The U.S. Army has quietly deployed a second battery of Pershing 2 nuclear missiles in West Germany. military sources reported. They said that the battery’s nine medium-range missiles have become “fire ready” at the Army base at Mutlangen, site of numerous anti-nuclear protests. The base was the first site to receive Pershing 2 missiles under a North Atlantic Treaty Organization deployment plan that provides for West Germany to receive 108 Pershing 2 missiles over the next three years.
The Soviet Union has a negative view of the chances for achieving progress in arms talks with the Reagan Administration as a result of Administration oratory, the chairman of President Reagan’s Commission on Strategic Forces said. The chairman, Brent Scowcroft, offered a deeply pessimistic outlook for progress on arms control this year. Chances are “not bright,” at least through Election Day, he said.
The Soviet Olympic Committee said in Moscow that an anti-Soviet campaign was building around the Summer Games in Los Angeles. It asked for an emergency meeting of the International Olympic Committee to review security preparations and to demand United States adherence to the Olympic charter.
East German border guards fired at two men scrambling over the Berlin wall during the night, apparently hitting one of them and preventing his escape, West German officials said today. The West German Government condemned the incident as undermining relations between the two countries. Residents of the area close to the wall in the Neukölln district of the American-run sector of the divided city said they heard bursts of firing late Sunday from East German watch towers, West Berlin police said.
The guards apparently opened fire when they spotted two men scrambling over the 13-foot wall, the police said. A 20-year-old East German walked into a police station two hours after the incident and said he had escaped across the wall. He said his companion, caught with him on top of the wall when the guards opened fire, did not make it into the western sector and probably had been shot.
The Common Market financial crisis remained unbroken despite another round of talks to resolve it. As a result, European officials at the negotiations in Luxembourg, said President Francois Mitterrand was expected to meet soon with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Britain’s demand for a rebate of about $900 million on its contribution to the economic community’s budget deadlocked the talks.
Pope John Paul II has reorganized parts of the Roman Catholic Church’s central administration. The Vatican announced that the Pope named an American monsignor and an African cardinal to key Vatican posts, and redefined several other jobs.
The number of Afghan war wounded crossing into Pakistan has risen steadily since the end of last year, and 2,800 underwent treatment in the first two months of 1984, the International Committee of the Red Cross said today. In January and February, 2,156 wounded Afghans made their way across the border in harsh weather conditions for outpatient treatment at the group’s two surgical hospitals in Peshawar and Quetta, and 717 others underwent major operations, according to a report issued by the group.
Afghan guerrillas handed over a captured Soviet officer to the International Red Cross today for two years’ internment in Switzerland, an Afghan exile leader said. The Russian is Konstantin Nikolayev, 22 years old, a junior artillery officer.
Sikh extremists threw a bomb at a Hindu temple in the city of Bhatinda in Punjab state, killing two people. The attack-after another assault on a shrine hours before in the same city and a third shrine attack in neighboring Haryana state-led to the jailing of a Sikh leader under a controversial preventive detention law. Sukhjinder Singh, a leader of the Akali Dal party, had been campaigning for “Khalistan,” an independent Sikh homeland.
Pakistan’s military leader, General Zia ul-Haq, said he will not run for the post of civilian president in elections he has promised by next March, the Associated Press of Pakistan reported. Zia’s statement, in a speech in Karachi, went beyond his usual remarks that he has no personal ambitions, but it did not rule out a movement to draft him for the presidency after martial-law ends.
Vietnam charged today that recent battles along the China-Vietnam and Cambodia-Thailand borders were linked to a ”global strategy” by Peking and Washington to stem the spread of Communism. ”To prevent the newly independent countries from advancing toward socialism is a crucial point in the global strategy of the U.S. imperialists in collusion with the Chinese expansionists and hegemonists,” the official Hanoi radio said in a broadcast monitored in Bangkok.
A Vietnam Veterans of America delegation seeking information on United States servicemen missing in the Indochina war met today in Hanoi with Foreign Minister Nguyễn Cơ Thạch, the Vietnamese press agency reported.
A Philippine inquiry commission viewed television footage taken by American and Japanese journalists that was said to contradict military accounts of the assassination of opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. The pictures, introduced as evidence before the panel investigating the slaying at Manila airport last August, show scenes inside Aquino’s jet as he was led out by three arresting soldiers. Attorney Raul Gonzales, president of the National Bar Association, who is observing the proceedings, said the pictures corroborate the testimony of eight civilian witnesses who say Aquino was shot on the airliner’s staircase. Military accounts said Aquino was slain after he reached the tarmac.
