The U.S. Navy battleship USS New Jersey (BB-62) fired for the first time against targets in Lebanon, hurling 1,900-pound shells at Syrian antiaircraft sites in the mountains east of Beirut. The battleship has been cruising offshore since September, but had not fired her heavy guns in combat since the Vietnam War. A Marine spokesman said the New Jersey and two other American warships began firing five minutes after a pair of Navy reconnaissance planes were fired on from Syrian-controlled territory.
An extension of the New Jersey’s tour in the Mediterranean was announced by Pentagon officials. They said the battleship would remain there until she has been relieved by the battleship USS Iowa next spring.
President Reagan attends a national security briefing.
The marines will not be withdrawn from Beirut until the Lebanese Government takes control of its territory or there is “such a collapse of order” that no peaceful resolution of the conflict is possible, President Reagan said at a news conference.
Enhanced security measures have been put into effect at the United States Embassy in Kuwait, according to American officials. They said that the six marines responsible for internal security had been ordered to “shoot to incapacitate” intruders at the embassy compound.
The Soviet Union has developed the world’s largest aircraft — a military transport plane that can easily airlift Soviet SS-20 mid-range nuclear missiles and their components to forward bases, according to the authoritative Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. The plane is the four-engine Antonov 400, code-named Condor by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It has a wingspan of 319 feet and is one of a new generation of modern planes being developed by the Soviet Union that are narrowing the qualitative edge enjoyed by their Western counterparts, Jane’s said in its new edition.
Lech Walesa, the founder of the Solidarity union, refused to answer a summons to appear before a prosecutor in Gdansk today, saying that he had the flu. Instead, Mr. Walesa, the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, stayed in bed with a fever, according to family aides and the Walesa family priest, the Rev. Henryk Jankowski. Father Jankowski said Mr. Walesa became ill yesterday, after his car was repeatedly stopped at roadblocks in below-freezing weather by policemen conducting document checks. Mr. Walesa, his wife, Danuta, their son Bogdan, and Father Jankowski were en route to Gdansk from Czestochowa, where Mr. Walesa laid his Nobel medal at the shrine of Poland’s most-revered icon, the Black Madonna, when the police stopped them 13 times. Mr. and Mrs. Walesa and Father Jankowski were also body-searched during a two- hour detention in the city of Lodz.
A Walesa family aide said last night that they believed the police were looking for a tape-recording of a speech Mr. Walesa planned to give on Friday, the anniversary of the 1970 Gdansk riots, in which the police killed scores of workers. Mr. Walesa has said he intends to make “an important statement” on that day. Last year, the police prevented him from addressing a rally on the anniversary by picking him up and driving him around Gdansk all day.
Spain’s Transport Ministry said today it had already drawn up plans to improve equipment at Madrid’s Barajas Airport before last week’s runway collision that killed 93 people. A spokesman said the improvements, which will cost about $13 million, were part of the 1984 budget presented by the government earlier this year. They call for more automated air traffic control at Barajas and other airports, wider runways and new signaling lights. Spanish pilots criticized signal and marking systems at Madrid after last Wednesday’s collision on a foggy runway between a DC-9 of Spain’s domestic airline, Aviaco, and a Boeing 727 of the national carrier, Iberia.
Pope John Paul II, during a Christmas-week visit to a Rome prison, will meet privately December 27 with the Turkish terrorist who tried to kill him, Italian news agencies reported today. The Ansa and A.G.I. news agencies quoted unnamed sources as saying the papal visit would take place at Rebibbia Prison, where the Turk, Mehmet Ali Ağca, is serving a life sentence for shooting the Pope on May 13, 1981. Neither Vatican nor Italian Government officials would officially confirm the visit. Vatican officials announced that John Paul would visit a prison over Christmas as part of celebrations for the 1983 extraordinary Holy Year of Redemption.
The news agency reports said that a tentative program calls for John Paul to arrive at the prison at 10 A.M. for a two-hour visit. The 63-year-old Pope will lead a prayer service and deliver a sermon at the prison chapel for about 1,000 inmates, the reports said. At the end of the service, the Pope will greet inmates individually and give them rosaries as Christmas presents. Then he will retire into a small conference room for a private meeting under tight security with Mr. Ağca, the reports said.
A withdrawal from UNESCO is being considered by the Reagan Administration, according to State Department officials and American delegates to the organization. The action is being weighed because of the Administration’s anger over UNESCO’s policies and budget.
Thieves in Paris who stole the Holy Tunic of Christ will return it in exchange for a $35,700 donation to the outlawed Polish union Solidarity and the release of three prisoners, the leftist Paris daily Liberation reported. The tunic, reportedly worn by Jesus before his crucifixion, was stolen early in the week from a church crypt in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil, where it had been kept since AD 800. Liberation said a telephone caller offered proof that he had the tunic by saying it had been kept in the church’s reliquary.
