A car bomb explosion in London killed six people (including three policemen) and injured 77. It occurred outside Harrod’s department store in an area filled with Christmas shoppers. The police said they were convinced that the Irish Republican Army was responsible.
Evacuation of Yasser Arafat loyalists from Tripoli began with the departure of about 100 wounded Palestinian fighters and civilians aboard an Italian ship chartered by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The wounded were the first Arafat loyalists to leave Tripoli since rebel Palestinians laid siege to the city a month ago.
The Federation of Arab-American Organizations is sending a delegation to Syria to seek the release of a captured U.S. flier. Dr. M.T. Mehdi, a New York physician, said his federation represents about 50,000 members of 25 Arab-American groups in the United States. The delegation will seek the release of Navy Lieutenant Robert O. Goodman Jr. whom the Syrians have said they will hold him until U.S. troops leave Lebanon. Goodman’s plane was downed during a December 4 raid on Syrian-held territory in Lebanon.
Resurgent Islamic fundamentalism in which Tehran has a major role is unsettling the Muslim world from Africa through the Middle East and into Asia, according to scholars and government officials. Diatribes against Western nations and “corrupt” Arab governments are broadcast daily by Radio Iran.
Angola and Namibian rebels dismissed South Africa’s proposal for a 30-day disengagement of forces on the Angola-Namibia border. Instead, Angola circulated the draft of a U.N. Security Council resolution again demanding unconditional withdrawal of South African troops from its territory and the payment of reparations. Last week, South African Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha said his country’s forces would disengage if Angola guaranteed that its own troops, guerrillas of the South-West Africa People’s Organization and Cuban forces “would not exploit the situation.”
As many as 200,000 people of Rwandan origin may have fled or been killed after being attacked in Uganda in the past two days, according to official reports reaching Rwanda today. It was the second outbreak of Ugandan violence against Rwandans in Uganda since October 1982, according to the reports. The displaced people were said to be walking toward Rwanda to seek refuge. Such an exodus would represent a major problem for the Government of Rwanda, one of Africa’s poorest nations. A representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Kigali said he was extremely alarmed by the reports and was seeking further information from Uganda.
About 130 West German anti-nuclear protesters, including novelist Guenter Grass and former West Berlin Mayor Heinrich Albertz, staged a sit-in to blockade the entrance to a U.S. Army base they believe will house new nuclear missiles, police said. Officials said there were no violent incidents and no arrests were made in the protest at the front of the main gate of the Waldheide base, 25 miles north of Stuttgart. West Germany will receive 108 Pershing 2 and 96 cruise missiles under a North Atlantic Treaty Organization plan to counter Soviet SS-20 missiles targeted on Western Europe.
The French government announced an agreement with the car manufacturer Peugeot to lay off nearly 2,000 workers. The management had threatened to close the huge Talbot plant at Poissy, west of Paris, and shelve a $145-million modernization program because of government hesitancy in approving 2,905 planned layoffs. An official French government communique said that a plan for 1,905 layoffs, combined with social benefits for the workers concerned, was acceptable. There was no immediate reaction from the trade unions involved.
Britain’s Labor Party, under the new leadership of Neil Kinnock, has moved to within 1 percentage point of the governing Conservative Party, a poll in the Sunday Times of London said. The newspaper reported that if elections were held now, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives would scrape home with 40.5% of the vote, Labor would get 39.5% and the Liberal-Social Democratic alliance would receive 18%.
A Soviet dissident who ran an aid fund for political prisoners, established by exiled writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, has been sentenced to three years in a labor camp, dissident sources in Moscow reported. Sergei Khodorovich, 42, a computer programmer, was convicted of spreading anti-Soviet slander at a Moscow trial last week, they said. Dissident lawyer Vladimir Albrekht, 51, was given a similar sentence in a separate Moscow trial, the sources said.
A fire in a Madrid discotheque killed 78 people and injured at least 21. Most of the dead were said to have been asphyxiated as they struggled to reach street-floor exits of the dance hall, called the Alcala 20 and situated in the central business district. The crowd stampeded up narrow staircases. An employee said one of the doors on an upper floor was locked, and others noted that a major exit shared with the lobby of a theater in the same building had been closed by an iron grill. It was smashed during the fire, and scores of screaming young people poured out onto the street. “We had to beat our way out with our fists because people were panicking and couldn’t control themselves,” one survivor said.
