The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military alliance renewed a proposal for an agreement with the West to freeze and then reduce military spending. The proposal is more specific than one offered by the Communist alliance a year ago, a Western diplomat in Moscow said. It appears to stem from a diplomatic initiative by Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, who has stressed the need for missile cutbacks. The offer includes preliminary talks toward a freeze on spending, a “small, token single reduction” of military outlays by each Warsaw Pact and each NATO nation, and no subsequent rise in bloc arms budgets for three years.
President Reagan meets with Senators Cohen and Biden to talk about the President’s goals for Russia. Reagan finds Biden skeptical of Reagan’s insistence that he really wants real arms reduction.
The International Civil Aviation Organization’s governing council voted 20 to 2, with nine abstentions and two absentees, to condemn the Soviet Union for shooting down a Korean Air Lines jetliner September 1. killing all 269 aboard. The U.S. resolution condemned “the use of armed force” and deplored the Soviet failure to cooperate in search and rescue efforts and the organization’s investigation of the incident. The Soviet Union withdrew, without a vote, its resolution accusing the South Koreans and Americans of failing to cooperate with a Soviet investigation.
Only 109,072 Soviet citizens voted against the candidates nominated by the Communist Party in Sunday’s national elections, the official news agency Tass reported. It said that 99.94%, or 183,897,728 voters, endorsed the candidates for the nominal Soviet Parliament put forth by the party. Tass did not give a percentage figure for voter turnout. which officials have said regularly exceeded 99% in recent years. There is no legal requirement that Soviets vote, but those who do not face censure at work.
Yuri Lyubimov has been dismissed from his directorship of Moscow’s Taganka Theater for failing to return from an eight-month trip to the West, according to sources at the theater. Mr. Lyubimov, who is reported to be in Italy, is widely regarded as the Soviet Union’s most accomplished theatrical director.
A twelve-month-long strike in the British coal industry begins. The National Coal Board (NCB) announced that the agreement reached after the 1974 strike was obsolete, and that to reduce government subsidies, 20 collieries would close with a loss of 20,000 jobs. Many communities in Northern England, Scotland and Wales would lose their primary source of employment. Sensitive to the impact of proposed closures, miners in various coalfields began strike action. In Yorkshire, miners at Manvers, Cadeby, Silverwood, Kiveton Park, and Yorkshire Main were on unofficial strike for other issues before official action was called. More than 6,000 miners were on strike from 5 March at Cortonwood and Bullcliffe Wood, near Wakefield. Neither pit’s reserves were exhausted. Bullcliffe Wood had been under threat, but Cortonwood had been considered safe. Action was prompted on 5 March by the NCB’s announcement that five pits would be subject to “accelerated closure” in just five weeks; the other three were Herrington in County Durham, Snowdown in Kent and Polmaise in Scotland. Today, pickets from Yorkshire appeared at pits in Nottinghamshire and Harworth Colliery closed after a mass influx of pickets amid claims that Nottinghamshire was “scabland in 1926”. The strike will last just three days short of one year.
The deputy warden of Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison, which holds hundreds of Irish Republican Army guerrillas, was shot to death in front of his family by IRA gunmen, police said. Two killers, with an accomplice waiting in a getaway car. ambushed William McConnell as he stepped from his Belfast home and pumped six bullets into him at point-blank range, a police spokesman said. The IRA issued a statement saying its men killed McConnell because he “organized and directed beatings” in the prison, southwest of Belfast.
A key House subcommittee voted to cut 1985 military aid to Turkey by $39 million despite Reagan Administration warnings that the move could jeopardize talks to resolve the Cyprus crisis. The new package would reduce Turkey’s military aid allocation to $720 million while maintaining Greece’s military aid level at $500 million. Some congressmen on the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hope to cut Turkish aid even more sharply as a means of demonstrating U.S. frustration with the Ankara government.
