“The only sane policy” for the United States and the Soviet Union is to assure that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” President Reagan declared. In his annual State of the Union Message, Mr. Reagan said the first item on his “agenda for peace” was to establish “a more stable basis for peaceful relations.” “Tonight, I want to speak to the people of the Soviet Union to tell them: It’s true our governments have had serious differences,” Mr. Reagan said. “But our sons and daughters have never fought each other in war. If we Americans have our way, they never will.” The section on relations with the Russians was consistent with the conciliatory note struck by Mr. Reagan in a speech on January 16, when he called for serious negotiations across the board between the Governments. Yuri V. Andropov, the Soviet leader, on Tuesday criticized the Administration’s policies but said the Soviet Union was always ready for meaningful negotiations.
President Reagan meets with joint leadership of Congress regarding Lebanon & Central American affairs. Anger over the marines’ presence in Lebanon was reflected in an exchange between President Reagan and House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. in the presence of Democratic and Republican Congressional leaders. The Speaker later said he had told Mr. Reagan, “Every time I talk to you, you say things are going well, but there’s nothing but deterioration over there.” The White House said later that the President responded to critics at the meeting of Democratic and Republican Congressional leaders by declaring: “If we were to be driven out by terrorists, it would make it extremely difficult to pursue a policy of peace in the Middle East.” The President stressed the same point later in his State of the Union address. “We must have courage to give peace a chance,” he said in defending his Lebanon policy, “and we must not be driven from our objectives for peace in Lebanon by state-sponsored terrorism.”
Lebanon’s most influential Sunni Muslim leader joined the critics of embattled President Amin Gemayel, accusing the government of using its emergency powers, granted by Parliament last year, to establish dictatorial rule. Former Premier Saeb Salaam, patriarch of the Sunni community, ended months of relative silence on Gemayel’s government by also calling for the inclusion of Christian sects other than the president’s dominant Maronites in attempts to end the fighting in Lebanon.
Fulfilling a congressional requirement, the State Department reported to Congress that 1983 was a year of “important consolidation and forward movement” in El Salvador’s land-reform program. The report, which also said the process has been “halting and painful” at times, meets a requirement that the department certify progress in Salvadoran land redistribution. The law requires that without such a report, not more than 90% of military aid allocated for fiscal 1984 could be spent.
An American who fought for two years with the Salvadoran guerrillas was killed in action last summer, rebel and government sources said in San Salvador. The rebel radio said that Carroll Ishee, 29, of New Orleans, died in a strafing attack by a helicopter in Morazan province. In New Orleans, his widow, Lavaun, said her husband joined the guerrillas so that “the people of El Salvador did see a different foreign policy than that of the Reagan Administration.” Ishee was the second American reported killed with the rebels fighting the U.S.-backed Salvadoran regime.
Nicaragua has demanded that Honduras investigate a charge that Honduran soldiers massacred 200 Miskito Indians trying to return to their homeland, the Foreign Ministry said today. The charge was made by Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the Argentine Nobel Peace Prize winner, who visited Honduras and Nicaragua last month. Mr. Perez Esquivel said he learned in Honduras that the 200 Miskito Indians were killed January 6 as they tried to go back to Nicaragua. Some 10,000 to 15,000 Indians have left Nicaragua since the Sandinistas took power in 1979, claiming the Marxist-led regime was trying to destroy their culture and way of life. The Nicaraguan protest was sent Tuesday to Honduras, officials said.
The Honduran Government said today that it is investigating the charge that Honduran troops massacred 200 Miskito Indians this month. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the Government had sent instructions to the Honduran Ambassador in Argentina to obtain details on the massacre report from Mr. Perez Esquivel.
More than 150,000 Brazilians demonstrated today to demand an end to 20 years of military rule, singing and chanting “We want the vote!” in one of the biggest protests ever held in the country. Banners reading “Elections Now” swamped the downtown Cathedral Square where the crowd overflowed down side streets into the shopping district. Some people hoisted enormous red banners of the illegal Communist Party of Brazil. An opinion poll published in major newspapers showed 9 out of 10 voters support direct elections for a new president in 1985.
Lawyers for a Palestinian prisoner whom Israel held back during a prisoner swap with the Palestine Liberation Organization asked the International Red Cross not to assist in any future exchanges until Israel frees him. The prisoner, Ziad abu Ein, was among about 4,400 Arab prisoners being freed by Israel last November in exchange for six Israeli soldiers when he was held back “at the last minute,” the Red Cross has charged. The Israelis said his name was omitted from the prisoner list due to a clerical error by the Red Cross. Abu Ein was extradited from the United States in 1981 and convicted of planting a bomb in Tiberias, Israel, that killed two people.
Israel asked Chile to extradite accused Nazi Walter Rauf, who allegedly invented mobile gas chambers in which 250,000 Jews and others were killed. The announcement in Jerusalem coincided with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s visit to Israel. Israeli Justice Minister Moshe Nissim said that Rauf was a senior Nazi officer in World War II.
