Israeli planes bombed what were described as Palestinian guerrilla bases in the Syrian-and Druze-controlled hills around Beirut. The air attacks coincided with the eruption of major battles around the mountaintop village of Suk al Gharb, just east of Beirut, where units of the Lebanese Army loyal to President Amin Gemayel are defending the approaches to the presidential palace in Baabda. Syrian-backed Druze and Shiite militiamen appeared to be poised to try to push Mr. Gemayel out of his official residence.
Lebanon’s army is preparing for what many in Lebanon say they think will be the decisive battle between the Lebanese Government and Muslim militias opposing it. Many Lebanese leaders say critical battles will be fought for two towns, Suk al Gharb, a mountain settlement in a commanding military position above Beirut, and Baabda, where the presidential palace is situated.
Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim and Druze leaders met here today with Syrian officials to plan political and military strategy after President Hafez al-Assad’s rejection of a Saudi-backed peace plan. Nabih Berri, leader of the Amal Shiite Muslim organization, and Walid Jumblat, the Lebanese Druze leader, met together privately first and then separately with Syrian leaders in talks on the latest situation in Lebanon. Mr. Berri said the Lebanese had discussed security matters inside West Beirut, the predominantly Muslim sector that is now under the control of Shiite and Druze militiamen. Syria continued, meanwhile to criticize President Amin Gemayel of Lebanon in the official Syrian press.
Heavy fighting flared again in the war between Iran and Iraq, and the Iranians accused Iraq of breaking its pledge of last week to suspend air and artillery attacks on cities. An Iranian regional broadcast charged that the port of Abadan came under heavy Iraqi artillery bombardment. Iran had said Saturday that it also would halt air and artillery attacks on Iraqi cities if Iraq did not shell civilian areas. Both sides reported new ground fighting south of the Iranian border city of Mehran, where Iran launched an offensive last week.
Afghan government forces killed more than 600 guerrillas over four days of heavy fighting across the country, the official Kabul radio declared in a broadcast. The Soviet-installed regime said 157 of the guerrillas were killed Saturday and 461 last Thursday, the latter the highest one-day casualty toll announced since Soviet troops intervened in December, 1979, to prop up the Marxist regime. There was no independent confirmation of the Kabul casualty report.
U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, without referring to the outlawed Solidarity trade union movement, said in a speech in the Polish city of Krakow that some countries pay only lip service to human rights and trade union freedoms. Perez de Cuellar said that, while standards for such rights and freedoms have been set, “their universal application remains regrettably lacking…” The secretary general, in Poland on an official visit, did not name any country.
The Soviet Union is willing to start improving relations with the United States if the Reagan Administration will negotiate on the basis of “equality and equal security,” the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda said in an editorial that was devoid of the harsh language of recent Soviet commentary. The newspaper made no reference to a demand by the late Soviet President Yuri V. Andropov that the United States show a readiness to remove new nuclear missiles being deployed in Western Europe as a condition for resuming suspended arms talks and improving relations.
The USSR performs a nuclear test at Eastern Kazakh/Semipalitinsk.
France and independent truckers agreed to hold talks on ending the drivers’ blockades of dozens of main highways. The blockades were set up to protest cargo losses in freezing weather that occurred after a customs agents’ strike prevented the trucks from reaching their points of delivery.
The Pope beatified 100 people, all but one of them victims of that phase of the French revolution known as the Reign of Terror. The exception was an Italian missionary who was killed in 1855 in what is now Papua-New Guinea.
A high-level U.S. military and civilian delegation flew to Hanoi from Bangkok, Thailand, to try to determine the fate of approximately 2,500 American servicemen missing since the Vietnam War ended 11 years ago. The group, expected to stay until Wednesday, is led by Richard Armitage, assistant secretary of defense, the highest-ranking defense official to visit Vietnam since 1975. It also includes Ann Mills Griffiths of the privately funded American League of Families.
A Philippine opposition leader, Salvador H. Laurel, flew to the United States today, saying he would ask the American leadership to stop aiding the “oppressive” rule of President Ferdinand E. Marcos unless Mr. Marcos pledged honest elections. “Without American support this dictatorship will collapse,” Mr. Laurel said before boarding a plane for San Francisco. “We can topple this regime through peaceful means.” Mr. Laurel and his wife, Celia, had tried to leave on Friday. But the police said they found a gun in Mr. Laurel’s luggage, and he was arrested on charges of possessing an illegal firearm, a crime carrying a potential life sentence. Mr. Laurel said the gun was planted in his luggage to prevent his trip to the United States, and on Saturday a judge dismissed the charges against him after Mr. Marcos ordered that charges against him be re-investigated and that he be allowed to visit the United States.
