Political and military leaders today led thousands of mourners in paying respects at the garlanded bier of Yuri V. Andropov. Konstantin U. Chernenko, the second-ranking party secretary who is chairman of the funeral commission, led the nine other Moscow-based members of the ruling Politburo in a ceremonial appearance at the colonnaded House of Unions, where Mr. Andropov lay in state in an open casket. Their vigil and the condolences they offered to family members marked the beginning of four days of official mourning for Mr. Andropov, who died Thursday at the age of 69. Although the 300 members of the Central Committee have the formal authority to make the appointment, the actual choice would ordinarily rest with the Politburo, which now has 12 full, voting members. When Leonid I. Brezhnev died 15 months ago, the Politburo settled on Mr. Andropov within two days.
Limousine traffic at the Kremlin and the headquarters of the Communist Party’s Central Committee indicated that Soviet officials were attending high-level meetings that could determine who will succeed Yuri V. Andropov, whose bier was visited by thousands of mourners. Soviet sources indicated that no announcement was likely before a meeting of the Central Committee, which would probably be Monday. Some Western diplomats said they saw the delay as a sign that a power struggle might be in progress.
Whoever takes the place of Yuri V. Andropov as leader of the Soviet Union will face a host of problems that he might be called upon to address immediately. Around the Soviet Union’s far-flung borders, the policies of the last two decades have saddled the Kremlin with costly and unproductive dependencies, with a vexing war in Afghanistan, frustrated ambitions in the Middle East and, most seriously, with a stalemate in disarmament talks and the worst relations with the United States in at least two decades. This weekend, in well-appointed parlors and suites around Moscow, powerful men are probably gathered in clusters, their thoughts and schemes focused on the vacancy in one of the world’s most powerful offices. The complex maneuvering to fill the vacancy created by Mr. Andropov’s death may never come to light, since all that the world is likely to see is a “unanimous” decision by the Communist Party Central Committee sometime soon on a successor.
President Reagan gives a national radio address on U.S.-Soviet relations. The President invited the Russians to “take advantage of the opportunities at hand” and make a good faith effort at negotiating American-Soviet differences. Mr. Reagan said “America is ready, we would welcome negotiations.”
Dissident Soviet physicist Andrei D. Sakharov and his wife, Yelena. Bonner, are both seriously ill and I will die unless they are allowed to seek immediate medical help, Natalya Hesse, a friend of the couple said in Vienna. Sakharov, 62, has had two heart attacks and no medical care during four years of exile in Gorky, Hesse said, and Bonner had her second heart attack 11 days ago. Hesse, an author of children’s books, was harassed by authorities over dissident gatherings in her Leningrad apartment and left the Soviet Union several days ago.
Israel foresees policing border areas in southern Lebanon on its own if the Government of President Amin Gemayel abrogates the security agreement it signed last May with Israel, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said. He said that if the agreement is canceled, Lebanon will have effectively given up its independence.
Canceling Lebanon’s pact with Israel is essential for President Gemayel’s political survival, two senior Syrian officials said in Damascus. They said cancellation was also necessary for any progress toward resolving the Lebanese and Arab-Israeli conflicts. One of the officials said Syria was prepared to “study” the placement of a neutral international force in Lebanon to help maintain order and to speed the withdrawal of French, Italian and American forces.
A sailor from the U.S. 6th Fleet was hospitalized briefly at Rambam Hospital in Haifa, Israel, making him the first American serviceman from the U.S. detachment to Lebanon to be taken to Israel for medical treatment. A Navy doctor said a new order had been issued that severe medical cases, previously flown to Cyprus or West Germany, be taken to Rambam if they could not be handled on board ship. The 21-year-old enlisted man from the aircraft carrier USS Independence was not a battle casualty.
The Iran-Iraq war worsened. Iraq attacked Iranian civilians in Dizful and Iran threatened reprisals against Iraqi cities Sunday. Both sides appear to be trying to demoralize the other by bombarding or planning to bombard civilian targets for the first time in the war, officials said.
