Secretary of State George P. Shultz called on Moscow to join the United States in a new, more comprehensive dialogue on arms control and other East-West issues. His address in Stockholm at the opening round of the East-West conference on security in Europe was consistent with President Reagan’s call on Monday for a more constructive Soviet-American relationship. The only new detail offered by Mr. Shultz was an announcement that the United States planned to offer a draft treaty for “the complete and verifiable elimination of chemical weapons on a global basis” at the disarmament conference in Geneva in a few months. Work has been proceeding at the 40-nation conference in Geneva on banning all chemical weapons, although Mr. Shultz acknowledged at a press conference after the speech that verification measures would be difficult.
On the other arms control issues that have drawn considerable attention in recent months, Mr. Shultz noted that Moscow had “interrupted” three of the major negotiations by either quitting them altogether, as at the intermediate-range missile talks, or by refusing to set a date for their resumption, as at the strategic arms talks and the negotiations on reducing conventional forces.
Mr. Shultz said that, in addition to seeking arms control progress, the United States seeks “to engage the Soviet Union in a candid dialogue on those regional crises and conflicts that threaten peace and poison our relationship.” At the same time, he said, the United States has proposed some steps to improve communication with the Russians “to build confidence and reduce any chance of misunderstanding or miscalculation.”
Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang urged the Soviet Union and the United States to agree on “drastically reducing nuclear arms” so that other nuclear powers, including China, can eventually disarm jointly. Zhao, making the first address by a Communist leader to the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, endorsed Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s initiative for reducing world tensions, but he did not commit China to five-nation disarmament talks proposed by Trudeau.
President Reagan meets with Special Representative Paul Nitze to discuss a new offer to resume I.N.F. (Intermediate Range Nuclear Force) negotiations. Bypassing the Geneva talks on medium-range missiles in Europe in an effort to break the stalemate in talks with the Soviet Union, a possibility that has reportedly been discussed within the Reagan Administration, is opposed by Paul H. Nitze, the chief United States negotiator.
Iraqi warplanes today mounted their first attack on Iranian positions in a month, striking at troop concentrations in the central sector of the Persian Gulf war front, the High Command said. The Iraqi jets mounted heavy attacks, scoring “direct and effective hits” and suffering no losses, it said in a communique. The last Iraqi air raid was on December 15, against the city of Ilam in southwestern Iran and the border town of Dehloran in what a military spokesman said was retaliation for bomb blasts in Kuwait on December 12.
Reductions were reported in two of the military contingents of the four-nation peacekeeping force in Beirut. Italian military officials said that 150 soldiers arrived back in Italy, the first round of a previously announced cut in the size of the Italian force. In Paris, French military sources said that, as planned, 480 French soldiers in the Beirut force have been transferred to the U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. That leaves 5,120 peacekeeping troops in the Beirut area — 1,800 U.S. Marines, 1,270 French, 1,950 Italians and 100 British.
U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar offered to convene a U.N.-sponsored Mideast conference to help mediate solutions to the region’s problems. Perez de Cuellar, who is in Casablanca, Morocco, for a summit meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, made his proposal in an interview with the official Moroccan news agency. He said there are many proposals regarding the Mideast but no forum in which to discuss them.
Guerrillas fighting for independence in the province of Eritrea have opened a major offensive against Government forces, starting “intense” combat in northern Ethiopia, relief agency sources said today. The guerrillas said they overran a vital Government garrison town and several smaller villages in the dry-season push. The offensive is the latest outbreak of fighting in the long guerrilla war. Eritrean separatists have been battling the Ethiopian Government for some 22 years. Diplomats in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, said last week that Ethiopian forces had been placed on alert in Eritrea. Relief agency sources based in Asmara, the capital of the northern province, said Government forces moved out during the weekend to counterattack. The sources confirmed statements by the rebels that Ethiopian fighter-bombers had attacked villages near the border with the Sudan.
The death toll reached 25 as savage winter weather swept the British Isles for the fifth day. Five crew members of a Belgian trawler were added to the list of dead after a three-day search failed to find any sign of them. The blizzards and gales are expected to continue for the rest of the week, with freezing temperatures as far south as London. Most Scottish highways were closed and all ferry service to Britain was suspended. In Northern Ireland, a police spokesman said, “It’s been one of the worst storms in living memory.”
Ireland disavowed a statement by the nation’s Roman Catholic primate expressing limited support for Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich noted in a nationwide broadcast that Sinn Fein militants “involve themselves in the north in housing, in agitation for local benefits and for local improvements of the environment.” He said that joining for these reasons “may be morally justified.” However, the government of Ireland issued a statement saying that Sinn Fein has “declared its support for a campaign of murder and intimidation…. The government (does) not believe that ancillary political activities can ever provide grounds for support.”