Terrorists attempting to overthrow President Ferdinand E. Marcos trained in the Arizona desert before setting off more than 30 bombs in the Philippines four years ago, the Arizona Republic reported. The newspaper said it obtained federal records showing that the terrorists were members of a group identified as the April 6 Liberation Movement and a second called Light a Fire. The first group was responsible for a series of bombings in the Philippines that killed an American and wounded more than 60 others. The second set fires that damaged a Manila hotel.
Mismanagement and corruption run through the United States economic assistance programs in Central America, according to State Department audits and a Congressional study. The reports found illegal diversion of funds for private gain, fraudulent accounting procedures and spending that never reached the people it was intended to help.
Two U.S.-supplied “Huey” helicopters on a counterinsurgency mission crashed in El Salvador’s San Miguel province, killing all 28 people on the two aircraft, officials said. No Americans were reported aboard. There were conflicting reports on the crash, called the worst in the four-year-old civil war. An army colonel and leftist guerrillas said that rebel rocket fire hit one helicopter, which then collided with the second; a Defense Ministry statement in San Salvador said only that the two helicopters collided.
Britain and Argentina are near an agreement to open talks on declaring an end to hostilities over the Falkland Islands and the normalization of relations, according to unofficial reports circulating in London. The Foreign Office would not comment on the reports, but President Raul Alfonsin of Argentina is reported to have dropped Argentina’s insistence that the dispute over which nation has the right to sovereignty over the Falklands be settled as a precondition to restoring normal relations.
A Foreign Office spokesman confirmed that Mr. Alfonsin’s response to British proposals for talks, made late last month, came in a letter conveyed Friday night by the Swiss Embassy, which handles Britain’s dealings with Argentina. The letter is being “studied closely,” the spokesman said. Argentina’s immediate goal is reported to be an end to the 150-mile exclusion zone Britain has maintained around the South Atlantic island group as a result of Argentina’s unsuccessful attempt to take them by force. But it has not given up its sovereignty claim to the islands.
The Colombian and Venezuelan Governments agreed Friday to join forces against drug trafficking and guerrilla activity in the jungle along their border. “We will devote all our efforts to fight the powerful gangs of drug traffickers and subversives which pose a threat to our society,” Defense Minister Gustavo Matamoros of Colombia said after two days of meetings with his Venezuelan counterpart, General Humberto Alcalde, in Caracas. General Matamoros said drug traffickers in both nations had given Colombian guerrilla bands as much as $100 million in return for “protection services.” A small number of Colombia’s estimated leftist 15,000 guerrillas are active in the rural northeastern border region of that country.
As Iowa’s voters prepare for caucuses Monday night in the first test of strength among Democratic Presidential candidates, President Reagan will be returning to the scene of his first success as a radio personality. It is, all sides admit, a run at nostalgia, a media event, exquisitely timed and purely political. Half a century ago, as a bachelor in his early 20’s, the future Republican President became a sports announcer for the Des Moines radio station WHO. He broadcast University of Iowa football games. He recreated Chicago Cubs baseball games, describing them from scraps of paper handed to him by a Western Union operator. He touted Wheaties and Kentucky Club Pipe Tobacco, and the station’s 50,000-watt signal carried his voice across the Middle Western plains. It will carry him again on Monday. Mr. Reagan will make two addresses to Republican groups, and go on the air from WHO for 10 minutes “down memory lane,” as the station’s general manager, George Carpenter, puts it.
The status of a debtor nation faces the United States late this year or perhaps next year. Foreigners have been lending and investing more money in this country than Americans have been lending and investing abroad. Soon foreigners’ holdings in the United States may outweigh Americans’ holdings overseas. Some economists and Administration officials welcome this development, saying the willingness of foreigners to commit their funds confirms the American economy’s promise.
