A wider role for the Marines in Beirut is sought by the Lebanese Government, according to White House officials. They said Lebanon had asked that some of the American marines be shifted along the coast south of Beirut to support the Lebanese Army as it extends its authority. Administration officials said they doubted that the proposal would be accepted.
Lebanese factions have approved in principle a plan for establishing 700-yard-wide buffer zones to separate their warring forces, according to a government official. But he said the Druse were seeking clarification of some issues.
Security forces in Tunis fired over the heads of demonstrators amid renewed food riots that government officials say have killed 50 and injured hundreds more throughout the country. Witnesses said that crowds of young people were dispersed by troops when they tried to enter downtown Tunis through markets north and south of the city. The protests, over the doubling in prices for bread and other cereal products, forced the deployment of troops and armored vehicles to seal off the city’s Arab quarter.
The German deputy of U.S. General Bernard W. Rogers, supreme commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces, has been dismissed by the West German defense minister, a spokesman said. Military sources said that Lieutenant General Guenter Kiessling, 58, had requested an early retirement from his post as Rogers’ deputy. Kiessling, however, was dismissed as of December 31, after he reportedly quarreled with Defense Minister Manfred Woerner. Kiessling was assigned to the NATO job in April, 1982. His regular term of duty was to have ended in 1985.
Officials at Peugeot’s strike-bound Talbot car plant west of Paris abandoned attempts to restart production and announced that they are shutting down the factory after 55 people were injured in fresh violence among workers. About 1,500 riot police were called to the plant after clashes between a few hundred strikers and many of the 17,000 employees who want to resume work. Management had tried for three days to resume production, which has been halted since December 9 by a walkout over job cuts.
Italian police have arrested five men, including four former Sardinian shepherds, and charged them with the kidnapping of a jewelry company heiress and her teenage son whose ear was cut off before they were freed on Christmas Eve. The five men are accused in the November 19 abduction of Anna Bulgari Calissoni, 56, of the Bulgari jewelry family, and her son, Giorgio, 16, who were released after a ransom demand was met. Italian officials say they believe that former Sardinian shepherds are involved in some of the most active kidnapping rings in Italy.
A major Central America aid plan is expected to be recommended by a Presidential commission, according to commission officials. They said the panel was moving toward agreement on a plan for the United States to give $1 billion a year in economic and military aid to Central American countries, excluding Nicaragua, over 10 to 15 years.
U.S.-backed rebels attacked the Nicaraguan port of Potosi a few hours before President Reagan’s envoy Richard B. Stone arrived in Managua for talks with the leftist Sandinista government, military sources said. They reported that Potosi, 110 miles northwest of the capital, was strafed and shelled by at least two planes, two speedboats and one gunboat. One man was killed and eight wounded, and the customs house and a hospital were severely damaged, the sources said.
A Grenadian doctor said today that under pressure from the army he made up a cause-of-death certificate for Prime Minister Maurice Bishop without seeing the body. The doctor, Jensen Ottaway, told reporters he was summoned by the military ruler, General Hudson Austin, two days after he took power in a coup and told to perform a post-mortem on 15 bodies. But he said he saw only six bodies, most of them of soldiers, at a funeral parlor.
He said that when he asked for the other nine, including those of Mr. Bishop and his Cabinet colleagues, “Austin told me they were all disposed of, buried, and the idea is that I make up something to show they were part of the firing.” “I gave them a statement summarizing the post mortems. I had no option,” he said. The short-lived military Government overthrown in late October’s United States invasion said Mr. Bishop and several Cabinet ministers died when they led supporters into the Fort Rupert army barracks and shooting broke out. Some witnesses have said Mr. Bishop and his colleagues surrendered to the soldiers when the army stormed Fort Rupert and were later executed. Their bodies have not been found.
President Reagan, in a radio speech broadcast by the Voice of America, appealed to the people of Cuba tonight to realize that their leaders had betrayed them and that Cubans were not being told the truth about their country’s actions around the world. “Since 1959 you’ve been called upon to make one sacrifice after another,” Mr. Reagan said in the broadcast, which was recorded at the White House. “And for what? Doing without has not brought you a more abundant life. It has not brought you peace. And, most important, it has not won freedom for your people.” The President repeatedly asserted that the Cuban Government was leaving its people in ignorance about political prisoners, the failures of Communism and about the United States role in invading the Caribbean island of Grenada last October.