The Rev. Martin Niemöller has died in Weisbaden, West Germany, at the age of 92. Pastor Niemöller was a Protestant preacher, theologian and church leader who led church opposition to Hitler and survived the Dachau death camp.
Iraq’s Defense Minister denounced the United States today for charging that Iraqi forces had used “lethal chemical weapons” against Iranian troops in recent fighting. Accusing the United States of “political hypocrisy” in making such a charge against Iraq, the official, General Adnan Khairallah, said Iraqi forces had enough conventional war materiel to expel Iranian troops. General Khairallah announced at a news conference that Iraqi forces had begun a major drive to dislodge Iranian troops occupying Majnoon, an artificial island in the marshes north of the southern Iraqi port of Basra. The official said a division of Iranians were holding the island. While most of Iraq’s oil is produced in the Kirkuk area in the north, vast oil reserves are believed to lie under Majnoon. Iranian troops seized Majnoon on February 24.
Reporting that a battle “to kick the enemy” from the island was under way, General Khairallah said Iraq would provide news of the action only when it was completed. An Iranian communique broadcast from Teheran said, according to Reuters, that the island’s occupiers had repulsed the Iraqi attack, inflicting heavy casualties. General Khairallah’s remarks about the American chemical-warfare charge fell short of a direct denial of the statement, issued on Monday by the State Department. The United States said “available evidence” suggested Iraqi forces had used “lethal chemical weapons” in violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925. An Administration official said the chemical weapon being used by the Iraqis seemed to be mustard gas, a blistering agent, although Iran has accused the Iraqis of using nitrogen mustard, a similar substance.
The first open split in Syria since President Hafez al-Assad seized power in 1970 was reported by Reagan Administration officials. They said that members of the ruling elite in Damascus were deeply divided over the choice of a successor to the President. According to reports received by the United States and its allies, most of which have come from Western military attaches in Damascus, the split reached a high point last week, when rivals hoping to succeed the Syrian President put on competing shows of military force in the capital. There were reports of shots being fired around the presidential palace. The core of the tension, according to reports from Administration officials and foreign diplomats, seemed to be an effort by Rifaat al-Assad, President Assad’s younger brother, to position himself as his brother’s successor despite fierce opposition from the regular armed forces and some ruling Baath Party members.
Pope John Paul II has taken two important steps in hopes of establishing official relations with China, Vatican sources said. The Pope has quietly obtained the resignations of 21 aging prelates who had held title to church posts in China despite being outside the country for more than 30 years, thus permitting the Vatican to negotiate with Peking on new resident prelates. And the pontiff is reducing the Vatican’s representation in Taiwan to an apostolic delegation.
The U.N. Human Rights Commission approved an anti-torture convention after five years of deliberation and sent the treaty draft to the General Assembly for approval. The breakthrough came after several members — including China, the Soviet Union and Argentina — withdrew objections to a clause allowing the arrest of suspects who have fled to another country. Signers of the treaty would pledge to outlaw physical or mental torture and other degrading treatment.
George P. Shultz was irritated after hearing most members of a key House committee threaten to curtail aid to El Salvador. The Secretary of State told the Representatives they wanted to “walk away” from a vital area of the world because there are problems. “I really don’t understand you people,” Mr. Shultz said after being lectured at length by several members of the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Foreign Operations on human rights violations in El Salvador, which they said were not being ended despite Mr. Shultz’s assertion that progress had been achieved recently. “Here we have an area, right next to us, which a cross section of Americans on a bipartisan commission have studied carefully, really worked at it, have concluded is in the vital interests of the United States,” he said of the panel headed by former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.
Nicaraguan officials say that rebels fighting to overthrow their government have shown new skill in recent days, planting mines in at least one harbor and launching a series of coordinated air and sea attacks. Several Nicaraguan leaders, including the coordinator of the governing junta, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, and Foreign Minister Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, have publicly charged that these attacks reflect decisions by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Honduran Government to provide more direct support to the rebels than they have in the past. A spokesman for the American Embassy here, Gilbert Callaway, said he had no comment on the charges. Officials at the Honduran Embassy in Managua did not respond to telephone requests for their reaction.
