Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, in an interview with the Paris newspaper Le Monde, said he is ready to immediately withdraw his troops from Chad. Libya invaded northern Chad in support of rebels led by former President Goukouni Oueddei, who are seeking to oust the government of President Hissen Habre. Qaddafi, responding to a recent pledge by France to withdraw its 3,000 troops in Chad “within minutes” of a Libyan pullout, said he had sent French President François Mitterrand the withdrawal offer and a plea to re-establish bilateral relations.
Big government budget deficits, whether in the United States, Japan or Europe, are “desperately bad” for world trade because “they soak up the capital pool needed for the creation of jobs,” U.S. special trade representative William E. Brock said. Brock and top officials from 12 other trading nations and the Common Market had just ended a three-day meeting in Washington to reaffirm their commitment to free trade and to share concerns about the recent rise in protectionist sentiment. There was no agenda, and no final agreement at the gathering.
A rate limit on third world loans has been proposed by Paul A. Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who apparently fears that rising interest rates will lead to more financial pressures on third world debtors. He said it now seemed appropriate to move to “a new phase in financing” as part of a broad program to help consolidate the gains made by some countries and to prevent a significant worsening in the positions of others. He made his remarks at a news conference in Hot Springs, Virginia, where he was attending a meeting of the Business Council.
An international Olympic official met in Moscow today with the top Soviet sports administrator, but appeared to have made little headway in efforts to reverse the decision to withdraw from the Olympic Games in Los Angeles this summer. Two more Soviet allies, Czechoslovakia and Laos, announced that they would send no teams to the Games. The visitor, Mario Vazquez Rana of Mexico, who heads the Association of National Olympic Committees, said the Soviet official, Marat V. Gramov, had been “very eager to listen” to the reasons advanced by Mr. Vazquez for Soviet participation in the two-hour meeting. The Mexican said Mr. Gramov had not given any indication that Moscow was ready to reconsider. Mr. Gramov heads the Soviet Government’s Committee for Physical Culture and Sports as well as the National Olympic Committee.
Gunmen killed an off-duty soldier of the mainly Protestant Ulster Defense Regiment on his farm in Northern Ireland near the border with the Irish Republic and wounded two policemen in an ambush as they drove to investigate the slaying, police reported. The soldier, Sgt. Ivan Hillen, 46, was the third member of the security forces to be killed in the past four days. The outlawed Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility for the shootings.
Pope John Paul II returned to Rome from his 11-day Asian tour determined to continue the worldwide pilgrimages that have made him the most traveled pontiff in history. “The Pope should be a pastor. He should travel… He should be with the people,” John Paul told reporters on the special Alitalia DC-10 flight from Bangkok. He added that he wants to visit the Soviet Union and China. “The people of Russia are my brothers,” the Polish-born pontiff said.
A United Nations employee who was released after spending more than four years in a Polish prison on spying charges will start work for a United Nations agency in Warsaw on June 1, a United Nations spokesman said today. The United Nations employee, Alicja Wesolowska, a 40-year-old Polish citizen, was released from a Polish prison in February after negotiations between the Polish Government and the United Nations Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar. The spokesman in Geneva said Miss Wesolowska would work at the United Nations Development Program-Economic Commission for Europe on a trans-European highway project. He said Miss Wesolowska had been in Poland since her release. Since her arrest in August 1979, she has denied charges that she spied for an unnamed NATO country.
Blasts at the Pitti Palace Museum in Florence, Italy, injured at least 10 people, but none of the museum’s paintings were damaged. They were believed to have been caused by a gas leak. Two explosions from an apparent gas leak ripped through the ground floor of the 15th-Century Pitti Palace Museum in Florence, Italy, home of one of the world’s major art collections, injuring at least 10 people, police said. None of the priceless paintings of 16th and 17th Century Italian masters or other art works in the building was damaged. The blasts, apparently ignited by a cigarette, blew a 13-foot-wide hole in a frescoed ceiling and caused other damage.
