A withdrawal of the marines from Lebanon was urged by House Democratic leaders in a proposed Congressional resolution. It would urge President Reagan to begin “the prompt and orderly withdrawal” of the force, but the leaders, rejecting protests within their ranks, declined to include a specific timetable for a pullout. Advocates of a specific date argue that any resolution that does not set a withdrawal date is meaningless. They are likely to offer an amendment setting a date when the measure reaches the House floor, probably within several weeks. The leaders maintain that a firm date would place too severe a restriction on President Reagan, open the Democrats to political criticism and perhaps touch off a constitutional crisis. But in response to the critics, the language of the resolution criticizing the President was “toughened considerably” from earlier drafts, according to House aides.
National security adviser Robert C. McFarlane linked an Iranian-supported network of Muslim fundamentalists to the terrorist attack that killed 241 U.S. servicemen at the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut last October. Answering questions after a Washington speech, McFarlane tied the suicide-bomb attack to a “family” of groups that he said include Islamic Amal, the Islamic Brotherhood and the Islamic Student Union. He made no mention of Islamic Jihad, the shadowy group that claimed responsibility for the Beirut attack and others. Meanwhile, Lance Corporal George L. Dramis of Cape May, New Jersey, was identified as the Marine killed in action in Beirut on Monday.
The House Armed Services panel accepted a report criticizing the United States military in connection with the bombing of the Marine headquarters in Beirut. The committee has historically been strongly supportive of the military. The report was prepared by the committee’s investigations subcommittee. The report, completed last month, concluded that the Marine commanders in Beirut and other officers up the military chain of command had committed “very serious errors in judgment” that led to lax security the morning of the bombing, which took 241 American lives. The attack occurred October 23.
The Iraqi military said today that its forces had sunk five Iranian vessels and shot down a Phantom jet fighter in a battle in the northern end of the Persian Gulf. An Iraqi military spokesman, reading a communique over Baghdad radio and television stations, said the battle took place at noon today after a convoy of Iranian vessels was spotted sailing north toward Bandar Khomeini near Khor Moussa Creek. “The Iraqi Navy and Air Force launched a series of concerted, fierce and concentrated attacks and succeeded in destroying five of them,” he said. He added that several Iranian Phantom jets tried to fly over the stricken vessels, that a dogfight took place between Iraqi and Iranian jets and that an Iranian Phantom was seen crashing.
Western diplomats said today that Soviet- led forces in Afghanistan killed hundreds of civilians this month in bombing raids on villages north of Kabul, the capital. The reports could not be independently confirmed. Diplomats said the attacks on Afghanistan’s Shomali Valley began on January 19 and lasted through Friday, the same day that Afghan MIG’s reportedly killed 42 people in a raid on the village of Angur Adda, in northwestern Pakistan. “Heavy bombing and shelling of villages with some ground action by Soviet and Afghan regime troops” focused on the village of Ghaza, north of Kabul, one diplomat said. “According to multiple sources, civilian deaths have run in the hundreds,” another diplomat said. She said 73 people were killed at an outpost at the fringe of Ghaza.
Caution about quick progress if Moscow agreed to a date to resume arms negotiations in Geneva was expressed by a high State Department official. He cautioned against expecting quick progress in strategic weapons talks as a result of the chief American negotiator’s suggestion that Washington and Moscow could “make a breakthrough.”
Soviet support for UNESCO was expressed in a statement by Yuri V. Andropov distributed by Tass. The statement was intended as a reproach to President Reagan’s decision to order an American withdrawal from the United Nations agency.
Amnesty International published a firsthand account of life for political prisoners in the Soviet Union’s labor camps, describing a nightmare of abuse and near-starvation for those who disagree with the Soviet system. The letter, smuggled from a camp on the edge of Siberia, depicts men confined in tiny stinking cells, subsisting on miserable food and putrid water and being forced to work in a tedious daily routine in nearly dark rooms. Amnesty International, the human rights organization, said the account was written by “a known prisoner of conscience” in April, 1982, and reached Amnesty International last October.
Two policemen were killed when their unmarked car was blown over a hedge into a field by a 1,000-pound bomb planted under a road in Northern Ireland’s guerrilla-infested “bandit country,” police said. The Irish Republican Army, fighting British rule in the province, claimed responsibility for the blast in South Armagh, close to the border with the Irish Republic. Police said the car was hurled 60 feet by the blast. They believe that the bomb, concealed in a culvert, was triggered by an IRA team hiding on a wooded hillside 500 yards away.
The Greek Government began an investigation today into how a tape with a speech by the former dictator George Papadopoulos was smuggled out of Korydallos Prison, where the former colonel is serving a life term for the 1967 coup that led to a seven-year dictatorship. The Government warned that any subversive move would be crushed. The speech was heard at the inaugural rally on Sunday of a newly formed party of the far right, which declared the former junta strongman as its leader and announced the intention to nominate him for the European Parliament elections taking place in June.
Khmer Rouge guerrillas claimed to have captured and briefly occupied Vietnam’s military and logistics supply center at Siem Reap in western Cambodia. There was no independent confirmation of the guerrilla claim, made public in Bangkok. The guerrillas are fighting the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. Siem Reap, the principal town near the famous archeological site of Angkor Wat, is about 150 miles northwest of Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital.
