STABBING AT DIET

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29235, 20 June 1960, Page 11

STABBING AT DIET

Youth Gives Reasons

(Rec. 10 p.m.) TOKYO, June 18. A Japanese youth, who was charged by police with stabbing a senior Opposition Socialist Party member yesterday, said today he made the attack because he believed the Socialist Party was inciting student demonstrators to commit violence.

The youth was identified as Shinzaburo Toma, a car mechanic.

He told questioning police today he had no connexion with any ultra-Rightist organisations. He said he was so outraged by the Zengakuren student federation’s excesses that he believed only an attack on one of the Socialist Party leaders could bring the party to its senses.

The knife attack was made on Mr Jotaro Kawakami within the compound of the national Diet at the height of the Leftist students’ anti-Government and anti-United States treaty demonstrations. Toma told police that Kawakami had been one of several leading Socialists he had considered stabbing.

New Editor For “Sunday Mirror”

SYDNEY, June 19.

The Australian journalist and author, Cyril Pearl, has been appointed editor of the Sydney "Sunday Mirror.” He will take up his appointment soon. Mr Pearl launched the Sydney “Sunday Telegraph” as its editor in 1939 and remained in charge of the paper until 1949. Since then, he has written the best-seller, “Wild Men of Sydney." and other outstanding books, including “The Girl with the Swansdown Seat,” and “So You Want To Be An Australian." This year he received a Commonwealth literary grant to write “Always Morning,” a biography of the poet-adventurer, Richard Henry Horne.

Former Labour Minister.— Mr William Slater, a paper boy who became the Australian Minister to Russia, was the Victorian Attorney-General six times and a Victorian State parliamentarian for 41 years, died today. He was aged 69. Mr Slater was a power in the Victorian Labour movement for nearly 50 years.—Melbourne, June 19.