Rep. Kennedy Comes to Grips With the Irish Question

--Rep. Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass.) clashed with a British soldier at an army checkpoint in Northern Ireland. Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was being driven from a tour of a run-down housing complex in Roman Catholic west Belfast. Troops at the checkpoint told Father Matt Wallace, a local priest with Kennedy, to open the car trunk. “You cannot do this to a priest!” Kennedy, 35, said, according to reporters at the scene. The soldier grabbed Kennedy by the arm and the congressman shouted: “Take your hands off me.” The soldier, releasing his grip, asked Kennedy: “Why don’t you get back to your own country?” Kennedy snapped back: “Why don’t you get back to yours?” Kennedy is due to travel to the Irish Republic on Friday for talks with Prime Minister Charles Haughey and to visit his ancestral home in Wexford.

--Evangelist Billy Graham’s first trip to China will include a visit to his wife’s birthplace in a small town on the Yangtze River. Graham, who is in Hong Kong preparing for his trip, said he, his wife, Ruth, and their eldest son, Franklin, will go to China on April 13 for 15 days. They will make a special trip to Huaiyin, a small town on the Yangtze River about 300 miles west of Shanghai, where Mrs. Graham was born. Her father was chief surgeon for 25 years at a Presbyterian mission hospital there. “I am looking forward to my visit to China probably more than any other trip I have ever taken,” Graham said. “It is such a totally different culture and one that dates back thousands of years. The only thing that I am certain about in my knowledge of China is that I can use chopsticks.”

--Former astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt has been to the moon and he predicts that today’s children will live to see humans establish a settlement even farther away, on Mars. “In the process, we will probably begin to mine the moon,” Schmitt said during a speech at the University of Montana in Missoula. “I can’t tell you if the Soviets or the Free World will settle Mars, but human beings will settle it, and I hope we are a party to that great adventure,” he said. Schmitt, 52, was part of the last U.S. manned lunar mission in December, 1972.