Mr. Reagan said, “Cuban lives could have been saved if your government had respected the will of the Grenadian people and not ordered your soldiers to fight to the death” on behalf of the Grenada regime. “Fortunately, the great majority of your personnel in Grenada did not obey those orders,” Mr. Reagan added. The Grenadian Government under Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was a staunch Cuban ally. Mr. Bishop was overthrown in a coup led by hard-liners and killed by Grenadian soldiers on October 19. The United States invasion began six days later. The Cuban Government made it clear, however, that it was unhappy with Mr. Bishop’s ouster and the group that replaced him. The Administration has said that United States forces found about 800 Cubans on the island, and that 24 were killed and 59 wounded in the invasion.
A former Argentine navy officer said that he participated in the kidnapping of 200 political detainees and witnessed their torture in the 1970s. Raul Vilarino told the magazine La Semana that detainees were suffocated in water and given electric shocks and that some were thrown alive out of aircraft into the River Plate after being drugged. The interview appeared as Emilio Massera, former Argentine navy commander, was arraigned by a military court on torture and mass-murder charges. He is the last of nine former junta members to be arraigned under orders of President Raul Alfonsin.
President Miguel de la Madrid warned that Mexico must swallow some bitter economic medicine in 1984 to help cure its staggering $84 billion debt and 80% inflation. “The crisis — we have to recognize — continues to affect us daily. Its most preoccupying manifestation is inflation,” De la Madrid said in a nationally televised New Year’s address. He said his government will try to halve the inflation rate but warned that “1984 cannot be a year of expansion… we have to be especially careful in avoiding worsening unemployment.”
The Indonesian Government denied responsibility today for the killing of more than 3,000 reputed criminals and members of underworld groups since April. It has been widely reported that the government approved the slayings in a campaign to reduce crime, and a statement today by the visiting Dutch Foreign Minister, Hans van den Broek, implicated Indonesia. In the government denial, Information Minister Harmoko said, “In accordance with repeated explanation given by the authorities, the killings were the results of gang fights or because the criminals or suspected criminals resisted arrest by authorities.”
The Tanzanian radio said today that 20,000 ethnic Rwandans had fled into western Tanzania from their homes in Uganda. The broadcast gave no reason for the sudden influx, but reports from southern Uganda last month said many ethnic Rwandans had fled their villages because of ethnic violence. Most were believed to be Ugandan citizens whose families had lived for generations in Uganda, where ethnic Rwandans form a community of 500,000.
Paul Thayer was accused of having helped eight people make $1.9 million in stock-trading profits by illegally giving them “insider” information before he became Deputy Defense Secretary. The charge was made by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which said that among the eight people was a woman with whom Mr. Thayer had a “private, personal relationship.”
President Reagan attends a meeting with agricultural leaders about Food and Agricultural policy.
President Reagan records birthday wishes for Cary Grant on his 80th.
Residues of a carcinogen have been found by Federal investigators in samples of some foods around the country, according to officials of the Environmental Protection Agency. William D. Ruckelshaus, administrator of the agency, said his staff was pressing efforts to set a guideline for a maximum safe level for the cancer-causing pesticide, ethylene dibromide, in foods that the states could use in deciding whether to order the products withdrawn.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights should make major changes in its programs in an effort to examine possible adverse effects of affirmative action, racial quotas, court-ordered busing and bilingual education, according to the commission’s new staff director, Linda Chavez. Miss Chavez chose as the panel’s general counsel Mark R. Disler, a Justice Department lawyer who said he opposes mandatory busing, quotas and other “racial preferences.”
Fallout from 1950s nuclear testing in Nevada does not appear to have caused a significant increase in childhood leukemia deaths in neighboring Utah, according to a new analysis by National Cancer Institute scientists. The report, to be published today in Science magazine, contradicts findings in an earlier study that blamed fallout for a marked increase in leukemia deaths in Utah. About 1,200 persons have sued the federal government, alleging fallout from above-ground nuclear weapons tests caused cancer and other diseases. U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins has yet to render a decision in the 1982 trial in Salt Lake City.