North Korea has at least 2,400 agents to help armed spies and saboteurs infiltrate South Korea, often with the use of special amphibious vehicles, two captured Communist agents said. The two agents were captured December 3 near the southern port city of Pusan after being dropped off by a North Korean speedboat that was subsequently sunk by South Korean naval vessels. The agents, both in their 20s, said North Korea has developed new half-submersible vehicles to slip agents into South Korea by sea without detection by radar.
China denounced Vietnam for spreading a “groundless concoction” about improved relations between the two hostile neighbors and accused the Vietnamese of worsening ties by firing on border posts and hijacking Chinese fishing boats. Chinese government spokesman Qi Haiyuan said at a Peking news conference that Vietnam has spread rumors recently of secret contacts, but these are “aimed at deceiving public opinion” and reducing demands for withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia.
Bangladesh’s military ruler, Lieutenant General H. M. Ershad, released about 200 political detainees today in what government officials said was an effort to pave the way for talks with his opponents early next month. Invitations to opposition leaders for formal talks with General Ershad will be issued next week and the discussions are expected to start in the first week of next month, the officials said. They said about 120 people were freed from prison in Dhaka and 80 more in other parts of the country. They had been detained during recent anti-government unrest.
A crackdown on death squads in El Salvador has been demanded by the United States, according to Salvadoran political informants. They said that Washington insists that a number of Salvadoran civilians and military officers involved in the right-wing terrorism be exiled or expelled. In return, the informants said, the United States has promised to increase American military aid to El Salvador substantially.
The Salvadoran military high command issued a statement denouncing rightist death squads and urging citizens to help in their identification and capture. The statement, signed by 31 officers, including the directors of the Treasury Police, the National Police and the National Guard, endorsed an earlier statement by Defense Minister Carlos Vides Casanova that “the death squads must disappear forever.” The statement follows U.S. Vice President George Bush’s warning Sunday that the government risks losing U.S. support unless the squads are stopped.
Former Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte said that his country’s right wing is becoming more democratic, despite the defeat a rightist coalition gave his Christian Democratic Party this week on a major land-reform measure. Duarte, in Washington to appeal for economic assistance, said that the “fanatical rightist people” are becoming isolated, while there is a large center of moderates from both left and right trying to sustain a democratic base.
A Colombian cargo plane exploded in the air seconds after taking off from the northern city of Medellin. Officials said 18 people were killed and 19 injured. Flaming debris from the jet rained over 400 yards in an industrial area of the city, Colombia’s second largest, setting fires in five factories and demolishing six buses and three cars, officials said. An airline spokesman said all three crew members aboard the Boeing 707 were killed. The 15 others killed were working in or around the area’s textile and metal factories.
The entire Bolivian Cabinet handed its collective resignation to President Hernan Siles Zuazo today, Foreign Minister Jose Ortiz Mercado said. The minister said at a news conference that the Cabinet took its action in order to make possible the formation of a cabinet of national unity. The resignations were announced at the end of a 48-hour general strike organized by the Communist-led Workers Union to try to force the left-wing government to grant major wage increases.
President Reagan, deploring hunger, said his Administration’s policy was that even one American going hungry was “one too many.” House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. charged that Mr. Reagan’s statement, made in a brief meeting with White House reporters, “does not square with” Administration actions.
The President and the First Lady host the annual Christmas Reception for members of the press.
In a vigorous defense of two embattled aides, President Reagan charged that reporters took controversial quotations from chief economic adviser Martin S. Feldstein and presidential counselor Edwin Meese III out of context. Reagan said he had discussed Feldstein’s remarks that higher taxes and spending cuts would lower the budget deficit. But, Reagan said, Feldstein “did not say it would be right to do these things, either to increase the tax or to reduce the defense spending.” In a comment at the close of a brief news conference, Reagan again faulted the media for the controversy that erupted after Meese was quoted as saying he had seen no “authoritative figures that there are hungry children in America.” Reagan said the phrase was taken “totally out of context with the entire interview.”
Fundamentalist church and school groups pleaded at a Senate hearing for a delay in the law that on January 1 will force them to pay Social Security taxes and predicted tax resistance if their appeal is spurned. The law will require all nonprofit groups-such as churches, schools and hospitals-to pay the taxes for their employees.
