Korean Air Lines Flight 007, shot down by Soviet fighters September 1, was flying on a wrong heading, and the crew was unaware that the jumbo jet had strayed into Soviet airspace, an international aviation panel formally reported. The report, issued by the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency, confirmed an earlier account of errors in inserting flight data into on-board computers. The Boeing 747 was shot down with a loss of all 269 passengers and crew members.
In an implicit rebuke to Moscow, the governing council of the International Civil Aviation Agency approved a resolution “exhorting all parties involved in the investigation to cooperate fully in furnishing to I.C.A.O. without reservation, all information as soon as possible.” The 33-member council decided to put off consideration of a staff report until January 23. This gives the Soviet Union a second chance to turn over such materials as recordings of the radio transmissions by the fighter pilots who trailed Korean Air Lines flight 007 over Sakhalin Island on September 1 and then shot it down. The plane fell into the Sea of Japan with the loss of all 269 people aboard. Moscow says it was on a spy mission.
American warships opened fire on Syrian antiaircraft batteries in the mountains east of Beirut after two United States jets reportedly on a reconnaissance mission were fired on by Syrian surface-to-air missiles. Neither plane was hit. Farther north, Israeli gunboats shelled strongholds of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian guerrillas around Tripoli.
The American Embassy in Kuwait received “general and specific threats” over the last several months that prompted officials to take “as many precautions as possible,” according to embassy officials. But they said they had not acted on several proposals designed to improve security at the embassy compound, the main target of Monday’s bomb attack, because of budgetary and other constraints.
Afghan guerrillas battled Soviet troops in at least four provincial cities in advance of the fourth anniversary December 27 of Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, Western diplomats reported in Islamabad, Pakistan. There were also reports that the rebels have killed two more high-ranking officers of the Afghan government army-the chief of staff of an army division and a major general who died when his helicopter was shot down by rebel forces.
France has taken security measures to avert possible attacks by Islamic terrorist squads on President Francois Mitterrand and other Government leaders. Gates at the presidential palace have been shut, and the streets where some officials live are being heavily patrolled.
Twenty Romanian men, women and children escaped to Austria by hiding for more than two days inside a sealed container truck carrying ball bearings from Bucharest, police said. They said the group arrived in Vienna on Saturday after a 600-mile journey that included several East Bloc border points and asked for political asylum. All 20 were taken to the main Vienna refugee camp at Traiskirchen. Police refused to identify the refugees or their occupations. It was the biggest such mass escape to neutral Austria since July, 1980, when 20 Romanians arrived after flying from their Communist homeland in a small airplane.
The Vatican, citing the case of “Baby Jane Doe,” has again attacked euthanasia, or mercy killing, calling it “the most hateful and insufferable of discriminations.” Vatican radio declared in a broadcast that “nothing and no one can authorize the killing of an innocent human being” even if the person is suffering from “an incurable or agonizing disease.” The parents of “Baby Jane Doe,” a severely deformed 2-month-old New York infant, have refused to allow surgery that would prolong the child’s life but would leave her handicapped and in constant pain.
British printers postponed a nationwide one-day strike set for today, pending a meeting of the General Council of the Trade Union Congress, Britain’s equivalent of the AFL-CIO. A court has declared the planned strike illegal under strict new laws adopted by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. The strike, growing out of a minor labor dispute, was planned as a challenge to the new laws.
Argentine junta leaders face charges of ordering deaths and torture, Raul Alfonsin, the new President, announced in a broadcast address. The President, a human rights advocate who took office Saturday, said he would take legal action against nine generals and admirals who established the juntas that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1982. He also said he would bring charges against any individuals responsible for terrorist activities in the 1970’s.
Land redistribution will be cut sharply in El Salvador under a bill approved last night by the Constituent Assembly. A coalition of rightist parties pushed through a constitutional measure that reduces by about half the amount of land available for future distribution.
The Administration was exonerated in a classified report from criticism that it failed to press for the swift prosecution of the killers of four American churchwomen in El Salvador, Congressional informants said. They said the report was commissioned by the State Department and prepared by a former federal judge and former Deputy Attorney General, Harold E. Tyler.
Soldiers killed 25 guerrillas who set off land mines in an ambush attempt near Guatemala’s northern border with Mexico, the army said today. Six soldiers were reported killed and 14 wounded in the fighting. The army press office said the action took place Monday in the town of La Libertad in northern Peten Province, 20 miles east of the Mexican border. Officials said the army convoy attacked by the guerrillas was taking part in a local development program. It said several farm cooperatives are near the site of the attack, where soldiers are helping to provide housing, construction material, medicine and clothing.