About 1,600 Salvadoran army troops have launched an offensive against guerrilla supply camps in Usulutan and San Miguel provinces east of San Salvador that is making “good but relatively slow progress,” according to their commander, Colonel Domingo Monterrosa. The offensive is part of “Operation Well-Being,” an effort to permanently drive out rebels and begin reconstruction, Monterrosa said. Meanwhile, the rebels’ Radio Farabundo Marti reported continued fighting in an area 40 miles north of San Salvador where rebel forces claimed they killed or wounded 45 soldiers.
El Salvador’s Election Commission has urged leftist political leaders to reactivate two dormant political parties so that they may field candidates for the March 25 presidential elections. The two parties, the communist National Revolutionary Movement and the socialist Nationalist Democratic Union, have been inactive since 1979. Leftists have expressed fears that the list of the names of supporters required to establish the legality of the parties would end up in the hands of rightist death squads.
Argentina’s lower house of Congress, in which President Raul Alfonsin’s Radical Party holds a majority, passed a trade union reform bill placing all unions under a six-month government trusteeship to permit new union elections. The government says it will make unions more democratic, since present union officers were elected during the Peronist regime or appointed by subsequent military rulers.
Prosecutors say they have ordered the arraignment of 26 policemen accused of taking 31 Indian peasants from a party, shooting them dead and dumping their bodies into a ravine. The order on Friday was the first proceeding against members of the Peruvian armed forces, who are battling a Maoist guerrilla group known as Shining Path. In Lima, Interior Minister Luis Percovich Roca denied the charges and said investigations had proved the slayers were people dressed as policemen. But the prosecutor, Jorge Zegarra, said his case was based on reports of many witnesses and shells at the scene of the killings on November 13.
A terrorist leader from Kashmir who preached secession from India was executed today. Kashmiri terrorists who seized and killed an Indian diplomat in Britain last Sunday had demanded his release. The hanged man, Mohammed Maqbool Butt, 50 years old, was the founder of the Kashmir Liberation Front, which is based in Britain. The Indian authorities said he organized secessionist groups in Kashmir in the 1960’s.
In one incident, he allegedly shot and killed an Indian intelligence official. He was captured and sentenced to death but escaped from an Indian jail and fled to Pakistan. He returned to organize secessionist groups in Kashmir in 1976. He was arrested in connection with the slaying of a bank manager in a robbery. His execution brought protests in the part of Kashmir held by Pakistan. In Indian-held Kashmir, at least 400 people, most of them members of anti-Indian organizations and Muslim fundamentalist groups, were reportedly detained in an effort to avert violence.
Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos ruled out further concessions to his opponents before parliamentary elections scheduled for May, saying his supporters fear that he is “giving away the store.” Major opposition parties have given Marcos until Tuesday-three months before the voting-to relinquish his authoritarian powers or face a boycott of the election. Marcos’ wife, Imelda, hinted to reporters that she may reconsider her decision not to run for a seat. “I cannot deny the will of the people… I leave everything to fate, destiny or God,” she said.
Sudanese rebels raided a French construction firm’s work camp in southern Sudan, and seven workers, two of them French, are missing, the official Sudan news agency reported. The camp, 430 miles south of Khartoum, is working on the Jonglei Canal to divert Nile River water around swamps and use it for irrigation in Sudan and Egypt. Rebels seeking independence for black southern Sudan from the Arab Muslim north briefly kidnapped French workers on the canal in November and killed three foreign workers for the Chevron oil company February 2.
Legal status for the 100,000 Cubans who came to the United States in the Mariel boatlift of 1980 will be offered by the Reagan Administration, in addition to citizenship opportunities. Federal officials said they had concluded that the Cubans were eligible for legal status under a 1966 law that applies specifically to Cubans. The decision was made as some Cubans were planning a lawsuit to compel such action.
Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale has a 2-to-1 lead over Senator John Glenn in the South but President Reagan would sweep the region against either contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination, a new poll indicates. “What we have right now is an election dominated by two people,” said Claibourne Darden, whose concern conducted the survey. “Mondale dominates the Democrats but then Reagan dominates Mondale. It’s not close anywhere.” The Darden Research Corporation questioned 1,000 people in nine southern states in the final week of January and first week of February. The states surveyed were Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee.
