A Reagan Administration official said this week that President Reagan, in an effort to bolster plans for a strategic defense against nuclear missile attack, intended to speed research to “find out what emerging technologies hold some promise.” Merely to identify the most promising technologies “is going to take a long, long time,” the official said in a news briefing Wednesday, the contents of which were withheld from publication until today. The official, who was authorized to interpret recent speeches and remarks by President Reagan, also said it was wrong to believe that any United States defense against hostile missile attack could be deployed “in the short term.”
In a related development, General James Hartinger, commander of the Air Force Space Command, was asked in an interview Wednesday with The Washington Times whether it was feasible to develop the kind of missile defense that the President discussed in a major speech last March 23. “We don’t have the answers now,” General Hartinger replied, adding that in his opinion “we are looking at a revolutionary idea, but we should seek to get there in an evolutionary manner.” Such remarks, and a growing body of other evidence, seems to indicate that a group of technological and strategic conservatives in the Pentagon and the White House have prevailed over a coalition of political conservatives in the Administration and Congress who are convinced that a crash program to deploy space-based missile defenses could be successfully undertaken within a relatively short time.
Three civilians were killed and eight wounded in clashes today between two pro-Syrian Lebanese militia forces in northern Lebanon. The Beirut radio said the battles, with heavy and light weapons, broke out between the Arab Knights militia force of the Arab Democratic Party and militia forces of the National Syrian Social Party. At the United States base at the Beirut International Airport, meanwhile, a Marine guard fired at a civilian vehicle that ignored orders to halt at the entrance, but no one was wounded and the vehicle turned out to be on an authorized visit, a Marine spokesman said. The Marine guard fired a single shot at the vehicle, a Land-Rover, which was carrying a driver and a Lebanese technician who was sent to make a routine inspection of airport radar inside the Marine compound, the spokesman said. The bullet pierced a front fender. “The vehicle drove through the gate at 15 m.p.h. and guards yelled halt six times before putting a single shot beside the radiator,” a Marine spokesman said.
The Islamic Conference voted to readmit Egypt. That nation’s membership had been suspended after it signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. “The conference invites Islamic Egypt to resume its membership in the Islamic Conference Organization,” a brief passage in the final document said. There was no mention of any conditions. The decision, reached at the end of a four-day meeting, followed an announcement from Cairo, after President Hosni Mubarak had met with his advisers, that the Egyptian Government would accept no conditions for its return. The decision also came after the representatives of three hardline Arab nations — Libya, Syria and Southern Yemen — walked out in protest.
The State Department accused Iran today of renewed persecution of Bahais and said more than 550 members of the religious faith were in prison. Alan D. Romberg, the State Department spokesman, said about 180 were arrested in November and December, most of them former elected members of Bahai organizations that disbanded in September after their activities were banned by Iran’s chief revolutionary prosecutor. Mr. Romberg said 70 more Bahais were arrested January 1-3.
Washington and Moscow made no progress toward a resumption of nuclear arms reduction talks during the five-hour meeting between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko of the Soviet Union on Wednesday. Mr. Shultz said that the meeting was worthwhile but that there had been “absolutely no movement” in resuming arms talks.
The Warsaw Pact may be willing to reopen the 10-year-old talks on limiting conventional forces in Europe, according to Western officials. The foreign ministers of Italy and West Germany said they left meetings with Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei A. Gromyko, with the impression that the Vienna negotiations on force reductions may resume in the coming months.
President Reagan holds a meeting with Prime Minister Lubbers of the Netherland.
Britain’s powerful printers’ union threw in the towel after a head-on clash with the courts that cost it nearly $1 million in fines, giving Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher her first major victory in her fight with unions over tough laws curbing their power. The National Graphical Association said in a statement that it will obey the laws because it cannot continue to function without its $14 million in assets, frozen by the courts. The dispute, over the hiring of non-union workers by a free-subscription weekly newspaper group in northern England, created the worst industrial violence since Thatcher took office in 1979.
