Christians and Muslims clashed in central Beirut today and there were artillery duels in the mountains as a Saudi mediator met with Lebanese officials to try to forge a new cease-fire. The police said one person was killed and 12 were wounded in firing along the Green Line between predominantly Christian East Beirut and the Muslim west. The artillery duels were between the Lebanese Army and anti-Government Druse militiamen in the hills overlooking Beirut.
Rafik Hariri, Saudi Arabia’s chief mediator in the Lebanese crisis, met with President Amin Gemayel and Foreign Minister Elie Salem. Government sources said Mr. Hariri was trying to arrange a cease-fire before leaders of Lebanon’s factions leave for reconciliation talks in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Monday.
A new Middle East strategy is being shaped by the Reagan Administration to build closer ties with Israel and Jordan as well as between those two countries. The intent is to try to capitalize on what officials see as increased Jordanian fears of a stronger Syria and inklings of growing sentiment for compromise in Israel. “We have no illusions about short-term results,” a senior Administration official said, “but the process is going on.” The evolving strategy, as the senior official described it, is “to help King Hussein solve his problems.” The Jordanian King, the official continued, has security problems with Syria and negotiating problems with Israel.
Three Israelis were killed and nine were wounded when a bomb exploded on a bus in the port city of Ashdod, south of Tel Aviv. About 100 Arabs were rounded up and held for questioning, after which most were released, the Israeli radio reported. The Palestinian group led by Abu Nidal took responsibility in an announcement from Damascus. His group, the Revolutionary Council of the Fatah, left the Palestine Liberation Organization about 10 years ago. The bus was carrying shoppers near an Arab market when the bomb went off, killing a middle-aged couple immediately. Another woman died later.
Israel accused Egypt of reneging on clauses of their 1979 peace treaty as soon as the Egyptians recovered full control of Sinai. The clauses call for normal Israeli-Egyptian relations. The charge was made by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in a speech in Parliament.
The Marxist Government of Ethiopia has expelled two Soviet diplomats on espionage charges less than a month after breaking up what it said was a United States spy ring and expelling four Americans, Western diplomatic sources said today. The sources said the two unidentified Soviet diplomats had been ordered out in late February.
An Algerian student who said he had a bag of explosives hijacked an Air France jetliner with 68 people aboard today and ordered it flown to Geneva, and Swiss policemen disguised as airport staff overpowered him nearly five hours later. All the passengers and crew were safely freed. Official Geneva sources identified the hijacker as Ali Chohra, a 27-year-old engineering student in Darmstadt, West Germany. A police spokesman, Marcel Voudroz, told reporters that policemen in airport work clothes had entered the plane to deliver lunch and took Mr. Chohra by surprise.
President Reagan has George Shultz deliver a letter to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin for General Secretary Chernenko.
Hundreds of students took over a Polish agricultural school for 14 hours to protest the Communist regime’s orders to remove crucifixes from classrooms but gave up when police surrounded the facility and threatened to remove them. About 400 of the teenagers, some wearing wooden crucifixes around their necks, tried to march from the school to a church 3½ miles away, but a wall of riot police turned them back. The protest developed out of a three-month dispute pitting students and their families against school administrators, who have ordered all religious symbols removed from state property.
Rejecting an Administration appeal, the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted to reduce aid to both Greece and Turkey, unless the two U.S. allies cooperate in seeking a settlement on Cyprus. At the same time, impatient with a lack of progress in the dispute over the divided island, the committee on a voice vote trimmed proposed Turkish military aid by $39 million. Greece would receive $500 million in loans for military purchases, while Turkey would receive $720 million in arms assistance.
The town manager of a West German resort banned a group of Nazi Waffen SS veterans from holding a reunion May 17-20 in a local auditorium, citing security problems and bad publicity. Horst Voigt told a news conference that local politicians and the town council of Bad Harzburg, in the Harz Mountains of central Germany, support the ban. About 800 veterans and their relatives were expected to attend the reunion of the elite Waffen SS units. The gathering was being arranged under the guise of a meeting of “economic experts.
A British Government minister has ordered an investigation into allegations that radiation has caused severe deformities to babies born near a United States nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch in western Scotland. The minister is John Mackay, the Scottish Office minister responsible for health matters who is also the Conservative Member of Parliament for the area in which the children were born. Mr. Mackay told the House of Commons on Monday: “From what I see, there is absolutely no evidence of any connection between radiation from the base and those deformed babies.” But he added, “The local health board is taking the matter very seriously, and a full investigation is now underway.”