Challenger made a perfect landing at Cape Canaveral, the first time that a space shuttle has landed at its launching base. The landing, on schedule at 7:16 A.M., ended an eight-day STS-41-B mission marked by disappointing failures and dazzling achievements. Minutes after dawn, before Venus had set in the east, the winged spaceship soared out of the western darkness into the clear blue sky over the Kennedy Space Center, announcing itself with a double sonic boom. It glistened in the sunlight of the new day as it turned left out over the Atlantic and looped back to approach its runway from the northwest. Vance D. Brand, the commander, steered the white spaceship to a touchdown on the center line of the runway, a strip of concrete three miles long and 300 feet wide set in lush marshland of palmetto, wild pigs and alligators. The landing occurred on schedule at 7:16 A.M.
President Reagan returned last week to his contention that American schools are plagued with crime and violence and unruly behavior. In a speech to the National Association of Secondary School Principals, meeting in Las Vegas, he called for the restoration of “good old-fashioned discipline.” The White House began stressing school discipline some time before the President announced for re-election. The reaction shows the effects of a Presidential attempt to raise a social issue to the top of the nation’s agenda. Critics, including some teachers and school officials, say the Administration has overstated the problem. But White House advisers note that, according to many opinion polls, the need for more school discipline is the public’s foremost educational concern. “Many schools are filled with rude, unruly behavior, and even violence,” Mr. Reagan said in a nationally broadcast radio address last month. His panel on school discipline and violence, which included top officials from the Departments of Education and Justice, went further. “For many teachers,” the group said, “schools have become hazardous places to teach and definitely places to fear. Self-preservation rather than instruction has become their prime concern.”
Fellow Democrats steadily criticized Walter F. Mondale, though politely, in the second nationally televised debate among Mr. Mondale and the seven other major Democratic candidates for the Presidential nomination. Attacks on one another also were frequent in the debate in Des Moines, and there was strong criticism of President Reagan’s domestic and foreign policies.
Republican National Chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. predicted a boom in legalized gambling in the United States as the need for revenue overcomes “irrational” moral objections. “The blue-stocking movement is losing ground,” said Fahrenkopf, whose Reno law firm represents gaming clients. In remarks to a panel of the American Bar Association in Las Vegas, Fahrenkopf said that growing state deficits are spurring legislators more and more to look to legalized gambling as an alternative to higher taxes. Fahrenkopf took part in a panel discussion with other lawyers who represent gaming interests in Nevada and New Jersey, the two states that have legalized casino gambling.
The Texas Board of Education tentatively approved a new back-to-basics curriculum that mandates the teaching of evolution. Before this “historic moment.” as one board member called it, evolution has been taught in Texas as a theory. rather than a fact, under a board ruling of 1974. Under the new curriculum, which has been in the making for seven years, elementary students will be required to spend more time on reading, writing and arithmetic. A final vote is scheduled next month.
A gunman in military fatigues hijacked a New York-bound flight carrying 152 people from Haiti, but surrendered before the plane reached its destination and asked for political asylum. The FAA in Washington said the hijacker had commandeered the plane while it was still on the runway in Port-au-Prince and demanded it be flown to New York’s Kennedy Airport, its scheduled destination. A source in Haiti told UPI the hijacker was a Haitian soldier. Fifty-five minutes after the American Airlines flight departed, the hijacker surrendered his gun to the captain. Haiti’s poverty has prompted an exodus of more than 21,000 people since 1974, most of whom braved the sea in tiny sailboats to seek jobs in the United States and the Bahamas.
A judge ordered police to surrender hundreds of confidential student records seized from public school offices in Summit, New Jersey, in a raid the county prosecutor called “absolutely unconstitutional.” The raid, carried out with a search warrant issued by a Municipal Court judge, has left officials baffled over why police wanted the disciplinary records of junior high school students from 1976 to the present. Police officials have refused to comment on the matter. Later, Superior Court Judge Edward W. Beglin Jr. in Elizabeth ordered police to turn the documents over to him after the board of education filed a motion seeking their return.
