Vehicle bombings in Kuwait demolished the American Embassy and damaged the French Embassy and four other sites. A total of five people were killed and 62 injured in the attacks, which were attributed to an Islamic extremist group with ties to Iran. The group, known as the Islamic Holy War, is the organization that said it had been responsible for the car bomb attack in April that wrecked the United States Embassy in Beirut with a loss of 63 lives and for similar bombings on Oct. 23 that killed 240 United States servicemen and 56 French paratroopers there.
No American deaths were reported as a result of today’s attacks, but a few Americans were said to have suffered minor injuries. Five Kuwaiti employees and one of the two terrorists who had been on the truck that blew up at the United States Embassy were reported killed in that explosion. The blast caused the administration building that housed the consulate to collapse. The other terrorist was blown out of the truck, survived and was hospitalized in serious condition. Thirty-seven people were injured at the embassy, 20 of them said to be Kuwaiti employees. The others were reportedly visitors. One person was reported missing. Within an hour, remote-controlled car bombs went off at the airport, killing an Egyptian technician; at the French Embassy, slightly injuring two workers and causing extensive damage; at a residential area where many Americans live, and at an industrial complex and an electric power station. Another car bomb was found at the Kuwaiti passport and immigration office and was rendered harmless before it could be detonated.
Consideration of retaliation by the United States, perhaps in coordination with France, is probable if an investigation proves that a pro-Iranian group was responsible for the bombing of the American Embassy in Kuwait, according to a senior American official. The official, traveling with Secretary of State George P. Shultz, said the United States was aware that the Islamic Holy War, a pro-Iranian group, had said it was responsible for the attacks on five installations in Kuwait, including the American and French Embassies. He said: “We’re conducting an investigation, both on the scene and in terms of intelligence collation, to see how this event relates to earlier bombings in the Middle East.”
U.S. jets made reconnaissance flights over the Shouf Mountains east of Beirut as the Lebanese army came under Druze mortar and rocket fire for a third straight day despite a new cease-fire. Military officials said the Druze, members of an offshoot Muslim sect, fired on the strategic mountaintop town of Souq el Gharb, which overlooks Marine positions at Beirut’s international airport. Meanwhile, U.S. special Mideast envoy Donald H. Rumsfeld put off for two days a visit to Syria scheduled for Monday, Lebanese official sources said.
Israeli authorities destroyed the homes of three Palestinians accused of killing a Jewish seminary student in the West Bank town of Hebron last summer. The authorities also sealed off four other homes of accused guerrillas in Hebron and Ramallah. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens has come under increasing pressure from Jewish settlers on the West Bank to take tougher measures against Palestinians openly hostile to Israel’s rule. Three of those whose homes were sealed have been charged with grenade attacks on Jewish settlers.
The Italian magistrate investigating the possibility of a Bulgarian connection to the 1981 shooting of Pope John Paul II has finished his two-year inquiry, it was reported here today. The Italian news agencies Ansa and A.G.I. said the magistrate, Judge Ilario Martella, had delivered his findings to a state prosecutor, Antonio Albano, who is to decide whether to recommend trials for a Bulgarian and two Turks charged in the case and held in Italian prisons. Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Turk, is serving a life sentence for the 1981 attack in St. Peter’s Square. Mr. Martella has been investigating Mr. Ağca’s assertions that Bulgarian agents aided him.
Gunmen shot and killed a Roman Catholic teenager, and a young Protestant man was found dead in a house in Belfast, Northern Ireland, victims of a religious gang war, police said. The deaths brought to 27 the number killed in that strife-torn province over the last two months. Gunmen fired three shots at Tony Dawson, 18, as he was walking on a dark street 100 yards from a police station, fatally wounding him in the neck. Only a few hours later, Protestant John Malloy, 21, was found dead, apparently from head injuries. No organization immediately took responsibility for either killing.
