French President Francois Mitterrand said that the United States and the Soviet Union will have to considerably reduce their nuclear arsenals before France is prepared to discuss cutting back its own nuclear weapons. In an interview with Japanese television, Mitterrand said he was “very surprised” by the Soviet demand that French and British nuclear weapons be included in the now-suspended U.S.-Soviet talks in Geneva on intermediate-range missiles. He said that France will support any move to reopen the Geneva talks but that “this doesn’t mean France intends to reduce its weapons.”
President Reagan, acting on a recommendation from Secretary of State George P. Shultz, has decided to take the first step toward U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO, an Administration official said. The State Department is expected to announce sometime this week that formal notice of intended withdrawal from the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization will be filed by New Year’s Eve. That step will set the stage for U.S. withdrawal from the agency at the end of 1984 — “unless UNESCO changes its ways,” the official said.
The Middle East peace initiative taken by President Reagan 15 months ago has a good chance of being revived, the President said in a year-end interview with wire service reporters at the White House. He said “we are optimistic” about the possibilities in the Middle East as the result of the split in the ranks of the Palestine Liberation Organization and last Thursday’s meeting in Cairo between Yasser Arafat, the P.L.O. chairman, and President Hosni Mubarak.
Beirut’s Shatila district was rocked by explosions as heavy fighting broke out in the Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs, the first such fighting since Beirut International Airport reopened December 16. Security officials said the new fighting began when Shiite Muslim militiamen tried to infiltrate positions abandoned during the day by French troops.
The Israeli charge d’affaires in Malta said that a gunman fired five shots at her as she sat in her car outside a florist’s shop in Valletta, capital of the Mediterranean island nation. The envoy, Esther Millo, said she suffered minor cuts from flying glass. She said she chased the attacker’s car, but lost it in traffic. Millo attributed the attack to the fact that “I am the head of the Israeli mission here.”
A policeman injured in the bombing last weekend at Harrods department store died today, raising the toll in the Irish Republican Army bombing attack to 6 killed and 95 injured. The officer, Inspector Stephen Dodd, 34 years old, suffered head injuries and had been placed on a kidney machine. He died in Central Middlesex Hospital, a statement said. He was married and the father of three children. Another policeman and a policewoman were among those killed in the bombing, for which the Provisional wing of the I.R.A. has taken responsibility. Another police officer, John Gordon, remained in critical condition. He lost a leg and most fingers of one hand.
Kidnappers today freed an heiress of Italy’s Bulgari jewelry company and her teenage son, whose ear had been cut off in an attempt to force a ransom payment, the police said. They were kidnapped November 19 by three masked men. The woman, Anna Bulgari Calissoni, 56 years old, and her 16-year-old son, Giorgio, were freed a few yards from where they were abducted and they “seemed to be in good condition,” said a policeman. “The boy did not have an ear,” he said in a telephone interview shortly after the release near the family villa, 18 miles south of Rome. Kidnappers sent a severed ear earlier this week as a warning that they would kill their hostages if their demands were not met. It was not immediately known whether a ransom was paid. Newspapers had put the demands at $2.4 million and $4.2 million.
Turkey’s new civilian government, led by Prime Minister Turgut Ozal, won a vote of confidence in Parliament, giving it a clear mandate after more than three years of military rule. Ozal’s program, giving priority to reducing inflation and unemployment and maintaining law and order, was approved by a vote of 213 to 115 with 65 abstentions in the new Parliament chosen in last month’s elections.
Mao Zedong is being extolled anew in China, in films, newspaper and magazine articles and by his old comrades-in-arms. The tributes are being paid on the 90th anniversary of Chairman’s Mao’s birth and seven years after his death. But the orchestrated nostalgia seems to be selective.
Bangladesh has asked Moscow to withdraw six of its diplomats for having engaged in “non-diplomatic activities,” a phrase often used to cover accusations of spying, the newspaper Ittefaq reported in the capital of Dhaka. The paper, known for its pro-Western editorial position, said that the six included I.A. Krivogoz, a Soviet Embassy counselor who was expelled from Greece in 1969 when he was an official of the Soviet Embassy there. There was no immediate comment on the report from the Bangladeshi government.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s nominees headed for victory today in special elections to provincial legislatures and the Indian Parliament, pushing aside a strong challenge by the opposition. Her candidates won 1 of 3 races to Parliament and 3 of 11 legislature seats at stake. They were leading in 7 other legislative districts in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. Mrs. Gandhi has a two-thirds majority in Parliament and her Congress Party runs the governments in all the states having elections except West Bengal, which is controlled by the Communist Party.