Food price increases, delayed and cut back after a public outcry, will go into effect January 30 and average 10 percent, the Government spokesman, Jerzy Urban, said today. The increases, about a third lower than first proposed in November, were approved by the Cabinet yesterday and will increase the cost of living by up to 3.5 percent, Mr. Urban said. The Government took the unprecedented step of consulting the nation about the increases after strong opposition to them from the public. Opponents of the increases charged that they would inflict hardship on the elderly and lower-paid workers. The authorities said the increases, needed to reduce the burden of food subsidies, were worth $1.12 billion a year to the economy, offset by about $470 million in aid to the needy. Increases on some staples, including margarine, cooking oil, cottage cheese and low-grade beef, were scrapped altogether, and the rise in the price of bread was cut.
Soviet aircraft stationed in Vietnam have the ability to attack American military bases in the Philippines, an officer of the U.S. 7th Fleet said. The officer, who declined to be identified, said in Manila aboard the fleet’s flagship, the Blue Ridge, that a squadron of nine to 12 Soviet TU-16 Badgers could attack Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base using cruise missiles or nuclear bombs. The Soviet planes have been based since mid-November at Cam Ranh Bay, a former U.S. base.
A British-Chinese agreement on the future of Hong Kong after Britain’s lease on the crown colony expires in 1997 should be reached now, a senior Chinese official said. Ji Pengfei, who directs the Government’s Office of Hong Kong and Macao Affairs, said the “time is ripe” for such an agreement. He detailed what appeared to be Peking’s plan for running Hong Kong.
Opposition leaders in Nicaragua expressed doubt about elections that the ruling Sandinistas say will be held in 1985. Hernaldo Zuniga Montenegro, president of the Conservative Democrats, the country’s oldest party, said that a faction of his group wants to boycott the elections, fearing that they will be set up in a way that will legitimize continued Sandinista rule. Enrique Bolanos, head of the country’s main private business group, said, “They are doing this (announcing elections) just to put up a front and fool the world.”
An $11 million Canadian lottery prize is waiting for the holder of the winning ticket to claim it. The prize is the largest for the holder of a single ticket in North American lottery history. It is possible that United States Customs officials might have confiscated the winning ticket under a 1930 law banning the importation of lottery tickets.
Supporters of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s party rampaged through Calcutta today, setting fire to five buses and damaging others to protest the arrest of some party leaders. One person was wounded when the police fired shots to disperse the mobs. Traffic in India’s most populous city was blocked for several hours by the violence, which was set off by the arrests yesterday of three youth leaders on charges of unlawful assembly, mischief and intimidation after a demonstration last Sunday against the visiting chief minister of Kashmir state, Farooq Abdullah. The flare-up followed violent clashes in Kashmir over the weekend between Mrs. Gandhi’s supporters and the police.
Nigeria’s economic recovery will take precedence over the return of the country to democratic rule, the head of Nigeria’s new military Government said. Major General Mohammed Buhari, who heads the Supreme Military Council, said that a democratic system might be restored but that it was too early to speak of a timetable or to suggest what form that democracy might take.
Private taping of TV programs by people who use their own video recorders does not violate Federal copyright law, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-to-4 decision. Nor do companies that make and sell the video recorders violate the copyright law by making them available to the public, the Court held. The industry, with more than $1 billion in yearly domestic sales of video recorders and tapes, had operated under a legal cloud since a 1981 decision by a Federal appeals court in California. That court ruled that the Sony Corporation of America, which markets the Betamax video recorder, infringed the copyrights owned by two Hollywood movie studios by enabling home television viewers to record movies without paying royalties. In overturning that decision today, in an opinion by Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court suggested that the appropriate avenue of redress for the entertainment industry was Congress.
President Reagan participates in a Cabinet Council meeting about Western Water Policies.
President Reagan is “moving toward” proposing additional steps to curb acid rain in a program that would cost substantially less than one previously advocated by the Environmental Protection Agency, an Administration official said today. The official said, however, that Mr. Reagan told senior members of his Administration today, including some members of the Cabinet, that he had not decided how big a program he wanted and that would not make up his mind until after he had met with a group of Governors on Friday. The President’s comments were said to have come at a meeting of his Cabinet Council on Natural Resources, at which he heard the latest version of the environmental agency’s proposals to deal with a problem that has become a lively political issue in the Northeast and Middle West. An earlier plan put forward by William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, would have adopted a limited approach to reducing sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants and factories in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York and several other states.
The President and First Lady attend a reception for the organization “Citizens for the Republic.”
The Federal civil rights panel denounced the use of numerical quotas for the promotion of blacks and prodded the Supreme Court to take the same position. The United States Commission on Civil Rights, with a new majority firmly in control, abandoned the policy of its predecessor, which, like some Federal courts, had endorsed the use of racial quotas as a last resort to remedy effects of proven discrimination.
The Zimmer nuclear power plant near Cincinnati might be canceled. William H. Dickhoner, president of the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company, told the City Council that cancellation of the troubled plant was a distinct possibility.
The nuclear industry, shaken by the cancellation of one power plant and the government’s refusal to license another, got more bad news from a government report showing three-fourths of the nation’s reactors have cost consumers at least double what was promised. The Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration said the final construction costs for 77% of the plants now operating were at least double the pre-construction estimates. In 28% of the cases, the agency said, the final cost was more than four times the original estimate. The agency blamed inflation, construction costs and long building delays.