A fire at a Netherlands sex and gambling club in Amsterdam killed 13 people and injured 25 overnight, the police said today. They said a former club employee had been charged with setting the blaze. Firefighters battled flames into the early morning as they spread to three adjoining buildings housing similar clubs. A police spokesman, Kees Jagerman, said other victims might be in upper stories of the five-story building where the fire began. He said at a news conference that a sole arsonist had started the fire in the establishment, known as Club 26, contradicting earlier police reports that a gang of arsonists was responsible. The police said seven men and six women had been killed. Five of them were Dutch, said Mr. Jagerman. The others were five Surinamese, one Chinese, one Turk and one Moroccan.
A U.S. project in El Salvador faces failure, American officials say. The military and civic pilot program began in a key eastern province six months ago and was viewed by Americans as “the make it or break it” test for the Salvadoran military. It has been damaged by a guerrilla counteroffensive and by the unwillingness of the Government army to pursue insurgents who have returned to the province, San Vicente.
Pope John Paul II urged the Guatemalan Government today to restore democratic institutions, which he said would be a sure sign of lasting peace in the troubled Central American country. The pope was speaking at a ceremony to receive the credentials of Jose Alejandro Deutschmann Miron, Guatemala’s new Ambassador to the Vatican. The former envoy was dismissed after his government accused him of delaying a papal message urging clemency for anti-government rebels who were executed before the pope’s visit to Guatemala in March, casting a shadow over the visit.
The United States will open an embassy on Grenada, the head of a temporary U.S. mission said. Tony Gillespie, a deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, did not set a date for establishment of the embassy. The expanded operation will help U.S. officials oversee the spending of more than $18 million in emergency and development aid pledged to the island in the wake of the U.S. invasion, which began October 25.
Australia has bowed to British and American pressure and agreed to let a British ship, reportedly carrying nuclear weapons, use a Sydney dry dock, it was reported here today. Major Australian newspapers said the Government had invited the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible to use the dry dock to repair a damaged propeller. The ship had been barred because antinuclear groups said it carried nuclear weapons. Government policy prohibits bringing nuclear weapons onto Australian soil.
Three years in a row, President Reagan’s budgets have been wrapped like gift packages, each in a fresh concept to strike the fancy of Congress and the public. The “new beginning” in 1981, emphasizing tax cuts, led to the “new federalism” in 1982, an elaborate scheme to transfer programs and tax resources to the states. In the budget proposed for fiscal year 1984, sent to Congress in February, a vast freeze on Federal spending was proposed. This year, however, Mr. Reagan is planning a budget for fiscal year 1985 that even some advisers acknowledge is a hodgepodge of old ideas. Administration officials disclosed last week that there would be virtually no cuts in spending beyond those already put forward. Last year’s so- called contingency tax is to be reintroduced in some form, and no major changes are planned in economic projections.
The Administration’s caution rises from its long-standing budget dilemma, sharpened by the President’s presumed re-election drive. Congressional concurrence with the Reagan tax cut and military spending increases, and resistance to some of the President’s domestic spending cuts, have combined to produce Federal budget deficits near $200 billion a year. On the one hand, the re-election campaign blames Democrats in Congress for excessive spending. On the other, Mr. Reagan is not himself asking for drastic reductions again because his Republican allies in Congress can’t accept them. Senator Paul Laxalt, the Nevada Republican who is chairman of the re-election committee, said recently that “politically, we’ve cut to the bone.”
President Reagan makes a Radio Address to the Nation on drunk driving. President Reagan in his weekly radio address urged Americans to get tough with drunk drivers by changing their attitudes and rewriting the laws because “putting our foot down can save someone’s life.” The President added, “During these holiday festivities, our loved ones are in danger. Unless all of us unite to take action, thousands of our citizens, perhaps a member of your own family, will suffer terrible deaths. . “He cited figures showing that 25,000 Americans are killed and 700,000 injured each year in alcohol-related highway accidents. In the Democratic response to the President’s address, Kentucky’s newly inaugurated governor, Martha Layne Collins, took the White House to task for recent comments questioning the extent of hunger in America. Citing personal observations in her state, Collins said, “Mr. President, innocent Americans are hungry, and for your Republican Administration to have implied in recent days that that is not the case is wrong.”