El Salvador’s Constituent Assembly chose Maria Julia Castillo, a conservative, as its new Speaker. Castillo replaces ultra-rightist Roberto D’Aubuisson, who resigned to campaign as the Arena Party’s candidate for president in elections scheduled March 25. The 60-member assembly named its new Speaker by a 33-0 vote, with two abstentions. The other legislators, including 19 from D’Aubuisson’s party, walked out before the vote as a show of protest at the selection of Castillo, a member of the small Authentic Institutional Party.
Mr. D’Aubuisson’s main opponent in the March 25 election is likely to be former President Jose Napoleon Duarte, whose Christian Democrats won 40 percent of the vote in last year’s Constituent Assembly election while D’Aubuisson supporters got 29 percent. The United States supported Mr. Duarte during his presidency, but lately the American Embassy has been hinting that its favorite candidate is Francisco Jose Guerrero of the National Conciliation Party, an aide to President Alvaro Magano. American diplomats believe he is a conservative who could appeal both to businessmen and the military. Two other conservative parties also nominated candidates. Franciso Quinonez, a businessman who headed the country’s Peace Commission, was named by the Salvadoran Popular Party. Col. Roberto Escobar Garcia, a retired army officer, is the nominee of the Salvadoran Institutional Party.
President Reagan also reiterated his support for special envoy Richard B. Stone’s mediating role in Central America. Mr. Stone will return to Nicaragua next month to promote talks between the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan rebels. Managua has been making conciliatory offers but White House officials said the Sandinistas could do “a great deal more.” The Miskito Indians evidently agreed. Several hundred more of them took refuge in Honduras last week. According to reports reaching the State Department Friday, Roman Catholic Bishop Salvador Schlaefer, who was born in Campbellsport, Wisconsin, safely crossed the border with the Indians. Nicaraguan officials had accused the rebels of abducting Bishop Schlaefer.
Angolan rebels said that they are freeing all of their foreign captives except Czechoslovaks as a good-will gesture for Christmas. Two of the freed captives, Canadian women missionaries, have arrived in South Africa, but it was not immediately clear whether the rest, numbering more than 20, have been released. A spokesman for the rebels, who are fighting Angola’s Marxist government, said that all would be handed over to the International Red Cross at a rebel camp. The release of about 20 Czechoslovaks captured in June has apparently been held up because of attempts to exchange them for prisoners held by the Angolan regime.
A locomotive and 13 coaches ran off the tracks today and plunged into a ravine, killing 31 people and injuring 215 others, the government said. An investigation was ordered to determine the cause of the derailment, the Transport Ministry said. Two Zimbabwe Air Force troop transport planes flew to this mining town, formerly known as Wankie, to ferry the injured to hospitals in Harare, 262 miles east of here, security sources in the capital said. Passengers were on their way to Hwange, the northwest resort town of Victoria Falls and neighboring Zambia for Christmas.
Rebels killed a white Zimbabwean family of four Friday night in Matabeleland Province, a government spokesman said today. Their names were not disclosed pending notification of relatives. The spokesman said one of the rebels was killed by neighboring farmers.
The first draft of a report on hunger in the United States recommends a slight expansion of federal food assistance programs and conversion of food stamps to cash benefits for some families. Contents of the draft were disclosed by members of the President’s Task Force on Food Assistance, whose final report is to be released next month. Meanwhile, an Agriculture Department official said that President Reagan would not seek new cutbacks in food and nutrition programs when he submits his budget to Congress in January.
President Reagan makes a Radio Address to the Nation about Christmas. The President used his weekly radio address to deliver a Christmas message, then left the Oval Office to return to his living quarters and decorate a tree with his wife. Nancy. Among the ornaments they hung on the family tree were two decorations made for them by the Korean youngsters, 7-year-old Ahn Ji Sook and 4-year-old Lee Kil Woo, who traveled to the United States with the Reagans in November and underwent heart surgery in New York. The children have returned to South Korea. In the radio talk, Reagan turned to the Bible in calling for a “spirit of righteousness” in the nation.
