Afghan government troops killed 60 guerrillas in a major battle along Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan, Kabul radio reported. The government radio said the rebels were trying to re-enter Afghanistan from Pakistan when they were engaged by troops and wiped out in a daylong battle. The report could not be independently confirmed.
Iraq claimed that its armed forces repelled an Iranian advance near the Iraqi port city of Basra, killing at least 1,000 enemy soldiers. Iran said it “crushed” the attack, killing or wounding 500 Iraqi soldiers. Neither side’s claim could be independently confirmed. An Iraqi military command communique said its warplanes and helicopter gunships carried out daylong raids against Iranian positions but predicted that Iran is planning a new offensive across Iraq’s eastern border.
After two days of private talks, Lebanon’s factional leaders gathered again today to debate a list put together by President Amin Gemayel of various proposals for a political settlement. The eight factional leaders, along with President Gemayel and Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam of Syria, met for nearly five hours at the Beau Rivage Hotel here. Another round of talks was scheduled for Sunday. Conference sources said Mr. Khaddam was letting each faction know what Syria believed it should give and receive. ”The dancing phase of this conference is over,” said a Shiite delegate. ”Now the arm twisting has begun.” It is expected to be several days before an accord is reached, because of the mistrust among the Lebanese leaders and the side games they are playing with one another.
There are, in effect, two conferences going on here. The one the public sees is the gathering of leaders seeking a formula for national unity. The other involves private backroom maneuverings among groups that have been fighting one another in shifting alliances for decades. Ultimately, it is the private meetings that will shape the outcome. Discussions with Muslim and Christian delegates shed light on some of these private arrangements. Former President Camille Chamoun, an 83-year-old Maronite Christian, is allied with Pierre Gemayel, the Christian Phalangist Party leader, in a Christian Lebanese Front. However, the sources say, Mr. Chamoun is also quietly working to undermine Pierre Gemayel’s son, President Amin Gemayel, and develop a new alliance with Walid Jumblat, the Druze leader.
An emergency airlift to the Sudan is being discussed by the United States and Egypt because of the bombing attack on the chief Sudanese city of Omdurman on Friday, Reagan Administration officials said. The airlift would provide military equipment to bolster the Sudan’s defenses against Libya and Ethiopia. An Administration official said there was no doubt that Friday’s attack was carried out by Libya.
Ireland’s most-wanted terrorist was captured after a 90-minute gun battle with 40 detectives at a cottage in County Clare where he had been hiding with three confederates. The arrest of Dominic McGlinchey, known as Mad Dog because of his ruthlessness, was hailed by James Prior, Britain’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, as a major victory over terrorism.
British miners in three more coal districts voted against joining a strike, their leaders announced, widening the split in their union as police braced for confrontations between strikers and non-strikers. Police reinforcements gathered in Nottinghamshire, the country’s second-largest coal region, and in Lancashire. Miners in many coal fields began the walkout last Monday to protest the National Coal Board’s announcement that 20,000 jobs would be eliminated in the next 12 months at money-losing mines.
Trybuna Ludu, the Polish Communist Party daily, said a U.N. report that described the state of human rights in Poland as encouraging was a blow to Western capitals trying to exert pressure on the Warsaw regime. The commentary followed a condemnation of the report as a whitewash by the U.S. delegate to the Geneva-based Human Rights Commission. The U.N. report, which drew exclusively on government information, said the number of political prisoners in Poland had dropped to 281 last month from 1,500 in January, 1983.
Sweden detonated several explosive charges in a restricted naval zone today after it detected ”irregular underwater activity.” Colonel Evert Dahlen, spokesman for the military staff, said four light charges were dropped from a helicopter and a 220-pound charge in the water was detonated ”following technical indications from our submarine alert systems.” ”No results from the detonations have yet been reported,” he said. ”The search continues. There are no signs that what is in there has managed to escape.” The search area is a few miles from the place where a Soviet submarine ran aground in October 1981. The boat was released after a Soviet apology.
The official Soviet news agency Tass accused President Reagan of spreading “absurd and provocative allegations” about the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union. The charges came in a commentary by Tass analyst Yuri Kornilov, apparently in response to Reagan’s March 13 speech to the Young Leadership Conference of the United Jewish Appeal. In it, the President mentioned restrictions on publication and teaching of Hebrew in the Soviet Union, a sharp drop in Jewish emigration and the jailing of Jewish dissidents. The Soviet Union denies charges of anti-Semitic discrimination.
Millions of Soviet citizens were stricken by influenza this winter in an epidemic that forced partial quarantines on hospitals despite a major vaccination campaign, a health official said in Moscow. Peter Burgasov, deputy minister of health, said about 10% of the residents of the major cities and capitals of the 15 Soviet republics suffered high fevers, chills, aches and pains symptomatic of the illness. “Influenza is a huge problem, without end,” he said.
