Rival PLO factions battled for the Beddawi refugee camp in Tripoli. In a counter-attack that began Friday, guerrillas loyal to Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization leader, have been firing barrages of rockets and mortars from several places in the city. The rebels have been responding with their heaviest bombardments since fighting in Tripoli began 17 days ago.
Secretary of State George P. Shultz said domination of the Palestine Liberation Organization by Syria may eliminate the PLO as a spokesman for the Palestinian people and open new opportunities for peace in the Mideast. The PLO’s internal struggle is certain to have “major implications” for the future of American-sponsored peace efforts in the Middle East, Secretary of State George P. Shultz said. The possibility that it might fall under Syrian domination was also considered by Mr. Shultz in a speech prepared for delivery at a meeting of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds in Atlanta. He indicated that PLO infighting could provide opportunities for Jordan to negotiate with Israel on Reagan’s plan.
President Reagan speaks with Assistant for National Security Affairs Robert McFarlane to discuss security implications of the French attack in Lebanon.
An explosion at a restaurant in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne wounded at least a dozen people, apparently none seriously. The blast, which police said was probably caused by a bomb thrown onto a balcony, severely damaged l’Oree du Bois restaurant, a plush establishment in the wooded area just west of the central city. No group immediately took responsibility for the attack. The last such bombing in Paris occurred in August, 1982, at Jo Goldenberg’s, a kosher restaurant on the Rue de Rosiers. Six people were killed and 21 wounded in that explosion.
Polish police have arrested an alleged underground activist of the banned Solidarity trade union known as “The Fox” along with 12 people suspected of helping him, the official Polish news agency PAP reported. The suspect, identified only as Marek N., 32, and the others were the first to be arrested since a government amnesty for underground dissidents in hiding expired October 31. The government described Marek N. as an architect and said he engaged in illegal Solidarity activities in the industrial city of Wroclaw.
Solidarity banners hang on altars in some Polish Roman Catholic Churches. Partisans of the outlawed union defy the Government by chanting support for Lech Walesa, the union’s founder, at religious rallies and marches. Last week, the Government was hitting back. In a letter to the Polish Primate, Jozef Cardinal Glemp, the authorities ordered him to silence some 69 “antisocialist” priests; otherwise, he was warned, they may face arrest.
Unfazed, the church hierarchy criticized Government plans to raise food prices at the beginning of 1984. The planned increases of 10 to 20 percent on basic foods “do not solve the problem,” 84 bishops said in a joint statement. The authorities, they suggested, should instead encourage “fruitful work” by ending political trials and releasing political prisoners. Police nevertheless announced they had arrested a Solidarity activist in the southern town of Wroclaw – the first such arrest since the expiration on Oct. 31 of a Government amnesty offer for underground militants who surrender. Parliament is expected to revive the amnesty when it meets next week. The underground Solidarity leader, Zbigniew Bujak, went further in his criticism of the price increases. He called for “resistance,” contending the higher prices would “siphon as much money as possible” from workers’ pockets to finance rising military budgets.
U.S. travel rules for Soviet diplomats and journalists were changed by the State Department. More of the United States was opened up for travel by the Russians, but some key areas that were previously open, such as the “Silicon Valley,” near San Francisco, were closed.
West German Social Democrats ignored an appeal by former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and said they could not accept the stationing of American medium-range weapons in West Germany. The decision by the opposition party, taken at a special party congress in Cologne, was the culmination of a left-wing rebellion against Mr. Schmidt’s support of the Western alliance.
Cyprus is objecting to U.S. use of its largest civilian airport for supplying the American military contingent in Lebanon.
King Hassan II of Morocco appointed Mohammed Karim Lamrani as premier of a new government to be formed soon to organize general elections. Lamrani, 64, is a political independent who served twice before as premier — in 1971 and again in 1972 — at a time of aborted military coups against Hassan. He replaces Maati Bouabid, who has headed a coalition government for four years.
