CC: Okay. I guess the biggest news was Vhat President Nixon went on national television tonight to dis- cus the military situation in Vietnam. He said efforts toward Vietn_m_ zation of the war were proving effective. And he announced additional U.S. troop withdrawals of 20 000 men by July the first. At the same time, the President character- ized the current North Vietnamese advances into South Vietnam as an open invasion. And he said U.S. air and naval forces will continue to attack military targets in North Vietnam to assure the safety of remaining U.S. forces in South Vietnam and to prevent a military takeover of South Vietnam by the North. The President also said U.S. nego- tiators would return to the Paris peace talks, as he put it, "To get on with the constructive business of obtaining peace." "The first order of business," he said, "will be to get the North Vietnamese to stop their invasion and to secure the release of Americans being held prisoner." And we got an item here on Apollo 16. The headline says, "Space- ship Speeds Up, Zeros in on Earth." Apollo 16 picked up speed today from the gravitational em- brace of Earth as scientists awaited the delivery of samples that may rewrite the history of the Moon. Astronauts John Young, Charles Duke, and Thomas Mattingly II, were due to enter the atmosphere of Earth Thursday afternoon at 24 000 miles per hour. Apollo 16 is returning 240 pounds of Moon samples. But the flight's lunar legacy consists of more than just rocks. Mattingly spent an hour walking in space Tuesday to retrieve two holders containing the exposed film of powerful mapping and panoramic cameras. With only one mission remaining in the Apollo Program, the cameras' pictures, taken from lunar orbit, are expected to provide much knowl- edge about areas of the Moon that man will not visit for a long time. And a little - little bit on the Democratic campaign here. "Muskie dealt 1-2 blow by McGovern in Massachusetts and HHH in Pennsylvania. Senator George McGovern, triumphant in Massachusetts, and Senator Hubert H. Humphery, the Pennsylvania victor, joined head-on political battle today after dealing a 1-2 blow to the Pres- idential campaign of Senator Edmund Muskie. Muskie finished a far-back second in Massachusetts, and managed only a virtual third-place tie with McGovern and Wallace in Pennsylvania where he concentrated his campaign. Alabama Governor George C. Wallace got 21 percent with 97 percent of the precincts tallied in Pennsylvania, after staging a 1-day campaign. Massachusetts gave Wallace 8 percent of the vote in partial returns, just ahead of Humphrey. Next Tuesday McGovern and Humphrey confront each other, Muskie, and Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington in Ohio battle for 153 convention delegates." A couple of items on - on the reentry area. The USS Ticonderoga, the primary recovery ship for Apollo 16, has arrived at the new splashdown site, 1500 miles south of Honolulu. The forecast for Thursday splash was unlimited visibility with temperatures in the 80s. Seas are expected to be 1 to 3 feet with swells to 5 feet. And the weather here in Houston is low tonight in the low 6Os, high Thursday in the low 80s, and the weather's been clear to partly cloudy today. And the Houston Astros did it again. They won their eighth consecutive baseball victory last night, a hard-fought 5 to 4 verdict over the Chicago Cubs. The win kept Houston in a tie wi_h Los Angeles for first place in the National League West. And let's see, I guess we'11 close - -