The U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO in 1985 has been recommended by the State Department if the United Nations agency does not curtail what the Administration regards as questionable political activities. The recommendation has been sent to the White House in anticipation of a formal deadline of December 31 by which President Reagan will have to decide whether to file notice of withdrawal.
President Reagan attends a National Security Council briefing to discuss the Secretary of Defense’s report on the investigation of the Beirut bombings.
The Pentagon withdrew a report on the truck bombing of the Marine compound in Beirut 30 minutes before it was to have been given to reporters. A spokesman said Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger needed more time to review it and prepare recommendations for President Reagan. There were indications that the Administration is divided over how to deal with it.
A pullout of Italy’s Beirut forces was proposed by President Sandro Pertini. He told reporters at a traditional year-end gathering at the Quirinal Palace in Rome that the danger of a direct clash between the Palestinians and the Israelis in Lebanon “gave clear meaning to our presence,” but with the evacuation Tuesday of Yasser Arafat’s troops, “Italy risks involvement in a war that does not concern it.”
A Jewish alliance criticized the Reagan Administration’s endorsement of the meeting Thursday in Cairo of Yasser Arafat and President Hosni Mubarak. A letter to President Reagan from Julius Berman, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, expressed “shock and dismay” at what he called the “the apparent reversal of your Administration’s policy toward the P.L.O. terrorist, Yasser Arafat.”
President Reagan attends a meeting with advisors to discuss Soviet nuclear arms and the adherence to treaties.
Tass, the official Soviet press agency, accused Sweden today of using reconnaissance planes to spy on Soviet military movements. The accusation closely followed news that Sweden had expelled two Soviet diplomats and another Soviet citizen whom it accused of spying. Tass said a program shown on Swedish television had provided evidence of the aerial surveillance of military movements in the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia. It said Sweden exchanged the data with other nations, but it did not identify them. The report made no mention of the expulsion of the three Russians from Sweden.
Two major political meetings next week may help dispel uncertainties that have surrounded the leadership of Yuri V. Andropov since he fell ill and disappeared from public view more than four months ago. Eastern European officials here are saying Mr. Andropov is sure to appear at a full meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee that is to begin in closed session Monday or Tuesday. These sources have been less emphatic about the meeting of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal legislature, which is scheduled to convene in public session Wednesday.
The meetings are usually held in November, and there is little doubt that Mr. Andropov’s illness was the reason for the unusually long delay this year. When the date for the Supreme Soviet was finally set late last month, the Kremlin seemed to have concluded that Mr. Andropov, who is both party leader and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, was either too ill to have any prospect of attending or recovering well enough to plan a return to public view. In normal circumstances, the attendance of the party leader would be considered obligatory at both sessions, but Mr. Andropov’s continuing absence from other events that he would normally attend have fostered doubts.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited Northern Ireland for six hours today and said Britain and the Irish Republic were determined to beat the Irish Republican Army’s “bombs, bullets and terrorists.” In London, the police for the third straight day questioned an unidentified I.R.A. sympathizer held in raids after the outlawed organization bombed Harrods department store last Saturday, killing 5 people and wounding 95.
A Warsaw prosecutor has indicted two police officers and four other people in the beating death of a 19-year-old Solidarity union supporter, the official Polish press agency reported today. The death of the Solidarity supporter, Grzegorz Przemyk, in May became a rallying cause for protests by supporters of the union formed by Lech Walesa. Many Poles regard Mr. Przemyk’s grave at Powazki cemetery in Warsaw as a shrine. The official P.A.P. press agency identified the six indicted people only by first name and last initial. Two of them were emergency ambulance doctors and two were ambulance workers.
Pope John Paul II said today that the deployment of more nuclear missiles in Europe worried people on the continent, and rightly so. “A new and grave uneasiness fills public opinion, and I understand it,” he said in a message prepared for the 17th “World Day of Peace” on January 1. In the 16-page speech, titled “From a New Heart Peace Is Born,” the Pope said the nuclear buildup had increased the need for worldwide disarmament. “War has its origins in the human heart,” the Pope said. “It is man who kills and not his sword, or, in our day, his missiles.” The Pope said nations had a legitimate right to defend themselves but they must seek disarmament through negotiation. He condemned “dangerous adventures, where passions override justice,” and big-power interference in the internal conflicts of other nations.
