Designation of a new Soviet leader is likely today, according to growing indications in Moscow. The delay in announcing a successor to Yuri V. Andropov suggested that the 12 members of the Politburo had been unable to reach a prompt consensus on the new leader. A stalemate in the Politburo would give the Communist Party’s Central Committee an opportunity to review the issue. The Committee is expected to meet today.
State Department sources believe that the new Soviet leader will be Konstantin U. Chernenko, 72 years old, who was a close associate of Leonid I. Brezhnev. Mr. Chernenko was named Friday to head the funeral commission for Mr. Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri V. Andropov.
Iran shelled at least three Iraqi cities and towns in retaliation for an Iraqi missile attack Saturday on an Iranian border city. Both had warned each other of the attacks, in some cases naming the specific city or town with a warning to residents to evacuate. An Iranian official said Teheran’s policy of announcing targets for future attacks “should be accepted by world public opinion.”
Amin Gemayel seemed certain that President Reagan was fully committed to help Lebanon recover its sovereignty and independence. President Gemayel and several of his aides repeatedly insisted in an interview that they were satisfied with the planned pullback of United States marines from their position near the Beirut airport to United States Navy ships offshore and that they had been reassured of the Reagan Administration’s backing.
Strong United States support for the May 17 accord between Israel and Lebanon will continue, senior State Department officials said. They said the Reagain Administration’s support for the agreement, which sets conditions for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, would go on despite the Administration’s recognition that it would hinder President Gemayel’s efforts to form a new government.
Lebanon’s President told opponents that if they agreed to participate in another Geneva conference, he would be ready to consider the abrogation or renegotiation of the May 17 Israel-Lebanon withdrawal accord, officials close to the negotiations said. Last Sunday, after the resignation of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, President Gemayel included a call for resumption of the Geneva reconciliation talks.
Syria will not stand by if American shelling of its positions in Lebanon persists, said a senior official, Farouk al-Sharaa, acting information minister.
Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Hussein met in Washington in advance of a round of discussions with President Reagan. The private dinner meeting came at the invitation of Hussein, an Egyptian Embassy spokesman said. Hussein was accompanied by Secretary of State George P. Shultz on his arrival at the hotel. The dinner came on the eve of a Hussein-Reagan meeting at the White House. Reagan and Mubarak are scheduled to meet on Tuesday, with Hussein scheduled to join later that day in a three-way summit on the Mideast.
The Reagan Administration is debating whether to authorize covert operations that would allow military or CIA hit teams to secretly attack terrorist groups responsible for the recent bombings of U.S. installations abroad. “It is being pondered at the highest levels of our government,” a senior intelligence official told the Washington Post. FBI Director William H. Webster confirmed that the Administration is debating the question, adding that he would oppose any covert retaliation. CIA Director William J. Casey also reportedly is opposed to any involvement by his agency in covert retaliation.
Britain might give notice that it intends to quit UNESCO by the year-end if it fails to secure far-reaching internal reforms, the Sunday Times of London reported. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was reportedly swayed last month by “confidential advice outside the Foreign Office,” saying that Britain should withdraw unless the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ceases its alleged anti-Western propaganda and changes some administrative policies. The United States announced in December that it plans to leave UNESCO on December 31, 1984.
The Swiss Socialists decided today to remain in the four-party coalition that has shared the seven ministries of the federal Cabinet for the last 24 years. By a vote of 773 to 511, delegates to a special party congress in Bern, the capital, rejected the proposal of the party’s leadership to withdraw from the coalition.
An Australian pilot abducted by southern Sudanese guerrillas has been killed, an Australian foreign affairs spokesman said. The victim. Peter Clarke, was one of seven people taken Friday from a French construction camp 430 miles south of Khartoum, the spokesman added. There was no word on the whereabouts of the six other workers, all of them now believed to be French nationals.
CIA-backed rebels fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government announced a purge that could pave the way for alliances with other guerrilla groups. Nicaraguan Democratic Force leader Edgardo Chamorro claimed that his Honduras-based army has been “cleansed” of former members of the National Guard of the late dictator Anastasio Somoza. He said the action is aimed at “leaving the door open to other combat groups,” an apparent reference to the Costa Rica-based Revolutionary Democratic Alliance. The alliance has criticized the ex-guardsmen’s influence in Chamorro’s group.
Salvadoran Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas, in his weekly homily, said that “the number of killings by death squads has been reduced, but they continue acting.” Speaking at the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador, he said that last week, six people were murdered by rightist death squads and four by guerrillas. As battle deaths, he listed 66 civilians and 41 soldiers, but he did not mention rebels. The figures were compiled by the archbishop’s Office of Legal Protection.