Mexican state police and army troops stormed and retook the Juchitan city hall in impoverished southern Mexico, expelling leftists who had held the building illegally since August, a government spokesman said. An unidentified number of people were reportedly wounded by gunfire, and about 50 people were arrested. The leftists were demanding new elections after the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party defeated a Communist-backed coalition of workers, peasants and students in what the leftists charged was a fraudulent election.
Peronist opposition leader Maria Estela Perón met in Buenos Aires with Argentina’s new president, Raul Alfonsin, in a move aimed at strengthening her authority within the party after two years of exile. Perónist sources said the 53-year-old widow of General Juan D. Perón, who returned from Spain ostensibly to attend Alfonsin’s inauguration, wants to give a bigger party role to women and provincial leaders, many of whom did well in the October 10 elections despite the Perónists’ overall defeat by Alfonsin’s party.
An opposition figure set conditions Monday for talks with Lieutenant General H. M. Ershad on restoring civilian rule to Bangladesh. General Ershad, who imposed martial law when he took power in a l982 coup, proclaimed himself President on Sunday and said military rule would be retained until elections next year. The opposition figure, Hasina Wazed, leader of the Awami League and a 15- party opposition coalition, said talks could not begin until restrictions on political activity and press censorship are lifted. All political prisoners or detainees must be released and the cases against them dropped, she added, and a judicial inquiry held into the November 28 clash between policemen and anti-Government demonstrators. Mrs. Wazed spoke in an interview after her release Monday from house arrest. She had been detained after the November protests. She is the daughter of Mujibur Rahman, the first President after independence in 1971.
Mary Renault died at the age of 78 in Cape Town, where she had lived since World War II. Her books, including many best-selling novels, gave readers a new insight into the history and legends of ancient Greece.
An orbiting American space station manned by a full-time crew may be in prospect. The Reagan Administration appears ready to commit itself to preparations for the project. President Reagan has not yet made a decision on the issue, but a high Administration official said he expected a space station to be one of the few new initiatives in the forthcoming budget for the fiscal year 1985.
President Reagan participates in a series of Budget meetings.
Reduced funds for immunization of children, for medical care of people exposed to toxic wastes and for treatment of venereal disease are proposed in the Reagan Administration’s new budget draft, Administration officials said. Aides to Margaret M. Heckler, Secretary of Health and Human Services, said she would object to the cuts at a meeting Wednesday with David A. Stockman, the budget director. The aides disclosed details of the budget as part of a campaign to persuade the budget office of the need for more money in the fiscal year 1985, which starts next October 1. The President is expected to send the budget to Congress at the end of January. The aides reported that the Public Health Service budget, while containing few new projects, also sought to reduce spending for personnel at the Food and Drug Administration. This, they said, could slow the approval of new drugs, contrary to the stated goals of the Reagan Administration.
President Reagan will hold a nationally broadcast news conference next week, his first in two months, a White House spokesman said today. Other aides said the President had set aside Tuesday night for his final formal news conference of the year with White House reporters. The news conference will be his seventh for the year and the 21st of his Presidency.
President Reagan participates in a signing ceremony for the National Drunk and Drugged Driving Awareness Week 1983.
The impasse between the White House and Stanford University over the Ronald Reagan Presidential library complex widened today as the university board of trustees voted to accept a Reagan political institute on the campus only “within the normal academic structure of the university.” The resolution, adopted unanimously by 30 trustees, reinforced the university’s position that it would welcome the Reagan archives and a small attached museum when Mr. Reagan leaves office but that it would not accept a Ronald Reagan Center for Public Affairs administered by the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. The Hoover Institution, situated on the Stanford campus, is a conservative research center with strong ties to the Reagan Administration that has long been a source of resentment to the Stanford faculty. The White House has insisted that the library and Reagan institute be accepted as a package, with the institute operated by the Hoover people.
President Reagan told a group of Southern Congressmen today that he would take unspecified action by Friday to limit the amount of textiles imported into the United States. Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, said: “This is a very vital matter to our state. The textile imports have been coming in for a number of years on a massive scale.” An aide said Mr. Thurmond asked Mr. Reagan to set total limits on low- wage exporting countries at current trade levels. Mr. Thurmond also asked that overall import growth be limited yearly to the growth of the United States market, which has been fluctuating between minus 2 percent a year and plus 1.5 percent. The main textile importers are China, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
President Reagan’s plan for standby tax increases to reduce the federal budget deficit ran into a buzz saw of criticism at a Senate hearing, even as the White House insisted that no decision had been made on whether the proposal will be offered again next year. At a Senate hearing on the dangers of budget deficits, both conservative economist Herbert Stein and liberal economist Alice M. Rivlin agreed that the problem is too serious to postpone until after the 1984 elections. “The conditions that call for a tax increase are here,” Stein said. “You don’t have to wait.” Rivlin said, “It is just possible that the voters would admire and reward a courageous demonstration of bipartisan determination to get the finances of the U.S. government back on a sound footing.”
