Four Israelis were killed and 46 wounded when a bomb, apparently placed by a Palestinian terrorist, destroyed a crowded bus at the height of the lunchtime rush in Jerusalem. It was the worst terrorist attack there since 1979, when 3 people were killed and 50 wounded by explosives packed in a bicycle frame.
Data about Syrian antiaircraft sites in Lebanon was inadequate and American pilots met more intense fire than they expected during Sunday’s bombing raid, a senior admiral said. He spoke at a Navy briefing in defense of the raid, in which two planes were lost, one airman was killed and one was captured by the Syrians. The performance of the airmen has been criticized by military specialists at home at abroad, including two former commanders of the Israeli Air Force.
Two Israeli pilotless drones were shot down as they flew over Syrian positions in eastern Lebanon and southwest Syria, Damascus reported. An Israeli military spokesman in Tel Aviv confirmed the loss of one pilotless craft.
Britain does not plan to withdraw its 100 or more soldiers from Beirut, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher affirmed. Opposition Labor spokesman and some Conservatives have demanded that the British force be brought home.
Secretary of State George P. Shultz said in Bonn that he is prepared to meet with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko at an international arms control meeting in Stockholm on January 17 because he feels high-level contacts with the Soviets are desirable. Shultz said he will attend the meeting if the representation is raised to the foreign minister level. Under current plans, special representatives will attend the meeting of 35 nations that signed the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Shultz and Gromyko have not met since an acrimonious encounter in Madrid after the September 1 Soviet downing of a South Korean airliner.
U.S. and Soviet negotiators have agreed to hold another meeting of the strategic arms reduction talks in Geneva on Thursday before a scheduled Christmas recess, but the Soviets left open the question of whether they will return to the talks next year. Chief Soviet negotiator Viktor Karpov told reporters he does not know if the talks will be resumed in 1984, adding, “You will hear from us Thursday.” The Soviets have scuttled parallel talks on limiting mid-range missiles in protest against the deployment of new U.S. missiles in Europe.
An arrest in a $38 million gold theft was made by the authorities in London. They charged a guard employed by the company that had three tons of bullion taken from its warehouse at Heathrow Airport 10 days ago. Five other men were being held for questioning. A Brink’s-Mat Ltd. security guard was arrested and charged with conspiracy in the record robbery November 26 of three tons of gold from the firm’s warehouse near London’s Heathrow Airport, Scotland Yard announced. The guard, Anthony John Black, 31, is being held without bail pending a court appearance. It was the first arrest in the case, in which several armed robbers overpowered security guards. None of the gold, estimated to be worth nearly $39 million, has been recovered, and its ownership has not been disclosed.
The Polish government brushed aside the prospect of talks with former Solidarity union leader Lech Walesa in the wake of his call on the West to lift economic sanctions, imposed during martial law. “There is no need for the government to change its attitude toward Walesa,” government spokesman Jerzy Urban told a press conference. He said Communist authorities also will refuse to let Walesa make a speech December 16 at a Gdansk shipyard monument commemorating the deaths of scores of workers shot by police during food-price riots in 1970.
Leaders of the ten European Community (EC) nations end a three-day summit in Athens, Greece, without an agreement on key financial issues. Common Market leaders are at odds over proposed cuts in farm spending and a British demand for a $1 billion budget refund. A summit meeting of the 10-nation European Economic Community ended in deadlock over the two issues. Officials said the disagreements left the Common Market on the brink of bankruptcy and facing the deepest political crisis of its 26-year history.
Two Soviet citizens entered the new U.S. Embassy building site in Moscow, demanded to meet Ambassador Arthur Hartman and refused to leave for 15 hours, an embassy spokesman confirmed. The spokesman refused to say whether the intruders met with Hartman, what other demands they might have made or whether they were arrested when they finally left. He said they scaled a chain-link fence to enter the site, which is guarded by U.S. Marines and scanned by closed-circuit television.
Turkey’s ruling generals stepped down after more than three years in power. Turkish President Kenan Evren, who led the 1980 coup, announced that the military is handing over authority to the newly elected Parliament. In an address to his nation, Evren said that the ruling military council has fulfilled all the promises it made after seizing power on September 12, 1980, including the pledge to restore democracy. The new legislature was elected on November 6.