A tiny Israeli opposition faction dropped plans to introduce a bill calling for early elections. The centrist Shinui Party, which is aligned with the Labor Party, had announced the plan but, 24 hours before Parliament was due to begin debating the measure, it said other parties asked for more time to determine their positions.
Nearly 250,000 opposition party activists were arrested today in a display of civil disobedience in Maharashtra state to support protesting farmers, authorities said. A general strike virtually paralyzed Bombay (today Mumbai), the state capital. Workers of the parties that called the 24-hour Bombay shutdown openly violated bans on public assemblies of more than four people. The demonstrators were seeking support for farmers who are demanding higher compensation for the Government’s takeover of their land for use in a port project. In the neighboring southern state of Karnataka, rail and road traffic was disrupted on the sixth day of a blockade by farmers, according to reports from there. Those farmers want title to the Government-owned land they farm. Karnataka officials said more than 27,000 farmers had been jailed since the agitation began Thursday.
Australia launched a controversial national health service for its population of 15 million. The program, one of the major plans of the Labor Party government elected to office last March, has been plagued by complaints from doctors about its cost and by the refusal of one right-wing state government, that of Queensland, to participate. All taxpayers will have 1% of their taxable income deducted to pay for the program, under which 85% of medical costs will be refunded by the federal government. Individuals will pay the rest themselves.
Chilean police arrested Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld and seven others after breaking up their demonstration demanding Nazi Colonel Walter Rauff’s expulsion from the country. Israel has asked for the expulsion so that Rauff can stand trial on charges of killing 97,000 Jews during World War II. Klarsfeld, a West German citizen, was later freed without bail.
“Considerable” Salvadoran progress in recent months in curbing right-wing death squad activity and in improving human rights was cited by Secretary of State George P. Shultz. But, speaking before arriving in San Salvador for an eight-hour visit, Mr. Shultz made clear that additional improvements were needed before Congress would approve increased United States aid.
Small ways to reduce the deficit to $180 billion next year will be proposed in the Administration’s new budget, President Reagan told Republican Congressional leaders. In briefings for them at the White House, Mr. Reagan offered a preview of the budget to be submitted today. According to Congressional informants, the budget calls for spending of $925 billion, with net reductions in domestic spending of $4 billion. The budget was described by the Republican leaders today as “realistic” and serving as a possible basis for bipartisan negotiations with the Democrats. “I think it’s a good, solid, sound budget,” said Senator Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, the Senate Republican leader. Mr. Baker added that the budget nonetheless failed to address “the structural problems inherent in the future deficits.”
President Reagan addresses the National Convention of the Cement, Gravel & Aggregate Groups on the issue of profit and free trade. President Reagan said today that his political opponents were trying to appeal to “greed and envy” in criticizing his tax-cutting program as favoring the rich. “The finger-pointers and hand-wringers of today were the policy-makers of yesterday, and they gave us economic stagnation and double-digit inflation,” the President said in an apparent reference to Democrats who have been criticizing him lately on the Presidential campaign circuit. In an address to executives of the concrete and gravel industries, Mr. Reagan cited a dozen different aspects of the economic recovery, saying, “We inherited despair and turned it into hope.”
Turning the Democratic issue of whether he is fair to all sectors of the economy on his critics, Mr. Reagan drew laughter from the gathering of about 4,000 people when he said, “There was only one thing fair about their policies: they didn’t discriminate; they made everyone miserable.”
President Reagan meets with a group of labor leaders from Chicago.
A warning about asbestos in schools around the country has been issued in an internal report in the Environmental Protection Agency. The report said that school administrators were failing to protect children and teachers from asbestos contamination and concluded that part of the problem was inaction by the EPA. The report recommends that consideration be given to providing money to schools to clean up asbestos contamination when an “imminent hazard” exists.
The EPA may recover some costs, including attorney’s fees, that it incurred in cleaning up a dioxin-contaminated site near Verona, Missouri, a federal judge has ruled. The decision by Judge Russell G. Clark held that some of the cleanup costs should be paid by a defunct chemical manufacturing company, its officers and a waste hauler.
The President accused his opponents of trying to appeal to “greed and envy” in criticizing his tax-reduction program as favoring the rich. In an address in Chicago, Mr. Reagan said such criticism reflected “the same antibusiness, anti-success attitude that brought this country to the brink of economic disaster.”
Seven Democratic aspirants for President coalesced around their opposition to the continued presence of United States marines in Lebanon in a 90-minute debate at Harvard University. In contrast to their previous debates, they spent more time criticizing President Reagan than attacking each other, and they seemed to be moving toward offering a broad Democratic alternative to Mr. Reagan’s policies on Central America and arms control.
The images of Democratic aspirants for President are seen with just about every click of the television dial in the politically pivotal states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Given the number of candidates and the ever-increasing limits on campaign spending, it is probably the greatest political-advertising barrage ever mounted at this point in a campaign.
