Soviet press outlets said today that a Pentagon report on Soviet military might is a “hackneyed invention” aimed at misleading the public. An editorial, which is to be published in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda Monday but was distributed today by the official press agency Tass, said the Defense Department’s booklet “Soviet Military Power” was an attempt to frighten allies of the United States into supporting American military policies. The Pentagon’s annual survey was made public Tuesday. “In the election year, the Administration would very much like to convince Americans that its policy of building up tensions and of the arms race, of shameless plunder of taxpayers for the benefit of the military-industrial complex is allegedly justified,” Pravda said. “It is obvious that the aim is also to mislead the public both at home and abroad.” It said the American leadership was obsessed with creating weapons “designed for launching the first disarming nuclear strike.”
More than 250,000 Australians took part in Palm Sunday protests against the nuclear arms race, and other big rallies were held in Europe. An estimated 125,000 people in Sydney and 85,000 in Melbourne gathered to hear anti-nuclear speakers. In Denmark, about 65,000 people took part in demonstrations in major cities to protest the deployment of new U.S. missiles in Western Europe. Almost 40,000 of the protesters paraded in Copenhagen, in the largest demonstration ever held in the city. And in Britain, hundreds of people gathered at U.S. military installations to protest the new missiles.
An American was rescued from kidnappers in Lebanon by Shiite Muslim militiamen who raided a West Beirut house in which he was being held after he was seized by unidentified gunmen two months ago. The Muslims also rescued a French construction engineer who had been abducted five days after the American, Frank Regier, an engineering professor. Two Americans are still missing in Beirut. They are the United States Embassy political officer, William Buckley, who was kidnapped March 16, and Jeremy Levin, the bureau chief of the Cable News Network, who disappeared Mar. 7.
Spokesmen for a group of Palestinians released from an Israeli prison camp in southern Lebanon last November accused the Israelis of murdering and torturing prisoners there. The 57 Palestine Liberation Organization guerrillas were among 4,600 Palestinians and Lebanese freed in exchange for six Israelis held by the PLO. One guerrilla told a reporter in Amman, Jordan, that 12 prisoners were shot or died of thirst after being kept on a beach in the sun by Israeli guards. Another said he was kept in solitary confinement for 117 days with his hands and feet bound and a sack over his head. An Israeli military spokesman described the charges as lies and propaganda.
Iranians voted in the second parliamentary election since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power in 1979. About 20 million voters were eligible to choose the 270-member Majlis, or Parliament, from a list of more than 1,500 government-approved candidates. Results were expected to be announced within a week. Iran is a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy, and a quarter of the candidates are young clergymen. Khomeini and his son Ahmed were among the first to cast their secret ballots in Tehran, the official news agency IRNA said.
In West Germany, demonstrators and riot policemen clashed for a third day today at the new runway at Frankfurt Airport. One demonstrator was arrested and several others were taken into custody and later released. The police said charges included breach of peace and grievous bodily harm. There have been 13 arrests since the runway opened Thursday. The police said about 150 youths had tried to ram the concrete wall around the runway, had set fires and had thrown flares at riot squads. The police used water cannon to put out the fires, then turned them on the protesters. Opponents of the runway say it will damage nearby woods and increase aircraft noise in villages. The airport authorities say the runway, used only for takeoffs, is needed to relieve pressure at peak periods.
A brother of Benigno S. Aquino Jr., the slain opposition leader, and 137 other Filipinos began a fast today to dramatize their opposition to the Government of Ferdinand E. Marcos. The brother, Agapito Aquino, and 34 other leaders of the fast have pledged not to eat for seven days, taking only salt and water. The others will fast for shorter periods. The group gathered for the fast at the Jesuit-run Ateneo University here. Mr. Aquino said President Marcos had ignored the demands of the opposition for a relaxation of his powers and had turned the May 14 parliamentary election into “just a sham exercise.”
U.S. arms sales to Taiwan will be discussed by the Chinese leadership with President Reagan during Mr. Reagan’s visit to China next week, a Chinese foreign affairs journal indicated. The magazine, World Affairs, said the issue of Taiwan could not be bypassed in developing Chinese-American relations.
