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The Ottawa Journal from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • Page 4

Location:
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Issue Date:
Page:
4
Extracted Article Text (OCR)

Saturday, January 14, 1978 Ottawt Journal World news Assassination attempt on Gandhi life foiled NEW DELHI (AP) A man. 'pointed a loaded gun at former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi on Friday but was over-; powered and did not shoot, police said. i Witnesses said a man Identified later as Murarl Lai Batra, 56, moved through a crowd and placed the muzzle of an Italian revolver at the window of a car carrying Mrs, Gandhi, 60, In the streets of Old Delhi, where she had gone to a public birthday celebration for a I religious leader, Swami Vlvekan-; anda. A bystander and a policeman grabbed Batra's arm and together I they took him to a police car. Soon afterward Mrs.

Gandhi cn-: tcred the town hall auditorium and spoke for 40 minutes, making no reference to the incident. Later she talked with some of the crowd aoout wnai nao nappeneu. Batra, an electro-plating worker, was Mitten a ponce siauuu unu questioned on suspicion of attempt- ed murder and violation of arms-control laws, police said. He was said to have lived In a neighborhood destroyed during a controversial slum-clearance program under the Gandhi administration. A political worker with Mrs.

Gandhi in her car said he saw an armed man approach the car and raise his arm to her window. "The gun hit the glass and I shouted, 'It's a J. K. Jain of Mrs. Gandhi's branch of the split and recently-dethroned Congress party, told a reporter.

He said Mrs. Gandhi was not disturbed by the Incident. Mrs. Gandhi governed India for 11 years and resigned after her. Congress party was defeated last March by Morarji Desai's Janata party.

Her administration has been accused of numerous abuses during her 19-month "emergency" that ended shortly before her defeat. She has since split with other V' 4 1-; IE Indira Gandhi narrow escape factions of her party. She was summoned anew Friday to testify before a government commission investigating her fallen regimeeven though she defied the inquiry Wednesday by walking out of the hearing. She said the hearings are unconstitutional and that she Is not obliged to testify. Andreotti begins crucial talks ROME (UPI) Premier Giulio Andreotti and the Communist Party today began crucial talks on the government crisis and aides to the Italian leader said he would resign early next week rather than accede to sharing power with the left.

The Communist Party Friday denounced what It called "grotesque" U.S. interference In Italian affairs by warning against expanded Communist influence In the key NATO nation. U.S. Ambassador Richard Gardner rejected the charge but Washington has made it clear it is unhappy about the prospect of any direct munist role in the government. Andreotti called meetings today with leaders of the nine parties that gave direct or indirect support to his minority government for the past 17 months.

Aides said the consulta: tions would be his final step before he hands in his resignation to President Giovanni Leone, probably on Monday. They said he would then probably try to gain Communist support for a new government without making 'concessions unacceptable to his party or to Washington. Although the U.S. state department said in an unusually blunt public statement Thursday "we do not favor" Communist membership in an Italian government, most Italian politicians said Andreotti would have to make at least partial concessions to the West's largest Communist party. The Communists, whose abstentions in key parlia ment votes have kept An- dreotti's party in power, are now demanding participation in an emergency coalition government to fight Italy's problems of inflation, unemployment and violence.

The Christian Democrats have said they do not intend to give, cabinet posts to the Communists in the next government or even accept them as part of the government's parliamentary majority, but some political sources predicted a possible compromise. Italy's political crisis has touched off U.S. concern unparalleled since 1948. Surgery for Mitchell WASHINGTON (UPI) Former Attorney General John Mitchell will undergo surgery for a ballooned abdominal blood vessel with justice department permission to extend his furlough from prison, his doctor said Friday. Dr.

P.M. Palumbo, who has been diagnosing Mitchell for an arthritic hip condition while the convicted Watergate conspirator was on medical furlough from a federal prison, said his patient would enter Washington's Georgetown University Hospital Sunday. The original furlough was scheduled to expire that day, but the justice department announced Friday It had been extended until Jan. 27 to allow for surgery in a civilian hospital. 1 There are times when only the very best will do UU r.