More attacks on Walter F. Mondale by the other major Democratic candidates for the Presidential nomination marked the closing hours of their campaigning on the eve of Iowa’s caucuses. Mr. Mondale is expected to win the caucuses handily. The main goal of his Democratic challengers is to finish in such a way that they are not written off before the first Presidential primary in New Hampshire February 28.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who preaches the politics of reconciliation, is being persistently questioned about whether he has used derogatory terms in referring to Jews. Mr. Jackson, a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, denied that he had made such remarks. He complained today that he was being hounded on the issue. Mr. Jackson has been questioned several times by reporters in the last two days about reports that he used anti-Semitic terms.
The questions were prompted by a report in The Washington Post Monday that in conversations with reporters Mr. Jackson had referred to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York as “Hymietown.” The article quoted Mr. Jackson as having denied making the remark. It did not name any reporters who had heard Mr. Jackson make such a remark. “Hymie” is a shortened version of the name Hyman, which is relatively common among Jews, and the term is considered offensive by many of them. Today, in an appearance on the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” Mr. Jackson repeated the denial, saying, “It simply is not true, and I think that the accuser ought to come forth.”
The nation’s largest ecumenical body has a new leader, Bishop Philip R. Cousin, the first member of a predominantly black denomination to become president of the National Council of Churches of Christ. He said he hopes to bring to the council the vitality he has experienced in the black church, emphasizing spirituality and social activism.
Eastern Airlines’ pilots ignored union leaders and approved a salary-for-stock swap plan that is the key to a $367-million bailout plan for the financially troubled carrier, a union vote count showed. A preliminary count in Miami showed that pilots voted 1,784 to 696 to back the proposal, which already has won the approval of Eastern’s union machinists and flight attendants. “This means all the employee groups of Eastern Airlines support the plan,” said Captain George Smith, chairman of the Master Executive Council of the Air Line Pilots Association.
An increase in the number of black mayors in the 1970s directly corresponded with a rise in municipal jobs for blacks, according to a study released by the Joint Center for Political Studies. The report found that in 1973 blacks held 27.5% of the municipal jobs in the cities he studied. By 1980 that had increased to 32.6%, roughly reflecting blacks’ 33% proportion of the urban population. The study found that in 1980 the cities that had the greatest percentage of black officials were Berkeley, California, where blacks in government represented 187% of the percentage of blacks in the general population, and San Francisco, where the figure was 176%. Berkeley had a black mayor and San Francisco a white mayor.
Americans can expect interest rates to “drift down” this year, if the Federal Reserve does its job right, and they need not worry about the budget deficit until 1985, Secretary of the Treasury Donald T. Regan said. In an interview in U.S. News & World Report, Regan also chided congressional Democrats for their “preposterous demands” for cutting the Pentagon’s budget to reduce the deficit. He said the odds are not good for achieving a bipartisan compromise on the issue.
There are twice as many men as women among prospective jurors in the case of a woman who was gang-raped on a pool table in Fall River, Massachusetts, and feminists objected to a possible all-male jury. Judge William Young will let defense and prosecution lawyers make the final picks for the two 16-member panels. More women than men were excused during preliminary selection because they contended they already had an opinion about the case, in which six Portuguese-Americans are accused of aggravated rape last March 6.
Nine inmates, some of them armed, remained at large yesterday after separate escapes in three states. Two medium-security prisoners who walked away from a work detail Friday afternoon outside the walls of the Tennessee State Prison remained free last night.
One of five men who escaped Saturday from Tennessee’s Fort Pillow State Prison after overpowering their guards was captured yesterday, and the authorities believed they spotted three others in a wooded area as night fell. The Fort Pillow fugitives were said to have taken two families hostage in their flight. No one was hurt in any of the hostage incidents.
In Louisiana, two of nine men who escaped an Alexandria jail after cutting bars and climbing down knotted sheets Friday were still at large yesterday.
Two convicts who overpowered their guards while being driven across Ohio Saturday abducted seven people, including two sheriff’s deputies, before one was stopped yesterday in Indiana, the authorities said. The two were being returned to prisons after sentencing for other crimes in Kentucky.
Eight antinuclear activists convicted of burglary and conspiracy after entering a General Electric plant and hammering the nose cones of two nuclear missiles have won their appeal. Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled 6 to 1 Friday that Judge Samuel Salus 2nd of Montgomery County erred in stopping the defendants from arguing that their act was justified. The Montgomery County District Attorney’s office has 120 days to decide to hold a new trial or drop the charges. Convicted March 6, 1981, of burglary, conspiracy and criminal mischief in connection with the break-in at the G.E. plant in King of Prussia were Molly Rush, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, his brother, Philip, the Rev. Dean Hammer, Elmer Maas, the Rev. Carl Kabat, John Schuchardt, and Sister Anne Montgomery.
