The Supreme Soviet ended its winter session here today with Yuri V. Andropov’s empty seat on the podium symbolizing the political uncertainty that has enveloped the country in the face of his prolonged absence. Mr. Andropov has been out of public view for four months, among the longest absences of a Soviet leader since Lenin suffered a stroke in 1923 and moved to the mansion at Gorki, south of Moscow, where he died. Two meetings this week — of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal legislature — were accompanied by vigorous efforts to offset the impact of Mr. Andropov’s absence. Assertive Speech on Economy
An assertive speech on the economy was read to the Central Committee in Mr. Andropov’s name, four men considered loyal to him were promoted to positions on the top party bodies, the Politburo and the Secretariat, and the press lavished praise on him in the context of his nomination as a candidate in the single-slate elections of the new Supreme Soviet in March, in other circumstances a routine event. At the same time, officials were busy in lounges off the Supreme Soviet chamber assuring diplomats and Western reporters that Mr. Andropov’s illness was more a matter of age — he is 69 — than of a critical ailment. One official denied, in particular, that the party leader’s problem is with his kidneys, as has been reported.
Behind all this, the message seemed to be that Mr. Andropov is politically stronger than ever, and that neither the Soviet population nor the world has any reason for concern. Yet, as Western diplomats assessed it, the net of the week’s developments was to underline the problems that can beset this highly centralized, autocratic system when the man at the pinnacle of power is removed from direct and visible control. “Running a country where every decision of importance has to be taken at the center is a backbreaking job, and a tough, fit man at the helm is indispensable,” a Western envoy said. “If that man is incapacitated for any length of time, the groups that don’t like what he is trying to do are encouraged to fight and delay, and even those who support him begin to look for new alliances in case he has to step down.”
A change in the Marine mission in Beirut will be pressed in Congress if President Reagan fails to change it by the end of January, according to Democratic and Republican Congressional leaders. The legislators include several who have previously supported Administration policy in Lebanon. The Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., scheduled a meeting of Democratic leaders next Tuesday to discuss policy in Lebanon and proposals to require a Marine withdrawal before the present 18-month deadline.
The Pentagon is drafting plans for confronting the problem of combatting terrorists for review by Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, according to Defense Department officials. They said the department was preparing proposals hastily in response to criticisms that the United States armed forces are not equipped to fight terrorism.
State-sponsored terrorism is exploiting an anti-American atmosphere in the Middle East, according to Arab and Israeli security experts. They said that the major element required in the rash of terrorist bombings was a government intelligence organization or something very similar to it. Only such an organization, they said, could have had the expertise, experience and money to plan and organize such complicated and expensive suicide attacks.
Jesse L. Jackson left for Syria. The Presidential aspirant said he had “virtual assurance” of a meeting with President Hafez al-Assad or other high officials to hear his appeal for the release of an American flier captured in Lebanon.
Syrian President Hafez Assad last month suffered from heart trouble brought on by exhaustion, not from appendicitis as announced earlier, Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Talas told the Associated Press. He reported that Assad has recovered completely. Talas also said the October 23 terrorist bombings of the U.S. Marine and French army facilities in Beirut were the work of a “small, very close inner circle” of Lebanese Shia Muslims who have refused offers of help from Syria and Libya. A group called Islamic Jihad (Islamic Holy War), reportedly linked to Iran, claimed responsibility for the attacks.
An employee of the Jordanian Embassy in Spain was shot to death and another seriously wounded by an assailant who fired a submachine gun into their car at a Madrid street corner. Police said the attacker, who appeared to be an Arab in his 20s, escaped after killing Walid Jamal Balkiz, 34, and wounding Ibrahim Suami Mamid, 40, both embassy administrative aides. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. Two months ago, attempts were made on the lives of Jordan’s ambassadors to Italy and India, for which Jordan blamed Syria and Palestinian extremists.
Two Arab citizens of Israel have been sentenced to death by a secret military court for the murder of an Israeli soldier in 1980 on orders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, according to Israeli newspaper and radio reports. The trial was secret to prevent Arab reaction, the newspaper Maariv said. The executions, if approved by the army chief of staff and a military appeals court, would be the first in Israel since 1962, when Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was hanged. In 1954, Israel abolished the death sentence except for high treason, Nazi war crimes or terrorist killings.
Small groups of Jews and Arabs in Israel are struggling against the tide of mutual hatred and suspicion. One group assembles after classes at the Martin Buber Institute for Adult Education in Jerusalem, where Jews are studying Arabic and Arabs Hebrew. They also have joint cultural evenings and excursions.
The Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasser Arafat, will go to Tunis to convene a meeting of the Central Committee of his Fatah movement in about 48 hours, his spokesman said today. Mr. Arafat will also call a session of the Palestine National Council, probably in Algiers in February, the spokesman, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, said. The Tunis and Algiers meetings will chart a new strategy for the P.L.O., and a new leadership under Mr. Arafat’s chairmanship will emerge with Syrian and other “agents” discarded, Mr. Abdel Rahman said. “We are against the puppets of the Syrian and Libyan regimes,” he said. “Those who shot and killed the Palestinian fighters have no right to re-enter the P.L.O.” Mr. Arafat has spent several days in seclusion in Yemen conferring with loyalist guerrilla leaders after his evacuation last week from Tripoli, Lebanon, with 4,000 supporters.