The United States attacks San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua.
Tens of thousands of people marched through Manila to a seaside park for the biggest anti-election rally yet held in the Philippine capital. More than 40,000 marchers converged from north and south after 60-mile, six-day treks, chanting “Boycott, boycott.” and “Dismantle the U.S.-Marcos dictatorship. However, the opposition to President Ferdinand E. Marcos is split over whether to boycott the May 14 parliamentary elections.
Canada will proceed on its own without the United States to try to cut industrial emissions linked to acid-rain pollution by 50 percent in the next decade, officials said. Ottawa has accused the Reagan Administration of stalling on the issue.
The State Department deplored two Salvadoran attacks — one by the left and one from the right — that it said were clearly aimed at the March 25 elections. Officials said that leftist guerrillas attacked a clearly marked Red Cross ambulance in San Vicente province, killing two Salvadoran Red Cross workers and wounding two children and a woman. In the other incident, the rightist Salvadoran Anti-Communist Commando group claimed responsibility for machine-gunning the outside of the advertising agency for centrist presidential candidate Jose Napoleon Duarte.
The Reagan Administration is planning to ask for $93 million in expedited military aid to El Salvador, Senate Appropriations Committee sources said this evening. The sources added that the Administration was also considering making a request for at least $17 million in additional funds for Nicaraguan rebels in 1984. The aid to El Salvador is to be proposed as an amendment to a $150 million food assistance bill, which is currently before the Senate subcommittee on foreign operations, the sources said. The bill provides for emergency assistance to African nations suffering from a serious drought and poor harvests.
The aid package to Nicaraguan rebels, which in the past has faced strong opposition from House and Senate Democrats, was said to be aimed at boosting the morale and effectiveness of the rebels, who are fighting from neighboring Honduras to establish a toehold inside of Nicaragua. So far the forces of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Government have held the rebels in check. William J. Casey, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Secretary of State George P. Schultz are both scheduled to appear Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss funding for the Nicaraguan rebels.
China confirmed that it has expelled Tiziano Terzani, the Peking correspondent of the West German news magazine Der Spiegel, saying he was caught last month smuggling “cultural relics” out of China. Terzani, 45, an Italian, has been in Asia for more than a decade. In Hamburg. Der Spiegel called the charges false and said Terzani was expelled for his critical articles about China over the last four years.
The Reagan Administration has approved the sale of $40-million worth of oil drilling equipment to the Soviet Union. Officials said the Commerce Department agreed to grant export licenses to the Hughes Tool Co. for submersible pumps about six weeks ago, a decision that reflected President Reagan’s stated intention to ease restrictions on sales of commodities that the Soviets can purchase elsewhere. The New York Times reported that the licenses were granted only after the United States failed to persuade other Western industrial nations to add the pumps to a list of items embargoed for Soviet export.
President Reagan will meet with Pope John Paul II in Alaska during Reagan’s return trip from China in May, an Administration official said. The official, speaking on condition that he not be identified by name, said that the meeting will take place May 1 or 2, probably in Fairbanks. The Pope is scheduled to be traveling in the Pacific island region in May. Reagan and the Pope last met on June 7, 1982, in Vatican City during a 10-day European tour by the President. The Pope was last in the United States in October, 1979.
President Reagan meets with the Deficit Down payment Negotiating Group. Progress on deficit reduction plans was made in both the House and the Senate despite the stalled bipartisan negotiations between Congress and the White House.
The Senate Finance Committee, trying to carve $100 billion from the federal deficit over the next three years, was stalled by disagreement over a plan to reduce the tax break for commercial buildings. Senator Robert J. Dole (R-Kansas), chairman of the panel, said the committee was trying to compromise with the real estate and building industries on the issue. The panel reached preliminary agreement last week on a $3.5-billion item that would extend the current 15-year depreciation for non-residential buildings to 20 years, thus reducing the tax break each year. But industry pressure weakened support for the measure.
President Reagan has lunch with editors of business magazines.
President Reagan’s spokesman said today that the President seldom attended church services because he disliked inconveniencing parishioners. He also said that Mr. Reagan did not intend to make morality a campaign issue. Larry Speakes, the deputy press secretary, faced questions about the President’s religious habits in the wake of Mr. Reagan’s overtly religious speech Tuesday to the National Association of Evangelicals and his push for approval of a constitutional amendment allowing voluntary prayer in public schools.