Scores of Sikh terrorists set fire to nearly 40 railroad stations in the Punjab region of India. No injuries were reported. A terrorist group that has taken responsibility for the assassination of a Hindu politician said it was also responsible for the fires.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced that he was resigning as vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The New York Democrat said he was protesting the failure of the Central Intelligence Agency to inform the committee “properly” about the scope of United States involvement in the mining of Nicaraguan harbors.
Nicaragua acknowledged for the first time that Costa Rican-based rebels have captured a Nicaraguan town. The rebels, led by former Sandinista Eden Pastora, hold the southern seaport of San Juan del Norte and a 30-mile beachhead along the surrounding Caribbean coast, according to Costa Rica reporters who visited the area. Nicaraguan Defense Minister Humberto Ortega said that retaking the town would be difficult because of surrounding mountains and forests.
A member of El Salvador’s National Election Council left the country because of threats from right-wing death squads, Christian Democratic Party sources confirmed. Roberto Meza Delgado, vice president of the election council and a member of the party, left the country for an undisclosed location last Thursday after several sticks of dynamite were found in his private offices. Meanwhile, a U.S. source reported that John Kelly, an elections expert for the U.S. Agency for International Development, has “temporarily” left the country after receiving telephoned death threats.
ICIA Director William J. Casey said that a “massive wave of immigration” spurred by Communist takeovers in Central America would “excite Americans” a lot more than any qualms about mining Nicaragua’s harbors. “If we have another Cuba in Central America, Mexico will have a big problem and we’re going to have a massive wave of immigration,” Casey said in a U.S. News & World Report interview.
An inquiry into poverty in South Africa, sponsored by the Carnegie Corp., has revealed widespread hunger and deprivation in rural areas, including the 10 tribal homelands set aside by the government for the country’s black majority. One report in the inquiry, made public at Cape Town, said that in the Ciskei homeland, declared independent by South Africa, the average monthly income per family was $44.
A bomb explosion at a filling station in northern South-West Africa (today Namibia) reportedly killed two United States diplomats. The two men were part of a small United States mission charged with monitoring the peace initiative in neighboring Angola. South African officials said there was “a very real possibility that it could have been a coincidence” that the Americans were at the filling station when the bomb went off. In a brief statement, the United States liaison office in Windhoek, the capital of South-West Africa, said the diplomats were killed at a gasoline station near the northern town of Oshakati, close to the border with Angola. The reports indicated the explosion had gone off near the diplomats’ car.
Zimbabwe’s Roman Catholic bishops offered details today of what they said were atrocities committed by government troops fighting rebels in southern Matabeleland. The details of the atrocities the bishops said have been committed since a curfew was clamped on the area February 3 were in a report made available today here in Matabeleland’s provincial capital. The bishops sent the report to the government April 2. Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s government has denied the charges. At a news conference here Saturday Mr. Mugabe accused the bishops of supporting rebels and the opposition leader Joshua Nkomo, and said they should stay out of government affairs.
Last Monday, a week after Mr. Mugabe received the report, the government said the dissident threat in the area had been checked and eased the clampdown. Shops were ordered to reopen and buses and other forms of transport were again allowed to operate there, but a curfew remains in force. In their report, compiled from accounts by churchmen and other residents of Matabeleland, the bishops said people had been killed, kidnapped, tortured, raped, beaten and threatened by government troops.
The USSR performs a nuclear test at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeast Kazakhstan.
Medicare and Medicaid costs rise when hospitals change hands because of mergers or acquisitions, without providing additional health care to the elderly and the poor people aided by the programs, according to Federal officials. The costs rise, often dramatically, they say, because the new owners usually borrow money to finance the purchase, and the process of depreciation starts again from a much higher level reflecting the purchase price.
A North Carolina jury acquitted six Ku Klux Klan members and three members of the American Nazi Party of civil rights violations connected to the shooting deaths of five Communists and the wounding of seven other people at an anti-Klan rally in 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Five of the defendants had been acquitted of murder and rioting charges in the same case at a trial in 1980.
