Photograph: The White House, 7 November 1983. President Ronald Reagan addresses the crowd with Nancy Reagan, Caspar Weinberger and John Vessey applauding on the South Lawn during the ceremony for the medical students from St George’s School of Medicine in Grenada.
Washington urged Syria to show “restraint and prudence” and said the United States had no plans to attack Syrian forces. The comments by senior officials came as Israel and Syria called up reservists and the United States strengthened its naval forces in the eastern Mediterranean. Still, a senior State Department official said that the United States and Israel were concerned and uncertain over the consequences of what he said was “an increasingly hard line” on the part of Syria.
Israel assured Syria it had no intention of mounting an attack against Syrian forces. Israel has announced plans for a mobilization of its forces later this week, but officials said it was a routine, semiannual maneuver that was “in no way connected with events in Lebanon.”
Yasser Arafat’s last stronghold in Lebanon came under rocket and artillery shelling, and some of his guerrillas withdrew into the densely populated city of Tripoli. The guerrillas began setting up rocket positions against Syrian-backed Palestinian insurgents, raising fears that the strategic port city would soon be engulfed in battle.
An ailing Yuri V. Andropov did not appear with other Soviet leaders atop the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow for the annual Revolution Day parade, breaking a Soviet tradition. Questions about the Soviet leader’s condition and its consequences spread through the diplomatic community. Yuri V. Andropov, the Soviet leader, was absent today from the group of Politburo members reviewing the traditional Revolution Day parade, heightening speculation that he may be seriously ill.
It was the first time in memory that a Soviet leader failed to attend the November 7 parade, the highpoint of the Soviet calendar when eyes at home and abroad are fixed on the leadership. Mr. Andropov has not been seen in public for over two months and did not turn up at an indoor Kremlin rally on Saturday in honor of today’s 66th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Last year Leonid I. Brezhnev, Mr. Andropov’s predecessor, climbed the stairs to the reviewing stand and stood an hour in freezing weather just three days before he died.
A gunman killed an employee of the Jordanian Embassy in a tourist-filled Athens alley and seriously wounded another. It was the third attack on Jordanian Embassy personnel in two weeks. In previous attacks, Jordanian ambassadors were wounded in Rome and New Delhi. The Front for Syrian Struggle claimed responsibility for the Rome attack.
Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, in another display of his independence from Moscow policies, has called on the Soviet Union to drop its insistence that British and French nuclear missiles be included in Soviet-U.S. arms talks in Geneva. The appeal was contained in letters sent to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, President Reagan and Soviet President Yuri V. Andropov, Kohl said. The appeal from its Soviet Bloc ally was unlikely to change the Kremlin’s mind, but it was seen in the West as a blow to Soviet propaganda efforts.
Reports of a mass grave in southern Grenada containing more than 100 bodies were denied by the chief United States spokesman on the Caribbean island.
Leaders of eastern Caribbean nations told a group of United States Congressmen that they remained worried about Cuban, Libyan and North Korean subversion in the region despite the downfall of the radical regime in Grenada.
An American aid plan in Grenada, begun after the United States-led invasion, is apparently developing into a long-range relief and rehabilitation program. President Reagan orders the 82nd Airborne to Grenada to repair war damage and provide medical care for the citizens of Grenada.
A strong earthquake jolted an agricultural area of eastern China, killing at least 30 people and damaging thousands of homes and buildings, officials said. Seismologists said the quake measured 5.9 on the Richter scale. The tremor and its aftershocks, centered in Shandong province, were also felt in Hebei, Anhui and Henan provinces. The area is one of the most densely populated in eastern China. In 1976, a quake in northern China measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale killed an estimated 800,000 people.
The beleaguered government of Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos announced that two army battalions will reinforce anti-riot security in Manila. Major General Josephus Ramas, army chief, said that the troops, fresh from campaigns against Communist guerrillas on the southern islands of Samar and Mindanao, will be fielded “only as the need arises.” Opposition leaders reportedly are planning protests on November 27, which would have been the 51st birthday of Benigno S. Aquino Jr., Marcos foe slain on August 21.