Common Cause said political action committee spending figures for 1982 bolster its argument that PACS “distort and undermine” democracy by giving incumbent candidates a 3.4 to 1 advantage over challengers. The self-styled citizens’ lobby released statistics showing that more than 1,200 of 3,371 PACS reporting spent 80% or more of their contributions on incumbent members of Congress. At a Washington news conference, Common Cause President Fred Wertheimer called PACS an “ugly” but legal method of buying influence in Congress.
Iowa’s caucuses can be held February 20 despite court action by three Democratic Party activists to have them postponed, a federal judge in Des Moines ruled.
Georgia’s death penalty was challenged by lawyers for a black man convicted of murdering a white man. In a case that might affect scores of death row inmates, the lawyers attempted to persuade a federal appeals court to order a hearing on whether the state’s death penalty is applied in an arbitrary and unconstitutional manner.
The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that a shopping mall can prohibit the National Organization for Women from collecting petition signatures or distributing literature on its property. The decision ordered a lower court to dissolve an earlier injunction that had given the Connecticut chapter of NOW limited access to the Westfarms Mall in Hartford against the owner’s wishes. NOW had argued that its guarantee of free speech allowed petition and information activities, even on private property.
A federal jury in New Orleans awarded $250,000 to a Louisiana woman who had sought $100 million for the death of her parents in the nation’s second-worst air disaster. The verdict settled the first of 180 pending damage suits that seek more than $5.5 billion for survivors of 154 persons killed when a Pan American World Airways jetliner crashed on July 9, 1982, during a severe storm shortly after takeoff from New Orleans International Airport. Pan Am’s insurer and the government have admitted liability, so juries will decide only how much money to award.
At least 49,000 persons have applied in the last two days for 300 Chicago-area mail-handling jobs, the Postal Service said. Thousands of people lined up before dawn Monday in zero cold when the applications were first handed out. Postal Service officials said the rush was continuing and they expected more before Friday, when the application period ends. The jobs, which pay nearly $21,000 annually, will be awarded on the basis of a competitive exam.
An 18-year-old man charged with killing a newspaper editor and the editor’s wife and son left a note saying, “I haven’t killed nobody,” then hanged himself in his jail cell in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with a strip of torn mattress cloth, authorities said. Police said Calvin D. Perry III had confessed to the beating deaths of Daniel Osborne, 35, his wife, Jane, 34, and their son, Ben, 11. The bodies were found in the family home September 19.
An attorney for the People’s Republic of China asked a federal judge in Birmingham, Alabama, to set aside a $43-million judgment against China over defaulted railroad bonds held by more than 200 Americans, saying the ruling would create “diplomatic problems of the first order” if allowed to stand. U.S. District Judge U. W. Clemon took the case under advisement, promising to rule within 30 days. The railroad bonds were issued in 1911 by the Imperial Chinese government and have been in default since 1930. The communists and the current government did not take power until 1949.
Lower cholesterol levels in the blood help to prevent heart attacks, a 10-year federally sponsored study has shown. The study, which is considered conclusive, was conducted among 3,806 middle-aged men with abnormally high cholesterol levels. It found that for every 1 percent reduction in cholesterol, there was a 2 percent decline in the rate of coronary heart disease.
A doctoral student expelled by Stanford University last year for his activities in China has appealed to the school’s president for reinstatement. Stephen W. Mosher, a former graduate student in anthropology, said yesterday that unless he was readmitted to the doctoral program, he would sue the university. Mr. Mosher recently retained Melvin Belli, the San Francisco lawyer, to represent him.
“Nineteen Eighty-Four” is the nation’s fastest-selling book, 35 years after it first appeared on the best-seller lists. George Orwell’s novel about a totalitarian future has been selling in three paperback versions and in hard-cover at the rate of more than 50,000 copies a day over the last several weeks in every section of the United States, publishing industry executives said.
Lucky, a loggerhead sea turtle that lost her flippers to a shark while frolicking with her mate, paddled triumphantly across a tank of water today with a pair of rubber flippers that had been attached in a $200,000 operation. “I love it, I love it!” shouted Dr. Patrick Barry, an orthopedic surgeon, after the 350-pound turtle was carried to the tank and began swimming. A crowd of about 100 people cheered. Lucky, 25 years old and pregnant, will remain about 30 days recuperating, then be tagged and released in the ocean. Lucky’s flippers were bitten off in the Florida Keys by a hammerhead shark. The team of surgeons led by Dr. Barry removed the stumps of the turtle’s front legs, drilled into the bones and inserted the metal pins that hold the flexible rubber fins in place. Doc Pingree, a spokesman for Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, estimated that his concern had spent $35,000 developing and making the fins.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1271.46 (+3.87).
Born:
Calvin Harris, Scottish DJ, singer-songwriter and producer (“I’m Not Alone; “We Found Love”), in Dumfries, Scotland, United Kingdom.
Mark Van Guilder, NHL centre (Nashville Predators), in Roseville, Minnesota.
Died:
Kostas Giannidis [Yannis Constantinidis], 80, Greek composer and pianist.
History Diaries 