Amin Gemayel informed his enemies that he will cancel the 1983 accord with Israel in exchange for their agreeing to begin reconciliation talks with his government. Senior government officials said the Lebanese President realized that the United States could not save his deteriorating government and army with military support.
U.S. Marines will begin moving from the Beirut airport to ships offshore in two or three days, a senior White House official said.
Only about 12,000 troops of the 22,000 combat troops in the Lebanese Army are still loyal to the Government of President Gemayel after two major defeats in the last 10 days, according to estimates by Lebanese and Western military officials.
U.S. officers continually sent optimistic reports to Washington on the progress they were making in the 14 months that they trained the Lebanese armed forces, according to senior Pentagon and Administration officials. They said most of the progress reports failed to discuss in any detail the doubts that many American instructors had about the Lebanese army’s ability to fight.
Iran said today that its forces had begun an offensive against Iraqi border fortifications on the central front and that Iranian soldiers were advancing. Iraq said it had contained the drive. Both sides said heavy casualties had been inflicted on the other. It was clear that heavy fighting had erupted, but neither side’s claims could be verified since outsiders are rarely allowed to visit the front.
The Iranian radio said the drive, in the Mehran area, had resulted in at least 1,200 Iraqi casualties, both dead and wounded. The Iraqi radio gave no casualty figures, but said Iraqi troops backed by tanks and helicopter gunships had sent the Iranians into disorderly flight. The Iraqi command said that its navy and air force had sunk five Iranian ships near the port of Bandar Khomeini, and that Iraqi mines in the same area had sunk two more. Iraq also said the Iranians had shelled Iraqi border towns, killing five civilians, the latest in a week of cross- border artillery attacks.
Iran’s communiqués said its troops had advanced southeast of Mehran and regained Iranian territory that had been under Iraqi occupation since the beginning of the war. The two countries went to war in September 1980 over control of the Shatt al Arab waterway, which divides their territories at the head of the Persian Gulf. Iran said its troops had crossed into Iraq near Badrah, a border town opposite Mehran and 90 miles east of Baghdad. It said the drive started around midnight Wednesday, with Iranian troops advancing along a 70-mile-wide sector between Mehran and Dehloran. The Iraqi communiqués said an Iranian force ”tried to attack the border guards’ observation post of the Second Army, deployed in the central sector.” This was met with a counterattack, the communique added. Iraq also said Iranian artillery continued its daily shelling of Iraqi towns, including Basra, Khanaqin and Mandali, killing five civilians.
Fresh claims of responsibility by known members of the Red Brigades for the Rome assassination of American diplomat Leamon R. (Ray) Hunt aroused fears that the left-wing gang that terrorized Italy in the 1970s has been revived. Jailed Red Brigades terrorists making a routine court appearance in Genoa shouted, “We claim the attack in Rome.” Hunt, 56-year-old director general of the multinational force that acts as a buffer between Egypt and Israel in the Sinai Peninsula, was fatally wounded by two gunmen. Responsibility for the killing was later claimed by the Fighting Communist Party, an offshoot of the Red Brigades.
As Russians picked up the rhythms of their lives again this week, there were some who had fresh worries to add to the daily concerns about food lines, adequate winter clothing and the fortunes of Soviet athletes in the Winter Olympics. The focus of the anxiety was Konstantin U. Chernenko, new leader of the Communist Party, and whether he will be effective in tackling the nation’s store of domestic problems. In particular, there were many who wondered whether he would press forward with the modest economic improvements started by Yuri V. Andropov or will allow the bureaucracy to lapse back into the stagnation of Mr. Andropov’s predecessor, Leonid I. Brezhnev, whose 30-year sponsorship lifted Mr. Chernenko from a provincial party career to the heights of power.
A fresh clue today suggested that one of the younger men, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, 52, a national party secretary under Mr. Chernenko, would be a man to be reckoned with. A booklet containing official documents from the Central Committee meeting that appointed Mr. Chernenko last Monday revealed that Mr. Gorbachev had made a previously undisclosed speech appealing to the Central Committee’s 300 members to show unity and unanimity in carrying out party policy. The fact that Mr. Gorbachev had made such a speech suggested to Western diplomats that he might well be the second-ranking party secretary, after Mr. Chernenko, the General Secretary. The national party secretaries carry out on a day-to-day basis the policy made by the Politburo, and the party’s General Secretary is, in effect, the Soviet leader.