A police group has filed suit over the layoffs of 290 Cleveland police officers, part of a city cutback ordered after voters defeated a proposed payroll tax increase. The officers, chosen because they were the most recently hired, were among 597 city workers laid off. The Shield Club, representing minority-group officers, filed a motion in U.S. District Court contending the layoffs fall too heavily on minorities. Of the officers released, 46% are members of racial minorities. The group wants the number cut to 21%. The Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, charging that police layoffs were too numerous, has indicated it will file a lawsuit today.
New Orleans dockworkers accepted a tentative pact yesterday to end a two- day-old strike by members of the International Longshoremen’s Association. The workers voted 830 to 598 to accept a contract offered by the city’s steamship lines that the largest of the area’s five locals had earlier rejected. “We can’t afford not to work,” said Irwin Joseph of Local 3000. Most of the 50,000 members of the union in 36 Atlantic and Gulf Coast cities accepted new three-year pacts with shippers last week. But local issues delayed settlements in five ports. Negotiations continued in Philadelphia and Baltimore, and were set to resume Tuesday in Philadelphia. A new contract was ratified Friday in Providence, Rhode Island.
A blizzard swept into the eastern plains of Colorado so quickly today that dozens of motorists were stranded on highways blocked by snowdrifts and the National Guard was alerted. “It hit us pretty hard and sudden,” said Lieutenant John Williams of the Colorado State Patrol at Limon. “When they come in that fast, it doesn’t give us a chance to get the roads shut down and people are stranded.” He said up to a foot of new snow had been whipped into deep drifts by winds of about 60 miles per hour. Gusts to 69 m.p.h. were reported. Some motorists told snowplow drivers they preferred to stay with their cars until the roads reopened. National Weather Service forecasters did not issue a blizzard warning for the northeast Colorado plains until the middle of the morning, after highways had been closed.
Wayne Gretzky sets the NHL shorthanded season scoring record at 11.
Peter Angerer of West Germany charged past Jan Matousch of Czechoslovakia on the final leg of the 20-kilometer biathlon today and won the Olympic gold medal in 1 hour 11 minutes 52.7 seconds.
Wolfgang Hoppe, a 26-year-old army engineer, won the gold medal in the two-man bobsled competition at the Winter Olympics today as the East Germans captured the top two spots. Hoppe and his sledmate, Dietmar Schauerhammer, turned in two runs of 51.06 seconds today. Combined with their times on Friday it gave them a four-run total of 3 minutes 25.56 seconds. That edged their teammates, Bernhard Lehmann and Bogdan Musiol, who had a total of 3:26.04. “My only competition was from within our ranks,” Hoppe said afterward, dismissing the newly designed Soviet sleds that finished third and fourth. Zintis Ekmanis piloted his sled to the bronze medal in 3:26.16, followed by his teammate, Janis Kipurs (3:26.42). The top American in the event was Brent Rushlaw of Saranac Lake, N.Y., who was 15th in 3:30.75. Fred Fritsch of Virginia Beach, Virginia, was 17th in 3:32.20.
Bonny Warner, America’s top woman luger at the Olympic Games, cracked into the wall entering the final stretch today in the third of the four runs. She recovered to finish the run, but was knocked out of the top 10 in the sledding event. Miss Warner, a 21-year-old student from Mount Baldy, California, hit the wall entering the stretch and flipped. She managed to hold on to her sled and got back on before it crossed the finish line. She was not hurt. “Years of training, of hard work gone just like that,” she said. “It is terrible. I was eighth going into today’s run and I was hoping to be at least sixth at the end. Now I am 16th and broken-hearted.”
Born:
Maxime Talbot, Canadian NHL centre (NHL Champions, Stanley Cup-Penguins, 2009: Pittsburgh Penguins, Philadelphia Flyers, Colorado Avalanche, Boston Bruins), in Lemoyne, Quebec, Canada.
J.R. Towles, MLB catcher (Houston Astros), in Crosby, Texas.
Alando Tucker, NBA small forward and shooting guard (Phoenix Suns, Minnesota Timberwolves), in Lockport, Illinois.
Travis Wilson, NFL wide receiver (Cleveland Browns), in Carrolton, Texas.
Aubrey O’Day, American singer, in San Francisco, California.
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