Two British men were charged with attempting to smuggle six U.S.-made computers into Soviet Bloc countries in violation of Western bans on exporting sensitive technology. The computers were seized Sunday by customs agents in the English Channel port of Poole as they were about to be loaded onto a ferry for France. The men charged are company director Bryan Williamson, 51, and engineer Christopher Carrigan, 40, both of the British computer-design firm Data-Lec. The computers were made by an American company, Digital Equipment Corp. Another DEC computer was reportedly being shipped to the Soviet Union by a third party last month when Swedish officials seized it.
Britain’s powerful Trades Union Congress narrowly voted to back a planned one-day strike by printers to shut down virtually all of the nation’s newspapers Wednesday. The 9-7 vote was immediately condemned by Lionel T. Murray, secretary-general of the congress, who said it would inflame the confrontation between unions and the Conservative government. Publishers won a court injunction against the strike, which was called to protest the almost $1 million the union has been fined for violating previous court orders.
The United States has sent a strong message to Australia requesting an explanation of that nation’s refusal to allow the British aircraft carrier HMS Invincible to use drydock facilities in Sydney. Australian government sources said the message, from Paul D. Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, expressed concern about what the action may mean for U.S. vessels. Australia’s Labor government, which bans nuclear weapons on Australian soil, last week refused to allow the Invincible to dock for repairs until the British disclose whether nuclear weapons are aboard.
Defense Minister Gordon Scholes has said that if the carrier, the Invincible, entered a drydock near Sydney harbor with nuclear weapons, it would be violating Government policy prohibiting the stationing of such weapons on Australian soil. An editorial in The Sydney Daily Telegraph called the Government ban “ludicrous.” “The Government doesn’t object to the danger to the people of Sydney of having a warship which might have nuclear arms aboard moored in the harbor,” it said. “But we are expected to believe that once a vessel is out of the water it becomes a threat which cannot be allowed.” The ban was also assailed by Andrew Peacock, the leader of the opposition Liberal Party, who said it would damage Australia’s “reputation as a reliable ally.”
The last American combat forces to have fought in the invasion of Grenada were flown off the Caribbean island, a Pentagon spokesman said. Those departing are about 1,000 paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division. Left behind, the spokesman said, is a force of 1,200 support troops that will be reduced to about 300 by the end of the week.
Henry A. Kissinger has clashed with some Democrats on the Presidential commission on Central America who favor making new United States aid to El Salvador conditional on an end to right-wing death-squad violence, according to commission officials. They said that former Secretary of State Kissinger, who heads the commission, had argued that since El Salvador was of vital interest to the United States, aid should not be made conditional.
President Daniel arap Moi marked the 20th anniversary of Kenya’s independence from Britain today by assuring Uganda and Tanzania of friendship and pardoning 7,000 petty criminals. The statement followed a successful November 16 meeting in Arusha, Tanzania, between Mr. Moi, President Milton Obote of Uganda and President Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania. “I wish to assure them of this renewed friendship,” Mr. Moi said. Mr. Obote and Mr. Nyerere were among the nine African heads of state and the more than 10,000 people attending the main anniversary celebration at downtown Nairobi’s Independence Park.
President Reagan travels to New York City, New York to attend the 1983 Convention of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. President Reagan honored the nation’s military heroes yesterday and declared that while “tyrants are tempted” by weakness, his military rebuilding program now has the armed forces “standing tall.” “We have tried turning our swords into plowshares, hoping others would follow,” the President said, referring to the biblical dictum for peace. “Well, our days of weakness are over. Our military forces are back on their feet and standing tall.” In an emotional address to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society at the Sheraton Centre hotel in Manhattan, Mr. Reagan celebrated the military in heroic terms, declaring that the invasion of Grenada demonstrated that “the United States will do whatever is necessary” to protect its citizens.