Soviet human rights activist Yuri M. Orlov was released from prison after completing a seven-year term and now begins five years of internal exile, a Western diplomat in Moscow said. The diplomat, who asked to not be further identified, said dissident sources informed him that Orlov was released last Friday and added that he did not know where the physicist would live in internal exile. Orlov, 59, was arrested in 1977 and given the maximum sentence for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda in connection with his activities in the Helsinki rights-monitoring group.
Major Alpine highways from France to Italy were blocked by truck drivers today, leaving thousands of vehicles stranded on both sides of the border. The blockade by French truck drivers was intended as a protest against a strike by French and Italian customs officers that has held up truck traffic across the border for the past three days. By placing their trucks across the access roads to the Mont Blanc and Frejus tunnels, the drivers halted all traffic. The French police highway control center in Lyons reported 1,750 trucks and hundreds of private cars were halted on the approaches to the two tunnels. The police said that even if the blockade was lifted immediately, it would take two days to clear the traffic.
The Soviet aircraft carrier Novorossiysk passed Singapore and entered the South China Sea en route to join the Soviet Pacific fleet, a U.S. 7th Fleet spokesman said. The carrier, accompanied by four other warships, will join another Kiev-class carrier, the Minsk, in the Pacific. The Novorossiysk carries about three dozen planes, plus helicopters and missiles. It is expected to call at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, on its way to Pacific duty.
Philippine opposition leaders, trying to avert a split in their ranks over whether to boycott the elections scheduled for May, decided to give President Ferdinand E. Marcos two more weeks to meet their demands. They had given Marcos until last Tuesday to surrender his authoritarian powers or risk an opposition boycott. Marcos ignored their demands.
Guerrillas supporting the ousted Pol Pot regime said today that they had driven Vietnamese occupation troops out of western Cambodia’s most important city. The clandestine insurgent radio, believed to be broadcasting from southern China, said a raid last Saturday on Battambang in western Cambodia was a success. The guerrillas are fighting to oust 150,000 Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. Western diplomats in Bangkok said they were unable to confirm the guerrilla claims about Battambang but had evidence to at least partly back up earlier insurgent battlefield reports. The Pol Pot forces, with an estimated 40,000 guerrillas, make up the bulk of the fighting forces of the three- party insurgent alliance led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk.
Congressional investigators have concluded that new U.S.-built runways and base camps in Honduras amount to a permanent network of facilities, backing up an assertion made earlier this month by Senator Jim Sasser (D-Tennessee) during his visit to the area, according to congressional sources who asked not to be identified. The General Accounting Office. Congress’ investigative arm, presented its conclusion in secret House and Senate committee briefings over the past week, the sources said. The Administration has asserted that the installations, built during recent U.S.-Honduras military exercises, are temporary. The exercises are to resume this summer.
The Salvadoran army claimed that it killed 60 guerrillas and overran five of their camps in a major drive through northern Chalatenango province, but leftist rebels said government troops failed to achieve “their military or political objectives” or to “dislodge our fighters.” In nearby Cabanas province, residents reported that the two sides were fighting for control of Villa Dolores and Nueva Eden de San Juan.
The union leader of Guatemala’s largest newspaper has been freed unharmed by kidnappers. ”I believe I was abducted for having witnessed a kidnapping a few minutes before,” Sergio Aldana Galvan said Wednesday in an interview with Guatemala’s largest independent newspaper, Prensa Libre. Mr. Aldana Galvan, leader of the newspaper’s union, was seized by armed men Saturday a block from the building where he worked in Guatemala City. He said he was released in downtown Guatemala City late Tuesday. He speculated he was abducted because moments earlier he had witnessed the kidnapping of a young man who was forced into a car by armed assailants. ”They did not mistreat me at any time,” Mr. Aldana Galvan said.
South African authorities completed the forced removal of more than 100 families from the village of Mogopa, land where their families had lived for 70 years or more, in a program to move blacks from areas set aside for whites. The blacks were taken from the village, about 100 miles northwest of Johannesburg, to Pachsdraai, a new village two hours away by car, which is to be incorporated into the nominally independent Bophuthatswana black homeland. Police said the operation went smoothly, but the Black Sash relief organization said some were moved in handcuffs and threatened with batons.
President Reagan, who trailed in an Illinois poll last fall, would probably win the state if the general election were held today, a new voter sampling shows. The Chicago Sun-Times and WMAQ- TV poll showed the President leading his closest Democratic challenger, Walter F. Mondale, by 52 percent to 44 percent. Mr. Reagan’s lead over Senator John Glenn of Ohio was even greater, at 55 percent to 40 percent, according to poll results released today. The poll results were a reversal from last October, when Mr. Mondale held a 52 percent to 43 percent edge over the President and Senator Glenn led Mr. Reagan, 50 percent to 43 percent.