Polish police questioned Solidarity union leader Lech Walesa for two hours about the outlawed union underground, but the Nobel Peace Prize-winner said he refused to answer any questions. Walesa said that he tried to hand his interrogators a letter to General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Communist Party leader and premier, but that they refused to accept it. He left the police building without any indication whether he would be summoned for further questioning.
East Germany initialed an agreement today to hand over to West Berlin operation of the western part of the city’s loss-making urban railway system, which it has controlled since the 1950’s. The agreement, expected to be formally signed Friday in East Berlin, was reached after two months of negotiations. The railway, known as the S-Bahn, was the most extensive transit system in Europe before World War II, carrying millions of passengers around the city and to and from the suburbs. The East Germans were made responsible for running trains in all sectors of Berlin when the victorious allies, Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union, divided the city after the war.
A U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO was formally announced by Washington. But, at the same time, it said it would strengthen American participation in the United Nations and other international organizations.
The Salvadoran army deployed about 20,000 troops-80% of its combat forces-across the country in the biggest counterinsurgency operation of the four-year-old civil war, a Defense Ministry spokesman said. The deployment, aimed at leftist guerrillas, encompassed 11 of the country’s 14 provinces, but there was no immediate report of contact with the guerrillas. The biggest operations were in the four easternmost provinces, where most of the fighting in the war has occurred. More than 2,500 soldiers surrounded the rebel stronghold on the Guazapa Volcano, about 20 miles north of San Salvador, advancing under artillery cover, the spokesmen said.
Lu Zhixian, Chinese vice minister of culture, said his nation will discuss resumption of official cultural exchanges with the United States that were suspended after the United States gave Chinese tennis player Hu Na political asylum last April. The announcement, reported by the official New China. News Agency, comes less than two weeks before Premier Zhao Ziyang is to visit the United States and is a strong indication that he will discuss the exchange question with President Reagan. The U.S. Embassy declined comment on the Chinese statement. Hu, 19, defected in July, 1982, while in California for a tournament.
An air raid in Angola was announced by South Africa. It said its jets had attacked a Namibian nationalist guerrilla base near Lubanga.
Two espionage convictions were announced by South Africa’s supreme court. It said that a high naval commander and his wife had been found guilty of high treason and face possible death sentences. The officer was head of the Simonstown dockyard, South Africa’s most strategically important naval installation.
The 10-year-old Lesotho interim national assembly will be suspended early in the new year to pave the way for a general election, Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan announced today. Lesotho has had no elections since 1970, when Mr. Jonathan seized power, suspended the constitution and declared a state of emergency in the tiny African mountain kingdom. Mr. Jonathan has ruled by decree with an interim national assembly of appointed members and chiefs since April 1973.
The separate branches of the U.S. military refuse to work together to build common, cheaper weapons systems because each thinks its own ideas are best, a General Accounting Office report said. The study centered on the joint acquisition of major weapons systems, which usually cost more than $1 billion, to buy planes, ships, missiles, electronic gear, vehicles and other high-cost items for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.
Alan Cranston calls for summit talks on the arms race and a halt in testing or deploying nuclear weapons if Moscow did. In an interview, Senator Cranston said that if elected President he would put more Americans back to work, seek a balanced budget and more competitive bidding on military contracts and abandon any antimissile system.
The President and the First Lady travel to Palm Springs, California and stay with the Annenbergs tonight.
Members of a task force on narcotics are suspected of having committed fraud in the expense vouchers they submitted while on temporary assignment in southern Florida. As a result, according to officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration, a federal grand jury will soon be convened to investigate the case.
An inquiry on Paul N. Thayer, the Deputy Defense Secretary, has prompted federal prosecutors to plan inquiries into whether crimes were committed during the investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to Justice Department officials. They said the United States Attorney in Washington, Joseph DiGenova, is looking into whether witnesses made false statements or obstructed justice.
Public health veterinarians are urging all states to ban importation of wild animals or wild crossbreeds, such as dogs that are part wolf and cats that are part ocelot, because they pose a significant rabies danger. A spokesman said that there is no vaccine that effectively immunizes wild animals from rabies. The National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians Inc., in its annual Compendium of Animal Rabies Vaccines, released in Atlanta, recommended “that neither wild nor exotic animals be kept as pets and that wild animals not be crossbred with domestic dogs or cats.”
