More military aid for El Salvador will be sought by the Reagan Administration, according to a White House official. He said officials were preparing to ask Congress for $250 million more in military aid in the present fiscal year, nearly four times the current level. He also said the Administration planned to seek about $350 million in military aid for El Salvador in the next fiscal year.
A report on Central America issued Wednesday by a Presidential advisory commission was challenged by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The New York Senator said he found no evidence in the report to support the panel’s position that a Soviet-Cuban challenge in the region represented a serious threat to United States security.
Nicaraguan troops killed a U.S. pilot Wednesday, a Pentagon official said. The White House called the slaying of an Army helicopter pilot near the border between Honduras and Nicaragua “reckless and unprovoked” and said the United States expected both an explanation of the slaying and an assurance that there would be no similar incident in the future.
Heavy artillery battles were fought by Lebanese soldiers and Druse militiamen around Beirut. In Damascus, the special American envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, began talks with Syrian officials on efforts to separate Lebanon’s battling factions.
An early withdrawal of U.S. Marines from Beirut would result in a bloodbath and attempts by thousands of Lebanese to flee their country, Lebanon’s ambassador to Washington warned. Abdullah Bouhabib, an American-educated economist, said at a Times Washington Bureau breakfast that Lebanon has no intention of asking the United States to increase its troop commitment to the four-nation Beirut peace force. Although political and congressional pressures are building for a Marine pullout, the envoy said he believes that Reagan will keep the Marines in Lebanon until they restore stability or until April, 1985, when the Congress-mandated limit for their deployment expires.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir vowed to sustain Israel’s settlement drive in the occupied territories despite substantial cuts in government spending. The pledge came hours after Finance Minister Yigal Cohen-Orgad said that spending on new settlements in the occupied West Bank will be cut “considerably more” than in other areas of the government’s austerity budget. Although not specifying how the funding will be obtained, Shamir told officials of his Herut Party that there will be no freeze in settlements in the territories.
George P. Shultz sought to persuade American and European public opinion that the Reagan Administration is sincere in wanting to reach agreements with the Kremlin. At two news conferences, Secretary of State Shultz said he was ready to discuss all East-West issues “in a constructive spirit” when he meets with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko next week in Stockholm.
The Polish government announced food price boosts averaging 9% after bowing to a public outcry over increases of 10-15% outlined in November. Even so, the moderated proposals drew immediate fire from the new government-controlled trade unions. The increases range from 8% for lard to 42% for ham. The plan leaves untouched the prices of such staples as vegetable oil, margarine, cottage cheese and low-quality beef. Rationing will continue for basics such as meat, flour, sugar, rice and other grains. The government has raised food prices three times since imposing martial law in December, 1981.
The mother of imprisoned Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky said her son is emaciated beyond recognition and in constant pain but authorities refuse to hospitalize him. Ida Milgrom, 75, said she was permitted one of two yearly visits to her 35-year-old son last week at the Chistopol Prison, 500 miles east of Moscow. “He was totally unrecognizable,” Milgrom said. “His cheeks were sunken, his lips were withered… For the entire two hours, I couldn’t talk. I just looked.” Shcharansky, a human rights activist, was sentenced to three years in prison and 10 years in a labor camp in 1977 on charges of spying for the CIA.
Retired West German General Gert Bastian, one of the Greens party’s most prominent legislators, threatened to quit the leftist party over tendencies toward anti-Americanism and violence by some members of the group. Bastian, in newspaper and television interviews, complained of “surprising success” by Communist-influenced members in changing party policies of pacifism and neutrality. Bastian said the majority of Greens “do want to hold both superpowers equally responsible for the present state of over-armament and want both sides to achieve disarmament.”
Former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing. under attack for his role in the so-called sniffer-plane case, has denounced President Francois Mitterrand. “Francois Mitterrand is no longer qualified to represent the unity of the country,” Mr. Giscard d’Estaing said Wednesday. “When the President of the Republic allows his predecessor to be attacked, he is responsible.” The government has accused Mr. Giscard d’Estaing of covering up losses of hundreds of millions of dollars that the government oil company spent in the 1970’s on a prospecting technique – later shown to be a fraud – involving planes that were supposed to detect oil and gas deposits from the air.