Japan announced that it will ban North Korean diplomats from the country to protest the bombing attack that killed 17 prominent South Koreans, including four Cabinet ministers, in Rangoon, Burma, last month. Japan said it will also discourage contacts between Japanese and North Korean diplomats in third countries, impose harsher restrictions on North Korean citizens traveling to Japan and ban North Korean commercial airliners from landing in the country. There are no diplomatic relations between the two countries.
President Kim Il Sung of North Korea may be visiting Chinese leaders in Peking on a secret mission, diplomatic sources reported today. Envoys from both Western and East bloc countries said they were aware of rumors about a clandestine visit by the 71-year-old North Korean leader, but could not confirm them. If confirmed, it would be President Kim’s second clandestine visit to China since August, diplomats reported. Tensions on the Korean peninsula have intensified because of the October 9 bombing in Burma, and because of recent unofficial contacts between Peking and South Korea.
Pope John Paul II will visit South Korea sometime next May, Korean Foreign Ministry officials said. The visit will be part of celebrations marking the bicentenary of the introduction of Roman Catholicism to South Korea, where there are about 1.4 million Catholics.
Under Secretary of Defense Fred C. Ikle discussed renewing U.S. military aid to Guatemala in a meeting with General Oscar Mejia Victores, Guatemalan chief of state, in a surprise meeting in Guatemala City. Ikle said he also discussed economic aid and human rights with the Guatemalan leader and members of his government. Under the Carter Administration, the United States insisted on improvement in human rights performance as a condition for continued military aid.
Argentina’s military government said it will hand over power to President-elect Raul Alfonsin on December 10, seven weeks earlier than planned. The date was moved forward after consultations with Alfonsin’s reformist Radical Civic Union party, which won an October 30 election held to begin the nation’s return to democratic rule.
Philemon Muzorewa, a son of the detained former Zimbabwean Prime Minister, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, was reportedly arrested today, a spokesman for the bishop’s United African National Council party said. The spokesman said Philemon Muzorewa, 26 years old, who is not politically active, was forced into a car and driven away from his Harare home at 10 A.M. The party checked the number of the car with police and was told it belonged to Zimbabwe’s secret service, the spokesman said, adding, “We assume he has been arrested.” Former Prime Minister Muzorewa was arrested October 31 on suspicion of carrying out subversive activities in league with South African. His family said today he had been on a hunger strike since then, taking neither food nor liquids.
President Reagan participates in a ceremony welcoming home 400 students from the St. Georges University School of Medicine in Grenada. Hundreds of students from St. George’s University Medical School on Grenada cheered President Reagan at the White House today as he welcomed them home and denounced critics who have belittled the danger they were in on the island. “It is very easy for some smug know- it-all in a plush protected quarter to say that you were in no danger,” the President said, drawing applause from the students. “I have wondered how many of them would have changed places with you.” The students, waving small American flags, were exuberant as they gathered on the South Lawn with members of the military services who took part in the October 25 invasion that led to their evacuation from Grenada.
“Prior to this experience, I had held liberal political views which were not always sympathetic with the position of the American military,” Jeff Geller of Woodbridge, New York, one of the students, told the President. He added that he had “learned a lot” from the experience. “There’s one thing to view an American military operation from afar and quite another to be rescued by one,” he said. With the Marine band playing marches, the front rows of seats filled with military men and the Stars and Stripes on display all about, the outdoor event had a patriotic motif that the President obviously enjoyed.
At two minutes before 11 o’clock in the evening, a thunderous explosion tore through the second floor of the U.S. Capitol’s Senate wing. Since the area was virtually deserted at the time, there were no casualties. Minutes before the bomb went off, a caller claiming to represent the “Armed Resistance Unit” warned a Capitol switchboard operator that a bomb had been placed near the chamber — purportedly in retaliation for the recent U.S. military actions in Grenada and Lebanon.
The force of the device, hidden under a bench outside the Senate chamber, blew the hinges off the door to the office of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia), the minority leader. It also damaged five paintings, particularly a stately portrait of Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster. (The blast tore away Webster’s face and left it scattered across the floor tiles in one-inch canvas shards. Senate officials recovered the fragments from debris-filled trash bins. Over the coming months, a conservator painstakingly restored the painting to a credible, if somewhat diminished, version of the original.) The blast also punched a hole in a partition that sent a shower of pulverized brick, plaster and glass into the Republican cloakroom behind the chamber.