President Reagan meets with his Emergency Committee for American Trade.
President Reagan is awarded by Muscle Training Magazine as the “best physically conditioned President in history.”
Three years of “serious errors in judgment” have thrown the federal government’s coal-leasing program far off track, according to a report to be delivered to Secretary of the Interior William P. Clark today. It represents a broad condemnation of the policies under which Clark’s predecessor, James G. Watt, sought to put billions of tons of federal coal under lease as rapidly as possible. The report essentially reinforces the arguments of those who have angrily contended that the Administration’s eagerness to lease coal, at a time when there was little demand for it, cost the government millions of dollars.
A ground collapse after a bomb test Wednesday, injuring 12 workers at the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons proving ground in Nevada, was attributed to unexpected geological conditions in the desert by the program’s manager, Thomas R. Clark. He denied Soviet assertions that the test had violated an unratified Soviet-American agreement not to test nuclear arms more powerful than the equivalent of 150,000 tons of TNT, or 150 kilotons.
Both sides in the Cincinnati school desegregation case announced an agreement in principle that would implement a seven-year program to reduce racial isolation in public schools without forced busing. The agreement, reached after a month of intensive out-of-court negotiations, must be formally approved by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which filed the suit in 1974, and the Cincinnati and Ohio boards of education. Negotiators said that they expect approval of the agreement, which expands the city’s “alternative schools” program to attract students from various neighborhoods. The plan is viewed by the N.A.A.C.P. as an alternative to the type reached in Bakersfield, California, last month that was hailed by the Administration as a model for future accords.
The Iowa caucuses next Monday are looked upon by many political strategists to clarify a muddled political situation that prevails in New Hampshire in advance of the nation’s first Presidential primary on February 28. Every public opinion poll places Walter F. Mondale in first place in the Democratic primary, but the major question that has strained the predictive skills of the experts is who will be second.
Telephone service has declined markedly around the country in the seven weeks since the January 1 breakup of the Bell System and even in the few months or so before, according to customers and some telephone company executives.
A proposed sex education program for Girl Scouts was revised after some troops canceled hundreds of cookie sale orders to protest the inclusion of birth control and abortion information, says Peggy Bailer, executive director of the Detroit area Girl Scout Council. Bailer said that she wrote to the council’s 6,000 volunteers, emphasizing that the sex education program is only in the planning stages and all mention of birth control and abortion has been eliminated. She said the instructions were to be part of a sexual awareness workshop proposed for girls in the sixth through eighth grades. It will be funded partly by cookie sales.
Heart, cancer and lung associations charged that recent tobacco company advertisements seeking to open a debate about smoking are really a smoke screen to hide the hazards of cigarettes. At a joint news conference in Washington, leaders of the three national health organizations said that there is nothing left to debate. Thirty years of evidence is overwhelming that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and chronic bronchitis, they said.
David, the 12-year-old severely immune deficient boy who spent his days isolated in a plastic bubble until nine days ago, is suffering a serious reaction to a bone marrow transplant. “The GVH (graft-versus-host) reaction is serious,” said Susannah Moore Griffin, spokeswoman for Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. A person with graft-versus-host reaction suffers from the transplanted-thus foreign-cells’ attempting to destroy his own body tissue. David’s condition remained serious but stable. Gastrointestinal bleeding from an undiagnosed source continued. His doctor said David-whose last name has never been divulged to protect his privacy-was alert and able to walk around his hospital room.
Genene Jones, found guilty of murdering a baby girl by fatal injection, was sentenced today to 99 years in prison by the jury that convicted her. ”It’s over, it’s over,” said Petti McClellan, whose 15-month-old daughter, Chelsea, died in September 1982 after receiving what were supposed to be routine immunizations at a Kerrville pediatrician’s office. They were given by Mrs. Jones, a vocational nurse, the equivalent to a practical nurse in other states. Mrs. Jones, who did not testify at the trial, took the stand briefly today in the punishment proceeding. Clutching a tissue and appearing disoriented, she told jurors she had never been convicted of a crime before. When the sentence was read, she appeared dazed. The sentence could have been five years to life. Inmates serving 99 years are eligible for parole in about 20 years. Mrs. Jones’s attorneys said the verdict would be appealed.
An explosion apparently caused by methane gas in a Pennsylvania coal mine early today injured 10 miners and left three men missing. Officials said they feared the three men were dead. Rescue teams with air tanks and portable lights found large pockets of gas deep in the mine and a Federal official said he was not hopeful the miners had survived. ”We have run into a situation that’s not optimistic,” said Frank O’Gorman, a spokesman for the Federal Mine Safety and Health Administration in Arlington, Va. ”There’s a possibility of another explosion.”