The terrorist violence that has long plagued the Basque region of northern Spain has spilled into southern France. The development has aroused fears of a “dirty war” fought across the mountainous border by Basque separatists and right-wing Spanish extremists. The fears were heightened Monday night when a 23-year-old Spaniard living in France and believed to be connected with E.T.A., the Basque separatist organization, was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen in a bar where he worked in the town of Bayonne. Witnesses said the assailants fled in a car with Spanish registration. The killing was thought to be in retaliation for an attack four days earlier on two national policemen in San Sebastian. One policeman died and another was wounded in that assault, which followed the pattern of many E.T.A. assassinations.
President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines said today that the claim that his Government was involved in the assassination of Benigno S. Aquino Jr., his political rival, was a lie spread by political opponents and the “recalcitrant rich.” But a man who said he was an airport worker near the scene said he saw policemen holding the wrists of the accused killer when the opposition leader was slain while disembarking from a plane at Manila’s international airport. “The military told the false story and I am telling the somewhat real story,” said Reuben Regalado, who spoke to NBC News. “They could probably go after me. So I think it is right for, safe for me to hide for a while.” Mr. Regalado has left the Philippines and is in hiding. The network did not say where Mr. Regalado was, but the news dispatch was from Tokyo.
Laos has handed over to a United States team the bodies of some American soldiers who were reported missing in action in the Vietnam War, the Laotian press agency said today. The report, monitored in Bangkok, did not identify any of the servicemen. This week the team, from the United States Joint Casualty Resolution Center in Honolulu, conducted the first official American inspection of the site where a United States Air Force C-130 cargo plane crashed Dec. 21, 1972, after having been hit by antiaircraft fire. It was the first official inspection of a crash site in Laos since the Communist Government took over in 1975.
A United States-born bishop, reported by Nicaragua to have been killed, arrived in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Monsignor Salvator Schlaefer, 63 years old, crossed the border accompanied by about 1,300 Indian refugees. Nicaragua said he had been killed by rebels.
Heavy rain in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, over 15 inches in some areas, killed at least 26 people today and left thousands homeless, the Press Trust of India news agency said. Most of the deaths occurred when rain- soaked mud walls of houses and huts collapsed on their inhabitants, it said. The state capital, Madras, received 6.8 inches of rain, but that area is recovering from a drought and the water was welcome.
Prime Minister Robert Mugabe gave a carefully worded reaction today to the announcement this week that the United States had cut this year’s aid to Zimbabwe by $35 million. Mr. Mugabe said Zimbabwe “could not complain” if the Reagan Administration had to reduce Zimbabwe’s aid for budgetary reasons. Mr. Mugabe said, however, that he found it “extremely objectionable” that the United States might have cut the aid because of its disapproval of Zimbabwe’s votes in the United Nations. In his government’s first official reaction to the Reagan Administration’s decision to cut Zimbabwe’s aid for the current fiscal year from $75 million to $40 million, Mr. Mugabe said Zimbabwe valued its independence to make its own foreign policy more than it valued money.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said today that it would delay the next flight of the space shuttle challenger from January 30 to February 3 so that the agency could replace all three auxiliary power units to avoid a malfunction like the ones that plagued the last shuttle flight. The new units might be taken from the new orbiter Discovery, said Rocky Raab, a spokesman at the Kennedy Space Center. The units operate the orbiter’s flight control surfaces, landing gear, steering, brakes and nose wheel. Two of the three auxiliary units on the space shuttle Columbia caught fire shortly before it landed December 8. Two of the Columbia’s five computers also failed during preparations good computers and two from the Challenger to screen them before putting them into the Challenger for the February flight.
The resignation of J. Lynn Helms as administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration was submitted to President Reagan. Mr. Helms said he wished to resume his business consulting work. Mr. Reagan had accepted the resignation with regret. There was no mention of the various investigations being made into Mr. Helms’s own business dealings.
Christmas is not a time of depression and despair for most people, according to mental health researchers who have studied the holiday’s psychological impact. After years of hand-wringing over the “holiday blues,” a form of depression once thought to afflict many Americans, mental health experts are now stressing that Christmas actually intensifies most of the major emotions, both joyous and sad, of everyday life.
The Ku Klux Klan’s civil rights were defended by a black lawyer, in Chickasaw, Alabama, where the Klan had been forbidden to march January 7 by local officials. C. Christopher Clanton, a black lawyer pleaded the Klan’s case before the Chickasaw City Council, and is taking it to the Federal District Court.