The Spanish Cortes (Parliament) has approved broad educational changes that will reduce the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in schools and increase the state’s control over the curriculum. The Law of the Right of Education was approved in the Congress of Deputies on Thursday night by a vote of 196 to 96 with 6 abstentions. The bill brought protest marches by parents and teachers supporting the current system, but public opinion polls indicate most people favor the change. Unless a constitutional challenge to the law is successful, it is to take effect at the beginning of the school year next fall.
Under the new law, private schools that receive direct state subsidies must have a curriculum approved by the government and will be run by a school council composed of teachers, parents and students. The council will elect the school principal. In addition, students who prefer not to take religion classes will be allowed to skip them. Any school with a state subsidy must drop all tuition fees within three years after the law takes effect. The present system is a holdover from the days of the Franco dictatorship when the church was given virtual control over the school system and received subsidies without conditions. Of Spain’s 8 million school children, 3 million are in private schools, most of them church-run.
China and Britain today ended another round of talks on the future of Hong Kong and announced a stepped-up pace in the negotiations. A joint statement issued after two days of talks said the two sides would meet again in Peking on March 26 and 27 to discuss what will happen to the colony after Britain’s 99-year lease expires in 1997. The negotiations have been held every three to four weeks. Two other sessions were held January 25 and 26 and February 22 and 23.
The U.S. Army will soon return its elite Special Forces to the Far East for the first time in a decade, the service announced today. About 150 Green Berets belonging to a new company in the Special Forces will begin moving to Okinawa from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, this month, with the rest of a new battalion to follow in September, the Army said. The last Green Berets were withdrawn from Asia after the Vietnam War.
More intense fighting in El Salvador as the elections approach was promised by the leader of a major guerrilla group. Commander Joaquin Villalobos, leader of the People’s Revolutionary Party, said the rebels would “deepen” the war “before during and after” the elections. After a relative lull, the insurgents began a new series of attacks. ”From here on out, there is and there will be no truce,” Villalobos, the leader of the People’s Revolutionary Army, said on the insurgent radio. His warning and the renewed rebel attacks seemed to indicate a tougher approach to the March 25 presidential election. Last month the insurgents announced in Mexico City that they would not directly interfere. Commander Villalobos said the rebels were not worried over the results of the election, but he announced a new offensive, with the slogan, ”No to the electoral farce, yes to the people’s war.”
Walter F. Mondale won the Democratic caucuses in Arkansas and Michigan, giving his campaign new vigor for Tuesday’s Illinois primary. Mr. Mondale also held a narrow lead in Mississippi, another of the five states that held caucuses.
Gary Hart’s nine-year Senate record shows that he has consistently been more concerned about national defense and energy than other issues. It shows that he was speaking out against “big government,” warning about the size of the deficit and trying to cut federal spending and taxes before President Reagan took office. His record also shows that his interest in social welfare programs has mainly been limited to child nutrition programs, which he strongly supports. His party unity score, which is based on how many times he voted with a majority of Democrats against a majority of Republicans, has been higher than the average for his party.
President Reagan is lobbying among Senators for a constitutional amendment to permit officially approved prayer in public schools, to be voted on in the Senate Tuesday. He is recalling his own experiences to argue that children need not feel stigmatized by exposure to the religions of others. On Thursday the Senate overwhelmingly rejected a proposed amendment that would have sanctioned silent prayer in the schools.
President Reagan leaves for Camp David.
President Reagan receives a call from Attorney General William French Smith.
The President and First Lady watch the movie “Splendor in the Grass.”
Justice Department officials are considering whether to open an investigation on Edwin Meese’s finances. Attorney General William French Smith, whom Mr. Meese, the Presidential Counselor, has been nominated to succeed, met with other department officials to discuss the requirements of the Ethics in Government Act.
Kidnapping suspect Jeffrey Paul Doucet, 25, shot as deputies escorted him through an airport in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on his way back to stand trial, died of the bullet wound allegedly inflicted by the 12-year-old victim’s father, Gary Plauche, 38. Doucet had been charged in the February 19 abduction of Jodie Plauche, who was in Doucet’s karate class. The boy was rescued from a motel room in Anaheim, California, on February 28. The father was charged with second-degree murder. Plauche, in a disguise at the airport, leaped at the suspect, planted the gun muzzle against his ear and fired one shot. Doucet never demanded ransom but in phone calls to the boy’s mother told her to take her three other children and join him in New York if she wanted to see her son again.