For more than a month, China and Vietnam have each reported inflicting staggering losses on the other in their border conflict while suffering only modest casualties, all of them civilians. Neither side has admitted having its soldiers killed or wounded, prompting some diplomats to suspect that the artillery duels and battles have been exaggerated and that the biggest casualty of the murky war has been truth. Over the last week, Chinese frontier guards have been beating back Vietnamese incursions while being bombarded with thousands of artillery shells, as the New China News Agency told it.
On Thursday, the press agency said, Chinese frontier guards repulsed the seventh assault in a week on a 3,300- foot-high position on the Yunnan Province border, inflicting “heavy losses.” A Vietnamese diplomat here called the report “a total lie.” And a Chinese official told reporters the day before that the frontier had been “relatively peaceful” in recent days. The conflicting reports have been treated cautiously by diplomats since independent observers have not been allowed into the border zone.
A small Chinese naval squadron has moved to the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, possibly prompting a show of naval force from Vietnam and the Soviet Union, an Indonesian Government official said today. The Spratly Island group is claimed by China, Vietnam and other governments. The official said that in the last two or three days four Chinese vessels — two frigates, a landing craft and an oil supply ship — had approached the islands. He said the reason for the Chinese squadron’s presence was not known. But he added that there had been reports of Vietnamese and Soviet naval movements in the area, probably to counter the Chinese presence.
Sikh terrorists assassinated a leading Hindu newspaper editor in the northern state of Punjab today, touching off violence in which hundreds of Hindus attacked buses, stores and banks, reports from the area said. The editor, 60-year-old Ramesh Chandra of the Hind Samachar newspaper group, was killed when terrorists sprayed gunfire at his car in Jullundur city, some 215 miles northwest of New Delhi. His father, a prominent Hindu politician and journalist, was killed in a similar attack in 1981. Officials in the state capital, Chandigarh, set a curfew at Jullundur and put security forces in Punjab and neighboring Haryana state on alert. There were no reports of additional casualties. Mr. Chandra was an outspoken critic of Sikh extremism. A Sikh organization calling itself the Dishmish Regiment said it was responsible for the killing.
The Government of Bangladesh today postponed parliamentary and presidential elections, which had been scheduled for May 27. In an address broadcast to the nation, Lieutenant General H. M. Ershad, the military ruler, did not give reasons for the decision to delay the election to an undetermined date in the winter, saying only that the Election Commission could not hold the voting in May. Two opposition political coalitions have demanded an end to martial law, and have also asked for parliamentary elections before a presidential ballot. The general, who took power in a 1982 coup, said martial law would not be lifted before the voting.
Seventy-three men, women and children were taken hostage last night by Salvadoran rebels in a San Salvador discount supermarket and held for nearly nine hours before being released early today. The disruption, which began as a robbery, was the first major guerrilla action in the capital in more than three years. It ended after negotiations by the rebels, the International Committee of the Red Cross, a Salvadoran police director and the Mexican Embassy. The hostages filed out of the warehouse-like building about 3:45 AM and were put into vans. The five insurgents, their heads wrapped in towels, were given safe passage to the Mexican Embassy and left later this morning on a commercial flight to Mexico. Three of the hostages required medical care when tear gas that the guerrillas threw at the police outside filled the warehouse, the police said. A pregnant woman was also treated, according to a woman among the guerrillas who was reached by phone Friday night.
Chile’s President Augusto Pinochet said he will cooperate with a judicial hearing on his real estate deals “because I have nothing to hide or be ashamed of,” the newspaper Las Ultimas Noticias reported. The 68-year-old army commander was quoted as saying he would not claim presidential immunity from criminal investigation. An appellate judge is to hear charges by opposition leaders that Pinochet abused his power by buying five acres of land from the government for about $25,000 less than the government paid for the land.
South African prisoner Nelson Mandela sees his wife Winnie Mandela for the 1st time in 22 years.
Talks on the future of Namibia (South-West Africa) adjourned with Namibian nationalist guerrillas saying the two-day-old meeting was on the verge of collapse. Representatives of South Africa, the coalition of Namibian parties that it backs and the South-West Africa People’s Organization guerrillas are meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, to seek agreement on an independence plan for the South African-administered territory. SWAPO says the spirit of the talks is bad, pointing to Namibian delegates’ objections about the makeup of the SWAPO delegation.