El Salvador is facing a period of uncertainty after five years of guerrilla warfare that has left Salvadorans worried about a dangerous divisive election campaign, unsure about the scale of future United States aid and weary from the destruction caused by civil war.
Beate Klarsfeld, the pursuer of Nazis, who is in Paraguay in an attempt to persuade General Alfredo Stroessner’s government to expel Dr. Josef Mengele, the world’s most notorious war criminal, says she has found support for her efforts. Mrs. Klarsfeld, a West German, said Saturday that she had been encouraged by meetings with the president of Paraguay’s Human Rights Commission and leaders of the National Accord alliance, a coalition of three small center-left parties that oppose the 30-year reign of General Stroessner. Mrs. Klarsfeld says she believes Dr. Mengele is still in Paraguay. Dr. Mengele carried out medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, and selected new arrivals to be put to death in the gas chambers. He obtained Paraguayan citizenship in 1959. West Germany asked Paraguay for Dr. Mengele’s extradition in 1962 and the government issued a warrant for his arrest, but said it could not find him. The Supreme Court revoked Dr. Mengele’s citizenship in 1979, declaring that he had been “unjustifiably absent” from the country for more than two years.
Haitians voted today for members of a 59-seat National Assembly that was dissolved a year early as part of a government overhaul by President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier. The legislative assembly is a rubber-stamp body for resolutions by President Duvalier, 32 years old. He called on the assembly to dissolve itself as part of a government reorganization he started in August. He also rewrote the constitution to create a five-member “super cabinet” and to give himself the right to name his successor.
Nigeria’s military leader said the country cannot afford to hold elections for a civilian government. Contending that the ousted regime of President Shehu Shagari had left the West African nation poor. Major General Mohammed Buhari declared: “My government is not thinking of returning power again to the civilians now. We cannot afford any expenditure (to start) buying ballot boxes, ballot papers, getting elections and sending the police to supervise them.”
Japan’s supercomputers are leading the United States-made brands, according to American scientists. The Japanese machines are said to be more agile, easier use, and aimed at a wider market than those made in the United States. The Americans say Japan’s lead could mean stiffer competition for such makers of large business computers as IBM.
President Reagan returns to Washington, D.C. after four days at his ranch near Santa Barbara, California.
The First Lady leaves for Seattle and St. Louis to do stumping for the President’s drug program.
More law-enforcement officers along the Mexican border are planned by the Reagan Administration in a new effort to halt the flow of illegal aliens. The Administration proposes to station several hundred more patrolmen along the border, but Border Patrol agents say more police are not the solution. “You need something to remove the lure that brings them here,” a Border Patrol official in El Paso said.
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said the public confidence in the courts was diminishing because lawyers were making the pursuit of justice more expensive and time-consuming. He warned that unless steps were taken to cure these abuses, lawyers could “price themselves out of the market” and face greater governmental regulation.
City governments are turning to special fees and charges to raise money as federal aid declines and property tax income grows slowly. according to a Census Bureau study. Spending on police continues to close in on education as the biggest cost for municipalities. the study found. According to the report. “City Government Finances in 1981-82,” property taxes, long the largest local source of income for municipalities, climbed 6.7% to $19.5 billion. And over the last decade, the share of city income provided by property taxes has dropped from 31% to 21%, the study showed.
Under orders from a federal judge, a man stood up in his boyhood church in Crossville, Tennessee, confessed he helped to sell a stolen truck, then asked the congregation to “forgive me, and pray for me.” Jesse Smallwood said he did not approve of the sentence ordered by U.S. District Judge L. Clure Morton — “I think that judge is nuts,” he said — but he agreed that a public confession and three years’ probation were better than a year in prison. “I’m sorry I have to come to church like this,” Smallwood, 36, said softly as he stood in the pulpit of First Baptist Church. Pastor Carl F. Yarnell stood with his arm around his shoulder as Smallwood stared at the floor and made a 35-second statement.
The National Black Police Association, a group representing 34,000 black police officers, voted to oppose the nomination of White House counselor Edwin Meese III as U.S. attorney general. In a letter to President Reagan and Chairman Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina) of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the group’s board of directors said. Meese “cannot be trusted to aggressively pursue civil rights protections.”
Mark David Chapman wants to meet with John Lennon’s widow to apologize for killing the former Beatle and to ask for her forgiveness, a published report said. Chapman, who refused to discuss details of the December, 1980, slaying outside the Lennons’ Manhattan apartment building, made the comment to a Buffalo (New York) News reporter in an interview at the Attica Correctional Facility.
