Washington disputed Jordan by saying that “there is no possibility of progress toward peace” in the Middle East unless Jordan and other Arab countries agree to negotiate with Israel. The Administration took issue with King Hussein’s statement, in an interview with The New York Times, that he would not deal directly with Israel because he said the United States was so one-sidedly pro-Israel. It said King Hussein was deluding himself if he expected the United States to solve his problems for him by forcing concessions from Israel before direct Jordanian-Israeli negotiations began. King Hussein has long insisted that there can be peace with Israel only if the United States makes Israel return all the lands captured in 1967, as President Eisenhower made Israel withdraw from Sinai in 1957, the year after Israel captured it.
The Lebanese parley was disrupted by a shouting match among the delegates over the issue of relations with Israel. The dispute demonstrated the lack of consensus among the eight factional leaders meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, over the basic identity of Lebanon. It also indicated how easily the longstanding blood feuds among the rival clan leaders can derail any reconciliation efforts. According to a participant in today’s meeting at the Beau Rivage Hotel, the argument broke out when Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam of Syria — who is attending the conference as an observer but who is reported to be quietly orchestrating the whole meeting — commented on recent pro-Israeli and anti-Syrian statements issued in Beirut by the leader of the Christian Phalangist militia, Fadi Frem.
Iraqi officials said today that Iraq had gained a bridgehead on Majnoon Island and was maintaining artillery fire and air strikes against Iranian positions there. Iran captured the man-made island, built to exploit oil deposits, in an offensive last month.
A high Iraqi Government official appealed to the United States today to help end the Iran-Iraq war, saying that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, “must be stopped.” Ismat Kittani, Iraq’s Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, said in a speech at the National Press Club that the United States should discourage its allies from giving arms to Iran and from buying Iranian oil.
With talks resuming in Vienna today on proposed reductions of conventional military forces in Central Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had still not agreed on how to respond to the latest Soviet offer in the talks, now in their 11th year. The Soviets proposed phased reductions to bring the manpower levels down to 700,000 ground troops for both NATO and the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. The Soviets included in this offer a vague proposal for limited verification of the troop withdrawals, but they still refused to thrash out an agreement with the NATO powers on the size of existing forces.
President Reagan, denouncing “officially tolerated anti-Semitism” in the Soviet Union, said U.S. support of free emigration of Soviet Jews has been a top priority in talks with Moscow’s new leadership. Reagan issued a statement marking the International Day of Concern for Soviet Jews, the seventh anniversary of the arrest of human rights activist Anatoly Shcharansky. The situation for Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate “has deteriorated over the past year,” with Jewish emigration falling to the lowest level since the 1960s, Reagan said.
Several hundred Spanish Basque fishermen protested outside the French Consulate in Bilbao and threatened to burn it down if France prevented Spanish trawlers from fishing in the Bay of Biscay. Last week, a court in the French port of Lorient ordered Spanish trawlers to pay heavy fines for fishing illegally and for resisting inspection by a French navy gunboat. The gunboat fired at the trawlers, injuring nine fishermen.
Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald of Ireland urged Americans today to stop supporting Irish terrorists. In a speech to a joint meeting of Congress, Mr. FitzGerald said peace in Northern Ireland “can be fulfilled only by a corresponding rejection – of revulsion against – the very idea of aid by way of money, or by way of weapons, or by way of moral support, to any of those who are engaged in the act of horrific violence corrupting and destroying the life of a whole community.” This also precludes, he said, “making common cause for any purpose, however speciously well-meaning, with people who advocate, or condone the use of violence in Ireland for political ends.”
Scattered violence continued across Northern Ireland today as a result of the shooting of the leader of the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. Several buses in Belfast were pelted with rocks overnight and two were set afire. Protesters in Londonderry threw firebombs in the street. Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, who was wounded Wednesday, was reported to be making a satisfactory recovery. The police arrested three men who were identified as members of a splinter group of the Ulster Defense Association, a loyalist paramilitary outfit, in the shooting of Mr. Adams, a member of the British Parliament.
After more than a decade of debate, the Swiss Parliament’s lower house voted to have the neutral country join the United Nations. But the move still must be put to a national referendum. In a vote of 112 for, 78 against and 1 abstention, members of the National Council agreed that their country should. join the world body but that its application should express Switzerland’s position of armed neutrality.
Poland’s Roman Catholic primate. Cardinal Jozef Glemp, rejected demands by thousands of workers for the reinstatement of a parish priest who was transferred for delivering anti-state sermons. The confrontation came a day after Glemp protested the Communist regime’s decision to ban crucifixes from schools nationwide. A six-member delegation, representing 18,000 workers from the Warsaw suburb of Ursus, met with Glemp to air their grievances over the transfer last month of Father Mieczyslaw Nowak from Ursus to a country parish.
President Reagan learns that the U.S. lost a Poland Human Rights Bill by two votes (Russia and Jordan).