A Cameroonian Cabinet minister made the first official confirmation that people have been executed for their roles in last month’s coup attempt by members of the presidential guard. Finance Minister Etienne Ntsama, in Tunisia for the annual meeting of governors of the African Development Bank. said soldiers have been shot by firing squad for their roles in the aborted April 6 rebellion. Ntsama did not indicate how many have been executed.
France performs a nuclear test.
The Social Security agency flouts lower federal court decisions that agency officials believe conflict with Social Security regulations and policies. The agency disregards decisions in individual cases that would require payment of benefits to thousands of other people in similar situations. Federal judges have denounced the practice as lawless.
The anti-narcotics border system established in 1983 by the Reagan Administration as one of the principal initiatives in Mr. Reagan’s war on drugs has been denounced by the director of the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, Francis M. Mullen Jr., as an ill-conceived “liability.” He said in a report that the border system has accomplished little while taking credit for the accomplishments of other agencies.
Mergers between labor unions are being sought in their battle against high unemployment, declining membership and rising staff payroll costs. The AFL-CIO is encouraging the trend. The federation recently gave its blessing to the merger of two family members, the 45-year-old cement workers union and the 103-year- old boilermakers union.
The NASA space shuttle Discovery moves to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for mating with her external tank and SRBs for STS 41-D.
President Reagan rides his horse, “Giminish.”
An accused spy says he passed military secrets to a Soviet KGB officer in Japan because he was working for the CIA as part of a plan to infiltrate Soviet intelligence, the Washington Post reported. The newspaper said that Richard Craig Smith, a former Army counterintelligence specialist, says he was instructed by the CIA to pose as an American businessman with terminal cancer. He says he was told to pretend that he would be willing to sell anything, including military secrets, to help put aside a financial nest egg for his family. He also told the Post that the CIA said it would disavow any of his activities if he was discovered.
Texas Governor Mark White is proposing a three- year tax package of $4.8 billion to pay for improvements in the state’s education and highway systems. Mr. White, at a news conference Friday, called for a penny increase in the state sales tax to 5 percent, for doubling the 5-cent-a-gallon vehicle fuel tax, adding a 5-cent tax to the cost of a pack of cigarettes, raising the liquor tax by 20 percent and raising taxes on the sale or rental of vehicles 1 percent. Raises for teachers and equal state financing for rich and poor school districts are at the heart of Mr. White’s education plan. Starting pay for teachers would rise by about $4,000 to over $15,000 a year, while working teachers would receive an increase of at least 15 percent over two years.
Monsanto Co. paid almost half of the $180-million settlement reached by thousands of Vietnam War veterans and seven manufacturers of the herbicide Agent Orange, according to Business Insurance, an industry trade magazine. Monsanto paid $81.9 million, or 45.5%, and Dow Chemical Co. paid $35.1 million, or 19.5%, the magazine said. The payment breakdown by company is reportedly under court seal, but the trade publication published the amounts paid by the other defendants as: Diamond Shamrock Corp., $21.6 million; Hercules Inc., $18 million, T.H. Agriculture & Nutrition Co., $10.8 million, Uniroyal Inc., $9 million, and the defunct Thompson Chemical Corp., $3.6 million.
Cyanide in a bottle of cola killed a 34-year-old man in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and police warned area consumers to check all 16-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola for possible tampering. although the product was not being removed from stores. Authorities said Thomas Dresser’s body was found by his wife, Shelly, at a highway rest stop near Manitowoc where the couple had planned to have lunch. Two partially consumed 16-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola were found near the body. A Coca-Cola spokesman noted that the glass of the bottle would be impregnable and opening the twist-off cap would break a metal seal around the bottle from the rest of the cap.
School officials in Minneapolis have failed more than 11 percent of this year’s kindergartners and are requiring them to attend summer school before they can go on to first grade. The Minneapolis system is the first school district in the country to require competency tests for promotion to first grade, said Chris Pipho, a spokesman for the Education Commission of the States, in Denver, who keeps track of competency testing nationwide. Superintendent of Schools Richard Green said he hoped half of the 340 pupils held back would make enough progress in summer school to advance to the first grade next fall. Those who do not will repeat kindergarten or be placed in a transitional program to receive special academic help, he said.