Defense Department officials told a Senate committee that as much as a 50% increase is needed in current spending to develop technologies for the Space Age defense system urged by President Reagan. About $18 billion is now allotted for the 1985-1989 period. The President announced last March his intention to investigate a satellite-based defense system.
The Administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of state laws that permit a “moment of silence” in public school classrooms so students may engage in prayer or meditation. Asserting that such laws are “libertarian in the precise spirit of the Bill of Rights,” the Justice Department filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the court to review a pending Alabama dispute over a “moment of silence” law that was struck down by a federal appeals court. The Times reported last month that the Administration was planning to take this position. Alabama is one of 23 states with laws that either allow or require moments of silence in public schools. Lower courts have issued conflicting rulings on whether these laws are constitutional.
Federal action against drunk driving was recommended by a Presidential commission, which urged Congress to approve legislation to deny federal highway funds to states that fail to set a minimum drinking age of 21. Nineteen states have set 21 as the minimum drinking age while 31 states have minimum age limitations ranging from 18 to 20.
A struggle over water rights between the Pueblo Indians and descendants of Spaniards who settled in New Mexico in the 16th century is nearing resolution in Federal District Court, and bitterness on all sides is the likely outcome. The complex fight concerns the ownership of virtually all of the water in the Rio Grande and its tributaries north of Sante Fe.
Baltimore heating oil dealers are trying to shut down a church-run program providing low-cost fuel to the needy, charging unfair competition. “We’re sorry the oil companies have decided to make this their Christmas present to the poor of Baltimore,” responded Harold Smith, director of Catholic Charities Oil. The church group has dispensed 62,000 gallons of oil at 20 cents a gallon below market price to about 600 customers in its first six months of operation, Smith said. The Inter-City Oil Dealers Association, in papers filed December 2 with the Maryland Public Service Commission, charged that the operation was illegal and discriminatory and asked that it be shut down.
Wayne Williams, linked by the police to the slayings of 24 young Atlanta blacks, broke a long silence on the case today by telling reporters he has been “wrongly accused and connected with a series of heinous crimes.” Mr. Williams called a jailhouse news conference to make his first public comments since his February 1982 conviction of two of the murders. He said the purpose of the news conference was to respond to last week’s Georgia Supreme Court ruling denying him a new trial. “Naturally, I am disappointed” by the court’s ruling, Mr. Williams said.
Delegates to the United Mine Workers’ 49th constitutional convention in Pittsburgh voted by a 2-1 margin to reject union President Richard Trumka’s bid for increased power. The proposals would have given Trumka sole authority to call a strike, including strikes against selected companies, as well as almost total control over contract negotiations.
A new computer analysis of the Shroud of Turin, regarded by some as the burial sheet of Jesus Christ, offers highly significant evidence linking the cloth to the time of the Crucifixion, said the Rev. Francis Filas, a Loyola University professor. The results, released in Chicago, show shroud imprints fitting letters of a coin from 29 AD, shortly before Christ’s Crucifixion. The findings offer the “most significant” evidence to date the shroud, said Filas, who has studied the cloth for more than three decades.
Martha Layne Collins is inaugurated as Kentucky’s first female governor.
KYA-AM in San Francisco CA changes call letters to KOIT.
Forty-year-old Joe Morgan signs a one-year contract with the Oakland A’s — his 5th club since 1979.
The NHL New York Islander’s Butch Goring scores 4 goals against the Edmonton Oilers.
9,655 see the highest-scoring NBA game ever: Detroit 186, Denver 184 (3 Overtime periods).
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1255.89 (-5.69).
Born:
Otylia Jędrzejczak, Polish swimmer (Olympic gold, women’s 200-meter butterfly, 2004), in Ruda Śląska, Śląskie, Poland.
Laura [Summerton] Hodges, Australian National Team and WNBA center (Olympics, Silver, 2004, 2008, Bronze, 2012; WNBA: Connecticut Sun), in Adelaide, Australia.
Matt Deis, American bassist (CKY, All That Remains), in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
Died:
Leora Dana, 60, American actress (“3:10 to Yuma”, “Pollyanna”).
Mary Renault [Challans], 78, British author (“King Must Die”, “Funeral Games”).
History Diaries 