UPI Roundup
Fighting flares near Saigon
SAIGON—Heavy fighting flared near Saigon and on
South Vietnam’s far northern front, sparking the heaviest
raids by U.S. warplanes over the South in more than two
months, military spokesmen said Thursday. South Viet
namese troops encowtered stiff resistance for the second
consecutive day Thursday in the Michelin rubber plantation,
40 miles northwest of Saigon, where a major Communist
buildup of 8,000 men with armor and artillery was reported.
The buildup poses a major threat to the South Vietnamese
capital and its outlying areas.
Corona found guilty
FAIRFIELD. Calif—Without showing a tremor of
emotion. Juan Corona was found guilty Thursday of killing 25
itinerant farm hands in the worst mass murder in U.S.
history. The jury, which had been deadlocked 11-1 on a
verdict for two days, returned its unanimous verdict after 46
hours of deliberations. Corona. 38, a farm labor contractor
from Yuba City, Calif., sat expressionless, gripping the
defense table and rocking periodically, during the 30 minutes
it took for the jury to return its 25 first degree murder con
victions. Superior Court Judge Richard Patton delayed
sentencing imtil after a Jan. 29 hearing on defense attorney
Richard Hawk’s motion fix* a new trial. Corona faces life
imprisonment on each of the counts.
Leary is back
LOS ANGELES—Drug apostle Timothy Leary, who
escaped from a California prison in 1970 and drifted the worid
until be was arrested in Afghanistan, was returned to the
United States Thts'sday under armed guard. Leary, 51, who
faces corots of drug smuggling, conspiracy and income tax
evasion in addition to the escape charge, emerged in
manacles from a Boeing 747 jetliner in a driving rainstorm
and was hustled to a van for the trip to the Los Angeles
County Jail. Leary laughed and appeared to be trying to talk
to the small army of newsmen at International Airport but be
could not be heard over the background noise on the field.
Eight slain in Moslem center
WASHINGTON—Eight persons, including five children,
were found slain late Thursday afternoon in a northwest
Washington home used as a spiritual center by a Moslem
sect, District of Columbia police reported. Authorities said
they were searching for four men reportedly seen entering
the bouse during the afternoon, then later running from the
premises. They said more persons may have been involved.
The victims, all Blacks, were discovered about 5:30 pm. in a
three-story stone bouse in the 7700 block of 16th St. N.W., a
quiet neighborhood of upper middle class homes sometimes
called Washington’s “Black Gold Coast.”
Violence continues in N. Ireland
BELFAST—British army sentries shot a gunman to
death Thursday (hiring an attempted robbery of a bank
branch in Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital. A Roman
Catholic man was shot dead in Portadown, southwest of the
capital. The two deaths brought to 688 the number of persons
Killed in 3^ years of religious and political bloodshed in
Northern Ireland between Catholic and Protestant ex
tremists, the British army and police.
Peace talks resume
in Paris next week
The United States and North Vietnam announced
Thursday that White House adviser Henry
Kissinger and Hanoi’s Le Due Tho will resume their
negotiations in Paris next Tuesday with the aim of
completing an agreement to aid the Vietnam war.
A White House announcement that Kissinger will
leave for Paris Monday salt hopes soaring for a
Vietnam cease-fire in the near future. The an
nouncement by Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler said
Kissinger was going back “for the purpose of
completing the text of a peace agreement.”
A simultaneous announcement by the North
Vietnamese peace delegation in Paris said
resumption of the Paris negotiations after a 10-day
break was “aimed at achieving an accord on the
end of the war and re-establishment of peace in
Vietnam.”
Washington observers said the joint an
nouncement appeared to indicate that Kissinger
was returning to Paris to initial a peace treaty
ending the longest war in American history.
Ziegler did nothing to dampen speculation that a
ceasefire might be declared soon in South Vietnam.
Asked about rumors of a cease-fire, Ziegler said,
“There has been an awful lot of speculation along
that line. I am not prepared to address that
speculation, even if it is right or it is wrong.
“But I will tell you that Dr. Kissinger is returning
to Paris for the purpose of completing the text of an
agreement.”
The announcement came shortly after South
Vietnamese government sources in Saigon said
President Nguyen Van Thieu has accepted revised
terms of the Washing ton-Hanoi cease-fire draft “in
principle” but has requested about a dozen changes,
at least three of them substantial.
In Paris Thursday, U.S. and Vietnamese
negotiators indefinitely suspended the regular
weekly Paris peace talks that have been going on
for four years but said negotiations would continue.
Veteran observers at the peace talks said they
believed the Kleber Avenue sessions were being
suspended in their present form in the light of
progress made in the more meaningful talks bet
ween Kissinger and Hanoi diplomats.
Ziegler announced that Gen. Alexander Haig,
Nixon’s special emissary, who arrived in Bangkok
Thursday to confer with Thai leaders, will be
returning to Saigon Saturday to consult again with
President Thieu.
Denty Brinegar
Cabinet nominees confirmed
WASHINGTON — The Senate Thursday con
finned Frederick Dent as commerce secretary and
Claude Brinegar as transportation secretary
Approval also appeared sure fix- labor secretary
designate Peter Brennan despite some liberal and
civil rights opposition.
Confirmation for Dent, a South Carolina textile
executive, and Brinegar, a California oil man, was
granted routinely and “without objection," making
them the first of President Nixon’s new Cabinet
nominees to win Senate clearance.