Reports in the Chicago Tribune of an alleged $100,000 contract by organized crime to kill former Chicago Mayor Jane M. Byrne were described as “ludicrous” by the city’s former police superintendent, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. “If there were any plots of the slightest consequence, I would have been notified about it immediately so special precautions could be taken,” said Richard Brzeczek, the ex-superintendent. Byrne’s husband, Jay McMullen, agreed with Brzeczek.
Publicity over the deaths by beating of nearly 100 cats in Indianapolis has brought donations ranging from $1 to $500 to a reward fund. The fund is now over $2,000. “Something positive is going to happen – I know it will,” Kathleen R. Able said Saturday. She is vice president of finance for Spay-Neuter Services Inc., the group handling the reward fund for information leading to arrests. Animal lovers around Indiana and Ohio are offering money and advice, she said. The local chapter of Guardian Angels is patrolling the neighborhood, Mrs. Able said. “I am totally overwhelmed by the response,” said Velda R. Boenitz, president of Spay-Neuter Services, who initiated the reward. The killings slowed through late January and early February, but last Sunday 35 cats, most of them clubbed to death, were found on a street in the neighborhood. A city ordinance sets a $2,500 fine for a person convicted of abusing an animal.
The space shuttle Challenger made at least five additions to the world’s most expensive junkyard on its flight earlier this month, losing a rendezvous balloon, two satellites and two rockets. That brought to 5,173 the number of human-made objects floating through space, say officials of the North American Air Defense Command at Colorado Springs, Colorado. More than 3,700 of those items are junk such as burned-out rocket casings.
A weekend snowstorm fizzled out after plastering the Plains with more than a foot of snow and piling it into waist-high drifts, but roads were still blocked in places from Colorado to Minnesota. The snow tapered off in Minnesota as the storm crossed over the Great Lakes, dropping lesser amounts of snow in parts of Wisconsin and Michigan. Scores of motorists whose cars got stuck in drifts were rescued or jammed motels, truck stops and restaurants. One traffic fatality in Nebraska was blamed on the storm. The storm deposited a record 15 inches of snow in 24 hours in Grand Island, Nebraska.
“Doonesbury” closes at Biltmore Theater, NYC, after 104 performances.
President Reagan speaks with the Grand Marshall of the Daytona 500 race, broadcast over the track’s PA system prior to the race starting.
26th Daytona 500: Cale Yarborough wins for 2nd consecutive year and 4th time in career; last-lap pass to beat Darrell Waltrip.
Swedish cross country skier Thomas Wassberg wins 50k event at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics; his second gold of the Games (4 x 10k relay) and 3rd of his career (15k Lake Placid 1980).
The final day of the Olympic games in Sarajevo was brightened by two American skiing champions who ended a season-long slump by finishing first and second in the slalom. The victory of Phil and Steve Mahre, who are twins from Yakima, Washington, and the gold-medal winning performance by the Soviet hockey team were the final day’s highlights. In today’s slalom race, Phil Mahre had a total time of 1 minute 39.41 seconds for the event’s two runs. Steve was second, in 1:39.62, and Didier Bouvet, a French newcomer whose best previous finish in World Cup competition was 8th, finished third in 1:40.20. The course was steep, with a vertical drop of about 650 feet, and icy, with 60 gates on the first run and 58 on the second. Twenty-five starters, including some of the world’s best slalom specialists, fell or missed gates on the course.
Soviet Union wins its 6th Olympic ice hockey gold medal with a 2-0 win over silver medalists Czechoslovakia at the Sarajevo Winter Games.
The XIV Winter Olympic Games close in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. This evening at the closing ceremonies, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the president of the International Olympic Committee, declared the Games closed, and the Olympic flame was extinguished. Phil Mahre carried the American flag in the ceremonies.
Born:
Marissa Meyer, American Young Adult Sci-fi and Fantasy Writer (“Cinder”), Tacoma, Washington.
Died:
Claude Hopkins, 80, American jazz stride pianist, arranger, bandleader, and musical director (Josephine Baker).
Ina Ray Hutton [Odessa Cowan], 67, American singer and big band bandleader (“Ina Ray Hutton Show”), of complications from diabetes.
History Diaries 