The Soviet helicopter carrier Leningrad is conducting operations with a Cuban frigate in the Gulf of Mexico and approached within 100 miles of the U.S. coast on Saturday. senior Pentagon officials reported. The 17,000-ton carrier, along with its destroyer escort, the Udaloy, an oiler and a Soviet-built Cuban frigate were shadowed by a U.S. frigate off New Orleans as they steamed in a southerly direction en route to the Cuban port of Cienfuegos, the officials said.
Nicaragua asked the World Court to declare illegal United States support for guerrilla raids on its territory and what it said was Washington’s role in the mining of its harbors. The State Department said it had pre-empted the complaint filed in The Hague by filing papers Friday to deprive the tribunal of jurisdiction to consider the matter for at least two years.
The House will not approve the Reagan Administration’s request for $21 million in new aid for Nicaraguan rebels, the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., said. He and Representative Jim Wright, the majority leader, said reports of the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in the mining of Nicaraguan harbors had killed any chance that the measure would be approved. The Republican-controlled Senate passed the bill last week.
Rev. Jesse Jackson will go to Nicaragua in an attempt to ease tensions growing out the “provocative act of war,” the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, reportedly done with United States aid. A trip to Nicaragua scheduled in February was canceled on the advice of campaign aides who urged Mr. Jackson to concentrate on the New Hampshire primary. An aide said Mr. Jackson would make the trip in the next few weeks.
Indiscriminate bombing raids by Salvadoran government forces killed 235 civilians between March 16 and March 29, including refugees awaiting medical attention, two private human rights groups charged in a report. The Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights and Americas Watch said that half of the estimated 500,000 civilians displaced by El Salvador’s four-year-old civil war have been labeled by the government as guerrilla sympathizers merely because they failed to register for government aid. The armed forces have then bombed the contested zones in which the civilians gather for Red Cross aid, the report said.
Peruvian Prime Minister Fernando Schwalb resigned, saying he wants to leave President Fernando Belaunde Terry free to implement new economic policies. Schwalb has protested Belaunde’s proposed $600-million spending increase, designed to pull Peru out of a severe recession. The resignation of Schwalb, who is also Peru’s foreign minister, came amid intensifying social unrest. Striking bus drivers protesting rising gasoline prices blocked roads and stoned passing vehicles, and a work stoppage by doctors entered its second week.
The Canada Health Act, the country’s publicly-funded health insurance scheme (Medicare), is passed by the Canadian House of Commons.
President Reagan meets with the Mayor of Berlin.
The three Democratic candidates were criticized by Vice President Bush as not issuing strong condemnations of anti-Semitism. Mr. Bush’s remarks were prompted by threats against Jews and a newspaper reporter by Louis Farrakhan, a Black Muslim leader, who is a supporter of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Mr. Bush said, “I cannot understand why Walter Mondale and Gary Hart have not continued to speak out loudly and clearly against this.” The two noted that they had criticized Mr. Farrakhan’s remarks last week. Mr. Jackson dismissed Mr. Bush’s speech as “self-righteous.”
Final campaign speeches in Pennsylvania were made by the three major Democratic Presidential candidates on the eve of the state primary. Their campaigns will now swing to the West and Southwest. Walter F. Mondale’s aides said a victory in today’s primary would bring his delegate total to more than half the 1,967 needed for nomination. Gary Hart’s campaign chairman said Mr. Hart no longer expected to win a nominating majority before June 5. The Rev. Jesse Jackson campaigned in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, where he is counting on a strong black support.
President Reagan participates in a ceremony honoring the 1984 National Teacher of the Year, Sherleen Sue Sisney, from Kentucky.
The President and First Lady attend the 35th Anniversary Dinner of the Chowder & Marching Club.
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall forcefully answered recent criticism by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and others of lawyers who help Death Row inmates. “The accusation that these lawyers are holding up executions has always struck me as absurd,” Marshall said in a speech at the New York University Law School. “If there is any chance a defendant has a valid objection to his conviction or sentence, elementary principles of justice require that his attorneys be afforded a full opportunity to present that claim to the courts,” he said.
The court-appointed guardian for nearly 150 Vietnamese orphans who were brain-damaged in a 1975 air crash called on President Reagan to intervene in the continuing legal battle among the orphans, the U.S. government and Lockheed Aircraft Corp., which built the plane. A total of 98 children died during “Operation Babylift” when a Lockheed C-5A lost its rear door near Saigon; many of those who survived suffered “minimal brain dysfunction” when oxygen rushed out of the plane. Lockheed and the U.S. government have paid a total of $17.5 million to the 52 orphans who now are American citizens but has refused to offer settlements to the 93 orphans now in Europe and Canada, the guardian Charles R. Work said.