At least 4,000 guerrillas and civilians killed in Zimbabwe’s seven-year independence war have been discovered in shallow mass graves, a government spokesman said today. “The brutalities and atrocities committed by the regime of Ian Smith are now being exposed by patriotic Zimbabweans,” the spokesman, Information Minister Nathan Shamuyarira, said. Mr. Smith, who was Prime Minister during the war and is now one of 20 white members of the 100-seat Parliament, said in an interview that he knew nothing about the graves but could not deny that his troops buried guerrillas killed in the war in mass graves. He said he believed that the government of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe had purposely uncovered the graves now to divert attention from southern Matabeleland Province, where the army is conducting an anti-dissident campaign. In the interview, Mr. Smith said: “It’s common knowledge that thousands of people were massacred and bulldozed into common graves. At the time Rhodesia was at war and, tragically, terrible things happen in wartime.”
Gary Hart scored his third victory in a week with early returns showing him with more than a 3-to-1 margin over Walter F. Mondale in the Democratic Presidential preference vote in Vermont. The triumph by the Colorado Senator gave him a clean sweep of three New England states — New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont — and positioned him favorably for a critical test of the Democratic race – primaries and caucuses next Tuesday in nine states.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson finished third, but by getting less than 10 percent of the vote he is threatened with a cutoff of Federal campaign funds. Reubin Askew, the former Governor of Florida, was also on the ballot, but he had withdrawn from the race.
The Democratic aspirants stepped up their battle for the South amid reports from strategists and poll takers that the region’s voters were in an extremely unpredictable and volatile mood as a result of Gary Hart’s upset victories in New Hampshire and Maine. The Colorado Senator urged Southerners to choose him over Walter F. Mondale to show they “will not submit to insiders’ rule and special interests.”
The sudden rush of support that has flowed to Gary Hart in the last week is due, he said, to a need by Americans to re-identify with national purpose. In an interview, the Senator described the 1984 Presidential race as “not a left-right race,” but a “future-past race.”
President Reagan attends the 42nd annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals. President Reagan told evangelicals in Columbus, Ohio, that with his Administration “Americans are turning back to God.” In contrast, Mr. Reagan portrayed the 1970’s as a time of rampant pornography, drug abuse and sexual promiscuity. “In recent years, we must admit, America did seem to lose her religious and moral bearings,” Mr. Reagan declared in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Columbus. Denouncing “liberal attitudes” and an array of purported problems ranging from Governmental disarray to sexual license, Mr. Reagan pointedly described the turning point as coinciding with the 1980 Presidential election.
President Reagan is greeted in New York by U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York, Rudolph Giuliani.
Former President Jimmy Carter said today that Ronald Reagan would win the election if it were held now but that the Democrats had a good chance at victory in November if they united and overcame the President’s “personal attractiveness.” Mr. Carter, in a wide-ranging interview, was sharply critical of his successor, accusing Mr. Reagan of saying things about him “when he knows them to be untrue.” “President Reagan doesn’t always check the facts before he makes statements, and the press accepts this as kind of amusing,” the former President said.
In an attempt to win over wavering legislators, Senate Republican leaders agreed today on a compromise version of a proposed constitutional amendment to permit organized prayer in public schools. The main change would be to state specifically that individuals or groups would have a choice between silent or vocal prayer. In addition, the changes would strengthen a provision barring the local authorities from writing an official prayer and would permit religious groups to use public buildings for their activities. The changes are largely semantic, but they are aimed at a small group of legislators who were uneasy with the original measure, which came to the Senate floor Monday. These lawmakers were prepared to vote for some sort of prayer amendment, but they feared that under the original wording the local authorities could somehow force children to participate in vocal worship and thus subject them to pain and pressure from their peers. Supreme Court rulings prohibit officially organized prayer in school.