Fund-raising for Senator Gary Hart’s Presidential campaign in Texas, Arizona and California brought in more than $250,000, a considerable sum, according to Hart finance officials. The campaign appeal made some important inroads in such wealthy areas in California as Silicon Valley.
The bodies of 10 people — two women and eight children — were found in a two-family house in the East New York section of Brooklyn. The bodies were found in the house at 1080 Liberty Avenue by a man who was said to be the husband of one of the victims. All had been shot in the head. Ten persons, seven of them children, were shot and killed in a Brooklyn apartment, authorities said. A baby was discovered crawling unharmed on the floor. The victims were four boys, three girls and three adult women. Police said they had no motive in the killings but that they did not appear to be drug-related. The bodies were discovered by Carmen Rossi, owner of a bakery next door to the two-family apartment in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Rossi told police that a man ran out of the downstairs apartment screaming for help. Rossi went inside and found the victims in the living room and kitchen. They were believed to be Latinos.
Nine Klansmen and American Nazis were found innocent in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, of conspiring to disrupt a 1979 anti-Klan rally in Greensboro in which five communist demonstrators were killed. The all-white jury also acquitted five defendants of civil rights violations stemming from the deaths. Two defendants were also acquitted of conspiring to intimidate witnesses after the confrontation. “Man, I think I died and went to heaven,” said Ku Klux Klan leader Virgil L. Griffin, who was acquitted of both conspiracy counts. “I’m shocked and outraged,” said a weeping Dale Sampson, wife of one of the slain demonstrators. “This just gives the go-ahead for Klansmen and Nazis to kill people.”
The city of Washington has started to get tough on residents who neglect to pay their rent and manage to avoid eviction. Starting today, deputy U.S. marshals will operate under new guidelines that are expected to result in 300 evictions a week, a four-fold increase. More than 23,000 Washington families got eviction notices in 1982, but only 2,751 found their furniture piled up on the streets. For every eviction the marshals completed, 10 new eviction writs were issued. A huge backlog developed, enabling families to avoid eviction for a year or more. Under the new guidelines, evictions will be carried out by private contractors, with the marshals standing by to keep the peace.
Nearly 70% of senators and representatives surveyed by U.S. News & World Report rated Congress only poor to fair in responding to the nation’s needs, up from 50% in a similar poll by the magazine in 1982. Congress was rated poor by 23.6% of the 80 Democrats and 60 Republicans responding to its survey. It was rated fair by 43.3%, good by 30.7%, and excellent by only 2.4%. Democrats were more satisfied with Congress than Republicans, with half the Democrats giving it a good or excellent rating, marks given by only one GOP member in five.
The engineer of an eastbound freight train involved in a head-on collision that killed five crewmen did not know a westbound train was speeding down the same track because his radio was not working properly, federal investigators said in Wiggins, Colorado. Gordon Inglis, Denver investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said the Chicago-bound Burlington Northern train had its radio tuned to a local railyard channel because the main-line channel required on the open track “wasn’t working.” Inglis said so far there has been no finding of human error, but authorities were investigating such possibilities as drug or alcohol use by crew members and the lack of sleep.
Large doses of tranquilizers had been prescribed for a sheriff’s sergeant involved in a collision that killed three Secret Service agents riding ahead of a motorcade for Queen Elizabeth II, a federal investigator says in court documents. Papers filed at Federal District Court asserted that Sgt. Roderic Sinclair of the Mariposa County Sheriff’s force received more than 1,250 doses of Seconal and other drugs in a two-year period, including March 5, 1983, the day of the accident. The affidavit was filed by Raymond A. Conner, a federal drug investigator, in support of a request for a search warrant to examine the prescription records of Dr. Arthur H. Dahlem of Mariposa. Mr. Conner concluded he had probable cause to believe that Dr. Dahlem gave drugs to Sergeant Sinclair and two other people without medical need. No charges were filed. The highway patrol concluded that Sergeant Sinclair was driving 72 miles an hour when his patrol car hit the agents’ car head-on. Mariposa County, which faces $12 million in wrongful death claims, found no grounds for criminal prosecution of Sergeant Sinclair.