President Habib Bourguiba legalized two opposition parties today and announced plans to establish a multiparty political system, the Tunisian press agency said. After conferring with the President, Prime Minister Mohammed Mzali said the Socialist Democrats Movement and the People’s Unity Movement would be allowed to operate. The Socialist Destour Party, which Mr. Bourguiba founded, has had a virtual monopoly on Tunisian political life. The only other legal party has been the Tunisian Communist Party.
The Sudanese Army has freed seven French and two Pakistani workers who were captured this week by anti-Government guerrillas, the army general command said today. The command, in a communique carried by the official Sudanese press agency, said some Sudanese were also freed in the raid in the southern Sudan on Friday and that the rescued people were safe and in good health. The communique said the army attacked positions of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army in the upper Nile province of Kongor, about 600 miles south of Khartoum. It did not mention casualties on either side and did not say how many Sudanese were freed or whether they were soldiers or civilians. In a similar raid on Thursday, the army freed two British workers who were kidnapped Tuesday at Bentiu, about 470 miles south of Khartoum.
Americans living in Nicaragua denounced President Reagan’s Central American policy as “criminal and destructive” and said their security should not be used as a pretext for an invasion. An estimated 450 demonstrators in Managua, including U.S., British and Canadian citizens, marched to the U.S. Embassy to deliver a protest note addressed to Reagan. “Under no circumstances do we want to be ‘rescued’ from the Nicaraguan government by U.S. troops,” the statement said. Nicaragua’s government has described U.S. troops now conducting exercises in Honduras as the “spearhead of an invasion force.”
Departing from longstanding Administration policy of muffling criticism of selected right-wing governments, Fred C. Ikle, a senior Pentagon official, said last week that “the death squads of the violent right” must be defeated along with leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. The squads are blamed for many of the 35,000 civilian murders in four years of civil war. “We’ve had it with these guys,” another senior official said. “If they don’t clean up this time, we’re going to do something.” Sanctions, he added, could include a fiscal and immigration crackdown on wealthy Salvadoran exiles in Miami who are suspected of financing and directing death squads.
“Violent extremists on both sides,” Mr. Ikle said in a speech in Dallas, “are in practice working together” against the democratic center. A few days before, during a visit to San Salvador, he made the same point to Salvadoran officials and army commanders. Last week, Government troops in three small northern towns were accused of having rounded up and killed more than 100 civilians, including women and children. American and British reporters who went to the area last week were given a list of 117 dead. They counted 20 skeletons in a house said to have been the site of a massacre. An army statement said the victims were all “subversives.”
Japanese opposition lawmakers ended their 37-day boycott of Parliament after a compromise was reached on the controversy stemming from the October 12 bribery conviction of former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka. The boycott was called to support demands that Tanaka resign his seat in Parliament. Under the compromise, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party will set up a 20-member “political ethics council” to review measures to guard against corruption.
About 13,000 people took part in two demonstrations against President Ferdinand E. Marcos today, neither of them in Manila, and the state television said the army had created a special brigade named Prompt to help preserve order in the capital. It quoted the brigade’s commander, Colonel Franklin Samonte, as saying his men had had daily training for an unspecified period “to be able to function well when the situation calls for it.” The announcement coincided with a rally by 10,000 protesters in Malalos, 20 miles northwest of Manila, and a march by 3,000 residents in the Manila suburb of Taytay. In Malalos, Aurora Aquino, the mother of former Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr., the slain opposition leader, called for more protests against Mr. Marcos but said they should be peaceful.
South Africa has charged Allister Sparks, a South African correspondent for the Washington Post, with quoting a banned person and publishing untruths about the security police, the newsman’s lawyer, Raymond Tucker, said in Johannesburg. Jim Hoagland, an assistant managing editor for the Post, called the charges “ludicrous on their face.” Sparks, 50, a South African citizen, is accused of quoting Winnie Mandela, who is under a banning order-a form of internal banishment-and forbidden to be quoted in the press.
Congress left behind a budget deficit of $200 billion when it adjourned Friday night for a two-month recess. Members expressed little confidence that they would deal with it before the 1984 election.