The President and the First Lady are visited on Christmas Eve by members of their family. President Reagan is spending Christmas weekend at the White House with family and friends. Unlike other Presidents, Mr. Reagan has not found the White House a lonely place at Christmas time, and has celebrated the holiday in the mansion each of the three years of his Presidency. Tonight, the President and Mrs. Reagan follow their usual custom of attending a Christmas Eve dinner party at the home of Charles Wick, the U.S. Information Agency director. They will be hosts at a Christmas Day feast at the White House. They are being joined by their two youngest children, Ron and Patti, arriving at the White House today with Ron’s wife, Doria, and Patti’s friend from California, Paul Grilley.
The underground economy, hidden from tax collectors and government regulators, is probably around $222 billion or 7.5% of the gross national product, a new study disclosed. David O’Neill, a Census Bureau official, made the estimates in a study released by the Joint Economic Committee. The size of the underground economy has been hotly disputed. Estimates have ranged from $150 billion to $600 billion. O’Neill used a new, indirect method of calculation but conceded that “our estimates are also imprecise and perhaps unreliable.”
South Tucson, Arizona, filed a plan with U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Tucson proposing to pay paralyzed former Tucson policeman Roy Garcia $4.5 million through annuities over 25 years. In 1978, Garcia was shot when aiding South Tucson officers subdue a gunman, and a state court awarded him $3.59 million in damages in 1980. However, South Tucson, with a population of 6,500, contended it was too poor to pay that amount. The town, which subsequently filed for bankruptcy, now proposes to buy a tax-free annuity that would pay Garcia $108,043 the first year, with the amount increasing by 4% annually.
A Miami federal judge found innocent last February of criminal charges has asked a federal District Court in Washington to halt an investigation of him that is being conducted by a council of federal judges in the South. U.S. District Judge Alcee Hastings, who was acquitted on charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice, also sought a ruling that the federal law empowering judicial bodies to investigate judges is unconstitutional.
The federal government has denied a request by Florida Gov. Robert Graham to set national standards for food containing traces of the highly toxic pesticide ethylene dibromide (EDB) pending further study. The Florida government on Thursday banned the sale of a wide range of processed wheat and corn products because they contained one part per billion or more of EDB, a move resisted by a grocers’ trade group. The substance, according to scientists, is a potent carcinogen that causes tumors in laboratory animals.
Daniel Escobedo, whose murder conviction was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964 in a decision that radically changed police arrest procedures, has been charged in Chicago with taking indecent liberties with a child, police said. Escobedo, 46, was charged with sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl while he lived with her and her mother. Escobedo, who said he was an unemployed dockworker, has been living in Chicago since 1978, when he was paroled on a heroin conviction, police said. The murder case against him was dropped after the Supreme Court ruled that his confession should not have been used in court because police had denied his request to consult an attorney.
U.S. Customs agents posed as criminals to infiltrate a right-wing group plotting to kill the prime minister of Guyana, officials said in Cleveland. Eight members of the Conservative Party of Guyana were arrested in Ohio and Canada after a failed attempt to ship weapons to the South American country and take over the government, U.S. Customs spokesman David Ripa said. Agents posing as members of Cleveland’s organized crime family negotiated to sell $34,000 in weapons to the group, he said.
Eastern Airlines’ non-union workers have endorsed a plan to allow employees to purchase 25% of the debt-ridden company’s stock through wage investments, a company spokesman reported in Miami. The vote was 10,890 to 1,071 to approve the plan. Eastern’s branch of the International Association of Machinists, the company’s largest union, has endorsed the plan, but the program must still be approved by the company’s flight attendants and pilots to become effective.
An I.R.S. hunt for tax evaders has begun, using a computerized list of the estimated incomes two million households obtained from private sources. The I.R.S. has begun to test whether the list can help find people who fail to pay taxes, despite the refusal of three major companies that develop such information to turn it over to the Government. The Direct Marketing Association, a trade group that controls the release of income information, said the sale of the list to the I.R.S. violated the association’s code of ethics.
Ethics standards in computer use have been set by some companies, including the Equitable Life Assurance Society, in response to questions about what constitutes the proper use of industrial computers. Those companies dealing with ethical questions have barely scratched the surface of the problems that might arise, officials and lawyers say. Many of the codes and standards deal more with mechanical aspects of computer use than with ethics.