Although the explosion caused no structural damage to the Capitol, it shattered mirrors, chandeliers and furniture. Officials placed the damage at $250,000. After a five-year investigation, in May 1988 FBI agents arrested seven members of the May 19th Communist Organization, the “Resistance Conspiracy”: Marilyn Jean Buck, Linda Sue Evans, Susan Rosenberg, Timothy Blunk, Alan Berkman, Laura Whitehorn and Elizabeth Ann Duke. They were charged with executing the Capitol bombing as well as triggering similar blasts at Fort McNair and the Washington Navy Yard.
The trial of former Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin and co-defendant Samuel Brown was postponed for a week in Goshen, New York. The delay was caused by defense motions and the death of a police official. Boudin and Brown are the fourth and fifth persons to be tried for the 1981 robbery of a Brink’s armored truck, in which two policemen and a guard were killed.
The ex-operator of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was indicted by a federal grand jury on criminal charges of having falsified safety-test results before the accident at the Middletown, Pennsylvania, plant. federal officials have said that if such false reports were filed, they could have contributed to the severity of the March 1979 accident.
MX missile funds won final approval in the Senate. The vote of 56 to 37 cleared the way for full-scale production after the Republican-controlled chamber rejected a last-ditch effort by Democrats to thwart the strategic weapon.
A stay of execution was overturned by the Supreme Court, which acted against three bitter dissents. As a result, Louisiana is now free to execute a condemned killer and is considered almost certain to do so.
Correction Commissioner Benjamin Ward was named New York City’s police commissioner by Mayor Edward I. Koch. Ward, 57, becomes the first black to head the nation’s largest police department. “I had one overriding criterion in selecting a new police commissioner-and that is, who is the best person for the job?” Koch said. Ward, who had been a policeman for 23 years before entering the corrections field, will take office January 1, succeeding Robert McGuire.
Medical experts at a House hearing disputed allegations that wealthy foreigners coming to the United States for kidney transplants worsen the shortage of organs available to Americans. The foreigners, mostly from Saudi Arabia and Greece, make up only a tiny percentage of transplant patients, witnesses told a House Science and Technology subcommittee. Surgeon Nicholas Feduska of the University of California, San Francisco, cited a survey by the American Society of Transplant Surgeons which found that only 3.5% of the kidneys transplanted in 1982 went to nonresident aliens. A few hospitals, including St. Vincent’s in Los Angeles and UC San Francisco, “perform a large proportion” of transplants to nonresident foreigners, the study said.
A federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, upheld the gun-running convictions of former CIA agent Edwin P. Wilson but overturned his sentence, saying it was unconstitutionally severe. A new trial was unnecessary but Wilson must be resentenced, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 4th Court of Appeals said. He had been sentenced to 15 years in prison and fined $200,000 after being convicted in Alexandria in 1982 for selling weapons to Libya. Wilson has also been convicted of conspiracy to arrange murders and of conspiracy to ship explosives to Libya.
A new equal rights amendment was approved by a House Judiciary subcommittee, and Chairman Don Edwards (D-California) said he has the votes to win passage in both the full Judiciary Committee and the House. The measure is identical to a proposed amendment that passed Congress in 1972 and died June 30, 1982, three states short of the 38 needed for ratification. The amendment states: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
The Supreme Court, sidestepping a growing debate over the rights of severely handicapped infants, refused to review the case of a Bloomington, Indiana, baby boy who died after his parents decided against life-saving surgery. The justices left intact Indiana court rulings that the boy’s death had caused the controversy surrounding his parents’ decision to become moot, or legally irrelevant. Last week, the Reagan Administration filed a federal lawsuit in the case of a severely handicapped New York baby girl whose parents have chosen to forgo corrective surgery.
A convicted rapist was arrested today in connection with the murders of two of 32 older women killed in the last two years in Hollywood. The suspect, Brandon Tholmer, 27 years old, had been under 24-hour surveillance since November 2 after detectives identified him as a potential suspect because of his conviction in a 1975 rape of an elderly woman, Police Chief Daryl Gates said. Mr. Tholmer served three years in a mental hospital and was released in 1979. Mr. Tholmer, who was held without bail, was charged with the murders of Lucille Pyle, 82, and Mary Pauquette, 73. Both women had been raped. The killings occurred between January 1981 and October 1983 in Los Angeles’ West Side, which earned Tholmer the nickname of The West Side Rapist.