President Reagan makes a Radio Address to the Nation on the first session of the 98th Congress. Congress was congratulated by President Reagan for having approved “key reforms” and “bravely resisting attempts by some” to increase spending even though it failed to approve “a responsible budget to help bring down deficits,” he said in his weekly radio address.
In his weekly five-minute radio address, Mr. Reagan struck an unusually conciliatory note on the achievements of the Congress the day after it closed its 1983 session in a burst of legislative activity. “They can take some satisfaction from a change in the public’s attitude about their performance,” Mr. Reagan said of the lawmakers, citing a recent poll showing that Americans’ confidence in Congress had grown.
The key to that increased confidence, he said, was this year’s surprisingly strong economic growth. “Even the most committed pessimists are reluctantly concluding America is enjoying one humdinger of an economic recovery,” he said. And Mr. Reagan, who has often taken credit himself for the turnaround in economic activity in the last year, today said Congress “deserves its share of the credit.”
Fatherless black families have increased since Daniel Patrick Moynihan reported 18 years ago to President Johnson that a quarter of black families with children were headed by women and that this growing matriarchy was an important cause of poverty among black Americans. Today, virtually half of black families are headed by single women, and 55 percent of black babies are born to unmarried mothers. This situation has reached such proportions that it threatens to undo the economic gains made by black Americans over the past three decades.
The Census Bureau and the IRS are fighting a Reagan Administration proposal that would allow the bureau to share personal information about individual Americans with a number of other agencies. Sharing the information has been prohibited by law.
The Reagan Administration is spending $820,000 to honor some of the nation’s top public and private high schools, but the schools themselves will not get a penny. Instead, the money has been set aside for honorariums of up to $150 a day, airfare, hotel bills and other expenses for educators to visit and select schools that will receive the awards. A Department of Education official, Bruce Haslam, said it cost the Government $270,000 to find the 152 public junior and senior high schools that were honored by President Reagan at a White House ceremony September 28. Each school received a 4-by-6-foot flag and a plaque.
CIA Director William J. Casey has agreed to take a lie detector test to help resolve his dispute with White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III about whether Casey received then-President Carter’s debate briefing material during the 1980 presidential campaign. Casey reportedly had said that it would be “demeaning” to take a polygraph test as part of the FBI investigation of how the Carter papers were obtained. But, according to sources, Casey has decided that, like Baker, he is willing to undergo the examination. Baker acknowledges he had the debate documents, and says he got them from Casey, who was Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager. Casey denies that, saying he never had the Carter documents nor even knew that the Carter papers had been obtained by Reagan campaign officials.
A federal judge refused to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from allowing toxic wastes to be burned in the Gulf of Mexico. U.S. District Judge Ricardo Hinojosa called premature the request by the states of Texas and Louisiana for a temporary injunction. He stressed that his ruling did not concern the merits of the protest. The EPA is in the final stages of granting a permit to allow two huge boats to dispose of more than 80 million gallons of deadly chemical compounds such as PCBs and other poisonous chlorines at sea by burning them.
Congress has barred the Army from shooting cats and dogs so that its surgeons could practice treating wounds, but allowed them to experiment on pigs, goats and other animals. The measure was approved this week as part of the military appropriation bill. The chairman of a local humane society, People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, immediately protested. “What they’re saying is spare the cute ones but shoot the rest of them,” said Alex Pacheco, the chairman. The ban on using cats and dogs resulted from a public uproar over the disclosure four months ago that 80 anesthetized dogs were due to be shot at the nation’s military medical school in Bethesda, Maryland.
The black candidate whose police mug shots were used in campaign advertisements by his opponent defeated the father of Louisiana’s “creationism” law in a runoff for a state Senate seat. Shreveport City Council member Greg Tarver had 59% of the vote to 41% for state Senator Bill Keith, a white, whose television ads showed a police mug shot of Tarver and proclaimed, “The choice is not as clear as black and white.” Tarver had been arrested during civil rights protests more than a decade ago. Tarver finished first in the October 22 primary, but the runoff election was called because neither candidate won a majority. In the only two statewide races, Lieutenant Governor Bobby Freeman and Commissioner of Insurance Sherman Bernard won reelection.