Mercedes-Benz of North America announced it is voluntarily recalling 54,000 V-8-powered passenger cars from the 1977 to 1980 model years to replace a plastic bell crank bushing with a metal one, said A.B. Shuman, a spokesman for the firm located in Montvale, New Jersey. The models involved are the 450SL, 450SLC, 450SEL and 450SEL 6.9, officials said. The part replacement will be performed at no cost to the customer, Shuman said. Prolonged exposure to heat generated by the catalytic converter under the hood could cause the plastic bushing to deform, possibly preventing the throttle linkage from returning to the idle position, Shuman said. The firm has had no reports of any accidents or injuries associated with the problem, Shuman said.
A man was arrested and charged with threatening to kill President Reagan, who is to visit his Illinois hometown of Dixon Monday on his 73rd birthday. Frederick W. Schoaf, a gun collector, was taken into custody in Princeton, 35 miles south of Dixon, by the Secret Service and accused of saying, in a December 30 conversation at a Princeton truck stop, “If Reagan comes to town, I will kill him.” Shoaf was ordered held by the U.S. marshal and bond set at $100,000.
More than 100 illegal aliens, calling for “a collective suicide,” went into the seventh day of a hunger strike today in a barbed- wire-enclosed detention camp on the edge of the Everglades. Officials said 115 refugees at the Krome Avenue facility, which a Haitian protester called the “Reagan concentration camp,” refused breakfast in a hunger strike that began last week to protest what the refugees considered slow processing of their appeals for political asylum. Health authorities monitored those who refused food.
Striking members of the United Automobile Workers today rejected a proposed three-year contract from the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, voting to continue a 17-week strike despite the company’s plans to replace them. The local’s president, Bob Berghoff, said about 1,800 votes were cast against the contract and about 600 in favor. “I’m proud of them,” he said. “These people have been out of work for almost four months and living without paychecks, and then to have them vote to continue this thing. We want to get back to the table.”
A Federal district judge issued an injunction today against construction of the Navy’s Project ELF communications system in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Ruling in a lawsuit filed by the State of Wisconsin and Marquette County, Michigan, Judge Barbara B. Crabb said the Navy had not adequately evaluated studies on the potential health effect of the extremely low frequency radio waves. The Navy wants to use the $240 million system to communicate with deeply submerged submarines around the world.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will decide in the next three weeks whether to allow the second implant of the Utah artificial heart in a human, an FDA official said in Salt Lake City. Meanwhile, implant surgeon Dr. William DeVries is receiving one or two inquiries a week about the device and has turned down at least nine patients who asked to be considered. The FDA on January 23 received DeVries’ request for permission to repeat the procedure performed on heart patient Barney Clark.
Bishop John J. O’Connor, named to head the nation’s fourth-largest Roman Catholic archdiocese, vowed that the fight to stop abortion and “defend human life” would “permeate everything I attempt to do” as archbishop of New York. O’Connor, a former chief of Navy chaplains who helped draft the U.S. Catholic bishops’ letter condemning nuclear war, was bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania, for seven months before Pope John Paul II named him to succeed Cardinal Terence Cooke, who died October 6.
The Army’s new study center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory should be thrown out “at the earliest possible time” by administrators of the California Institute of Technology, members of the Caltech faculty have voted. The declaration, backed by a show of hands, came Monday after a stormy two-hour meeting in which Caltech’s president, Marvin L. Goldberger, was attacked for not keeping the faculty informed of negotiations. Mr. Goldberger said that the faculty’s wishes would be taken into account but that commitments to the Army might bind the new classified research center to the university for “several years.”
Most black colleges have survived in the face of a widespread fear in the 1960’s that they would be doomed by racial desegregation, in the consensus of educators, but a downward trend in enrollment is worrying black educators.
A howling snowstorm that blasted the coast of Maine was blamed for a 10-car pileup on the Maine Turnpike near Scarborough. One man was killed. The storm also caused a spectacular fire at a gasoline station when a driver lost control of his car and slammed into a gas pump at Raynham, Massachusetts. The rest of New England escaped the brunt of the storm. Snow was three inches deep in Boston and four inches deep along the Massachusetts and Rhode Island coasts.
Edwin Newman retires from NBC News after 35 years with the network.
The U.S. performs a nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site.
36th NHL All-Star Game, Brendan Byrne Arena, East Rutherford: Wales Conference beats Campbell Conference, 7-6; MVP: Don Maloney, New York Rangers, left wing.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1220.58 (-0.94).
Born:
Vernon Davis, NFL tight end (NFL Champions, Super Bowl 50-Broncos, 2015; Pro Bowl, 2009, 2013; San Francisco 49ers, Denver Broncos, Washington Redskins), in Washington, District of Columbia.
Josh Johnson, MLB pitcher (All-Star, 2009, 2010; Florida-Miami Marlins, Toronto Blue Jays), in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Mikhail Grabovski, German-born Belarusian NHL center (Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, Washington Capitals, New York Islanders), in Potsdam, East Germany.
Jeremy Wariner, American 400m runner (Olympics, 3 gold and 1 silver medals, 2004, 2008), in Irving, Texas.
History Diaries 