The U.S. Supreme Court and the Louisiana Supreme Court refused to block an execution scheduled Wednesday for murder convict Robert Wayne Williams, while two other convicted killers waited to learn whether they will die this week in Georgia’s electric chair. The Supreme Court’s action, on a 7-2 vote, cleared the way for the execution of Williams, 31, unless his lawyers can win a stay in a lower court or a reprieve from Louisiana Governor David C. Treen. In Atlanta, meanwhile, lawyers for convicted killer Alpha Otis Stephens asked the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to spare his life as they waited for a federal appeals court to rule.
Francis S. Guess, 37, Republican labor commissioner of Tennessee, was the choice of Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr. (R-Tennessee) to fill the eighth and final place on the reconstituted U.S. Civil Rights Commission. But the selection of Guess, who is black, did not appease minority organizations and women’s groups. They have protested that failure to redesignate two moderate Republican women members of the outgoing six-member commission, Mary Louise Smith and Jill Ruckelshaus, threatens the new commission’s independence.
The Department of Agriculture issued new rules today banning the movement of all live poultry or hatching eggs out of quarantined areas of Pennsylvania and New Jersey where flocks have been hit by deadly avian influenza. The department said the stricter regulations were needed to prevent the spread of the disease.
AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland called on the independent United Mine Workers Union to join his federation “under the same banner of solidarity” to defeat “Reaganites, Reaganism and Reaganomics.” But delegates attending the opening of the UMW’s five-day convention in Pittsburgh were cool to Kirkland’s wooing. UMW President Richard L. Trumka called it simply “a very fine speech.”
In a confrontation on the high seas at dawn that smashed a major drug ring, a Coast Guard cutter fired a warning volley of machine-gun fire to stop a Haitian ship suspected of trying to deliver an estimated 25 tons of marijuana to New England, authorities said in Rockland, Maine. Seventeen crewmen were arrested and nine had been arrested earlier in motels along the rocky Maine coast, a favored spot for drug smuggler landings, authorities said.
Seven Kansas City building inspectors were suspended without pay after a newspaper report said some inspectors loafed on the job and falsified time sheets. The quality of the city’s inspection effort has been under scrutiny since two major buildings collapsed: the Kemper Arena roof in 1979 and the 1981 Hyatt Regency Hotel disaster that killed 114 people and injured about 200.
Governor Ted Schwinden today endorsed a proposal to end Montana’s “absolute preference” law. The law gives veterans, their spouses and some dependents, as well as the handicapped, top priority in hiring for state and local government jobs. The 1921 law had escaped attention until a legally blind woman from Helena used it to win preference in hiring for a job with the State Library Commission. “I have a responsibility to provide state services as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible,” Mr. Schwinden said. “Good service comes from good people, and Montana is full of men and women who want to earn a day’s pay for a job well done.”
Three teen-agers and a man believed to be their drug dealer were arrested in the slaying of a 14-year-old girl who was killed because of fears that she had reported on a junior high school drug ring, officials in Fremont, California, said today. The suspects, who included two 13-year-old girls, were held for investigation of a single count of murder. The body of Kellie Jean Poppleton, badly beaten, was found along a road on December 2, her head wrapped in two green garbage bags. Investigators said she had been sexually molested. She once wrote a class essay about becoming intoxicated on marijuana.
[Ed: The story about a drug ring got a lot of press in 1983, but investigators quickly began to doubt it. The troubled girl who spun the tale soon proved to have inconsistencies in her account, and at least one of the people she claimed were involved was definitely not in the area that day. The case has remained unsolved for 40 years. Recently a DNA profile was developed, but there were no matches in Law Enforcement databases, and even using familial DNA matching came up empty. There is DNA evidence and some other undisclosed things that point to her killer being from Korea.]
The wide disparity in the punishment of criminals who had committed similar crimes prompted the enactment of new sentencing laws in many states in the 1970’s limiting the discretion of judges and parole boards. But now there is a growing belief among specialists that the new laws have made matters worse, and those who urged passage of the statutes disagree sharply about what should be done next.
Efforts to save the striped bass from possible extinction were pressed by conservationists and marine biologists. The biologists reported there have been drastic and accelerating declines in recent years in the commercial take and the reproductive rate of the “striper.”