Workers in New Hampshire and the District of Columbia posted the biggest gains in average annual pay from 1981 to 1982, while those in Michigan, Iowa and Washington state received the smallest increases, the Labor Department said. A report on a survey of 88.4 million workers covered by the federal and state unemployment compensation system, said employees nationwide averaged $16,732 in wages and salaries last year, a 6.6% increase from 1981. New Hampshire, which showed large gains in construction, health care services and machinery manufacturing, led the nation with an overall rise of 8.8%. Michigan had the smallest increase — 3.8%.
A judge in Plymouth, Ind., has struck down the state’s new drunken driving law that permits license suspensions without court review, saying it “lacks fundamental fairness and is alarmingly deficient in its constitutional protections.” The new law makes it a crime to drive with a blood alcohol content greater than 10 percent, regardless of whether the driver is operating the vehicle in an impaired fashion. If a driver fails a breath test, the license may be suspended automatically for up to 180 days or until the case reaches the court. It may be suspended for a year if the driver refuses to take a test.
A Miami businessman, who authorities say is a figure in the Omega 7 terrorist group, was indicted in New York on charges of lying to a federal grand jury. Jose Ignacio Gonzalez, 41, is the second person to be indicted within two days in the investigation of Omega 7, a squad of Cuban exiles that has claimed responsibility for two murders and 30 bombings in the last eight years. The group opposes Cuban President Fidel Castro. Eduardo Arocena, allegedly the leader of Omega 7 and an associate of Gonzalez, was indicted Wednesday in connection with 14 bomb attacks.
The Washington State Supreme Court today severely restricted the right of police officers to conduct warrantless searches at the time of an arrest. Justice James Dolliver wrote the majority opinion in a 7-to-2 decision that overruled a series of decisions dating to 1925. Under the new guidelines, searches without a warrant may involve only the person arrested and the area near him. A warrantless search may be used only to remove weapons the suspect might use to resist arrest or to escape, or to prevent the suspect from destroying evidence, the court said. In handing down the decision, the court reversed two convictions for drug possession.
An equipment failure at the government’s top-secret Savannah River Plant at Aiken, South Carolina, caused a small amount of radioactive waste to leak into a stream that flows into the Savannah River, officials said. Towns that rely on the river for drinking water have been notified of the leak, Energy Department spokesman Jim Gaver said, but he said the leak posed no health hazard.
An unidentified virus may cause a disease in monkeys and apes that resembles acquired immune deficiency syndrome, the human disorder known as AIDS, according to evidence reported by a team of 13 American researchers. Veterinarians and other scientists are studying simian AIDS extensively at many primate research centers around the country in hopes that such investigations will yield clues to the cause of the human disorder.
Only two of the 14 Laotian immigrants sickened by poisonous mushrooms they picked in the California wine country remained hospitalized today and doctors said both would survive. “They were lucky, very, very lucky,” said Dr. Alan Tani of the San Francisco Poison Control Center. “There was quite a bit of liver damage but the liver has tremendous reserves. It can handle quite an insult and still repair itself.” Doctors earlier had doubts that all of the Laotians would live. The mushrooms they ate were amanita phalloides, the world’s deadliest.
The numbing cold gripping most of the nation has brought death, hardship and inconvenience to the South. Scattered power failures and burst water pipes have driven residents from their homes and have darkened stores, and shelters are crowded with people seeking warmth.
Princess Caroline of Monaco today married Stefano Casiraghi, the 23-year-old son of a very rich industrial family from northern Italy. About 20 guests attended the civil ceremony, kept as private as the principality’s traditions, long and faithfully wed to publicity, would allow. But the match was believed to please her father, Prince Rainier, and he joined the couple at the palace window where the Princess greeted crowds after her first marriage in 1978.
Liberty Bowl, Memphis, Tennessee: Notre Dame 19, Boston College 18. Relying on a power-running game and a strong defense, Notre Dame salvaged its football season tonight when it turned back a last-minute Boston College drive to win the 25th Liberty Bowl, 19—18. The quarterback Doug Flutie had led Boston College to the Notre Dame 41-yard line with 3 minutes 8 seconds remaining. ”It’s normal after what’s happened to us this year, but I thought and expected something would go wrong,” said Chris Smith, the Notre Dame fullback. But Notre Dame held as a fourth down pass from the 35 by Flutie fell incomplete with 1:04 left. Playing on an icy field with the temperature falling to the low teens, the Irish stayed mostly on the ground as the tailback Allen Pinkett gained 111 yards and Smith had 104. The senior quarterback Blair Kiel, making his first start in eight games, directed three first-half scoring drives. Kiel, the Irish captain, completed 11 of 19 passes for 151 yards. The difficult playing conditions affected both teams’ kicking games. Notre Dame missed two conversion kicks, and Boston College missed all three of its conversion tries, including a pair of 2-point passing attempts.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1260.16 (-3.05).
Born:
Jessica Andrews, American country music singer (“Who I Am”), in Wynne, Arkansas.
Jason Snelling, NFL running back (Atlanta Falcons), in Toms River, New Jersey.
Derrick Ross, NFL running back (Kansas City Chiefs), in Huntsville, Texas.
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