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living space -1 Oy WIHy Bd Sales I i 3SsiR Muni Club PRICE: 173,500 to $115,0 VISITING MRS: Weekdays 1 9 pm Saturday 10 am 5 pm Sunday 1 5 pm 521-6451 Mideast peace initiative in danger, Sadat warns CAIRO (UPI) Egp-tlan President Anwar Sadat Friday said his' peace Initiative Is in danger because of the crucial Palestinian issue and he accused Israel of resorting to threats. U.S. officials said President Carter has ordered Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to push for a compromise on the matter at a conference in Jerusalem next week. The deadlocked Cairo talks recessed indefinitely Friday but Vance, who planned to leave for Israel late today, warned, "There can be no turning back." Sadat, speaking in Aswan, Egypt, after the Egyptian and Israeli defence ministers adjourned the talks, said, "The peace process is passing through a decisive stage, or is in danger." The problem, he said, is Israel's rejection of two key Egyptian demands removal of Jewish settlements from the occupied Sinai peninsula and. guarantees for Palestinian self-determination.

In Washington, a state department official said Carter has told Vance to push a U.S. proposal for an temporary solution of the Palestinian issue at the Egyptian-Israeli foreign ministers meeting in Jerusalem Monday. The plan envisages an interim administration for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to bridge the gap between Sadat's insistence on self-determination for the Palestinians and Israel's more limited idea of "self-rule" without independence, the official said. The official said Vance Kidnap suspects arrested VIENNA, Austria (UPI) Police Friday arrested three men who confessed to kidnapping the ailing wife of an Austrian textile millionaire and recovered nearly all the $1.6 million ransom paid for her release. "We have solved the case with the confession of the kidnappers," Vienna Police President Karl Rcidinger told a news conference.

Reldinger said the kidnappers tried to make it appear they were terrorists but "so far, the evidence shows no involvement of members of the German Baadcr-Meinhof gang." "They used a German-born woman who spoke with a heavy German accent for their phone conversation with the Boehm family," Reidinger said. "Apparently they tried to pose as German terrorists to mislead police would also seek an agreement on a broad set of principles which would in effect validate the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations and open the way for Jordan, and perhaps Syria, to join the talks later on. He said Vance, on his Middle East trip, plans to stop in Cairo briefly for talks with Sadat before returning to Washington next Thursday. An Egyptian official said In. Cairo that Sadat "Is concerned over Israeli intransigence" and had also sent messages to several Western European leaders about "obstacles Israel is placing In the way of Egyptian peace moves." NASA breaks sex barrier WASHINGTON (UPI) The space agency broke the astronaut sex barrier VFriday in selecting 35 men and women as astronauts for the space shuttle set to start flying Into orbit next year.

Identities of the successful candidates are to be revealed by Dr. Robert Frosch, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, at a news conference Monday. However, NASA spokesman David Garrett said the list of 35 approved by Frosch included women the first selected for the nation's astronaut corps. The first lady of space, however, is Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tercshko-va. She orbited Earth in 1963 aboard Vostok 6.

The new additions to the space corps were selected from 8,079 applicants, including 1,544 women. A total of 208 people, Including 21 women, were called to Houston for interviews and medical tests between last August and November. Four shuttle test flights are scheduled for 1979. CHINA rt7ri ALEUTIAN I I PACIFIC I 7 TRIANGLE hawaii -Jgj--4- 0CiAN-4-- s. AUSTRALIA I Pacific Triangle mystery: 6 lost ships in 15 months HONOLULU (UPI) An overturned liferaft and one lifeless body spotted momentarily in wild, mountainous seas were the only things the Coast Guard found while searching the Pacific Triangle for the sixth ship Inst in less than 15 months between Hawaii, Midway and the Aleutians.