At the sub-Cabinet level, the Senate approved
Nixon’s nominations of former White House aide
John Whitaker as aider secretary of interior and
Frank Carlucci, former depiky budget director, to
be undersecretary of health, education and welfare.
Brennan, a New York construction union leader,
appeared before the Senate Labor Committee at the
opening of his confirmation hearing and promptly
put himself at odds with the administration’s past
positions in several areas, including compulsory
arbitration, the minimum wage and low income
housing.
“I’m as damned good as anybody in this
Cabinet,” he said bluntly. “I don’t quit easy. You
can fight a better fight inside than outside."
Nixon’s selection of Brennan has been seen as a
bid by the President to draw organized labor away
from the Democratic Party. But the Democratic
con trolled Senate is not likely to help Nixon by
turning down a union member for the Cabinet.
Among Brennan’s opponents were the Americans
for Democratic Action (ADA) and Roy Wilkins,
executive director of the NAACP.
Wilkins urged the committee to reject Brennan,
claiming he had been “a major a<hninistrative
obstacle” to admission of minority group workers
into New York construction jobs and training
programs as president of the city’s Building and
Construction Trades Council.
The ADA, one of about a dozen groups planning to
fight Brennan, argued that he was unqualified to be
labor secretary because he had done nothing to
reduce discrimination in hiring and corruption.
But Brennan, 54, known as “Mr. Hard Hat”
because of his efforts to gain union support for
Nixon’s Vietnam policies, defended his civil rights
record and promised to “do my damndest” to
assure equal employment opportunity for all
workers.
Brennan, nominated to succeed James Hodgson
at the Labor Department, told the committee he
was against the administration’s legislation before
the last Congress to have a lower minimum wage
for teen-agers and to give the White House powers
to force labor settlements in the transportation
industry. Brennan said such force amounted to
compulsory arbitration.
The administration pulled back the trans
portation strike legislation during the election
campaign, with critics alleging the action was in
return for an endorsement of Nixon by Teamsters
President Frank Fitzsimmons. But the White House
is still on record in favor of a special youth
minimum wage.
Pledges to eliminate job discrimination
AT&T awards $15 million in back pay
WASHINGTON (UPI)—The American
Telephone and Telegraph Co., pledging to
eliminate job discrimination, agreed
Thursday to award back pay totaling as
much as $15 million to 15,000 women and
nonwhite males who may have been
denied promotions under past company
policies.
The agreement by the nation’s largest
private employe- was by far the biggest
proposed settlement in a civil rights case
in U.S. history, said William Brown HI,
chairman of the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission' The previous
record was nearly $1 million.
The employes involved now have the
option of accepting the compensatory
payments or trying to prove in federal
court that actual damages were higher
than they could obtain under AT 4c Ts
settlement formula.
AT 4 T and its 24 affiliated Bell System
telephone companies agreed to pay
restitution ranging from $100 to $400 to
10,000 women, mostly telephone operators,
to compensate them for denial of
promotional opportunities.
Ad EEOC spokesman said the payments
would go to the first 10,000 women to be
promoted to higher craft jobs. He said the
payments would be made even to women
who did not previously apply for craft jobs
which they knew the company had
reserved for men.
The Bell System denied it was engaged
in illegal discrimination, but it agreed to
the settlement to terminate a two-year-old
action filed against it by the EEOC and the
Labor Department.
At a news briefing, David Easiick, an At
A T vice president, said the company has
been “working hard to provide equal
employment opportunity ” He said the
government had “changed the ground
rules” for the anti-discrimination en
deavor.
However, Brown said AT&T had
engaged in “pervasive and systemic
employment discrimination.” The EEOC
said the company excluded women from
most craft jobs such as installer and
lineman and excluded men from clerical
and operator posts.
AT&T and the affiliated companies
employ 790,000 workers, a little more than
half of them women—the nation’s biggest
employer. The decree does not cover
Western Electric, the Bell System’s af
filiate which manufactures telephone
equipment.
About 1,000 job discrimination com
plaints against AT&T are pending before
the EEOC. The individuate involved now
have the option of accepting payment
under the agreed formula or pressing their
cases in an effort to prove actual damages
in excess of the amount they would receive
under the formula. The EEOC said other
employes could, if they chose, file in
dividual complaints instead of accepting
payment under the formula.
About 3,000 employes, including both
women and men from minority groups,
will receive about $7.5 million in back pay
for the last two years to give them
retroactive credit for transferred
seniority.
The agreement also establishes a new
class of awards in job discrimination
cases—payments to people who were
discouraged even from applying for higher
paid jobs.
The EEOC said about 2,500 women have
been promoted to craft jobs since the
complaint was filed two years ago. Those
who were promoted during 1971 will
receive a settlement of $100. Those who
were promoted last year will get $200.
Those who are to be promoted this year
will get $300 and those who are to be
promoted next year will get $400.
A spokesman explained the payments
escalated with time on the theory that the
longer a promotion was delayed, the
greater the individual was damaged.
The awards will go to the first 10,000
women who qualify for them and will be
terminated once the 10,000 figure is
reached.
Easlick said the company did not plan to
file requests for rate increases to recover
the additional wages it must pay its em
ployes, but he added, “on the other hand, it
is a cost of doing business and the cost of
doing business must ultimately be borne
by the users of the telephone.”