Heavy fighting in Beirut between Lebanese Army troops and anti-government militiamen along the line dividing east and west in the capital dashed hopes for a quick cease-fire guaranteed by Syria. The intense clashes occurred as President Amin Gemayel held another day of negotiations with Lebanese Christian and Muslim leaders in an effort to win support for his understanding with President Hafez al-Assad of Syria on a framework for a settlement of Lebanon’s political strife. In Damascus, Syrian officials were expected to continue their efforts to convince the two key Lebanese opposition figures, Walid Jumblat, the Druze leader, and Nabih Berri, the Shiite Muslim leader, to cooperate with Mr. Gemayel. They had earlier called for his resignation, but Mr. Jumblat said Friday night that they had agreed to drop this demand. There were reports that Mr. Berri and Mr. Jumblat might meet today with President Gemayel, but the Druze leader said that there had been no talks.
Experts here said they believed that earlier talks by Syrian officials with Mr. Berri and Mr. Jumblat were partly aimed at securing their agreement for a halt to the violence here before political reconciliation talks in Geneva could begin. Meanwhile, the Syrian-Lebanese understanding won endorsement today from two other leading Lebanese opposition figures, former Prime Minister Rashid Karami and former President Suleiman Franjieh. The two men, members of the pro- Syrian National Salvation Front, met today with Mr. Gemayel. The meeting with Mr. Karami, a Sunni Muslim, was especially significant because he and Mr. Gemayel had not met since national reconciliation talks broke down last November in Geneva.
As talks went on, fire from mortars, tanks, heavy artillery and rocket-propelled grenades shook buildings around the city and added to the already heavy toll of civilian casualties. The crackle of gunfire and the loud report of exploding grenades and artillery shells echoed down the streets in many parts of the capital. In some neighborhoods, residents said the fighting was the worst in some time. Artillery duels also erupted between Lebanese Army troops and Druze and other anti-government forces around Souq El Gharb, a strategic mountain village not far from the presidential palace and the Defense Ministry. In today’s fighting, two 82-millimeter mortar shells struck near the Hotel Alexandre, which houses most of the foreign press corps in East Beirut. The shells wounded one neighborhood resident and damaged eight cars.
Iran said its forces advanced six miles into Iraq toward the port city of Basra after successive attacks over the last three days. Tehran radio, monitored in London, said that an Iraqi mechanized brigade and an armored brigade were “largely destroyed and an infantry. brigade wiped out” in the advance toward Basra, which is Iraq’s second largest city. There was no independent confirmation of the Iranian report.
According to United States intelligence officials, Iran is preparing a second offensive that could involve more than 400,000 troops advancing on both Basra and Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. The officials said there are approximately 250,000 Iraqi soldiers deployed to meet the expected Iranian drive.
In Baghdad, the Iraqi Defense Minister, General Adnan Khayrallah, issued a statement Friday night saying Iranian troops had been “crushed in a battle unprecedented in its ferocity since the outset of the war” that began in September 1980. The statement did not specify where the battle took place.
The Iranian press agency said Iraqi forces had fired 20 chemical shells in an attempt to blunt the Iranian drive on Basra, adding that “this had no effect on the operation.” Iran said that Iraqi chemical attacks had wounded about 1,000 Iranian troops since Iran launched its offensive on Basra on Thursday and that 16 of the wounded had been flown to hospitals in Sweden and Switzerland.
Konstantin U. Chernenko’s remarks on Soviet-American relations seemed to reflect an increased interest in Moscow in exploring what lay behind President Reagan’s call for a more constructive dialogue, senior Administration officials said. They said a high-level review was currently under way in Washington on whether the United States should take any new initiatives toward Moscow in the near future.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl arrived in Washington and will meet with President Reagan tomorrow. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl flew to the United States for talks with President Reagan ranging from prospects for improved East-West relations to nagging European concerns about U.S. economic and trade policies and the huge budget deficit. Kohl planned meetings Monday and Tuesday with Reagan, key Cabinet members and leaders of the House and Senate foreign affairs committees. Some of his senior advisers say that Mr. Kohl will insist that the United States not interpret the stationing of new medium- range American missiles in West Germany as reflecting a slackening of Bonn’s interest in renewed arms talks with the Soviet Union.