A French jet was shot down in Chad by anti-Government forces and the pilot was killed, the French Defense Ministry announced. The incident marked the first time that French forces had been involved in combat in Chad since they were sent there last August to support the Government in its fight against Libyan-backed rebels.
The State Department accused the Soviet Union of slandering Jewish victims of Hitler’s Nazi regime in World War II with an article in the Communist Party daily Pravda equating Zionism with Nazism. “The views expressed in that piece are so outrageous and so indefensible that we are reluctant to dignify them, or even call further attention to them, with a response,” spokesman Alan Romberg said.
Vatican aid for Nazi war criminals after World War II has been alleged in statements by a French Nazi-hunter and a declassified State Department report. According to the Frenchman, Serge Klarsfeld, Walter Rauff, a former SS colonel wanted for the mass gassing of Jews in death vans, told in 1962 of having been given refuge in Vatican City convents for 18 months. Chile, which has harbored the Nazi for more than 25 years, is facing mounting demands for his expulsion.
A gala crowd at the Paris Opera applauded, then cheered and then honored Martha Graham on an evening that marked a celebration of her work and a gathering of France’s wealthy, powerful and famous. The gala was also a harbinger of what Rudolf Nureyev intends to do as the Paris Opera’s director of ballet. Miss Graham’s company is the first American dance troupe ever to appear on the stage of the Opera.
Italy’s concordat with the Vatican has been tentatively revised after 15 years of negotiations. Under the plan, Roman Catholicism would cease to be the state religion.
The official Polish press agency P.A.P. says an ambulance attendant has admitted striking a young Solidarity supporter who died after being detained by the police. The attendant, who was not identified, reportedly said the blow might have been fatal, P.A.P. said Tuesday. The death last May 14 of 19-year-old Grzegorz Przemyk prompted a storm of antipolice protests, and his funeral attracted some 20,000 mourners. Two policemen, two male ambulance attendants and two doctors indicted in the case had been scheduled to go on trial February 3. But P.A.P. said that the case had been returned to the prosecutor because of the attendant’s confession and that it would probably be delayed.
North Korean Vice Premier Ho Tam rejected suggestions that China take part in talks on a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. North Korea recently proposed tripartite talks involving the two Koreas and the United States on the division of the Korean Peninsula. President Reagan suggested that China also participate. But Ho, addressing the Supreme People’s Assembly in Pyongyang, rejected the idea, the North Korean news agency reported.
Nigeria’s new military rulers have forced 34 top-ranking police officers to retire and transferred several others, press reports said today. Newspapers, quoting authoritative sources, said most of the retired officers were thought to have been too involved in party politics during national and state elections last year. During the elections, the press criticized police commissioners in some of Nigeria’s 19 states, accusing them of supporting individual candidates and of rigging votes.
President Reagan delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. The President urged smaller deficits in his televised State of the Union Message. Declaring that bipartisan cooperation in Congress had already helped arrest the nation’s “long decline,” Mr. Reagan appealed to both Republicans and Democrats to join in a new attempt to reduce the federal budget deficits by $100 billion in the next three years. Mr. Reagan drew a warm reception at the beginning and end of his 43-minute address at the Capitol, where security outside was heavy. He spoke smoothly, with some stumbles. More than three dozen times, the audience interrupted him with applause, most notably when he called for school prayer and denounced nuclear war. By far the biggest ovation came when the audience rose and cheered Sgt. Stephen Trujillo after Mr. Reagan cited the Army man’s record of heroism in Grenada last October and said: “God bless you.” Sergeant Trujillo, sitting with Mr. Reagan’s family, rose to accept the greeting.
Democratic leaders reacted warily to President Reagan’s proposal for bipartisan cooperation in reducing budget deficits. Democratic Congressional leaders said they feared that participation in such deliberations could lead the public to consider Congress a partner in the creation of deficits that they blame on the Administration.
President Reagan endorsed the development of the first U.S. permanently manned space station. The space program endorsed by President Reagan in his State of the Union message would establish the first permanently manned American space station and would also provide a base from which such distant bodies as the Moon or Mars could eventually be colonized.
The Reagan Administration opposes legislation to alter the Social Security disability review system because reforms enacted since 1981 make further changes unnecessary, a government official said. However, other witnesses told the Senate Finance Committee that changes are urgently needed. The acting commissioner, Martha A. McSteen, said the agency plans to notify the states to resume processing disability cutoffs. They were suspended last December 7 when a law allowing people to keep drawing benefits while appealing their cutoff expired.
Robert Hayes, testifying in a large basement room of an emergency housing shelter six blocks from the Capitol, asked a House subcommittee today to help meet the needs of America’s homeless. “Isn’t it time for Congress to consider a national right to shelter?” asked Mr. Hayes, the counsel to the National Coalition for the Homeless. “Is a little mercy too much to ask for?” The room was chosen by the House Banking subcommittee on housing. Dozens of homeless people were in the room while the hearing was under way. Mitch Snyder, spokesman for the Washington Community for Creative Non-Violence, said the recently opened shelter holds 500 to 525 people each night and use is expected to grow to 700 people or more. Speakers included the Mayors of New Orleans, Washington, Denver and Chicago and Governor Cuomo of New York.