West German General Guenter Kiessling turned to a civil court to fight his forced retirement, rejecting government allegations that he frequented gay nightclubs in Cologne and was therefore a security risk. The civil action came one day after Defense Minister Manfred Woerner told a parliamentary committee of the dismissal of the 58-year-old Kiessling, second in command at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to U.S. General Bernard W. Rogers.
The taking of hostages is “one of the most dramatic and potent forms of contemporary terrorism,” and the way to counter it is with good police intelligence, the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict said. The institute, which is directed by British academics, retired diplomats and military officers, analyzed 146 incidents of political hostage-taking in Europe over 12 years. Its report recommends no single course of action but instead suggests that flexibility and a knowledge of a terrorist group’s history are the keys to saving hostages’ lives.
The Vatican and the Communist government of Poland may establish diplomatic relations this year, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, primate of Poland’s Roman Catholic Church, said after talks at the Vatican with Pope John Paul II. “It is not to be excluded that they (relations) will be restored this year,” Glemp told reporters. Polish officials welcomed Glemp’s comments on the restoration of relations, which lapsed in 1939 after the Nazis invaded Poland. Predominantly Roman Catholic Poland would be the first Warsaw Pact nation to establish ties with the Vatican.
Sanctions against Poland were eased by the Reagan Administration because of “positive developments” in that country. In response to an appeal from Lech Walesa, the right of Polish fishing vessels to work in American waters and the right of a limited number of Polish charter flights to stop at United States airports were restored.
Japanese rescuers found a last survivor who spent 26 hours in a pocket of air while 83 co-workers died in a coal mine deep beneath the sea off the southern island of Kyushu. In all, 13 of the 96 miners trapped in Mitsui Mining Co.’s mine survived the blaze, which filled the shaft with smoke and carbon monoxide.
Amid fears of another violent upheaval, the capital of the state of Kashmir was shut down peacefully today by a one-day general strike called to protest demonstrations by supporters of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Kashmir is governed by the National Conference Party, an organization opposed to the Prime Minister’s Congress Party, and her opponents charge that she has brought about the current crisis in the state by trying to topple the state government. Nine of her party workers were killed in Kashmir over the weekend, heightening tension there. Reports from Srinagar, the state capital, said that all shops and businesses were closed today and that bus service was also halted.
A Scotland Yard official will come to Grenada, a Commonwealth country, to help investigate the killings of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and members of his Cabinet in the military coup last October, it was announced here today. Nicholas Brathwaite, head of the interim government, said he was unhappy about the delays in bringing charges against 32 detainees, including former Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard. Mr. Brathwaite did not name the official. Other sources said he would arrive next week. The coup against Mr. Bishop’s revolutionary government resulted from a feud with Mr. Coard. A military government took over after Mr. Bishop and others were slain. It ruled until the United States invasion of October 23.
A Salvadoran military court will investigate whether army Captain Eduardo Alfonso Avila, linked by subordinates to the 1981 slayings of two American labor advisers, was behind a 1982 car-bombing in Limon, Costa Rica, that killed a Cuban, according to a Western diplomat and a Salvadoran source. Avila, 37, has been jailed for an indefinite period. He was serving as a military attaché in Costa Rica at the time of the 1982 bombing.
Jacobo Timerman visited the site of a secret prison in Argentina where he said he was imprisoned and tortured by the military junta in the late 1970’s. Earlier in the day, the Government arrested the general who Mr. Timerman said ordered the torture. Mr. Timerman returned to Argentina after a three-year exile.
Corruption in Nigeria’s Government was one of the reasons it was overthrown, according to the leader of the coup there in December. Major General Mohammed Buhari, the nation’s new head of state has pledged to keep a keen eye on all ministers and all Government employees.
Nigeria’s Supreme Military Council approved a decree allowing authorities to detain people up to three months without formal charges on suspicion of security or economic offenses. The council also ordered the 18 Cabinet members sworn in by Nigeria’s new leader, General Mohammed Buhari, to declare their assets within six weeks. Among the Cabinet of seven military men and 11 civilians are Foreign Minister Ibrahim Gambari, director of Nigeria’s Institute of International Affairs, and Petroleum and Energy Minister Tam Sokari David-West, a former medical professor.