Baseball’s first expansion since 1977 is being considered by major league team owners. Representatives from cities throughout North America attended an owners’ meeting in Nashville, where talks on expanding the number of teams were held. Possible expansion sites are St. Petersburg and Tampa, Florida, Vancouver, British Columbia, Buffalo, and Indianapolis. Denver has been making especially strong efforts to get a baseball franchise.
Freezing cold gripped most of the nation on Christmas Eve, threatening minds, bodies and the holiday spirit. Record low temperatures were reported in 21 states and 60 cities. On the day before Christmas, the nation was in the grip of a record freeze that threatened minds, bodies and the holiday spirit. At 2:20 this morning, long before the first shoppers turned up on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, the temperature dipped to 24 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and blistering northwest winds made it feel like 80 below. In Casper, Wyoming, it was 34 degrees below zero, 21 degrees lower than the previous record. Dubuque, Iowa, registered 25 below and Toledo, Ohio, 15 below, and the pattern held throughout the Middle West. “We’ve had record temperatures for the day broken in 21 states and 60 cities, some dating back to 1872,” said Harry Gordon of the National Severe Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City, Missouri. Health officials have warned people to stay indoors, but Christmas Eve, for many, meant trips downtown for last-minute shopping and visits to Santa Claus.
Actor Johnny Depp (20) weds Lori Anne Allison.
AFC Wild Card Playoff Game:
The Seattle Seahawks made their first appearance in the playoffs a memorable one today. They scored 24 straight points over the last three quarters to defeat the Denver Broncos, 31—7, in the American Conference wild-card game. Both teams came into the game with remarkably similar seasons. Each had a 9–7 record, and both had gone through multiple starting quarterbacks. The Seahawks were starting Dave Krieg, who had replaced Jim Zorn in the ninth game of the season. Steve DeBerg started for the Broncos, returning to the lineup for the first time in seven weeks after suffering a separated shoulder.
The Seahawks won their first playoff game in team history with Krieg completing 12 of 13 passes for 200 yards and three touchdowns. They also got a big performance out of rookie running back Curt Warner, who rushed for 99 yards and caught three passes for 22 yards. Seattle scored on the opening drive of the game, with Warner carrying the ball on six of eight plays and Krieg hitting wide receiver Steve Largent for a 17-yard touchdown pass. After a few punts, the Broncos tied the game with Jesse Myles’ 13-yard touchdown reception from DeBerg. After forcing Seattle to punt, DeBerg drove the Broncos to the Seahawks 29-yard line. However, Kerry Justin intercepted DeBerg’s underthrown pass and returned the ball 45 yards to set up Norm Johnson’s 37-yard field goal, giving the team a 10—7 lead. The Broncos responded with a drive to the Seattle 5-yard line, but once again they failed to score as running back Gerald Willhite lost the ball while being tackled by linebacker Shelton Robinson and safety Paul Moyer recovered it with less than two minutes left in the half.
On Seattle’s first drive of the second half, Krieg completed a 28-yard pass to tight end Charle Young and a 34-yarder to Largent on the next play. Following two carries by Warner for six yards, Krieg finished the possession with a 5-yard touchdown pass to tight end Pete Metzelaars, making the score 17—7. The Seahawks went on to score two more touchdowns, an 18-yard pass from Krieg to Paul Johns on the first play of the fourth quarter, and a 2-yard run by the reserve fullback David Hughes with 9:34 remaining in the game. Meanwhile, Broncos rookie quarterback John Elway made his playoff debut, replacing DeBerg in the fourth quarter. He completed 10 of 15 passes for 123 yards and rushed for 16, but also threw an interception to Seahawks defensive back Gregg Johnson.
Denver Broncos 7, Seattle Seahawks 31
Born:
Tim Jennings, NFL cornerback (Pro Bowl, 2012, 2013; Indianapolis Colts, Chicago Bears, Tampa Bay Buccaneers), in Orangeburg, South Carolina.
Alvin Bowen, NFL linebacker (Jacksonville Jaguars), in Montclair, New Jersey.
Grégor Blanco, Venezuelan NFL outfielder (World Series Champions-Giants, 2012, 2014; Atlanta Braves, Kansas City Royals, San Francisco Giants, Arizona Diamondbacks), in Caracas, Venezuela.
History Diaries 