A Navy flier came home to the United States and met with President Reagan in a White House ceremony. Mr. Reagan praised the flier, Lieutenant Robert O. Goodman Jr., who was freed by the Syrian Government after 30 days of captivity, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had flown to Damascus to appeal for his release. Jackson also met with the president. Mr. Reagan praised the lieutenant, who was freed by the Syrian Government after 30 days of captivity, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had flown to Damascus to seek his release.
”This young Naval officer was flying a mission of peace,” the President said, ”and, both during and after, he exemplified qualities of leadership and loyalty, qualities of so many fine men and women in our military that we’re all proud of.” Mr. Reagan then turned to Mr. Jackson, the 42-year-old civil rights leader and Democratic Presidential candidate who headed a delegation that went to Syria to make an appeal for the flier’s release. ”Reverend Jackson’s mission,” he said, ”was a personal mission of mercy and he has earned our gratitude and our admiration.”
Heavy casualties were reported as 16 Israeli fighter-bombers, flying in four-plane formations, struck targets in the eastern Lebanon town of Baalbek. The Beirut radio said the hourlong raids left nearly 100 dead and 400 wounded. The International Committee of the Red Cross said most of the casualties were civilians. The Israeli command said the targets were two bases used by Iranian-supported guerrillas.
The situation in Lebanon shows signs of improvement, according to Reagan Administration officials. They asked Republican Congressional leaders to withhold any drastic action that could undercut that movement. The Republican leaders, in turn, warned that members of Congress and their constituents are rapidly losing patience with Administration policy in Lebanon.
The Israeli army has urged a phased withdrawal of its troops from Lebanon in what would amount to a major reversal of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s policies, Israeli newspaper reports said. The reports said the military acted after reviewing its position in Lebanon in light of mounting casualties inflicted by guerrillas. The Haaretz newspaper said Defense Minister Moshe Arens approved the phased withdrawal proposal and is presenting it to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. The army reportedly wants an initial partial pullback from current lines along the Awwali River, 28 miles north of the Israeli border at its farthest point, to positions 12 to 15 miles north of the border.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir held an unprecedented meeting with members of Israel’s Arab minority, who complained to him of unequal treatment by the government and violence by extremist Jews. The 27 Arabs, including 15 mayors and religious, educational and social leaders, told Shamir that Israel’s 18% Arab population feels isolated and neglected, the mayor of Baqa el Gharbiya, Samir Darwish, said. Shamir “promised to put his full weight behind finding quick solutions,” an aide said.
Tunisian leaders, displaying force, appeared to have halted a wave of rioting over a doubling of the prices of bread and cereals. Tanks and armored cars were drawn up at key points in Tunis, and around them armed soldiers shouted at passers-by not to approach.
Moslem insurgents are battling the Soviet- backed regime daily in Afghanistan’s second largest city, where a December 22 assault on an army headquarters left 31 government soldiers dead, Western diplomats said today. The southern city of Kandahar was ”perhaps the only provincial capital in which major fighting has been taking place on a daily basis for extended periods of time in downtown areas,” according to a report from diplomatic sources who insisted on anonymity. The report quoted ”highly reliable sources” as having said that government control in Kandahar was ”virtually nil” and that the insurgents had set up their own law courts outside the city.
President Reagan learns that the Soviets are interested in setting up communications.
Britain said it will carefully study a new Argentine call for Falklands peace talks but restated its refusal to discuss sovereignty over the islands. The Foreign Office in London said it has not received the text of the bid from Argentina’s new civilian government for talks on the peaceful transfer of the Falklands to Argentina in exchange for guaranteeing that its residents will continue to enjoy their current way of life.
The police arrested four Sardinian shepherds and a man from the southern region of Puglia today and charged them with the kidnapping of two recently freed members of the Bulgari jewelry family, the authorities said. A police spokesman said that investigations were continuing and that two more people could be involved in the kidnapping gang. The five men arrested today were accused in the abduction November 19 of Anna Bulgari Calissoni, 56 years old, and her 16-year-old son, Giorgio. The suspects were also charged with illegal possession of arms, causing serious bodily harm and theft. The son’s right ear was cut off by the kidnappers during the ordeal, which ended with the victims’ release Christmas Eve after payment of a ransom, the amount of which has not been disclosed.
Pope John Paul II appealed for the release of all people held by kidnappers and said a “sad plague” of abductions has carried into 1984. “I must raise my voice once again to ask for the liberation of the many people who are still kidnapped,” the pontiff told 15,000 pilgrims and tourists gathered in St. Peter’s Basilica for his first general audience of the year. Gangs seeking ransom payments abducted 35 people in Italy last year.