A series of 1,500 earthquakes ripped through the Central Asian Soviet republic of Uzbekistan in the last two months, leaving 9,000 families homeless and reducing thousands of buildings to rubble, Soviet television said. The quakes were recorded in the region of Namangam, about 1,800 miles southeast of Moscow. No deaths or injuries were attributed to the quakes, although Soviet media rarely give casualty figures. One of the worst of the tremors, reportedly measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale, occurred on Tuesday.
Bodies of 30 of the 81 crewmen aboard an American oil drilling ship that sank in a typhoon in the South China Sea last October 25 are being sent to Hong Kong for identification, Chinese oil officials said. Divers have given up the search for more victims of the sinking of the Glomar Java Sea, they said. But the official New China News Agency said that divers will continue searching for the ship’s log book, nautical charts and other material. There were 37 Americans aboard the ship, owned by Global Marine Inc. of Houston.
President Reagan’s effort to hasten Congressional approval of emergency arms and economic aid for Central America ran into new and serious difficulty today. A quick maneuver in the Senate left arms aid for anti-Government rebels in Nicaragua and for the armed forces of El Salvador in legislative doubt. The House Foreign Affairs Committee refused to include any Central America aid in next year’s foreign aid bill, and Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. said Mr. Reagan’s handling of the aid issue had demonstrated that he was “unfit” for national leadership. By the end of the day the Central American aid package, a series of bills and amendments that constitute one of the Administration’s major foreign policy initatives, appeared to be in deeper trouble than ever.
A retired Salvadoran colonel who worked for a far-right political party was shot to death in San Salvador today by unidentified gunmen. The colonel, Tito Adalberto Rosa, who coordinated the campaign of the Salvadoran Authentic Institutional Party in Cabanas Province, was driving his 6-year-old daughter to school when men jumped from the back of a truck and fired shots at his car. His daughter was seriously wounded. The retired officer’s death and the slaying Wednesday of a conservative deputy from the Constituent Assembly mark an upswing in violence as the country approaches elections March 25. The insurgents have said they would not directly disrupt the elections.
Somali guerrillas said today that they had killed 123 government soldiers and wounded 231 in the last week in northwestern and central Somalia. The rebels’ radio station, broadcasting from Ethiopia and monitored in Nairobi, said the guerrillas had captured four villages in the northwest since the fighting began March 8 and suffered “only light casualties.” The guerrillas’ said the fighting began after an army patrol killed eight villagers, touching off an uprising. The claims of the rebels, who are fighting to overthrow President Mohammed Siad Barre, could not be verified independently.
Tanzania adopts a constitution. The Constitution was amended to include a bill of rights. The 1984 amendments also limited the presidential mandate to two terms and introduced a system of two Vice-Presidents, whereby at any time, one shall be the President of Zanzibar and the other the Prime Minister of Tanzania.
President Reagan makes an announcement to the press that the deficit reduction package has bipartisan support in both Houses of the Congress. A $57 billion cut in military spending over the next three years was accepted by President Reagan in an effort to break the deadlock on his proposed budget. Mr. Reagan’s action was part of an agreement reached with Republican Congressional leaders on a package to reduce the federal budget deficits by $150 billion over three years.
John Glenn plans to withdraw from the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination, according to his top campaign aides. They said the Ohio Senator, whose campaign is more than $2 million in debt, has scheduled a news conference today and is not likely to endorse either of the two major aspirants, Walter F. Mondale or Gary Hart.
The campaign between Walter F. Mondale and Gary Hart grew increasingly acrimonious as the two major rivals for the Democratic Presidential nomination exchanged charges and personal attacks. The exchanges came as the two contenders headed into two key contests, Saturday’s caucuses in Michigan and Tuesday’s primary in Illinois.
A proposal to sanction silent prayer in the public schools was overwhelmingly rejected by the Senate, which agreed to vote Tuesday on President Reagan’s proposal for vocal prayer. That vote would end two weeks of Senate debate and supporters’ fears that the proposed constitutional amendment could be filibustered to death.
The Defense Department has authorized its officials to bypass a new law requiring that manufacturers guarantee the performance of their weapons in cost-plus contracts, the Pentagon said. The addition of a guarantee to cost-plus contracts, in which the manufacturer would be reimbursed for unanticipated expenses, would not be worth it because it would cost too much, the Pentagon argued. Under the law, the defense secretary can waive the requirement.
The Secret Service is taking seriously a claim by sex magazine publisher Larry Flynt that he put out a contract to kill President Reagan and it has opened an investigation, Secret Service spokeswoman Mary Ann Gordon said. The agency responsible for guarding the President started investigating the claim when Flynt made the disclosure in a jailhouse interview with Cable News Network. Flynt is serving a 15-month sentence in federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, for contempt of court. Threatening the President is a crime punishable by one year in prison and a $5,000 fine.
Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan and Senate supporters of the war on drugs traded salvos over whether a proposed plan to cut 954 U.S. Customs agents and more than $23 million from the Customs budget would undercut President Reagan’s anti-drug initiative. The secretary, speaking before a Senate panel on the Treasury’s fiscal 1985 budget, stressed that the cuts would not weaken the “front line” against drug enforcement and angrily denied charges that the money saved would be spent on office renovations.