Elliot L. Richardson, who as U.S. attorney general refused to obey President Nixon’s order to fire a special Watergate prosecutor, is running for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Paul E. Tsongas (D-Massachusetts). Richardson, 63, a Republican who has held federal Cabinet and ambassadorial posts under Republican and Democratic presidents, said he will formally announce his candidacy March 19. Another Republican, businessman Ray Shamie of Walpole, Massachusetts, has already announced as a candidate for the Senate seat. Tsongas is not seeking reelection because of poor health.
Two brakes failed as the Challenger landed at Cape Canaveral and a possible collision with a bird damaged some heat-shielding tiles, but space agency officials said today that the space shuttle should be ready to fly again, as scheduled, early in April. The brake damage, a persistent problem with the shuttle landings, caused the National Aeronautics and Space Administration the most concern. The agency and the brake manufacturer, the B. F. Goodrich Company, are seeking the source of the trouble and considering a redesign of the system. Kenneth W. Colley, chief of the shuttle’s mechanical systems at the Kennedy Space Center here, said the brakes for both wheels of the right main landing gear were discovered to be “charred and fractured.” The tires were also badly worn. The outboard brake was the most severely damaged. Neither was found to be re-usable.
A traffic accident victim whose cough alerted doctors preparing him for organ donor surgery on Tuesday that he might be alive, has died. The man, Alan Supergan, 20 years old, of the Chicago suburb of Glenview, died about 6 A.M. Saturday of heart failure in Condell Memorial Hospital after four days on a life-support system, officials said. Mr. Supergan suffered brain injuries in a traffic accident February 2. He was declared legally dead last Monday after showing no response to pain and exhibiting no brain activity. After his cough startled medical personnel Tuesday, a finding of slight brain activity led doctors to try to revive him.
After the discovery of a highly radioactive table base in a Chicago hotel, Illinois nuclear officials said Sunday they were “pretty confident” no more of the contaminated pedestals would be found in areas open to the public. The radioactive pedestals apparently were made in Mexico with scrap metal contaminated by cobalt-60 from a stolen medical therapy device. The Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety ordered 38 table bases removed from the unidentified hotel Saturday after inspectors found one of the pedestals emitting radiation of 200 millirems per hour, the equivalent of 10 chest X-rays. The others averaged about 2 millirems per hour, still above the limit nuclear authorities consider safe.
Winds reaching 95 m.p.h. and the first tornadoes of the season battered parts of Texas, Kansas and Louisiana as strong thunderstorms pounded the lower Mississippi Valley with half a foot of rain. The National Weather Service reported several tornado sightings and high wind around Louisiana, causing scattered damage to rural buildings and downing trees. The agency issued a series of tornado watches and warnings throughout the afternoon for various parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The twisters caused only minor injuries but left a trail of destruction.
William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 3 (“The Sunday Symphony”), composed in 1958, receives premiere performance, by the North Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Carlton Woods.
12 years after winning the doubles in Sapporo (1972), Italian Paul Hildgarten wins the men’s luge singles at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics.
East German luger Steffi Martin wins the first of 2 consecutive women’s singles gold medals at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics; also wins in Calgary (1988).
Finnish cross-country skier Marja-Liisa Hämäläinen wins the 5k gold medal at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics; 2nd of 3 individual medal sweep, also winning 10k and 20k events.
The United States won its first medal of the XIV Olympic Winter Games tonight when Caitlin (Kitty) and Peter Carruthers of Wilmington, Delaware, took the silver medal in pairs figure skating. Elena Valova and Oleg Vasiliev of the Soviet Union, the 1983 world and 1984 European champions, won the gold medal, as expected. Twenty- four-year-old Peter and 22-year-old Kitty finished barely ahead of Larisa Selezneva and Oleg Makarov of the Soviet Union for second place. The young Soviet pair took the bronze.
Cale Yarborough, becomes 1st Daytona 500 qualifier, above 200 MPH.
Born:
Peter Vanderkaay, U.S. swimmer (Olympics, 2 gold medals, 4x200m freestyle, 2004, 2008; 2 bronze medals, 200m, 2008; 400m, 2012), in Royal Oak, Michigan.
Brad Keselowski, American auto racer (NASCAR Xfinity Series 2010; NASCAR Cup Series 2012), in Rochester Hills, Michigan.
Died:
Anna Anderson [possibly born Franziska Schanzkowska], 87, best-known of several imposters claiming to be Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov, dies still maintaining her fraudulent claim.
History Diaries 