An Australian woman has given birth to the world’s first baby conceived from an egg taken from another woman and fertilized in a test tube by her husband’s sperm, her doctor said in Melbourne. Dr. Carl Wood, head of the in vitro fertilization team at Queen Victoria Hospital, said the healthy boy was born in November. The news was withheld to protect the privacy of his family and the egg donor — a 29-year-old woman who herself tried unsuccessfully to have a baby through in vitro fertilization. Wood said that perfection of the new technique means almost any woman can now bear a child.
A sailing boat off the coast of Cuba sent out a distress signal Wednesday night saying it was “being attacked and shot on,” according to the captain of a nearby passenger ship, who said he relayed the distress call to the Miami Coast Guard. The passenger ship’s captain reported that “after that message no further contact” was made with the vessel in distress, which the Coast Guard identified as the New Zeland. A spokesman for the ship’s captain said the New Zeland was reportedly “in the three-mile limit in Cuban territory waters.” A Coast Guard official in Miami said that, because the vessel was not in international waters, the Coast Guard did not start a rescue operation, but notified the State Department. Officials at the State Department and the Coast Guard could not identify what country the New Zeland was from, how many people were on board, or what became of the vessel. Both agencies declined further comment.
Students protesting the Sierra Leone Government’s economic policies rampaged through the capital of Freetown today, looting stores, commandeering buses and stoning a car carrying a Deputy Vice President, Christian Kamara Taylor, witnesses said. A boy was reported to have died in a hospital after he was shot in the shoulder by a store owner. The police fired tear gas at the students, who rioted at the start of a convention of the All People’s Congress, the governing party. As a result of the rampage, the convention site was shifted to a location outside the city. Witnesses said shopkeepers had opened fire on mobs trying to steal food and other goods from stores. Gunshots could be heard in the center of the city. Government sources said President Siaka Stevens had summoned an emergency Cabinet meeting.
President Reagan has breakfast with Premier Zhao of China.
President Reagan conducts a meeting with the Cabinet Council on Economic Affairs to craft monetary policy.
The President and First Lady attend the Kennedy Center for a live performance of “The Hasty Heart.”
Lowering cholesterol levels in the bloodstream reduced the rate of heart attacks and coronary heart disease in a high-risk group of middle-aged men, according to medical researchers who announced what they called the first conclusive evidence of the finding. Scientists cooperating in a 10-year, $150 million, nationwide study reported that use of a potent drug substantially cut both blood cholesterol levels and coronary heart disease in middle-aged men who had had very high cholesterol levels.
The bizarre death of a general at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio is prompting civilian and military investigators to try to unravel contradictory physical evidence and plumb the state of his mind. The 48-year-old reserve officer, Major General Robert G. Ownby Jr., was found dead early Wednesday, hanged by the neck, with his hands tied with a belt and a note pinned to his shirt.
Family woes in Silicon Valley are increasing, according to therapists and law-enforcement officials. The California region has been portrayed as the vision of the American post-industrial future and the epitome of American free enterprise. But experts say there are growing signs that working in a such a competitive, high-pressure environment is taking a large human toll in divorce, child abuse, alcoholism and drug use.
Paul E. Tsongas will not run for re-election this fall. The Massachusetts Senator, a liberal Democrat, cited a “chronic illness,” which he declined to define. The sudden announcement by the Senator, who had been expected to win easily in this heavily Democratic state, opens the way for a large field of Democratic candidates. “It will be a small army out there, with more candidates than you can shake a stick at,” said an aide to Governor Michael S. Dukakis. “This place is suddenly on fire.” Senator Tsongas, who is 42 years old, said his illness, “while serious,” would not have prevented him from running for re-election, nor from serving a second Senate term.
[Ed: Tsongas was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1983 and declined to seek re-election in 1984. He returned to politics after undergoing a successful bone marrow transplant. He experienced early success in the 1992 Democratic presidential primaries, winning the New Hampshire primary, but withdrew from the race in March 1992 and endorsed Clinton. An opponent of deficit spending, Tsongas co-founded the Concord Coalition. He died in 1997 of complications from pneumonia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.]
An overhaul of offshore oil leasing was announced by Interior Secretary William P. Clark. He said he was changing his department’s leasing program to increase public participation and offer more consideration of environmental concerns.
A study of Utah Mormons exposed to radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests in Nevada shows that they suffered more cancers than expected because of radiation, the survey’s author said. The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, covered 4,125 Mormons who lived in southwestern Utah from 1951 to 1962, when nuclear bombs were detonated over Nevada. The cancer rate of the study group was compared to that of all Utah Mormons, which account for nearly 75% of the state’s population. Dr. Carl J. Johnson of Denver, the study’s author, said they found 288 cases in the fallout group, 109 more cases than were expected. They included leukemia, lymphoma, breast cancer, bone cancer, brain tumors and other forms.