Six times since November 1976, massive air and surface searches have answered frantic radio calls for help from two tankers and four freighters traveling the Great Circle route of the silk ships between Asia and North America. All the ships were lost and all but one the log-carrying Panamanian freighter Crown Pearl which sank Jan. 16, 1977 took with them at least some crew members. The latest and most tragic sinking was the 21, 635-ton Chandragupta, bound last week for Sri Lanka, Iran and India from Portland, Its holds filled with wheat. Aboard were 64 officers and crew, along with four women and two children, dependents of the Chandragupta's officers.

Eight days out of Portland, the Indian merchant ship entered the Pacific Triangle a I million square mile area stretching from Hawaii to Midway to the Aleutians and the spawning ground for the great Pacific storms that roar eastward. Chandragupta's fate was similar to those of the Panamanian freighter Carnelian-1 and the Crown Pearl. Hit by 40 and 50-foot waves and battered by gale winds for hours on end, the Chandragupta began taking on water from leaks somewhere deep inside its hull. Pumps were useless against the thousands of tons of water that soaked the wheat under its forward hatches and lowered the bow deeper and deeper into the 54-dcgrec water. The last word came Jan.

6 when the Chandragupta's master radioed that passengers and crew were abandoning ship in the fast-fading light of evening. Coast Guard and Navy searchers in Kodiak and Honolulu knew that only a desperate master would abandon his ship for rafts and lifeboats in the cold, white-capped seas and gale winds of the Pacific Triangle. Four-cngincd search planes crisscrossed the water around its last reported position, finding only the overturned yellow life raft and the body that was being tossed like a rag doll in the heavy seas. The weather was so bad the cutler Mellon could not recover the body. Along with the Chandragupta, the Carnelian-1 and the Crown Pearl, the tankers Irenes Challenger and Hawaiian Patriot were lost in the North Pacific in the past 13 months.

The 1. Iberian freighter Rose S. went down Dec. 12, 1977, with all hands. All told, 126 lives were lost In the six sinkings and the weather was a factor in each sinking, save that of the Rose S.

The Coast Guard, the Navy and the various ships agencies in Honolulu arc unable to explain the rash of sinkings. "There is an explanation for every one of those tragedies," said a marine insurance source, "but most probably the sinkings were a combination of several" factors the weather, the cargo and the ship. But we'll probably never find out, as the evidence Is at the bottom of the Pacific." Carter popularity takes dip NEW YORK (UPI) President Carter received a negative overall rating of 49 to 47 percent in a new ABC News-Harris poll, it was disclosed Friday. The 'canvass was taken among a cross-section of 1,259 adults. It marks a slight decline in Carter's standing from his December status of 50 to 47 percent positive.

The vote Indicates the president's recent trip abroad did not Increase his domestic popularity. Specifically, Carter's "handling of foreign policy matters" before his trip drew negative marks of 48 to 42 percent After the trip, he was rated at 48 to 43 percent negative. On Carter's overall energy program, he got a 57 to 38 percent negative vote, a sharp drop from the 52 to 40 percent negative standing In December. On his handling relations with Con gress, it was 58 to 33 percent negative, down from 55 to 38 percent negative last month. On his handling of the economy, he got 66 to 28 percent negative, down from a previous 81 to 34 percent.

On restoring confidence In government, Carter got' 48 to 47 percent positive, but this compares with a S3 to 43 percent positive standing In December. On Inspiring confidence In tho White House, he received a positive 49 to 44 percent rating, but this was a drop from 55 to 39 percent In December. The president emerged with a strong positive score in only one area. On his working for a peace settlement In the Middle East, he drew 57 to 34 percent positive marks. But his rating, despite his recent Mideast visits, was down from his 83 to 29 percent positive In December In the wake of President Sadat's first visit to Jerusalem.

JIMMY CARTER trlpdn help.

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Pages Available:
843,608
Years Available:
1885-1980