Many farmers are failing because of three years of high interest rates and other costs and soft commodity prices. Even many long-established farmers once considered largely immune to financial problems are included in an unexpectedly heavy toll this year in farm bankruptcies, foreclosures and forced sales.
Press coverage of Jesse Jackson is at issue. Black leaders say the press is unfairly critical of Mr. Jackson, Jewish groups say reporters are pulling their punches, and Mr. Jackson charges there is a double standard in the coverage, or noncoverage, of his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination.
Gary Hart’s Florida campaign has changed dramatically. Two weeks ago, it consisted of a half-dozen volunteers who had no office. Now, since Senator Hart’s victories in New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont, Hart strategists are planning a schedule of personal appearances and more than $100,000 in television advertising in advance of Florida’s primary next Tuesday.
Police groups urged the Senate to ban “cop killer” bullets — armor-piercing handgun bullets — saying that officers are in danger every day Congress fails to act. But the National Rifle Association called the proposal an attempt to separate gun owners from their ammunition. Norman Darwick, executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said his group “can find no legitimate use, either in or out of law enforcement, for this type of ammunition.” which is already banned in 10 states.
Education Secretary Terrel H. Bell called on educators to give “the highest possible priority” to improving textbooks as part of a drive to upgrade education. Bell said in Washington that publishers too often prepare texts for the bottom of the class, aiming for the widest audience and most sales. Bell also announced that he will award 51 grants totaling $1 million to develop merit-pay plans for teachers.
Retired California Supreme Court Justice Frank K. Richardson said he has accepted an appointment to serve under his former court colleague, William P. Clark, as chief attorney for the Interior Department. “It sounds interesting,” he said in San Francisco. “I hope I can make a contribution.” Richardson. with Clark, was one of two conservatives on a liberal-dominated court. Clark, a close adviser to President Reagan, was recently appointed secretary of the Interior.
A fugitive from a Tennessee prison who had said he would not be taken alive died in a gun battle with sheriff’s deputies today and his partner was captured. Ronald Lee Freeman, 41 years old, died at daybreak in an abandoned building after being chased from house to house in a night of flight and gunfire that was said to have caused an elderly blind woman in this Blue Ridge mountain town to suffer a fatal heart attack. Bullets from a deputy’s .30-caliber carbine blew two holes through a door Mr. Freeman was using for a shield, killing him.
Three-hundred police officers scoured the area for the other fugitive, James Clegg, 30, and two officers found him hiding under a garage behind a house a quarter of a mile from the house where Mr. Freeman died. Mr. Freeman and Mr. Clegg broke out of Fort Pillow prison in west Tennessee Feb. 18, opened fire on pursuing officers and three days later killed a Sunday school teacher and abducted his wife. They freed her unharmed in Knoxville and disappeared into the mountains, reappearing Tuesday when they shot a North Carolina state trooper who stopped them for speeding near Marion. The trooper, L. B. Rector, was reported in stable condition today.
A former Klansman was indicted by a grand jury in Chattanooga on charges of bombing and destroying a synagogue there in 1977. The former Klansman, Joseph Paul Franklin, is a suspect in at least 13 homicides in seven states.
The Justice Department notified a court today that it intended to appeal the lenient sentences given two Texans convicted of holding 12 Mexican workers in slavery. The government filed a notice of appeal in Federal District Court in Tyler, Texas, in the case of Steven Crawford and Randall Craig Waggnor, who were convicted last December of 19 counts of transporting illegal aliens and holding them in slavery. The men faced sentences of 95 years in prison and $70,000 in fines, but last month Judge William Steger sentenced them to five years’ probation and a $1,000 fine each.
Mary Evans, a lawyer who fell so deeply in love with the killer she was defending that she helped him escape, pleaded guilty today to under an agreement in which she could receive a suspended sentence. Her lawyer said she would enter a mental hospital. Miss Evans, 27 years old, refused to return the periodic glances of Tim Kirk, 37, the convicted murderer whose escape she pleaded guilty to engineering last year. The couple spent 139 days together on the run before being arrested in Daytona Beach, Florida, last August.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1143.63 (-8.90).
Born:
Brandon T. Jackson, American actor (“Tropic Thunder”, “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief”, “Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters”), in Detroit, Michigan.
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