The Environmental Protection Agency acted “inconsistently” in probing allegations of internal wrongdoing in 1982, congressional auditors said, with an agency whistle-blower subject to intense surveillance while a political insider was given only a cursory glance. The General Accounting Office said investigations of Hugh Kaufman, an EPA employee critical of agency policies, were so intense that even an investigator complained. But a conflict-of-interest investigation of James W. Sanderson, a top aide to former EPA Administrator Anne McGill Burford, was concluded after a brief look at the charges, the agency said.
A federal appeals judge issued a stay of execution early today for convicted murderer James W. Hutchins, less than six hours before he was scheduled to die for the 1979 killing of three police officers. The stay was issued by Judge J. Dickson Phillips of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, after the North Carolina Supreme Court and a U.S. District Judge in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, had rejected appeals to delay the execution. Hutchins, 54, was scheduled to be killed at 6 a.m. with an injection of sodium thiopental and pavulon at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina.
A judge cleared the way for columnist Mike Royko to work for the Chicago Tribune, saying the Pulitzer Prize winner’s contract with the rival Chicago Sun-Times allowed him to resign and collect dismissal pay if the paper is sold. The Sun-Times was formally purchased this week by publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch.
Editorial employees of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat voted overwhelmingly to accept a new severance waiver, allowing magazine publisher Jeffrey M. Gluck to take over the morning paper February 25. It means that the Globe “is going to continue in operation,” a union official said. Earlier, employees had agreed to accept temporary pay cuts of 6% and deferral of wage increases totaling 9%. The city of St. Louis and the state of Missouri have sought a federal court order to keep the failing newspaper in operation.
An airman arrested after he brandished a knife at a preschool teacher will be charged with kidnapping and stabbing to death two boys from an Omaha suburb, a prosecutor said today. Patrick Kelly, the Sarpy County Attorney, said John J. Joubert, 20 years old, of Portland, Me., should be held without bond. He said the charges included two counts of first-degree murder, two of kidnapping and two of using a knife in the commission of a felony. The slayings of 13-year-old Danny Joe Eberle and 12-year-old Christopher Walden of Bellevue shocked the suburban community of 23,000. More than 100 officers took part in the four-month investigation. Airman Joubert, stationed at Offutt Air Force Base, headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, was arrested Wednesday, Mr. Kelly said, after he pulled a knife and threatened a preschool teacher who fled to a nearby parsonage and called the police.
Cleveland’s public schools will reopen today after a two-day “sickout” by custodial workers that forced administrators to cancel classes, Superintendent Frederick D. Holliday said. He added that no progress had been made in federally mediated negotiations with the unions and that no additional talks were scheduled. Union members have said the school board wants a September expiration date for their contract so that it can subcontract custodial work. Robert P. Duvin, a school attorney, said the average custodian earns $30,000 a year, with benefits worth $13,500.
A high-wire performer from Florida who once worked with Karl Wallenda plunged 150 feet to his death from a trapeze on a helicopter in Puerto Rico today as carnival spectators watched. Mr. Wallenda himself died in a plunge from a high wire in Puerto Rico in 1978. The performer, Frank Bunn, 43 years old, was on a trapeze suspended from the helicopter when he fell, the police said. The accident happened at a carnival in Carolina, 12 miles west of San Juan.
More than $100,000 in donations have been received at the Utah Wildlife Division in a national campaign to save tens of thousands of deer and other animals starving in Western grazing areas covered with snow. Some people were giving tons of livestock feed. “It’s just astounding,” said Walt Fitzgerald, a wildlife biologist, referring to the checks that began flooding into the division’s Salt Lake City offices Thursday.
Relief pitcher Rich “Goose” Gossage signs with the San Diego Padres.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1279.31 (+1.99).
Born:
Scott Olsen, MLB pitcher (Florida Marlins, Washington Nationals), in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Daniel Sepulveda, NFL punter (Pittsburgh Steelers), in Austin, Texas.
Robert Hite, NBA shooting guard (Miami Heat), in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Sam Richardson, American actor (“Ted Lasso”), in Detroit, Michigan.
History Diaries 