The police said today that they had found more than half of the $11 million ransom paid for Alfred H. Heineken, the brewery chairman. The money was reportedly stuffed in plastic barrels that were buried in a Dutch forest. The police began searching the forest near Utrecht when two hikers found hundreds of $100 bills. The police rescued Mr. Heineken, 60 years old, and his driver, Ab Doderer, 57, from an Amsterdam warehouse last Wednesday after they had been kidnapped and held for three weeks. They recovered $2 million of the ransom in raids that led to the arrest of 25 people. Nineteen were later released.
A Romanesque gospel book, described by scholars and collectors as one of the greatest medieval masterpieces remaining in private hands, was sold in London to a West German consortium and will be returned to the region in Lower Saxony where it was created and sumptuously illustrated eight centuries ago. The Germans paid more than $11.7 million for the work of art after two minutes of bidding.
A Peking spokesman dispelled rumors that China might cancel the U.S. visit of Premier Zhao Ziyang, and by implication the return visit of President Reagan to China in April, because of displeasure over recent American expressions of support for Taiwan. The premier “will visit the United States next January in accordance with the agreement between the two governments,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
A Mexican destroyer stopped two Texas shrimp boats in international waters with gunfire and the threat of ramming, seized the boats and crews and took them to Veracruz for legal action, officials said. Lieutenant Larry Fontana, public information officer for the U.S. Coast Guard in Corpus Christi, confirmed the seizures early Monday 30 miles off the Texas coast, outside the 12-mile territorial limit claimed by the United States. Fontana said, however, that the Mexican destroyer Chihuahua was in “hot pursuit” of vessels that it said had been illegally trawling inside Mexico’s 200-mile Mexican Fisheries Conservation Zone.
President Reagan has sent a congratulatory telegram to Jaime Lusinchi, the newly elected President of Venezuela, the White House spokesman said today. The spokesman, Larry Speakes, said that in his message “the President notes with pleasure the Venezuelan democratic process has once again demonstrated its vitality.”
The Indian Government announced today that it had arrested three former senior military officers for passing military secrets on to a foreign government. Defense Minister Ramaswamy Venkataraman refused to name the country involved, saying further disclosures would hurt the investigation. Newspaper reports, however, said the three former officers and a fourth man, a civilian, had spied for the Central Intelligence Agency. The three officers, all retired, were identified as Major General F. D. Larkins of the Indian Army and his younger brother, Vice Marshal K. H. Larkins of the Air Force, and Lieutenant Colonel Jasbir Singh of the army. The civilian was identified as Jaspal Singh Gill.
The threats that prompted additional security precautions at the White House and State Department two weeks ago purportedly came from Shia Muslims, the Washington Post said, quoting unidentified sources. The Manassas, Virginia, police department received the first threat, which was directed at the State Department, in an anonymous letter warning that the Shia Muslims planned to ram the building with a truck laden with explosives on Thanksgiving Day, the sources said.
Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell, hosting a national forum in Indianapolis on America’s schools, detailed steps that states and localities should take to improve education — but did not say what the federal government will do. Bell said President Reagan will address the matter next month in his State of the Union address. In the meantime, Bell said at the opening of the three-day conference, attended by about 2,300 governors, educators and legislators, that governors should push for education reforms, including increased pay and training for teachers, and legislatures must enact the measures.
The National Governors Association has asked President Reagan to establish a bipartisan commission on unemployment insurance to recommend reforms for the debt-ridden system, it was learned. In a letter to Reagan dated December 1, Illinois Governor James R. Thompson, chairman of the association, requested the commission because “the states and federal government face fiscal problems in our nation’s unemployment insurance program that are reaching crisis proportions.”
Three more civil rights panelists were appointed by President Reagan. In naming the three to the restructured United States Commission on Civil Rights, Mr. Reagan declined to reappoint a prominent Republican who has criticized the Administration’s civil rights policies.
President Reagan meets with California Governor George Deukmejian and leaders of the Armenian-American Community.
President Reagan goes to the National Air and Space Museum. He attends a dinner there, honoring aviation pioneer and World War II hero Jimmy Doolittle.