Jewish, Islamic and some Christian groups reacted with anger and expressed alienation yesterday after the decision by the Supreme Court to allow a city to sponsor a Nativity scene as part of a Christmas display on public property. However, Roman Catholic bishops and fundamentalist Christians praised the High Court, which ruled on Monday that the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, could erect a creche on city-owned property. “There are plenty of worse things that occur on public property than Nativity scenes,” said Cal Thomas, vice president of Moral Majority, a religious fundamentalist group. At the American Jewish Congress in New York, Howard M. Squadron, president of the organization, said: “For the first time, we have a Court ruling that expressly prefers one religion over another. The necessary implication for the American Jewish community is that it is now a religious stranger in its own home.” In Washington, Dr. Adil al-Aseer, the imam, or spiritual leader, of the Islamic Center, spoke not of constitutional issues but of the needs of the poor. “Cities should not spend the money on religion, but on helping the needy.”
The decision marked the first time the Justices have permitted the official display of a symbol that is explicitly and exclusively Christian. The 5-to-4 ruling was written by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who revised the Court’s earlier interpretation of the constitutional principle of the separation between church and state. The “wall of separation” between church and state, Justice Burger wrote, was “a useful figure of speech” but “not a wholly accurate description of the practical aspects of the relationship that in fact exists.”
A bruised, frightened young woman told the police she “lost count” as she was repeatedly raped on a barroom pool table, a policewoman testified today, a year since the assault. “She was outraged,” said Officer Carol Sacramento of the New Bedford (Massachusetts) police. “She asked of me, ‘How could that happen?’ ” Miss Sacramento testified one year after the woman told the police she was attacked and raped in Big Dan’s bar in New Bedford on March 6, 1983. Six men are charged with aggravated rape in the case, which today was in the eighth day of testimony. When the woman testified earlier in the trial, she was asked about police reports quoting her as saying she lost count of the attackers. On the stand, she recounted four attacks by three men. She said Daniel Silvia and Joseph Vieira took turns holding her down and raping her.
An accountant who arranged loans totaling nearly $120,000 for the Presidential counselor, Edwin Meese 3rd, and the deputy White House chief of staff, Michael Deaver, said the accountant had not reported those loans to a Senate committee that held confirmation hearings on his appointment to the board of governors of the United States Postal Service. The accountant, John R. McKean, who was appointed by President Reagan, is now the board’s chairman.
The U.A.W. plans major demands in forthcoming contract talks with the General Motors Corporation and the Ford Motor Company, according to Owen F. Bieber, president of the United Automobile Workers. He said the union would seek guaranteed wage increases, increased job security, an improved profit-sharing plan and a shorter work week.
A federal safety board, in a report on the helicopter crash that killed the actor Vic Morrow and two children said today that the Government should control the use of helicopters in the motion picture industry. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the July 1982 crash on the set of the movie “Twilight Zone” demonstrated a lack of communications and coordination between the movie director and helicopter pilot. Five people associated with the movie, including John Landis, the director, and Dorcey Wingo, the pilot, have been charged in Los Angeles with involuntary manslaughter. The five have pleaded not guilty. The safety board urged that the Federal Aviation Administration require movie producers to submit detailed plans when a scene involves helicopters flying below 500 feet.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1152.53 (-12.67).
Born:
Prescott Burgess, NFL linebacker (Baltimore Ravens), in Warren, Ohio.
Steve Wagner, NHL defenseman (St. Louis Blues), in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.
Chris Tomson, American rock drummer (Vampire Weekend – “A-Punk”; “Oxford Comma”), in Upper Freehold, New Jersey.
Died:
Martin Niemöller, 92, German theologian who supported then opposed the Nazi regime, famous for his widely quoted poem “First they came …”
Henry Wilcoxon, 78, British actor (“Cleopatra”, “Jericho”, “The Ten Commandments”), from heart failure and cancer.
History Diaries 