Romania, concerned over a stagnating birth rate, announced a campaign today to urge citizens to have more children. The official press agency Agerpres, monitored in Vienna, said a resolution by the ruling Communist Party’s political executive committee set “firm measures to boost the birth rate.” The agency said that as of January 1, Romania’s population was 22,593,720, only slightly higher than it was the year before. In 1983 the population increased by 66,500, while in 1982 it increased by 103,000. The state has set a population target of 25 million by 1990. The committee also said it would seek better quality in production of goods, through “damages to be paid by foremen and engineers held responsible” for below-standard products. Poor quality of goods has been an obstacle to Romania’s goal of increasing exports.
Vatican and Czechoslovak delegations concluded their first consultations in three years on troubled relations and the Czechs’ official CTK news agency said further talks are planned. The Vatican delegation to Prague was led by Archbishop Luigi Poggi. Pope John Paul II’s special East European envoy.
India and Pakistan, which have fought each other in three wars over 35 years, will discuss proposals for detente in May, the Indian Government announced today. The announcement came after the foreign secretaries of the two nations concluded talks on better relations. The Indian Foreign Secretary, who is the No. 2 official in the ministry, Maharajkrishna Rasgotra, and his Pakistani counterpart, Niaz Naik, are to meet in Islamabad May 12 to discuss Pakistan’s draft of a nonaggression pact and the text of a treaty of peace and cooperation proposed by India, an Indian spokesman said. Both drafts were exchanged in 1982, but no further discussion has been held since then. India and Pakistan are at odds over territorial disputes in Kashmir.
China’s long-despised intellectuals are beginning to be recognized by the Peking leadership because their talents are desperately needed for the nation’s modernization. The updated Communist Party line is that most intellectuals have already merged with China’s working class and that the distinction between physical and mental labor will disappear as society develops and everyone becomes educated.
President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines said he would submit his powers of decree to a review and possible abolition by the new Parliament to be elected in May.
Salvadoran President Alvaro Magana said right-wing death squads blamed for thousands of civilian killings in his country have “taken the law into their own hands,” adding that the government is “totally against them.” He addressed a conference on Central America held in San Antonio, Tex. In related comments, the chief of staff of El Salvador’s armed forces, Colonel Adolfo Blandon, challenged those alleging Salvadoran military involvement with the death squads to prove their charges. Blandon, responding to a death-squad story in the New York Times, called the report “part of a campaign to discredit the armed forces.”
Senator Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) pressed the Reagan Administration to allow Roberto D’Aubuisson, the rightist Salvadoran presidential candidate, to visit Washington. D’Aubuisson, who was refused a visa in November, has been accused of links to Salvadoran death squads. He wants to visit members of Congress, speak to Young Americans for Freedom and Students for Reagan at Georgetown University, and hold a news conference. Deborah DeMoss, an aide to Helms. predicted that the State Department may this time delay action on D’Aubuisson’s visa request until “it (is) too late for him to come.”
Nicaraguan Indian rebels said they have seized an airstrip and several small towns in northern Nicaragua near Puerto Cabezas on the Caribbean in fierce fighting that left hundreds of Sandinista soldiers and a Cuban military adviser dead. Steadman Fagoth Muller said his Misura guerrilla force — made up of Miskito, Sumo and Rama Indians — captured “a large zone of Zelaya province.” Meanwhile, in Managua. Interior Minister Tomas Borge charged that rebels placed U.S-supplied mines in two key Nicaraguan harbors — Corinto on the Pacific and Bluff on the Caribbean — as part of stepped-up attacks on economic targets.
The massacre of 300 tribesmen by security forces in northeastern Kenya last month was in retaliation for the murder of several policemen by Somali bandits, a Roman Catholic church leader in the region said. Msgr. Leo White, head of the Catholic diocese in the area, confirmed much of the account by two officials from the Wajir district who said police and soldiers shot, clubbed and burned at least 300 ethnic Somali Degodia tribesmen to death between February 10 and 14. “There was a disaster in Wajir,” White said, reporting that priests and missionaries in Wajir confirmed the massacre.