Former Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota and former Representative John B. Anderson of Illinois, both onetime Presidential candidates, have claimed $18 million that Congress appropriated for a National Endowment for Democracy. The two men, who are trustees of an organization with the same name, said Monday that they would press their group’s claim until spending rules for the money were tightened. The program, a favorite project of President Reagan, was formally announced Friday by Mr. Reagan. Its purpose is to promote democracy and free enterprise abroad. Mr. Reagan said he got the idea for it when he saw the supporters of communism and other “isms” trying to export their ideas. Mr. Reagan originally proposed such a program in 1981 in a speech to members of the British Parliament.
The $18 million, now in the hands of the United States Information Agency, would go to the major political parties and business and labor groups. The third trustee of the McCarthy- Anderson group, Edward Crane of the Cato Institute, a libertarian study institute, said the three objected to using public funds for propaganda purposes and wanted to subject the endowment to audit controls and the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.
President Reagan does homework at the White House.
George A. Sawyer approved when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy for shipbuilding and logistics large contracts with companies that employed him before he joined the Pentagon in 1981 and after, according to public records. Mr. Sawyer left the Government last June and is now executive vice president of the General Dynamics Corporation, the nation’s biggest military contractor.
The West German physicist who recently completed a mission aboard the space shuttle Columbia has sharply criticized U.S. space officials for trying to “dominate” the operation in a bid to impair European competition. In an interview to appear Monday in the magazine Geo, Ulf Merbold, the first European to accompany U.S. astronauts in space, said he resented the “touchiness” of NASA officials over European “rights and prerogatives.” He said he could not understand why the Europeans had only one astronaut while the Americans had five, “when they (Europeans) had conceived, constructed and paid for the laboratory and carried out 50% of the experiments.”
[Ed: Maybe because you didn’t build or launch the shuttle…]
The Americans for Democratic Action gave a 100% liberal report card to Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) and gave seven Republican senators zero ratings. The group released its ratings based on 20 key Senate votes during the 1983 session, and Metzenbaum was the only senator to get a perfect score. Zero ratings were given to seven GOP senators: Frank H. Murkowski of Alaska, James A. McClure and Steve D. Symms of Idaho, Chic Hecht of Nevada, John P. East and Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.
A grand jury found that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges in the 1981 Hyatt Regency Hotel skywalks collapse that killed 114 persons in Kansas City, Missouri, prosecutors said. U.S. Attorney Robert Ulrich and Jackson County prosecutor Albert Riederer said in a joint statement that they were ending their investigation. In April, 1982, Riederer’s office began trying to determine whether the crimes of manslaughter, perjury, false declarations and criminal conspiracy were committed before the July 17, 1981, tragedy or during later litigation.
Two of eight high school students charged with stealing $100,000 in equipment to build a computer laboratory will spend most of the holidays in custody, at the request of their parents. Judge L. A. Cushing of Juvenile Court ordered Friday that Michael A. Kelly, 16 years old, remain in a juvenile holding facility for two weeks after his mother tearfully asked the judge to detain her son. Shawn Covington, 17, also was remanded to juvenile custody for two weeks after the boy’s parents indicated they wanted him held by the authorities. The others were released to their parents.
Veterans and the handicapped should have no more than a limited advantage in applying for state and local government jobs, the Montana Legislature decided today after six days of debate. The bill would replace a veterans’ preference law that was enacted in the 1920’s. The State Supreme Court had interpreted it last June as giving an absolute preference for public jobs to veterans, the spouses and dependents of disabled veterans and the handicapped. Until then the preference had been used only as a tie-breaker among equally qualified applicants. Since the court’s decision, more than 90 percent of all state government jobs have gone to veterans, according to Dennis Taylor, the State Personnel Director.
A Federal district judge has stopped the Government from enforcing a new rule that bars illegal aliens from working while attempting to remain in the United States legally. Judge David Kenyon on Friday granted a preliminary injunction sought by the National Center for Immigrants’ Rights against the regulation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The rule went into effect December 7. “There is sufficient evidence of the possibility that the regulations will impose irreparable harm to those who fall within the purview of the no-work condition,” Judge Kenyon ruled. Two special assistant United States Attorneys said they would seek a stay of Judge Kenyon’s order on Monday.
Every kitchen in the country could be heavily stocked with Government-financed reserves of grain and dairy products, raising again the question of why the surpluses could not be used to feed the hungry in the United States and around the world.
Chicago’s City Council overrode Mayor Harold Washington in a factional vote on the city budget. The action was yet another symptom of the breakdown of a famous political machine.