Former Governor Ray Blanton, the only Tennessee chief executive ever convicted of a felony, was ordered by U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Bailey Brown in Memphis to begin serving his sentence for peddling liquor licenses on May 3. Brown dismissed all pending motions for new trials or reductions of sentences. Blanton was found guilty of extortion, conspiracy and mail fraud on June 9, 1981, and given a three-year sentence and an $11,000 fine. Former aide Clyde Edd Hood was convicted of conspiracy and mail fraud and sentenced to 18 months and a $14,000 fine. Ex-aide Jim Allen was given two years on the same charges and fined $14,000.
A federal grand jury charged a former Army counterintelligence officer with selling the Soviet Union information about six U.S. double agent operations aimed at penetrating the Soviet KGB spy agency. Richard Craig Smith, 40, of Bellevue, Washington, reported he was paid $11,000 for the information and was offered an additional $100,000 to $150,000 for further information. A five-count indictment was returned in U.S. District Court in suburban Alexandria, Virginia, against Smith. He is being held without bond.
A month after Governor John Spellman blocked her release from prison, the Washington state parole board voted unanimously to free a woman whose drunken driving killed three children in 1981. Dorothy Judge, 22, has served more than two years of a 10-year sentence for negligent homicide. Spellman blocked her release in March because he questioned whether her time in prison provided adequate retribution or sufficient deterrence to other would-be drunken drivers.
Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander called out the National Guard to search for three convicted killers who escaped from Fort Pillow Prison, less than two months after another major jailbreak that left three persons dead. Four prisoners escaped from a work detail, and one was captured almost immediately. Police using bloodhounds, helicopters and airplanes launched a massive hunt for the fugitives in a heavily wooded area near the rural prison. They were to be joined at daybreak by 225 military policemen from the National Guard. Five convicts escaped from Fort Pillow in February and three people died before the last one was captured last month.
The school where hundreds of the very young, it has been charged, were sexually molested and physically abused by teachers in the past decade was vandalized and set afire, the police reported today. The fire late Sunday burned two classrooms at the McMartin Pre-School, causing about $10,000 damage. A message painted on a concrete walkway near the school said, ”Only the beginning.” The elderly founder of the school, her daughter, two grandchildren and two teachers were indicted by the Los Angeles County Grand Jury last month for sexually molesting 18 children.
[Ed: And again, of course, there was no molestation; the charges were later shown to be unfounded.]
Faced with an expanding boycott of its beer, the Adolph Coors Company has signed an agreement with the National Association for the Advancement of colored People to spend more money on black-owned businesses. The agreement, which stopped a five-day boycott, also calls for more blacks to be moved into executive-level positions at Coors. The boycott was begun after the chairman of the Colorado-based brewery, William K. Coors, told a group of black businessmen that African blacks are ”intellectually inferior.” Later, he apologized for the remark.
Three universities will stop research on certain kinds of sensitive but unclassified scientific subjects for the Defense Department if, under a Pentagon proposal, military reviewers restrict publication of their findings, the presidents of the institutions told the Reagan Administration.
Four marines from the island of Oahu who went on a sightseeing flight in a single-engine airplane were missing today and it was feared the plane was down somewhere near the Mauna Loa volcano. The Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station on Oahu confirmed that four of its personnel were on a sightseeing trip to the big island of Hawaii. The Grumman plane left Honolulu Sunday for Hawaii and refueled at Kona Airport before taking off at 2:40 PM on a flight over the volcano, northeast of the airport. It carried enough fuel to stay aloft four hours.
The Reagan Administration today proposed a reduction in the amount of asbestos permitted in workplaces to one-quarter of the current limit. The proposal by the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is to be published Tuesday in the Federal Register, would affect 375,000 industrial workers. It would cut the permissible exposure level from 2 fibers of asbestos for each cubic centimeter of workplace air, which has been the Federal standard since 1976, to either 0.5 or 0.2 fibers for a cubic centimeter.
The 56th Academy Awards: “Terms of Endearment”, Robert Duvall & Shirley MacLaine win. Linda Hunt becomes the first person to win an Oscar for portraying a character of the opposite sex, Billy Kwan in “The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982)
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1133.90 (+1.68).
Born:
Adam Loewen, Canadian MLB pitcher and outfielder (Baltimore Orioles, Philadelphia Phillies, Arizona Diamondbacks), in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada.
Linda Chung, Chinese-Canadian actress and singer, in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada.
History Diaries 