Two men were convicted of raping a young woman at a bar in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The verdict, reached after four and a half hours of deliberation by the jury of four women and eight men, ended a round in a case that has drawn national attention in part because the defendants were two of six men who were said to have assaulted the woman as patrons cheered them on. All six suspects are Portuguese- Americans. Some members of their ethnic community expressed fears that its gains over the years would be negated by the case. Women’s groups charged that the woman involved, a mother of two, seems to be on trial herself. After Daniel Silva and Joseph Vieira were convicted, cries of ”shame” rang in the crowded courtroom in Falls River, Massachusetts, some from members of the defendants’ families, and Judge William D. Young ordered the courtroom cleared. Sentencing was scheduled for Friday. The Fall River police were called in to quell minor disturbances in the parking lot of the courthouse, mainly by people slamming cars with their fists and screaming obscenities.
The Interior Department is offering offshore oil leases on nearly 6 million acres in Bering Sea waters claimed by the Soviet Union. The winning bidder, should any companies bid on the tracts involved, will have to wait until the boundary dispute is resolved before knowing whether it may drill. A total of 28 million acres, including the 6 million in disputed waters, is being offered in the Navarin Basin, which lies about 250 miles from the Alaska mainland. The sea bed there could contain 1.2 billion barrels of oil and 7.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, experts estimate.
Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds, in an address at the Church of the Master in New York City’s Harlem, said the Administration has been pursuing a “color blind policy that keeps its eye riveted on equal justice for every American. That, my fellow Americans, is the true mark of effective civil rights enforcement.” Reynolds, defending his record as the Administration’s chief civil rights enforcer, said the Justice Department’s initiatives have included spearheading major suits under the Fair Housing Act.
Nearly 500 chanting Seattle-area women marched past X-rated movie houses and adult bookstores to protest what they said was a lack of police vigor in the investigation of a series of strangling murders. Louise Chernin of the National Organization for Women said the march and rally Friday night at the King County Courthouse were intended to ”show officials and the King County police that the public is concerned” about the murders. The women’s groups have accused the authorities of not giving full attention to the case because some of the victims were prostitutes. Several of the 14 victims discovered since the summer of 1982 were found in or near the Green River southeast of Seattle. All had been strangled, and the police believe the murders were committed by a single person.
[Ed: The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, would eventually be caught and imprisoned — but not until 2001, not before dozens of women, suspected by investigators to be about 71 in total, were killed.]
The Environmental Protection Agency may reverse the Administration’s policy of doing nothing about the health threat posed by toxic chemical emissions from electrical transformer fires involving PCBs-polychlorinated biphenyls. The decision to consider new restrictions arises from an out-of-court agreement between the EPA and two national environmental groups that sued the agency over its 1982 refusal to assess the health risk of PCB transformer fires.
A former Philadelphia police officer was found innocent of murdering a black youth in a shooting that set off three days of racial violence in 1980. John Ziegler, 37, who is white, was accused of first- and third-degree murder and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter in the death of William Green, 17, who was shot August 24, 1980, during a struggle after a high-speed chase. Ziegler testified that Green turned on him after being stopped as a suspect in a hit-and-run incident.
Fifty religious activists, vowing they will ”not be intimidated” by threats of arrest, left in a 12-car caravan today to lead a family of illegal Guatemalan refugees to sanctuary in Vermont. After singing ”Be Not Afraid” in a South Side church, the travelers embarked on their eight-day trip in automobiles that bore signs reading ”Hands Off the Freedom Train” and ”Resist Death – Give Sanctuary.” Mike McConnell, an organizer of the group, had warned the travelers that acting in public made them possible targets of arrest on charges of harboring illegal aliens. The Guatemalans, a mother, father and five children, are Mayan Indians who said they had to flee when soldiers were sent to kill the father for teaching other villagers to read.
A $66-million wood stove nine stories tall and believed to be the largest wood-fired generator in the nation was dedicated in Burlington, Vermont, and is expected to start turning out electricity in three to four weeks. The McNeil Generating Station will use 1,200 tons of wood chips a day in what is called the perfect replacement for the city’s aging petroleum-fired generating plant. Consumers are already being assessed rate increases of more than 15% a year to pay for the station, and a 19.7% rate hike is being sought this year.
A slow-moving storm dumped up to a foot of snow in South Dakota and then moved eastward, prompting travelers’ advisories from eastern South Dakota through central Illinois. But residents of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Chicago, Kansas City, Cleveland, New York and other towns braved the wintry weather to watch traditional St. Patrick’s Day parades. Meanwhile, relief officials toured parts of northern Arkansas hit by tornadoes that killed at least five persons and injured 19 others Thursday night, doing $14.7 million worth of damage.
Ferguson Jenkins is given his unconditional release by the Cubs. He was 6-9 with a 4.30 ERA last season.
Born:
Chris Copeland, NBA small forward and power forward (New York Knicks, Indiana Pacers, Milwaukee Bucks), in Orange, New Jersey.
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