The St. Louis Globe-Democrat is being sold to a magazine publisher and his wife. The buyer, Jeffrey M. Gluck of Columbia, Missouri, and his wife, Debra, said they had signed a contract to purchase the newspaper, which was to have been shut down after January 1 because of financial losses.
Six people were injured today in Anchorage, Alaska when a Korean Air Lines DC-10 cargo jet attempting takeoff from the wrong runway smashed into a twin-engine commuter plane waiting on the ground for heavy fog to lift. A spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration said the DC-10, bound for Los Angeles with a crew of three, was taking off at Anchorage International Airport when it collided with a South Central Airlines Navajo headed for Kenai, Alaska. The Navajo, carrying seven passengers and two crew members, was destroyed, and the DC-10 burst into flames. The FAA said the K.A.L. pilot went to a different runway from the one ordered by tower controllers.
Puerto Rico’s police chief announced today that he would resign next Thursday, making him the second top official to step down amid a police scandal. Governor Carlos Romero Barcelo appointed Jorge Collazo, who has been the prisons chief, to replace Superintendent Desiderio Cartagena. The Governor said Mr. Cartagena told him he was resigning because of pressures from the scandal over the police slayings of two independence activists in July 1978. The Governor had been under pressure from opposition politicians to fire Mr. Cartagena for the alleged cover-up of the slayings of Arnaldo Dario Rosado and Carlos Soto Arrivi. Justice Secretary Carmen Rita Velez Borras resigned Monday.
A church bus crashed head-on into a tractor-trailer truck on a rain-slick highway tonight in Devers, Texas, killing nine people and injuring more than 20 others, a Department of Public Safety spokesman said. The collision occurred about 7:45 P.M. on Texas Highway 61, two and a half miles south of Devers, a small community on U.S. 90 about 50 miles northeast of Houston. Most of the bus passengers appeared to be teen-agers, said Ernie Zieschang, who was at the scene soon after the crash. “It was the worst wreck I have ever seen,” said Mr. Zieschang, editor and publisher of The Liberty Vindicator. “It completely tore the front end out of the bus as well as the cab on the truck. It knocked the motor completely out of both vehicles.”
About 20 pilot whales were stranded on a 15-mile stretch of Cape Cod beaches today as rescue workers fought harsh winds and freezing temperatures to save the large animals. Members of the International Fund for Animals sighted 21 large whales in an aerial survey of Cape Cod today, said Liz Kay, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium.
All the whales appeared dead. The aquarium initially estimated about 50 whales were stranded, but the aquarium spokesman said the aerial survey provided a more accurate count. Two surviving whales were found. One was returned to water and the other was taken to an aquarium. Reasons for the beaching remained a mystery. Seven other pilot whales had recently washed up on Block Island beaches. It was not known whether there was a connection to the Cape Cod beachings.
Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, putting an expensive end to the pine-tar affair, has fined George Steinbrenner and the Yankees $250,000. The fine is believed to be the largest ever assessed a sports team and an owner. Steinbrenner, however, escaped a suspension that at one point the Yankee owner felt Kuhn would impose. The Yankees announced the fine late last night, saying Kuhn had found statements made by Steinbrenner and action taken by other representatives of the club had not been in the “best interests of baseball.” The team said Kuhn also assessed the club “certain legal fees.” No amount was given for the legal fees.
The previous largest fine Kuhn levied in his 15 years as commissioner was the $100,000 penalty he assessed Ray Kroc, owner of the San Diego Padres, in 1979 for tampering with Graig Nettles and Joe Morgan, who were eligible to be free agents but were still under contract to their teams when Kroc talked about signing them.
The journal “Science” publishes the first report on nuclear winter.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1250.5 (-3.15).
Born:
Hanley Ramírez, Dominican MLB shortstop, first baseman, and third baseman (All-Star, 2008-2010; Boston Red Sox, Florida-Miami Marlins, Los Angeles Dodgers, Cleveland Indians), in Samaná, Dominican Republic.
Chris Conner, NHL right wing (Dallas Stars, Pittsburgh Penguins, Detroit Red Wings, Phoenix Coyotes, Washington Capitals), in Westland, Michigan.
Paul Irons, NFL tight end (Cleveland Browns), in New Orleans, Louisiana.
History Diaries 