Peggy Lee’s one-woman show “Peg” closes at Lunt-Fontanne Theater, NYC, after 5 performances.
In his 352nd NHL game, Wayne Gretzky scores a goal & 5 assists in 8-1 rout of Quebec Nordiques to record his 800th point and 500th assist; Gretzky averages 2.27 points, 1.42 assists, 0.85 goals per game to start his career.
NFL Football:
Tony Galbreath dived for a pair of fourth-quarter touchdowns, both on fourth-down-and-inches, as the Minnesota Vikings rallied to beat the Cincinnati Bengals, 20—14, in their National Football League season finale. The game did not affect the N.F.L. playoff picture, as Minnesota ended its season 8-8 and the Bengals 7-9. Galbreath carried the ball 19 times for 88 yards against the league’s No. 1-ranked defense. His first 1-yard touchdown burst came two seconds into the fourth quarter and tied the game at 14—14. The fourth-down score capped a 66-yard, 10-play Viking drive. A minute later, Rodney Tate, a Bengal running back, fumbled for the second time, giving the Vikings the ball on the Cincinnati 39-yard line. The Bengal defense flexed again, but Galbreath plunged over on fourth down to make it 20—14. Benny Ricardo’s extra-point attempt was blocked. The Bengals had taken a 14—7 lead midway in the third quarter when Larry Kinnebrew scored on a 2-yard run. That touchdown was set up when the linebacker Reggie Williams, who also had two sacks, recovered a Darrin Nelson fumble on the 28-yard line.
The bottom line is that the Giants lost today. The Washington Redskins beat them, 31—22, and clinched the Eastern Division title in the National Football League’s National Conference. The bottom line failed to tell how the Giants, in the last game of a 3-12-1 season, salvaged some self-respect. The Redskins were 15½-point favorites, and for good reason. They won the Super Bowl last January, and they won their last 9 games this season to finish with a 14-2 record, the best of the league’s 28 teams. But here, before a stunned crowd of 53,874 at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, the Giants outplayed the Redskins for much of the game. The Giants intercepted Joe Theismann 4 times, an amazing feat against a quarterback who had been intercepted only 7 times in the 15 previous games. Except for a key 44-yard run, they held John Riggins, the Redskins’ battering runner, to an average of less than 3 yards a carry. Riggins finished with 122 yards on 30 carries.
With that plus the first 4 of Ali Haji- Sheikh’s 5 field goals, the Giants led, 19—7. Then the Redskins found themselves and scored 24 points in the last 18 minutes. Washington will play its first playoff game in two weeks against any one of five possible conference opponents, and will have the home field for all of its playoff games. Jeff Rutledge, who started again at quarterback for the Giants, passed effectively, but two fumbles cost the Giants dearly. The first came on a center snap that never reached him and led to a field goal that closed the Redskins’ deficit to 19—17. The second came on a vicious sack and led to an insurance touchdown for the Redskins in the last two minutes. Midway through the 4th quarter, with the Giants blitzing, Art Monk, the Redskins’ wide receiver, was isolated on Bill Currier, the Giants’ strong safety. Theismann’s lead pass to Monk covered 34 yards, and on the next play Theismann passed 7 yards to Clint Didier in the end zone. That put the Redskins ahead, 24—22, and they nursed that lead until 3 minutes 25 seconds remained in the game. On first down from their 30, the Giants called for a pass, but a blitz ruined the play and their comeback hopes. Monte Coleman, a linebacker, crashed in on Rutledge and hit him so hard that Rutledge fumbled. Dave Butz recovered for the Redskins on the Giants’ 21, and Riggins carried 6 straight times, scoring from the 2. That was Riggins’s 24th rushing touchdown of the season, surpassing by one the record O.J. Simpson set in 1975.
Cincinnati Bengals 14, Minnesota Vikings 20
New York Giants 22, Washington Redskins 31
Born:
Gregory Campbell, Canadian NHL left wing (NHL Champions, Stanley Cup-Boston, 2011; Florida Panthers, Boston Bruins, Columbus Blue Jackets), in London, Ontario, Canada.
Erik Christensen, Canadian NHL centre (Pittsburgh Penguins, Atlanta Thrashers, Anaheim Ducks, New York Rangers, Minnesota Wild), in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Michael Coe, NFL defensive back (Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, New York Giants, Miami Dolphins, Dallas Cowboys), in Memphis, Tennessee.
History Diaries 