The decline in the national infant mortality rate in the last five years masks a widening gap between the mortality rates of black babies and white babies, a nonprofit research group said. The Food Research and Action Committee blamed the growing disparity on the 1981-82 recession and cuts in health-care spending for the poor. Nancy Amidei, the group’s executive director, said in 36 states and 16 major cities surveyed the 1982 rate for whites was 9.9 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared to 19.3 per 1,000 for blacks. The black rate was 86% higher than the white rate in 1978 and 95% higher in 1982. The overall national infant mortality rate was 11.2 deaths per 1,000 in 1982 and 13.1 per 1,000 in 1979.
The Environmental Protection Agency moved to impose a total ban in two years on the use of the soil fumigant DBCP, but said it was still studying what action to take against the more widely used chemical EDB. Laboratory tests indicate both are cancer-causing. DBCP, or dibromochloropropane, is used to control root worms in Hawaiian pineapple fields. The state of Florida recently ordered products ranging from cornmeal to pancake mix off grocery shelves after finding small amounts of the fumigant EDB, or ethylene dibromide, in the foods.
Oilmen bid cautiously to explore two newly opened areas off the Florida Gulf coast, offering $310,586,261 in high bids for 156 tracts at a federal government lease sale in New Orleans. The Interior Department has a few weeks to decide whether to accept the high bids for oil and natural gas drilling leases on 156 tracts. Industry sources said earlier drilling in the area has proved unproductive.
The first black to head the nation’s largest police force was formally sworn in as New York police commissioner. Benjamin Ward, 57, said his appointment was something he had not thought possible when he joined the force as a patrolman in 1951. “In 1951, I couldn’t even dream of this. Nor could many others. Who would have believed that there would be a Jewish mayor (Edward I. Koch) who would replace an Irish commissioner (Robert McGuire) with a black man?” he said. Ward had served as corrections commissioner since 1979.
A hospital report shows that chemotherapy is helping Pamela Hamilton, a 13-year-old preacher’s daughter who had to be forced by court order to accept treatment for bone cancer. Pamela’s father, fundamentalist minister Larry Hamilton, said previously that he would drop his legal challenge to treatment if doctors at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis said the 13-year-old girl was improving. Although the report was positive, the family’s attorney said he couldn’t say whether he would advise the Hamiltons to drop the case.
Brain tumors could be detected sooner and treated successfully if people notice one of the first signs — loss of smell. Patients usually lose their sense of smell years before a brain scan reveals presence of a growth, Dr. Louis Bakay of State University of New York in Buffalo said in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Delayed diagnosis is inexcusable in modern medicine, Bakay said.
An innovative medical care system for the poor in Arizona is plagued by large cost overruns and charges of corruption and mismanagement. The cost of administering the system, which seeks to cut the price of health care by spurring competition among doctors and hospitals, is said to be over four times the amount predicted. Nonetheless, many physicians say they believe that some of the innovations offer hope for lowering the cost of health care.
An electronic system to aid the blind has generated a dispute at the University of New Mexico. Blind students have started testing a new electronic travel device that its inventor says could significantly improve the mobility of people with little or no eyesight. But the undertaking is vigorously opposed by the New Mexico affiliate of the National Federation of the Blind on the ground that it suggests the blind can function only with the help of complicated technological devices.
Mobil agreed to surrender oil rights worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the State of Texas and a South Texas rancher in settling a long and bitter dispute.
The number of high school dropouts rose sharply from 1972 to 1982, according to the Federal Education Department. Nationally, the department said, 77.2 percent of the students were graduated in 1972 while only 72.8 were graduated in 1982.
Fewer new cases of AIDS were reported in the United States in the second half of 1983 than in the first half of the year. However, Federal health officials cautioned that it was too early to draw conclusions about a long-term trend.
The New York Yankees sign veteran free agent Phil Niekro to a 2-year contract, giving the club 6 starting pitchers. Dave Righetti will move to the bullpen to ease the logjam and to fill the void that will be left by the departure of Rich Gossage, who says he will not re-sign with New York.
The Chicago Cubs sign free agent Richie Hebner, late of the Pirates.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1282.24 (+13.19). The New York Stock Exchange trades a record 160 million shares.
Born:
Amanda Hearst, American heiress, daughter of Anne Hearst, the niece of Patty Hearst, and a great-granddaughter of media mogul William Randolph Hearst, in New York, New York.
Corey Potter, NHL defenseman (New York Rangers, Pittsburgh Penguins, Edmonton Oilers, Boston Bruins, Calgary Flames, Nashville Predators), in Lansing, Michigan.
History Diaries 