Edwin Meese 3rd will revise data in his financial disclosure statement to include a stock sale he failed to report, besides an unreported interest-free loan of $15,000 his wife received from an aide of his in 1981, a White House official said. Mr. Meese is revising the report for the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will reopen hearings on his nomination to be Attorney General.
A White House guard shot and wounded a man on the sidewalk outside the White House grounds after the man drew a loaded shotgun, a United States Park Police spokesman said. The man, identified as 25-year- old David Allen Mahonski of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, was said to be in fair condition. The young man’s father was quoted as saying his son was mentally troubled.
The arrest of 2,000 fugitives in California in the last 10 weeks was announced by law-enforcement officials. They said the operation was the largest joint manhunt by federal agents and local police officers in the nation’s history.
A Miami police officer was acquitted by an all-white jury of manslaughter charges arising from his fatal shooting of a young black man in December 1982. The incident generated three days of violence in the city’s Overtown area. The jury deliberated less than two hours over evidence presented for 57 days. As the court clerk read the verdict, jury members raced from the 117-seat court room at the Dade County Justice Building, Mr. Alvarez hugged his attorneys and members of the Johnson family wept. Word of the verdict quickly spread throughout the Miami area, where several hundred city, county and state police were deployed. Major freeways were lined with highway patrol cars and road barricade crews, and numerous sections of predominantly black neighborhoods where police reported rock- and bottle-throwing, were cordoned off. The Miami Police Department reported arresting more than 200 people by midnight, most of them on disorderly conduct charges. They were taken to the Dade County jail.
A Chicago court clerk was convicted on 10 counts of racketeering and extortion in the first case to come to trial as a result of a federal investigation into corruption in the Cook County court system. The jury deliberated just under four hours. A deputy traffic court clerk was convicted of extortion and racketeering in Chicago in the first trial stemming from Operation Greylord, an undercover investigation of the nation’s largest court system. Clerk Harold Conn, 56, was convicted of accepting $1,600 in bribes to influence the outcomes of seven cases. He has been employed in Chicago’s courts for 27 years.
A divorced mother who filed a $1.3-million lawsuit in Tulsa against the Collinsville, Oklahoma, Church of Christ and three of its elders for publicly denouncing her for the “sin of fornication” was awarded $390,000 by a jury. Marian Guinn contended that her privacy was invaded and that she suffered emotional distress when a letter criticizing her was read to the congregation in 1981. She was awarded $205,000 in actual damages and $185,000 in punitive damages.
James W. Hutchins was executed by lethal injection early this morning for the slayings of three law officers almost five years ago. Governor James B. Hunt Jr. had refused on Thursday to halt the execution. Mr. Hutchins, who had asked his lawyers to drop all appeals, was the 15th convict put to death since the United States Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, and the third to die by lethal injection. The latest occurred Wednesday when James David Autry was executed in Texas. Mr. Hutchins, 54 years old, visited with his wife, Geneva, on Thursday at Central Prison in Raleigh. He also met with a minister from his native Rutherford County, where the slayings occurred after Mr. Hutchins and his daughter, Charlotte, argued over the amount of alcohol in a bowl of punch for a high school graduation party.
After eight weeks of testimony, the prosecution rested its case today in the Federal trial of six Ku Klux Klan members and three American Nazi Party members accused of civil rights violations in the 1979 shooting deaths of five Communist Workers Party members in Greensboro, North Carolina. Five of the nine defendants were acquitted of murder and rioting charges in 1980 in state court in Greensboro after a jury heard conflicting testimony about who fired first. In the new trial, new evidence was introduced purporting to show that Klansmen and Nazis fired 11 shots, killing one and wounding five others, before return shots were fired. The shooting began after Klansmen and Nazis went to a “Death to the Klan” march November 3, 1979, in Greensboro.
An Amtrak train was struck by a loaded gravel truck that a witness said “tried to beat” the train past a crossing in northeastern Montana. The authorities said the truck driver was killed and scores of passengers aboard the westbound train were injured, 10 critically.
Tornadoes cut a swath across north-central Arkansas today, destroying a bridge, and killing four people and injuring more than two dozen others. One tornado demolished the 150-foot-long Edgemont Bridge over Greers Ferry Lake miles north of Little Rock in Cleburne County. There were no cars on the bridge, but three people in a boat beneath it were injured. In eastern Arkansas, three people died and at least 12 others were injured when a tornado hit in Fisher. Another person was killed when a tornado flattened a house at Brownsville, six miles northeast of Greers Ferry. An undetermined number of people were hurt at Tumbling Shoals and on Hutchinson Mountain in Independence County.
10th People’s Choice Awards: Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, and Meryl Streep win (Motion Picture); also Tom Selleck and Linda Evans win (TV).
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1167.4 (+1.36).
Born:
Jayme Mitchell, NFL defensive end (Minnesota Vikings, Cleveland Browns), in Jackson, Mississippi.
Died:
Ken Carpenter, 70, American athlete (Olympic gold discus 1936).
History Diaries 