The legacy of Terezin went on display at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. The exhibit includes poems, drawings and other things left behind by Jews in Terezin, a Czechoslovak village that the Germans turned into a concentration camp, a way station on the road to Auschwitz. Many of the visitors were overcome with emotion. Some wept and others left halfway through. Another major exhibit “The Precious Legacy,” a collection of Jewish ceremonial and folk art, opened at the same time.
A historic Capitol Hill church heavily damaged by lightning and fire, reopened today for Palm Sunday services. About 120 members of the congregation gathered in the fellowship hall below the sanctuary of the Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church. The sanctuary was still soaked from firefighters’ efforts Friday to put out the fire in the roof and attic, said the pastor, the Rev. Donald Allen. “We’re very much trying to continue on and have church as usual,” Mr. Allen said. Parishioners spent much of the weekend helping clean up from the fire, he added.
The St. Clair River was closed to vessel traffic yesterday as five American icebreakers and one Canadian counterpart continued working to clear the ice that has clogged the river more than a week, a United States Coast Guard official said. Four of five ships that had been stuck in Lake Superior outside the harbor at Duluth, Minnesota, were freed, the Coast Guard reported. But the ice that has jammed the 40-mile-long St. Clair River now extends into Lake Huron 16 miles north of its source at Port Huron, Michigan, Senior Chief Petty Officer James T. Perkins said in Detroit yesterday afternoon. Vessels will be permitted to resume navigating by sunrise today, he said. Five ships tried to negotiate the river yesterday, he said, but the ice was “basically becoming like a Jell-O, sticking to the sides.”
The volcanic eruption of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii ended today. Lava had at one point threatened the outskirts of the city of Hilo but never came closer than about 4 miles from the edge of the city. Mauna Loa volcano on the island of Hawaii stopped spewing lava for the first time in three weeks, but geologists warned that activity could start up again. Meanwhile, on the island’s Kilauea volcano, which has been in eruption for over a year. lava was reported to be bubbling near the brim of a vent in the active east rift zone. Mauna Loa came to life March 25, sending streams of lava toward the city of Hilo. The flows stalled several miles from homes. The ongoing Kilauea eruption has caused about $4 million in damage to homes and roadways.
Galt MacDermot and William Dumaresq’s musical “The Human Comedy”, based on the novel by William Saroyan, closes at Royale Theater, NYC, after 13 performances.
At Oakland, Reggie Jackson homers in the 1st, Brian Downing hits a grand slam in the 2nd and Rob Wilfong homers as well as the Angels take a 10-0 lead over Oakland. The A’s plate 8 unanswered runs to make it close before the Angels score a pair in the 9th for the 12-8 win.
The Phillies’ Mike Schmidt homered into the left field blue seats at Olympic Stadium, Montreal but lost it to a rainout.
48th U.S. Masters Tournament, Augusta National GC: Ben Crenshaw wins the first of his 2 green jackets, 2 strokes ahead of 1977 & 1981 champion Tom Watson.
Born:
Antonio Cromartie, NFL cornerback (Pro Bowl, 2007, 2012-2014; San Diego Chargers, New York Jets, Arizona Cardinals, Indianapolis Colts), in Tallahassee, Florida.
Daniel Paille, Candian NHL left wing (NHL Champions, Stanley Cup-Bruins, 2011; Buffalo Sabres, Boston Bruins, New York Rangers), in Welland, Ontario, Canada.
Cam Janssen, NHL right wing (New Jersey Devils, St. Louis Blues), in St. Louis, Missouri.
Rodney Carney, NBA small forward and shooting guard (Philadelphia 76ers, Minnesota Timberwolves, Golden State Warriors, Memphis Grizzlies), in Memphis, Tennessee.
Ben Kasica, American rock guitarist (Skillet), in St Louis, Missouri.
Died:
Machito [Francisco “Frank” Grillo], 76, Latin jazz musician and creator of Cu-bop and salsa music (Afro-Cubans), dies following a stroke.
Tommy Cooper, 61, British comedian and magician, collapses and dies on stage.
William Empson, 77, English poet and critic (Milton’s God).
History Diaries 