The National Urban League charged today that the Reagan Administration and Congress were displaying a complacency toward the plight of blacks and the economically deprived that bordered on “the callous.” Releasing its annual report on the “State of Black America,” the civil rights organization presented a bleak, strongly worded assessment in which it warned that poor blacks were being relegated to “an out-of-sight, out- of-mind” status in American life. “The state of black America is disastrous,” John E. Jacob, the league president, said in making the report public. “While white Americans celebrate a long-overdue economic recovery and a falling unemployment rate, black America is buried in a depression of crushing proportions. The plain ugly fact is that there is no recovery for black Americans.”
President Reagan has decided to appoint Ed Meese 3rd to succeed William French Smith as Attorney General for the United States. The announcement is planned for Monday.
Former Senator Harrison A. Williams Jr. (D-New Jersey) reported to the minimum-security federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, after losing a desperate last-minute bid to delay the start of a three-year jail term for his Abscam conviction. Earlier, a three-judge appeals court panel in Manhattan denied Williams’ motion for further delay of sentence. Williams, 64, was convicted almost three years ago of offering to use his influence to obtain government contracts for Arab sheiks, who actually were undercover FBI agents, in return for the sheiks’ financing of a mining venture.
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger refused to block a court order that could lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds for natural gas consumers nationwide. Burger left intact a federal appeals court ruling that natural gas prices since 1978 have been illegally higher than they should be. At issue is the ceiling prices producers are allowed to charge pipeline companies.
Walter F. Mondale, in one of his sharpest attacks on the Reagan Administration, said today that President Reagan and his appointees were “radicals” on the issue of women’s rights and “the Khomeinis of current American society.” At the same time, Mr. Mondale told a high school audience here that he favored “regulations” on snub-nosed guns but was opposed to controls on “regular” pistols and “long guns.” Aides said the comment was a reiteration of Mr. Mondale’s previous position on gun control and did not mark a shift on the issue, which is a highly emotional one in Iowa and New Hampshire, where there is strong sentiment against gun control. The two states hold the nation’s first Presidential caucus and primary contests next month.
Mr. Mondale’s comments came as the front-running candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination stepped up his verbal attacks on the Reagan Administration in a campaign swing through Iowa. On Wednesday and today, as Mr. Mondale criss-crossed the snow-covered state in a chartered plane and in automobiles, the Minnesotan appeared before high school, labor and farm groups to denounce the Reagan Administration’s foreign and domestic policies.
Bad news has followed John Glenn this week as he campaigned in the South. First came a poll suggesting that he lost support as a result of last weekend’s debate in Hanover, New Hampshire. Then came reports that a Glenn radio advertisement included interviews of voters taken after the debate, when in fact the interviews were conducted before the session. Last came the latest Gallup Poll results showing Walter F. Mondale leading the race for the Democratic nomination by 31 percentage points.
Access charges will be delayed for residential and small-business telephone customers. The charges, beginning at $2 a month for households and $6 for businesses with a single phone line, had been scheduled to take effect April 3. But a vote by the Federal Communications Commission postponed the imposition of the charges until 1985.
An Army Reserve general’s death was ruled a suicide, and not the work of terrorists. The medical examiner in Bexar County, Texas, said Major General Robert G. Ownby had not been beaten or otherwise subjected to violence from others. The general was found hanged near his office January 11, with two notes, purportedly from a terrorist group, pinned to his chest. Ownby, 48, was found dangling from a second-story landing in a headquarters building at Ft. Sam Houston early January 11, his hands bound behind his back with a belt. A typewritten note pinned to his sweater said he had been “sentenced and executed” for “crimes by the U.S. Army against the people of the world.”
A paralyzed woman has no right to make society help her commit suicide, the California Supreme Court agreed. The court upheld a lower court’s ruling that Riverside General Hospital is not required to comply with the request of Elizabeth Bouvia, a 26-year-old victim of cerebral palsy who wants to starve herself to death under medical supervision.