A posthumous pardon for Leo Frank is being considered by the authorities in Georgia. In an outburst of anti-Semitism, a mob lynched Mr. Frank in 1915 after the Governor commuted his death sentence in the murder of a 13-year-old girl. Attorneys for three Jewish groups petitioned for the pardon after a witness came forward last year to contradict a key witness against Mr. Frank.
New controversy about Galileo is arising at a time when the Roman Catholic Church appears on the verge of exonerating him of offenses against the church. Richard S. Westfall, a respected historian of science, has charged Galileo with stealing from a student telescopic proof that the planets revolve around the Sun rather than the Earth.
An ice storm turned freeways into booby traps across eastern New York and New England, sending cars and trucks hurtling into ditches or crunching into each other. Storm winds and 18-foot seas off the New Jersey coast capsized an 80-foot commercial fishing boat. Six of the nine people on board were hospitalized, and two men were reported missing. The severity of the freezing rain mixed with snow closed schools, and highways were barricaded in many areas. Elsewhere, more snow fell and avalanche warnings were posted in parts of the Rockies. Flood warnings were out in lower Michigan, ice jammed the Mississippi River north of Minneapolis and tornadoes and thunderstorms continued to torment the South.
5th ACE Cable Awards: The VII International Tchaikovsky Competition by Robert Dalrymple and Ken Locker.
NFL Monday Night Football:
Jan Stenerud, who had already set a league career field-goal record, kicked a 23-yarder 5 minutes 7 seconds into overtime to give Green Bay a 12—9 victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers tonight. The victory enabled Green Bay (8-7) to pull into a first-place tie with Detroit in the National Conference’s Central Division. The Packers can win the division title if they beat the Chicago Bears and Tampa Bay (2-13) upsets the Detroit Lions on Sunday. Green Bay took the kickoff to start the overtime and moved from its 29 to the Tampa 6, setting up the winning field goal, Stenerud’s 338th, which was kicked on second down. Stenerud, who surpassed George Blanda’s NFL mark of 335 field goals with a 32-yarder late in the third quarter, had forced the game into overtime on a 23-yard kick with 28 seconds left in regulation time.
Stenerud, who is 39 and in his 17th season, made it 9—9 at the end of a 13- play, 75-yard drive that began after Bill Capece of Tampa Bay failed on a 35-yard field-goal attempt. The key plays on Green Bay’s tying drive were a 24-yard pass from the quarterback Lynn Dickey to James Lofton and a 7-yarder to Harlan Huckleby, along with a penalty for roughing the passer. Tampa Bay had taken a 9—6 lead on Jack Thompson’s 4-yard scoring pass to Adger Armstrong with 7:33 remaining, but Capece missed the extra point. The touchdown came at the end of a 10-play, 65-yard drive that Thompson, who has thrown eight scoring passes in his last three games, kept moving with completions of 20 and 19 yards to Theo Bell. Stenerud, who began his career with the Kansas City Chiefs and joined the Packers in 1980, kicked a 35-yard field goal 2:55 into the game to give Green Bay a 3—0 lead. His 32- yarder with 42 seconds left in the third quarter gave the Packers a 6—3 lead. Capece kicked a 22-yarder in the second quarter.
Green Bay Packers 12, Tampa Bay Buccaneers 9
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1261.58 (+1.53).
Born:
Brad Smith, NFL wide receiver, quarterback, and kick returner (New York Jets, Buffalo Bills, Philadelphia Eagles), in Youngstown, Ohio.
T.J. Jackson, NFL defensive tackle (Atlanta Falcons, Kansas City Chiefs), in Opelika, Alabama.
Katrina Elam, American country music singer, in Bray, Oklahoma.
[Ed: This ridiculous farce included allegations by the grandmother of the family that Compton was a witch. Compton was eventually sentenced to time served — after a year and a half in an Italian jail.]
History Diaries 