The sanctity of life was extolled by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, the Archbishop of Chicago, as he urged Roman Catholics to join in a broad campaign against nuclear weapons, abortion and capital punishment. In an address at Fordham University, Cardinal Bernardin expressed opposition to the death penalty “because we do not think its use cultivates an attitude of respect for life.”
Religious opposition to the death penalty has forged an alliance that promises to strengthen with the prospect of a rising number of executions. On this issue, the Roman Catholic Church is allied with most mainstream Protestant denominations and most Jewish theologians. Fundamentalist Christians and some Jewish thinkers endorse the death penalty.
A second University of Massachusetts student was arrested in connection with nearly 40 arson fires that have terrorized students at the Amherst school this fall. Kent Bierly, 20, a physical education major, pleaded innocent to charges of damaging a fire alarm — not with setting a fire. The arrest came hours after another fire forced 200 students from their dormitory into the snow, and one day after a student counselor was arraigned on charges that she set a fire in an all-female dorm most often hit by the fires.
A minister’s cancer-stricken daughter who has been undergoing court-ordered chemotherapy since September left East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville to rest at home for the holidays. The Rev. Larry Hamilton of LaFollette has been involved in a bitter court battle to stop treatment for Pamela, 12, who has deadly bone cancer, because the family’s fundamentalist sect, the Church of God of the Union Assembly, believes that only God can heal and forbids medicine.
Joseph Bonanno, who reigned as a Mafia chieftain for 30 years without going to jail, was confined today to a hospital ward of a federal penitentiary where he began serving his first prison term. Mr. Bonanno, who is in his late 70’s, surrendered at Terminal Island Federal Prison Monday to begin serving a one-year sentence for a 1980 conviction for conspiracy to obstruct justice, prison officials said. Mr. Bonanno was found guilty by a federal judge of interfering with a grand jury investigation. Mr. Bonanno was placed in the hospital unit of the prison because of his age and to undergo a medical examination, a prison spokesman said.
A lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Los Angeles today in an effort to block the Immigration and Naturalization Service from putting a policy into effect Wednesday that would prohibit aliens from taking jobs while their applications to stay in this country were pending. The new policy would apply to aliens who are seeking political asylum or who are fighting Government efforts to deport them. The suit, filed by the National Center for Immigrants’ Rights and other organizations and individuals, charges that the immigration service is attempting to implement administratively provisions of proposed legislation pending in Congress that is designed to halt the flow of immigrants into this country. Under the policy no applicant for permanent status could be released from custody unless he agreed not to work. If he broke the agreement, he would be subject to detention.
Louis Hastings, a 39-year-old computer programmer, pleaded no contest Monday to charges that he killed six people and wounded two others last spring in a remote mining community. The plea came as Mr. Hastings’s trial on six counts of murder and two of attempted murder got under way and after the judge refused the request of the public defender, John Salemi, to overturn Alaska’s psychiatric defense statute. The law allows juries to find defendants “guilty, but insane.” The finding entitles convicts to psychiatric care in prison, but requires them to serve their entire sentences even if they subsequently are considered cured. Judge Ralph Moody of Superior scheduled a presentencing hearing for February 16. Mr. Hastings could receive up to 99 years on each of the murder counts.
A Nobel Prize-winning theory about the physiology of the inner ear was shaken in a test conducted by Spacelab scientists aboard the space shuttle Columbia. The theory now disputed was an explanation for the effectiveness of a common test used in diagnosing the dizziness caused by a malfunctioning inner ear. The theory was hypothesized by Robert Barany of Sweden in 1906.
A link to Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative disorders of the brain is the prion, the smallest infectious agent known, according to researchers at the University of California. They said their research indicated that a chemical also known to be present in the brains of victims may be clumps of prions.
The Pirates trade outfielder Mike Easler to the Red Sox for lefthanded starter John Tudor.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1269.3 (-1.22).
Born:
Rob Sims, NFL guard (Seattle Seahawks, Detroit Lions), in Macedonia, Ohio.
Ashley Madekwe, English actress (“Secret Diary of a Call Girl”, “Revenge”), born in London, England, United Kingdom.
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