A Chinese-born scientist has been fined $10,000 and placed on four years’ probation by a federal judge in Detroit for illegally exporting high-technology equipment to China. Pao-kuang Kuo, who pleaded guilty in September to exporting 642 pieces of electronic equipment in early 1981 without a license, said he acted “for humanitarian and scientific reasons.” The Wayne State University physics professor did not explain. The equipment, which included 44 types of computer circuits, went to Peking’s Institute of Physics.
Four railroad crewmen were killed and another was severely injured today when the tanker train in which they were riding rammed into the back of a parked freight train shortly before dawn near a residential neighborhood here. The wreck was the second train accident in a week in Texas. Last Saturday four people were killed when an Amtrak train derailed in Marshall. The accident today occurred 30 miles east of Houston in a remote residential subdivision in this industrial city of 60,000. A 10-car tanker train of the Southern Pacific Railroad that was carrying jet fuel was traveling north about 20 miles an hour when it rammed into the back of a 41-car Southern Pacific freight train shortly after 5 A.M., according to Sgt. George Turner of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
An invalid on a respirator was found dead by his wife Friday, less than 10 minutes after power to his Honolulu apartment was shut off because of an overdue bill. A spokesman for the Hawaiian Electric Company, Doug Carlson, said today that the man, Michael D. Hamlin, was not on the company’s list of special cases. Mr. Hamlin’s wife, Judith, was visiting another apartment when a utility worker arrived at the building. He turned off the power after failing to get a response when he knocked on the Hamlins’ door.
Johnny P. Cruz Jr. didn’t want to leave the Sacramento County Jail, but sheriff’s deputies insisted. There must be a mistake, he told them. But they sent him home anyway and, after 24 hours of freedom, he returned. “I’m supposed to be in jail,” he told clerk-typist Anna Reed. Cruz explained that he’d spent his free evening at a bar, and when he’d gone home, he’d found his wife hysterical because deputies “had been there tearing up the place looking for me.” A sheriff’s spokesman blamed the snafu on a paper work mix-up. Cruz, who is serving a 163-day sentence for drunk driving and vandalism, said, “Hey, I just want to do my time and get out of here.”
A dozen tornadoes and storms raged through Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, killing one Louisiana man with lightning. Winds gusting up to 40 m.p.h. downed power lines, scattered tree limbs across roadways and damaged homes in the northern part of Louisiana. Five persons were injured by a twister that hit central Texas about 20 miles south of Bryan. In Arkansas, two persons were injured and several businesses and homes were damaged by a tornado at Little Rock, and lightning was blamed for a fire that destroyed five businesses in Walnut Ridge. In New Mexico, blowing snow closed a state highway and was blamed for four weekend deaths.
Robert Whitney (79) conducts his final concert, leading the Louisville Orchestra at the opening of the Whitney Concert Hall at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in Louisville, Kentucky.
The Edmonton Oilers beat the New Jersey Devils, 13-4. Wayne Gretzky calls the Devils “a Mickey Mouse organization.”
Jari Kurri becomes the first (and only) Finnish NHL player to score five goals in a game.
Born:
Adam Driver, American actor (“Girls”, “Star Wars”), in Fontana, California
DeAngelo Hall, NFL cornerback and safety (Pro Bowl, 2005, 2006, 2010; Atlanta Falcons, Washington Redskins), in Chesapeake, Virginia.
Max Jean-Gilles, NFL guard (Philadelphia Eagles), in Miami, Florida.
Chandra Crawford, Canadian cross-country skier (Olympic Gold, Individual sprint, 2006), in Canmore, Alberta, Canada.
Died:
Tom Evans, 36, British rock guitarist, bass player, and singer-songwriter (Badfinger – “Come and Get It”; “Without You”: “Maybe Tomorrow”), commits suicide.
David Bowie — “Modern Love”
Billy Joel — “Uptown Girl”
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