Winter’s first major storm hammered Europe today for a third day, disrupting transportation, cutting power and causing at least 14 deaths. In West Germany, the police reported six deaths in accidents caused by the storm. The Netherlands called out 40 dike guards in Friesland when water levels rose 57 inches above normal in 70-mile-an-hour winds. Gales in the Irish Sea caused the cancellation or delay of ferry services between between Britain and Ireland. Irish authorities gave up hope of finding four fishermen missing in Lough Gill in western Ireland since Monday when the storm first hit. An entire family of four was killed on the other side of Ireland when a tree crashed on their car.
A transfer of two Salvadoran officers to posts abroad in response to United States pressure for a crackdown on right-wing death squads was reported by military informants in San Salvador. The two men were former intelligence officers.
Peruvian authorities accused a suspected commander and theoretician of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas of planning and directing assassinations of police and civil authorities. Police said that Emilio Antonio Diaz Martinez, captured two weeks ago, was turned over for prosecution after intensive interrogation by special anti-terrorist police. Police hope that his capture will enable them to crack the Maoist guerrillas’ highly secretive organization, which is based on clandestine cells in the central Andes.
Mexico’s coldest winter in 25 years has killed 110 people and damaged orange and coffee crops in the country’s northern regions, authorities said. Other crops threatened by the cold are beans and corn, officials said. Temperatures as low as 5 degrees were registered in the northern states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Sonora, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas, with many of the deaths occurring in auto accidents on icy roads.
Philippine Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, responding to complaints from civilian investigators, ordered the military to stop its separate investigation of the August 21 assassination of opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. Former Justice Corazon Agrava, head of the civilian fact-finding panel appointed by President Ferdinand E. Marcos, had told Enrile that military investigators were “scaring and possibly intimidating witnesses,” obstructing the panel’s work.
A former Philippine President, meanwhile, said the opposition should boycott parliamentary elections May 14 because they will merely ”perpetuate and strengthen the dictatorship of President Marcos.” Diosdado Macapagal, who was President from 1961 to 1965, made the comment in an interview a day after the biggest opposition coalition, the 12-party United Nationalist Democratic Organization, announced that it planned to contest the elections for the National Assembly.
The new 1,788-room palace in Brunei is believed to be the largest royal residence in the world. A knowledgeable informant put the cost of the palace of Sultan Muda Hassanal Bolkiah at about $300 million. Brunei, an independent country on the island of Borneo that is about the size of Delaware, is rich in oil.
Eight members of Congress began an 18-day fact-finding mission today into heroin smuggling in Europe, Asia and the Middle East and drug abuse among American servicemen in the Pacific. The eight legislators, led by Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, left for a two-day stopover in Honolulu before traveling to Okinawa, Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma, Pakistan, Turkey and Rome. The trip is expected to produce recommendations for Congress and various committees whose business involves drug-control problems.
President Reagan conducts a meeting about the 1985 budget for Education with House Republicans.
Changes in Medicare are again being sought by President Reagan, according to Administration officials. They said Mr. Reagan would ask Congress to revise the program so that elderly people would have to pay more for the first weeks of hospital care, but in return the Government would provide greater protection against the costs of a long illness.
A 17 percent rise in military spending in the next fiscal year is tentatively projected by the Reagan Administration. An analysis prepared by the budget director, David A. Stockman, shows proposed spending for military programs rising from $228 billion in the present fiscal year to $266.5 in the fiscal year 1985.
Paul Thayer resigned after serving one year as Deputy Secretary of Defense. Mr. Thayer told President Reagan that the Securities and Exchange Commission planned to file a civil suit accusing him of illegally passing along ”insider” stock trading information to others.
Black-Hispanic coalitions appear both rare and fragile, with competition for the same economic and political base breeding hostility more often than cooperation. Despite advances in Chicago, Boston and a few other cities, inquiries suggest that an atmosphere of detente rather than unity usually surrounds black-Hispanic voting blocs.
AIDS can be spread heterosexually and transmitted even before a person shows outward manifestations of the disease, according to new evidence. A team of doctors from the University of Miami and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said the evidence came from two of the most unusual cases of acquired immune deficiency syndrome reported to date — a Florida couple in their 70’s who had been married for 50 years.
The slayer of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk of San Francisco is scheduled to be released from prison tomorrow, and many people are angry and bitter that he served less than five years and two months after admitting the 1978 murders. There are predictions that the murderer, former Supervisor Dan White, faces danger.