About 300 people have been killed in religious violence in the northeast Nigerian city of Yola, and fighting continued on Friday, it was reported in the capital of Lagos today. Roads out of Yola were choked with hundreds of fleeing people, and many houses in the city were burning, the semiofficial newspaper The Daily Times said. It said the death toll had risen from 137, reported by an official on Wednesday, to 300, including 6 policemen. Troops moved in on Friday to quell renewed fighting by Muslim fundamentalists, who had earlier used modern weapons to beat back the police, a police spokesman said.
A special session of the House of Representatives has approved constitutional changes giving Tanzania’s central party organization more power in the affairs of Zanzibar, a semiautonomous island. The amendments were passed on Friday and reported today in the newspaper The News. They empower the national executive committee of the governing Revolutionary Party to make the final selection of a single candidate for Zanzibar’s president and Revolutionary Council chairman. The constitutional changes were approved despite widespread disenchantment among the 500,000 islanders over the 20-year-old union that merged Zanzibar and its sister island, Pemba, with mainland Tanganyika to form the East African country of Tanzania.
President Reagan addresses the nation about taxes and the budget deficit.
President Reagan, in his Budget Message to Congress this year, asked once again that the lawmakers approve a budget amendment. But given his proposal for a deficit of nearly $200 billion in the next fiscal year, Congress has not taken his request seriously.
Despite the record Federal budget deficit and polls showing increased public concern about it, a national drive to petition Congress to call a convention to draft a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget appears to have run out of steam this year. With only two more states, for a total of 34, needed to force Congress’s hand on the issue, resolutions demanding a constitutional convention have been proposed in several state legislatures this year. But in each case opponents of the resolutions seem to have succeeded in sidetracking the measures. Even the most optimistic proponents of the measure concede that a constitutional convention is at best a long shot this year. “It’s possible, but I’m not saying it’s likely,” said David Keating, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union, which has organized the drive around the country.
President Reagan keeps busy at his desk with paperwork.
The Presidential election campaign will come to Capitol Hill Monday as the Senate begins a major debate over a proposed constitutional amendment that would permit organized prayer in the public schools. President Reagan has been stressing the prayer issue in many campaign appearances, and he personally presided over a strategy session of Republican leaders at the White House on Friday afternoon. The prayer issue has simmered on Capitol Hill since 1962, when the Supreme Court banned officially sponsored prayer in the public schools as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Opponents of a prayer amendment believe it would violate the separation of church and state. Since 1962, a prayer amendment has passed the Senate once, but it has never made it through the House. Advocates themselves have often argued over the wording of an amendment.
The validity of medical credentials held by thousands of people working as doctors or seeking medical certification in many areas of the United States are being investigated by federal and state officials. Most of the investigations, reported under way in 15 states, began after the Postal Service’s discovery last year of what it called extensive trafficking in fraudulent medical credentials that originated primarily from medical schools in the Caribbean.
The Maine caucuses have been transformed from a routine political process into a closely watched battleground as the Presidential campaign enters a volatile new phase following Senator Gary Hart’s upset victory in the New Hampshire primary. The voting today in Maine will be the first two-man fight between Mr. Hart and Walter F. Mondale.
Secret Service agents need more mental health training to protect the President from potential assassins, most of whom have a history of mental illness, a panel of medical and legal specialists said today. The panel said 95 percent of the 300 to 400 people the Secret Service identified as dangerous to President Reagan and others under protection in the fiscal year 1983 had mental or emotional problems. Some of those considered dangerous were involved in violence, and others were committed to mental hospitals.
Two teams from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration arrived in Brigham City, Utah. to investigate a flash fire that broke out during the casting of motors for the space shuttle, causing “clearly a couple million dollars” in damage, an official said. Although the fire will interrupt engine production, it will not delay any shuttle flights because Morton-Thiokol, the manufacturer, has already cast motors for the next six shuttle missions. The fire at the 20,000-acre Morton-Thiokol missile and rocket manufacturing complex slightly injured 13 workers. The fire occurred in a pit where solid-fuel motors for the shuttle were being cast. The fire was apparently ignited when rocket fuel — in a liquid form resembling cake batter — was being poured into casings in rocket engines.