A turn to Islam is taking place among the more than 75,000 foreign Muslim students now studying in the United States, according to interviews with students and their professors. Some students are becoming “good” Muslims for the first time, they said, and the fact that their attitudes are changing has also led some to conclude that the American environment is nudging things along.
The Louisiana World Exposition opened in New Orleans for a run of six months. The “World of Rivers” fair, 10 years in preparation, cost about $350 million. Twenty-five countries, including China, are among the exhibitors. Officials expect the fair to attract 12 million visitors, the number needed for the fair to break even.
The David A. Kennedy death inquiry in Palm Beach, Florida, is focusing on who supplied him with illegal drugs, but the local police chief indicated it was unlikely that there would be any arrests or indictments soon. In Florida a charge of murder in the third degree can be brought against a supplier in a drug-related death like Mr. Kennedy’s.
Thousands of volunteers built and fortified sandbag dikes today along streams brimming with snow runoff from the mountains as the National Weather Service warned that its earlier forecast of flooding in Utah was near reality. Minor flooding is inevitable in 10 counties and the potential for mud slides in the foothills is rising with the runoff, the forecasters said. Six canyon creeks that spill mountain runoff into Salt Lake City’s storm system are expected to be near flood stage early next week.
A tornado that “snapped telephone poles like toothpicks” cut a swath 30 feet wide through a fairgrounds at Altamont, New York, scattering a flea market and injuring at least 12 persons, authorities said. “You could hear this tremendous wind,” fair manager Reid Northrup said. “It tore a large metal roof right off a building near me and it went right over my head.” Debris soared an estimated 1,000 feet in the air. The injured were taken to hospitals with broken limbs and cuts. The thunderstorms that spawned the tornado were reported to be moving into Vermont and Massachusetts.
A radio signal beamed from Earth maneuvered the errant Westar 6 communications satellite into a higher, more secure orbit, preserving the option for a space shuttle crew to recover it later this year. The signal from the Hughes Aircraft satellite control center in Fillmore, Calif., triggered an onboard rocket that jockeyed the satellite into a near-circular orbit 600 miles high. A misfiring of Westar 6’s solid rocket motor on Feb. 3 had put it into a useless orbit ranging from 690 miles high to 172 miles. The $75million satellite was in danger of dropping into the atmosphere.
Cincinnati’s Mario Soto is one out away from a no-hitter when the Cardinals George Hendrick hits a home run to tie the game 1–1. The Reds then rally for a run in the bottom of the 9th to give Soto a one-hit 2–1 victory.
The visiting Angels and Tommy John stop the Tigers (26–5), 4–2. John goes 9 innings scattering 8 hits to beat Juan Berenguer. Rob Wilfong and Reggie Jackson belt homers with Reggie’s going over the right field roof. Tigers manager Sparky Anderson is thrown out of the game in the 9th inning after the umpire calls a double play when Larry Herndon slides out of the basepath to take out the Angels’ shortstop.
The Giants tip the Expos, 8–7, but lose second baseman Manny Trillo when he is hit on the hand by a Steve Rogers pitch. Trillo will be out 6 weeks with the fracture.
Born:
John Carlson, NFL tight end (Seattle Seahawks, Minnesota Vikings, Arizona Cardinals), in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Roko Ukić, Croatian NBA point guard (Toronto Raptors, Milwaukee Bucks), in Split, Socialist Republic of Croatia, Yugoslavia.
Justin Williams, NBA center (Sacramento Kings, Houston Rockets), in Chicago, Illinois.
Michelle Campbell, WNBA forward (Chicago Sky), in Waterloo, Iowa.
Chris Robinson, Canadian MLB pinch hitter and catcher (San Diego Padres), in London, Ontario, Canada.
Darcy Campbell, Canadian NHL defenseman (Columbus Blue Jackets), in Airdrie, Alberta, Canada.
Emily Beecham, English actress (“Little Joe”), in Manchester, England, United Kingdom.
Clare Bowen, Australian actress (“Nashville”) and singer, in South Coast, New South Wales, Australia.
Died:
Doris May, 81, American silent film actress (“Peck’s Bad Boy”), of heart failure.
History Diaries 