Adm. William Lukash, said that Mr. Ford, who is 61 years old, maintained his "ideal weight" of 195 pounds because he exercised and followed a prescribed diet. [New York Times]
- The police said they were searching for two men seen running from the Fraunces Tavern annex in Manhattan just before the bombing there Friday at lunchtime that killed four persons and injured 53 others. One of the two men, who are believed to be members of a Puerto Rican terrorist group, was seen getting into a blue or gray step-in van with the license-plate 291-SIL. The police said it was an expired plate that had been stolen in 1973. A police department official said that 100 city policemen and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been assigned to the case. [New York Times]
- The Palestine Liberation Organization announced in Beirut that it had severely punished the Palestinian gunmen who last November hijacked a British airliner from Dubai on the Persian Gulf to Tunis. The gunmen killed one of the plane's passengers, a West German businessman. The announcement did not say what the punishment was, but Palestinian sources said privately that it was a long prison sentence. This was the first time that the Palestinian organization announced that it had taken action against guerrillas involved in a terrorist action abroad. [New York Times]
- Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko of the Soviet Union will go to Cairo for "continuing consultations", the Egyptian government announced through its Foreign Minister, Ismail Fahmy. The announcement also said that President Anwar Sadat had received messages from President Ford and Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, but there was no indication of the contents of the messages. [New York Times]
- Under a constitutional amendment passed without debate or dissent by her Parliament, Bangladesh changed from a fledging democracy of 75 million people to an authoritarian presidential form of government. The Prime Minister, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, became President vested with full executive powers. He was also authorized to declare Bangladesh a one-party state, shutting off any prospect for organized opposition. [New York Times]
- Moshe Dayan, Israel's former Defense Minister, does not believe that a war between Israel and her Arab neighbors is imminent, even though it is virtually taken for granted in Israel that another round of fighting will erupt in the spring or summer. "I don't think it will happen," Mr. Dayan said in an interview at his home in Israel, the first he has given since his forced resignation as Defense Minister last June. "There's a danger, of course," he said, "but I don't think full-scale war is imminent." He seemed keenly interested in getting back into active political life. [New York Times]