A 2½-year-old Miami girl whose dire need of a liver donor drew nationwide sympathy received a new organ in a 12½-hour transplant operation. Trine Engebretsen was reported in critical but stable condition, normal for recent transplant patients, in Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. Trine suffered from a rare and incurable liver disease and doctors had given her only a few weeks to live. As the girl held on, surgeons in the same hospital began a similar operation on Austin Szegda, 3, when the liver initially intended for Trine was found to be more suitable for him.
The Rev. Everett Sileven, locked in a battle with Nebraska authorities over his unaccredited church school in Louisville, fled the state again, then declared “war” on Nebraska and federal officials and called for a boycott of state businesses at a press conference in Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the Missouri River from Omaha. Supporters of the fundamentalist minister’s Faith Christian School contend that the state violates their constitutional right to freedom of religion by requiring the school to hire certified teachers and to comply with other education regulations.
In Knoxville, Tennessee, Pamela Hamilton’s parents, acknowledging that their “brave little girl” is getting better, today dropped their legal fight against court-ordered cancer treatments she is undergoing against her religious beliefs. The family attorney, James Bell said he had advised the Hamiltons they did not “have a legal leg to stand on” because Pamela, who is 13 years old, is responding well to the chemotherapy she has been getting since September. Pamela’s father, the Rev. Larry Hamilton, a fundamentalist, refused treatment for his daughter after she was diagnosed last July as having a rare bone cancer, Ewing’s Sarcoma. The state filed suit and a juvenile court judge declared Pamela a neglected child, placing her in the custody of the state for emergency treatment. Doctors said a tumor on her left leg has shrunk and her pain has eased.
Looking for new sources of income, the Tennessee Revenue Department has asked the state attorney general whether it can collect sales tax on a great American institution — Girl Scout cookies. “Can you see those girls keeping up with all those pennies in their grubby little hankies?” asked Girl Scout lawyer Penny Harrington. She said the Scouts will ask the Legislature for exemption. Last year’s cookie sales of $262,000 would have brought in $13,500 in sales taxes.
Computer companies are vying for prominent roles on the nation’s most prestigious campuses. The nation’s leading manufacturers are offering sharp discounts on their machines and multi-million-dollar research contracts to win the loyalties of the newest generation of potential computer users and talents of some of the world’s leading computer science research laboratories.
In a study raising concern about human infants whose mothers smoked in pregnancy, young rats whose mothers were exposed to moderate amounts of carbon monoxide in pregnancy had impaired memories and learning ability, researchers said today. “I think there’s reason to be concerned that the fetus may be particularly susceptible to carbon monoxide exposure,” said Laurence Fechter, a neurotoxicologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke displaces some oxygen in the blood, forming a compound called carboxyhemoglobin. Pregnant rats in the Johns Hopkins study were kept in a chamber with carbon monoxide levels that produced carboxyhemoglobin concentrations of 15.6 percent, similar to the upper levels of carboxyhemoglobin found in heavy smokers.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1266.02 (-3.35).
Born:
Elvis Dumervil, NFL defensive end and linebacker (Pro Bowl, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015; Denver Broncos, Baltimore Ravens, San Francisco 49ers), in Miami, Florida.
Nick Graham, NFL defensive back (Philadelphia Eagles, Indianapolis Colts), in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Thomas Vanek, Austrian National Team and NHL left wing (Olympics, 2014; NHL All-Star, 2009; Buffalo Sabres, New York Islanders, Montreal Canadiens, Minnesota Wild, Detroit Red Wings, Florida Panthers, Vancouver Canucks, Columbus Blue Jackets), in Baden bei Wien, Austria.
Johnny Boychuk, Canadian NHL defenseman (NHL Champions, Stanley Cup-Boston, 2011; Colorado Avalanche, Boston Bruins, New York Islanders), in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Euan Blair, eldest son of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in London, England, United Kingdom.
Died:
Max Bentley, 63, Canadian Hockey Hall of Fame center (Hart Trophy 1946; Chicago Blackhawks).
History Diaries 