Only a last- minute dive prevented a collision by two Pan American World Airways passenger jets carrying 496 people, officials said today. They said air traffic controllers mistakenly directed the two planes to intersecting flight paths. Reports placed the jets as close as 50 feet and as far apart as 600 feet before one pilot veered to the right and put his craft into a dive about 200 miles east of Miami over the Atlantic New Year’s Day. The area is outside the radar coverage of the Miami control center, but still within the center’s air space, said Roger Myers, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman in Atlanta.
”They both shouldn’t have been assigned the same altitude,” said Jim Reilly, manager of the Air Route Traffic Control Center here. Somewhere along the line, we goofed up here.” The point of the near miss was 20 miles beyond the Miami radar coverage, Mr. Reilly said. It is also where two teams of controllers transfer responsibility for the planes. An aviation agency spokesman in Washington, Dennis Feldman, said the planes were a Boeing 747 from London to Miami, and a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 charter from New York to St. Martin.
A military attack warning was accidentally sent to county emergency officials across Pennsylvania today. In the Allentown area, sirens were sounded and police and fire departments were alerted. The warning was sent by mistake by the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency as technicians tried to duplicate a stored message for the agency’s new computer system, officials said. The technicians realized the error immediately and county aides were notified by messages and phone calls to disregard the message, officials said.
Three Vietnam veterans, patients at a Veterans Administration hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts, surrendered today and were charged with burning a small Buddhist temple in the remote Berkshire hamlet of Hawley. Telephone calls made by an anonymous caller before the fire on New Year’s Eve had warned fire officials and reporters that a ”Vietnamese pagoda” would be destroyed as an act of revenge against Vietnamese refugees. The caller said the refugees received better treatment than veterans of the Vietnam War. The surrender of the men, who were on weekend leave from the hospital when the arson occurred, was arranged by William F. Martin, president of the Massachusetts Council of Vietnam Veterans of America, a national organization that has lobbied for better treatment of Vietnam veterans. One of the suspects had called him seeking help, the authorities said.
An attorney for a man paralyzed from the neck down by a gunshot told a Dallas jury hearing a $43 million lawsuit today that the makers and sellers of a .22-caliber pistol should be held liable. The trial opened today. Windle Turley, representing 22-year-old David Duane Clancy of Amarillo, Texas, told a State District Court jury that the cheap pistol had no useful purpose other than ”the wrongful killing and injury of human beings.” But a lawyer for the Zale Corporation, a defendant, said that to hold the marketer liable would be like holding an automobile dealership responsible for injuries inflicted by a drunken driver.
A federal district judge in Nashville, Tennessee ordered Henry Lee McDonald to put a sign in his front yard for 30 days declaring in 4-inch letters that he ”is a thief.” Judge L. Clure Morton instructed Mr. McDonald to erect the sign as part of his three-year probation for receiving and concealing a stolen car. Mr. McDonald, 34 years old, of Jamestown, pleaded guilty Tuesday. ”A special condition of probation is that defendant shall erect a 5-by-4-foot sign in front of his house at the edge of Highway 127,” the order read. The sign must be painted black and have 4-inch white capital letters saying: ”Henry Lee McDonald bought a stolen car. He is a thief.” The sign must remain 30 days, the order added. Mr. McDonald could have been sentenced to up to five years in a federal prison.
Ten Vietnamese refugee families who were placed in public housing in Houston by an official accused of accepting bribes will be ordered out of the apartments, officials said today. They were the last of an original group of 24 Vietnamese-speaking families who received apartments in the 1,000-unit Allan Parkway Village housing complex through Steve Phuc, a former assistant for the housing authority. He was dismissed in August after several families said in affidavits that he accepted money to provide the housing. Even though the families may qualify for the housing, they will have to move because they were permitted to move in without authorization, Esther de Ipolyi, a spokesman for the agency, said today.
“Night Court” starring Harry Anderson, created by comedy writer Reinhold Weege, premieres on NBC TV; runs for 9 seasons.
Adrian Dantley ties Wilt Chamberlain’s NBA record for most free throws made in a game by converting 28 of 29 free throws in Utah’s 116-111 win over Houston at Las Vegas.
Edmonton beats Minnesota 12-8 highest-scoring modern NHL game.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1269.05 (+16.31).
Born:
Jiří Hudler, Czech NHL right wing and centre (NHL Champions, Stanley Cup-Detroit, 2008; Detroit Red Wings, Calgary Flames, Florida Panthers, Dallas Stars), in Olomouc, Czechoslovakia.
Mike Williams, NFL wide receiver (Detroit Lions, Tennessee Titans, Oakland Raiders, Seattle Seahawks), in Tampa, Florida.
John Raynor, MLB pinch hitter and outfielder (Pittsburgh Steelers), in Memphis, Tennessee.
Robin Sydney, American actress, in Boulder, Colorado.
History Diaries 