The Reagan Administration proposed “a blueprint for desegregation in the future” today as it concluded an agreement to desegregate public schools in Bakersfield, California, without mandatory busing. The Government filed suit today in Federal District Court alleging illegal discrimination by the city school authorities. At the same time, the Justice Department and the Bakersfield City School District proposed a consent decree to avoid trying the case. A federal judge later approved the agreement. Under the decree, Bakersfield will try to attract white students to predominantly black and Hispanic schools by establishing special programs in science, computer-assisted instruction and the creative and performing arts, as well as special classes for gifted or talented youngsters. Four of the city’s 25 elementary schools will thus become “magnet schools.” Whites now account for no more than 8 percent of enrollment at any of the four schools, the only ones with so small a proportion.
A Florida prosecutor said he won’t bring charges against Director Charles Z. Wick of the U.S. Information Agency for secretly recording phone calls with presidential aides while in Palm Beach. David Bludworth, state attorney for Palm Beach County, said he had ruled out prosecution because Wick did not know Florida law requires consent from both parties before phone calls are recorded. Bludworth said his decision also was based on the fact Wick had publicly and privately apologized to everyone involved.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to stop tomorrow morning’s execution of Anthony Antone, who is on Florida’s Death Row. The justices, in an unsigned opinion released in Washington early Wednesday evening. voted 7 to 2 to deny a request to stay the execution, scheduled at 4 a.m. PST. Justices Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan Jr., who are opposed to the death penalty under all circumstances, dissented. The opinion said Antone’s lawyers merely were repeating legal claims raised earlier. The 66-year-old condemned man — Florida’s oldest Death Row inmate — was to have died in the state’s electric chair last Tuesday, but a federal appeals court granted a 36-hour stay so Antone’s lawyer could go to the U.S. Supreme Court.
An accord to desegregate the public schools of Bakersfield, California, without mandatory busing has been reached, the Reagan Administration announced. A Federal official called the agreement “a blueprint for desegregation in the future.”
Walter F. Mondale has captured a large plurality of the 110 delegates to the Democratic National Convention selected by House Democrats this week on Capitol Hill. The Mondale campaign said 49 delegates were publicly committed to the former Vice President. Aides to Senator John Glenn said they counted 13 delegates pledged to him.
The 6-year-old boycott of Nestle products is being called off by groups that have criticized the company’s marketing of infant formula in Third World countries, boycott organizers said in Washington. In a joint statement issued with the Swiss-based company, the International Nestle Boycott Committee said the boycott is being canceled because Nestle has agreed to observe the World Health Organization’s marketing code for infant formula in nations where the lack of basic sanitary facilities, especially clean water, endangers babies’ lives.
An Orthodox Jewish teenager arrested after a series of fires in the Jewish community of West Hartford, Connecticut, pleaded guilty to four counts of third-degree arson. The judge ordered an investigation of Barry Schuss, 17, before sentencing. Schuss was charged with setting fires at two synagogues, the home of his rabbi, Solomon Krupka; and the home of state Rep. Joan R. Kemler, between August 11 and September 17, 1983. The fires, which destroyed some sacred documents in the synagogues, attracted national attention.
The creation of a national organization to coordinate organ transplants was announced Tuesday at the end of a two- day conference of more than 400 officials of medical and charitable groups. The organization, to be known as the American Council on Transplantation, is to set up ways of matching organ donors with people in need of transplants across the country. Dr. Gary E. Friedlaender of the Yale University School of Medicine was named the council’s interim president. There are thousands of transplants done every year and yet many people who need organs still do not receive them, he said. “We are trying to create a system that is so good that it will benefit everybody in order of the priority of their needs,” he added.
Violence near the Navajo reservation in the town of Fort Defiance, Arizona, has prompted residents to consider arming themselves or leaving. A series of violent attacks, including a kidnapping and murder, has victimized people connected with a hospital operated by the United States Public Health Service.
A combination of aspirin and the drug Dipyridamole may double the long-term chances that a patient’s blood vessels will stay clear of obstruction after bypass surgery, doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota said. The finding, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, should benefit the 100,000 patients annually who have bypass surgery. It also increases hope that daily doses of the drug combination or small amounts of aspirin alone will help prevent heart attacks.
A young whooping crane that died Monday in New Mexico was not killed by shotgun fire, an autopsy showed, but possibly by contamination from lead shotgun pellets it swallowed when feeding on marsh berries and grit, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials said. The autopsy showed about 100 fragments of lead pellets in the bird’s gizzard. The crane’s death drew national attention because it was one of about 30 “whoopers” being monitored under a program to save the bird from extinction. About 100 survive in the wild.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1231.89 (-10.99).
Born:
Tyler Graham, MLB pinch runner and outfielder (Arizona Diamondbacks), in Great Falls, Montana.
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History Diaries 