Under pressure from a federal appeals court, 23 suburban school districts in St. Louis have agreed to participate in a modified voluntary plan to swap students between predominantly black city schools and mostly white suburban schools. The city and county school districts had reached a tentative agreement last spring, but the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals modified it to remove provisions that would have allowed students from mostly black county schools to transfer to white county schools at state expense. The court told the suburban districts to concur with the revisions or face a trial to establish their liability in the segregation of metropolitan schools.
In the opinion of a government lawyer last fall, there was insufficient evidence to lodge civil rights charges against two men accused in the beating death of a Chinese-American, a prosecutor has disclosed in a Detroit federal court. Prosecutor Ross L. Connealy reported the existence of the letter as the trial of Ronald Ebens and his son-in-law, Michael Nitz, was postponed from March 12 to June 5. Ebens, 44, and Nitz, 27, each face two federal counts of violating the civil rights of Vincent Chin, 27, who died June 23, 1982, after being beaten with a baseball bat. The case attracted widespread publicity after a judge sentenced them to three years’ probation on reduced charges and fined them $3,750 each. The men were indicted November 2 on the federal charges.
A proposal to ban handguns in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, which has prompted sharp opposition from gun owners and drawn overflow crowds to normally quiet committee hearings, is scheduled for a vote by the City Council Monday evening. The proposal was made by Councilman Richard G. Weigand, who argued that the weapons pose “a serious danger” to public safety. Mayor Alan J. Rapoport opposes the ban. City Manager Richard V. Robinson says he is neutral — even though the death of his 8-year-old son by accidental shooting is often cited as the reason for the ban. Weigand said his proposal is modeled after the gun-ban ordinance passed in 1981 by Morton Grove, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. Cleveland Heights, a city of 57.000 adjoining Cleveland, now requires handgun owners to be licensed by the police.
A howling winter storm lashed Louisiana and Kansas with hail and then roared north, bringing snowflakes “the size of cotton balls” to states still reeling from last week’s snowstorm, which killed 60 persons. A National Weather Service meteorologist, Harry Gordon, said it is “hard to tell” whether this storm, expected to bring eight inches of snow to the High Plains and Midwest, will be as intense as its predecessor, which buried parts of Ohio and New York under more than two feet of snow. “Up to eight inches of snow is an indication of a fairly intense storm,” he said. Snow extended from central Montana across western Wyoming and central Colorado. Nearly three inches of new snow-covered northern Nebraska and southern South Dakota, and rain extended through central Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and northern Mississippi.
Peter Ueberroth, the highly successful chairman of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee for the upcoming Summer Games, is elected to a 5-year term as commissioner of baseball. Ueberroth will take office on October 1st, succeeding Bowie Kuhn.
Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway (23) weds swimmer Janet Buchan in Menlo Park, California.
The New York Islanders score their most goals ever (11) vs the Toronto Maple Leafs (6).
Born:
Santonio Holmes, NFL wide receiver (NFL Champions, Super Bowl 43-Steelers, 2008; Pittsburgh Steelers, New York Jets, Chicago Bears), in Belle Glade, Florida.
Mark Setterstrom, NFL guard (St. Louis Rams), in Northfield, Minnesota.
Jimmy Williams, NFL cornerback (Atlanta Falcons), in Hampton, Virginia.
Alexander Semin, Russian National Team and NHL right wing (Olympics, 2010, 2014; Washington Capitals, Carolina Hurricanes, Montreal Canadiens), in Krasnoyarsk, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union.
Mike Gallagher, American politician and member of the House of Representatives (R-Wisconsin, 2017-2024), Chair of the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
The San Diego Zoo Safari Park, originally named the San Diego Wild Animal Park until 2010, is an 1,800-acre zoo in the San Pasqual Valley area of San Diego, California, near Escondido.
[Ed: She will be so screwed up in a very few years. Hollywood is Poison.]
[Ed: Sigh. In a couple of years, this photo will haunt the city of Boston.]
History Diaries 