Problems that plagued the Columbia in its final hours of flight last week have forced engineers to inaugurate the most extensive trouble-shooting operations since the space shuttles began flying in April 1981. The specialists are not yet sure how long this will take, what they may find or what impact their findings could have on future flight schedules. Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration do not rule out the possibility that the Columbia’s troubles will cause a delay in the next shuttle mission, scheduled for January 30. But they said every effort would be made to prevent a postponement, for that would have a serious effect on schedules for the other nine flights planned in 1984. The malfunctions included two computer failures, a navigation instrument shutdown and an explosive fire in the rear compartment.
The Columbia was scheduled to reach the Kennedy Space Center today, after a flight from Edwards Air Force Base atop a 747 jet. After the shuttle’s arrival in Florida, the two trouble-ridden auxiliary power units were to be removed and shipped to their manufacturer, the Sunstrand Corporation, in Rockford, Ill. There the machines will be dismantled and inspected. Meanwhile, engineers at the Johnson Space Center are examining all engineering data radioed from the units to Mission Control in the mission, hoping to reconstruct the events leading up to the fire. The two units that failed had been in the Columbia more than two years; the surviving unit was newer.
Huge sums of money may have been lost by federal and state governments for environmental damages caused by toxic waste, according to federal officials. Officials of the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies said there may be hundreds of hazardous waste sites where natural resources have been damaged but where claims against polluters were not filed before last Sunday’s statutory deadline.
Three present and former judges were among 10 men indicted in Chicago on charges of corruption as a result of a three-and-a-half-year federal investigation of the Cook County Circuit Court. The undercover operation was conducted by the United States Attorney’s office and the FBI with the cooperation of local law-enforcement officials.
Pentagon investigators have found that Defense Intelligence Agency staff members made 136 phone calls early this year to a New York “Dial-A-Porn” service. The practice — with a potential cost of up to $25,000 a month — was halted when technicians installed an “electronic block” in the line. No one was punished and the government got back $43.52, the Pentagon said. Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission moved toward regulating Dial-A-Porn telephone sex services by soliciting public comment on how it might enforce a new law signed by President Reagan last week that declares illegal any commercial service using “obscene or indecent” language if it is available to persons under 18 years of age.
A federal judge ordered the state of Washington to end wage discrimination against women employees immediately, a task expected to cost at least $225 million. State officials had hoped to equalize salaries over a 10-year period and the Legislature appropriated $1.5 million this year to begin that process. But U.S. District Judge Jack Tanner ruled that the state should implement its salary equity plan “forthwith.” The state said it would appeal. Lawyers have said the settlement, with back pay, could total $1 billion.
A referendum slashing legislative salaries and powers of House and Senate leaders is “clearly wrong” and cannot go on the 1984 ballot, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled. It was a victory for the Democratic legislative leadership and a defeat for an unusual alliance of liberals and conservatives who collected 100,000 signatures in their petition drive. The court said a referendum must propose either a law or a constitutional amendment. It said the petition did neither.
The United Mine Workers handed union President Richard Trumka new but limited powers to deal with the soft coal industry in 1984 bargaining, including authority to call selective strikes. The 160,000-member union also capped the third day of its convention in Pittsburgh with a ringing endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale.
Jewish leaders in West Hartford, Connecticut, offered their “compassion and assistance” to a teenage mental patient who admitted setting fires to two synagogues and the homes of a rabbi and a Jewish legislator. The outpouring of concern, mixed with relief, followed the arrest of Barry Dov Schuss, 17, a member of a devout Orthodox Jewish family who attended one of the synagogues he admitted setting fire to last summer. Schuss, a patient at an undisclosed private mental hospital, admitted setting fire to a synagogue August 11 and to Rabbi Solomon Krupka’s home August 16, but gave no reason why, Hartford County authorities said.
A drug for heart-attack victims cut their chances of dying by two-thirds in the first 30 days after the attack, according to researchers at 14 hospitals. They said the clot-dissolving drug should be squirted into the victims’ arteries routinely by hospitals that can administer it.
The heart of the Milky Way galaxy has been charted with great detail for the first time by observations with 27 antennas strung out in a large Y pattern on a barren plain in New Mexico. The resulting images, produced by several researchers in recent months, reveal three curving streams of gas that some astronomers believe are falling into a black hole in the very center.
Peggy Lee’s one-woman show “Peg” opens at Lunt-Fontanne Theater, NYC; runs for 5 performances.
Biographical drama film “Silkwood”, directed by Mike Nichols, and starring Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, and Cher premieres.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1246.64 (-9.25).
Born:
Randy Starks, NFL defensive tackle (Pro Bowl, 2010, 2012; Tennessee Titans, Miami Dolphins, Cleveland Browns), in Petersburg, Virginia.
Jeremy Mincey, NFL defensive end (Jacksonville Jaguars, Denver Broncos, Dallas Cowboys), in Statesboro, Georgia.
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