The blast tore through at least two branches of the Greenwich Collieries No. 1 mine, owned by the Pennsylvania Mines Corporation, a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company of Allentown, the company said. The missing miners had been pumping water in a tunnel about 450 feet below the surface and about one mile horizontally into the mine near this village about 90 miles east of Pittsburgh. Four men working in an adjacent tunnel were admitted to Miners Hospital in nearby Spangler with burns. Six miners were treated for injuries and released.
A pilot saw the Japanese adventurer Naomi Uemura on the windswept slopes of Mount McKinley today and reported he appeared to be in good condition after surviving a blizzard. The pilot, Doug Geeting, saw Mr. Uemura at the 17,000-foot level, far above the 7,200-foot base camp where he was supposed to arrive last Tuesday after becoming the first man to climb Mount McKinley alone in the winter. ”He appears to be O.K.,” said Mary Mell Mower, who was maintaining radio contact with the pilots who had been searching for the climber. ”He waved his arms at the plane, but there was no radio contact with him.” Another pilot, Lowell Thomas Jr., said winds were still high on the mountain, but not too strong to prevent the veteran mountain climber from renewing his descent. The 44-year-old Mr. Uemura reported on Monday that he had scaled the 20,320-foot summit of Mount McKinley on Sunday.
The latest in a chain of major winter storms blew knee-deep snow with winds gusting to 60 m.p.h. in the mountains of the West, while flooding spread from ice jams on brimful rivers in the East. The Midwest got the leftovers from an earlier Rocky Mountain blizzard, with freezing rain or about half a foot of snow making driving difficult in parts of Nebraska, the Dakotas and northwestern Minnesota. The new storm dropped up to eight inches of snow in the mountains of Oregon and Idaho. Residents of the central Rockies — particularly in the mountains of Utah — were warned to batten down for up to two feet of new snow driven by powerful winds. As heavy snow spread into Nevada and Utah, winds were gusting from 40 m.p.h. in the valleys to 60 m.p.h. in the mountains.
”Terms of Endearment” swept the Academy Award nominations as expected, winning 11 nominations in nine categories. Major surprises were the number of specialized, relatively low-budget movies that were nominated for two or more major awards.
Canadian speed skater Gaétan Boucher takes out the 1,500-meter race at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, his second gold medal of the Games; also wins the 1,000-meter.
Swedish cross country skier Gunde Svan takes his 2nd gold medal of the Sarajevo Winter Olympics in the 4 x 10k relay; also wins 15k gold.
Swedish cross country skier Thomas Wassberg wins 2nd career gold medal in 4 x 10k relay at Sarajevo Winter Olympics; 2nd of 4 career gold; 15k Lake Placid (1980), 50k Sarajevo, relay Calgary (1988).
Three-time men’s figure skating world champion Scott Hamilton of the U.S. wins the gold medal at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics from Brian Orser of Canada and Jozef Sabovčík of Czechoslovakia. Hamilton followed his performance by taking an American flag from a front-row spectator and waving it as he skated an extra victory lap around the rink.
Rosalynn Sumners of Edmonds, Washington, the world champion, suffered a setback today in women’s figure skating in the XIV Olympic Winter Games. As a result, Katarina Witt of East Germany won the short program and took the overall lead going into the final day of the women’s competition. Entering the long program, Miss Witt is first and Miss Sumners second. They are so close in the standing that the one who beats the other in the long program will almost surely win the gold medal.
The first American to win a downhill in Olympic skiing is Bill Johnson of Van Nuys, California. In capturing the gold medal in the men’s downhill at the XIV Winter Games, the 23-year-old Johnson toppled the European powerhouses of Alpine skiing. Last month, Johnson became the first American to win a downhill race in the World Cup, the chief circuit of international skiing, when he triumphed at Wengen, Switzerland. Today, he extended his series of firsts by finishing the twisting, 3,066-meter course, which had a vertical drop of 803 meters, in a sizzling burst of 1 minute 45.59 seconds. That was 27-hundredths of a second faster than Peter Mueller of Switzerland, who won the silver medal, and 36-hundredths better than Anton Steiner of Austria, who took the bronze medal.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1154.94 (-3.77).
Born:
Doug O’Brien, Canadian NHL defenseman (Tampa Bay Lightning), in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.
Cristopher Nilstorp, Swedish NHL goalie (Dallas Stars), in Burlov, Sweden.
Billy Latsko, NFL fullback (San Diego Chargers), in Gainesville, Florida.
History Diaries 