News stories from Sunday December 10, 1972
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- President Nixon conferred wth Gen. Alexander Haig, deputy to Henry Kissinger at the secret Vietnam cease-fire talks in Paris. The White House continued to provide no information on how close the two sides had come to concluding an agreement. General Haig's return to Washington and the announcement that the talks were now being held at the technical level seemed to suggest that the United States and Vietnam might be in the final phase of negotiations. [New York Times]
- Apollo 17 rocketed into an orbit of the moon and was set for a sixth landing on its desolate surface. The spacecraft America -- with its landing craft, the Challenger, in tow -- swung into lunar orbit at 2:47 P.M. Eastern standard time. The landing attempt is scheduled for tomorrow at 2:55 P.M. [New York Times]
- Former President Harry S. Truman was taken off the critical list but was still in serious condition at the Research Hospital and Medical Center in Kansas City, Mo., where he has been fighting lung congestion and heart irregularity. Reportedly gaining strength by the hour, the 88-year-old patient answered "better" when a nurse asked how he was feeling. [New York Times]
- A new kind of trade legislation, including a system of safeguards for industries and workers hurt by steeply rising imports, has strong backing within the Nixon administration. Proposed for submission to Congress early next year, the legislation would contain the traditional authority for reducing tariffs, to enable trade negotiations with other countries to begin late next year. The bill is tentatively titled the "Trade Reform Act," and its scope would be far broader than tariffs. [New York Times]
- A biracial commission investigating the killing of two students on the campus of Southern University in Baton Rouge on Nov. 16 said it disputed the official version of the deaths. The commission's 12 members have told Gov. Edwin Edwards that their preliminary findings differ from the Governor's report and those of the state police and local sheriff's deputies. It found that the same police shotgun blast killed the students. [New York Times]
- Premier Kakuei Tanaka's Liberal-Democratic party was returned to power with a solid but unspectacular victory in national elections. Incomplete returns in the election of 491 members of the House of Representatives, the lower and more powerful chamber of Parliament, gave the Liberal Democrats 252 seats. The Japan Socialist party, the major opposition party, made an impressive comeback from the beating it took in the 1969 election. [New York Times]