Henry Lee Lucas, a drifter who claims to have killed 165 people, went on trial today in the slaying of a 15-year-old girl he says he cut into “little teeny pieces.” As jury selection got under way, Mr. Lucas’ court-appointed lawyer, Tom Whitlock of Denton, indicated he would present a defense of innocent by reason of insanity. Mr. Lucas, who has served time in prison for killing his mother, is on trial in the fatal stabbing of Frieda Powell, of Jacksonville, Florida. The prosecutors said they planned to introduce a videotaped statement in which Mr. Lucas admits stabbing the girl and cutting her up. Mr. Lucas has detailed several dozen slayings for investigators and has even drawn pictures of some of his purported victims.
The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the oldest newspaper in Missouri, will cease publication December 31, its publisher announced. The decision is subject to approval by the Justice Department.
The first black Mayor of Philadelphia is expected to be elected today in one of the most widely watched of many off-year elections across the country. Voters will elect two governors, fill two seats in Congress left vacant by deaths of incumbents and choose mayors in several major cities, including Charlotte, North Carolina, where a black is also favored.
The political drive by homosexuals to create space and respect for themselves has become a national phenomenon. The effort, begun in recent years but already maturing, has proceeded in fits and starts but has already received the respect of such politicians as Walter F. Mondale and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. It has even allowed one avowed homosexual, Rich Eychaner, to seek the Republican nomination for a House seat from Des Moines.
NFL Monday Night Football:
Billy Sims scored on a two-yard run, Eddie Murray added a 35-yard field goal and the Detroit Lions recorded a safety during an eight-minute span of the first half Monday night, then went on to a 15-9 victory over the New York Giants. The Giants (2-7-1), winless in their last six National Football League games, could manage only three field goals by Ali Haji-Shiekh-of 27, 56 and 35 yards. The Lions improved their record to 5-5.
New York, trailing, 12-9, chose not to let Haji-Shiekh attempt a 57-yard field goal, and that decision led to a 33-yard field goal by Murray to complete the scoring with 8:04 left. A pair of interceptions by Bruce McNorton in the fourth quarter blunted the last two New York possessions. Haji-Shiekh’s 35-yard field goal with 4:02 left in the third period cut New York’s deficit to three points at 12-9. But on the Giants’ next possession they elected to punt from the Detroit 39, and the Lions took over and marched 65 yards. Murray kicked his field goal when the drive stalled at the Giants’ 15.
Haji-Shiekh kicked his first field goal, of 27 yards, to give New York a 3-0 lead. Robbie Martin returned the ensuing kickoff 51 yards to the Giants 44, and three plays later, Sims ran 37 yards around right end to the two. Sims scored on the next play. Detroit cornerback Alvin Hall recovered Butch Woolfolk’s fumble four plays into the next New York possession to set up Murray’s 35-yard field goal. On the first play following the fumble, Sims faked a run into the line, turned and pitched back to quarterback Eric Hipple, who lofted a 16-yard pass to Mark Nichols on the 20. Three plays later, Murray’s field goal made it 10-3. Detroit made it 12-3 with 7:15 left in the second period when defensive tackle Mike Fanning fell on center Rich Umphrey in the end zone after Umphrey had recovered a fumble by Woolfolk.
New York Giants 9, Detroit Lions 15
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1214.83 (-3.45).
Born:
Adam Devine, American actor (“Pitch Perfect”), comedian and TV producer (“Workaholics”), in Waterloo, Iowa.
Sabaa Tahir, Pakistani-American Young Adult writer (“An Ember in the Ashes”), in London, England, United Kingdom.
Esmerling Vásquez, Dominican MLB pitcher (Arizona Diamondbacks, Minnesota Twins), in Tenares, Dominican Republic.
Chris Taylor, NFL running back (Houston Texans), in Memphis, Tennessee.
Jeris Pendleton, NFL defensive tackle (Jacksonville Jaguars, Indianapolis Colts), in Chicago, Illinois.
Patrick Thoresen, Norwegian National Team and NHL centre (Olympics, 2010, 2014, 2018; Edmonton Oilers, Philadelphia Flyers), in Oslo, Norway.
History Diaries 