A Saudi oil tanker was attacked by an unidentified warplane in the latest of five air attacks this month on tankers in the Persian Gulf. American officials attributed the latest attack to Iran’s Air Force.
American air cover for tankers in the Persian Gulf has been offered by the Reagan Administration, according to Administration officials. They said that Washington offered last month to discuss the subject with Persian Gulf states, but that they did not act on the proposal. However, they said that all the states said privately they wanted Washington to maintain its carrier task force in the Arabian Sea to respond in emergencies.
Tunisia recalled its Libyan ambassador to protest Libya’s charges that Tunisia has been serving as a base for a campaign to destabilize the regime of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. Libya has sought to implicate Tunisia — along with Britain, Sudan and the United States — in a guerrilla attack in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, last week. Libyan officials said the guerrillas were members of the Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.
Israel and Syria are holding secret talks aimed at a joint withdrawal of their armies from Lebanon, according to intelligence sources quoted by the Israeli newspaper Maariv. The paper quoted unidentified sources in London as saying that the Damascus and Jerusalem representatives are likely to reach agreement soon on pulling their armies out of Lebanon. Israel has an estimated 15,000 troops in Lebanon and Syria between 40,000 and 60,000. An Israeli official, requesting anonymity, denied the Maariv report.
Many members of the Baha’i faith, who have been tortured in jails in Iran in an attempt to force them to abandon their faith, are now being tortured to force confessions to false charges, a Bahai spokesman said. Gerald Knight, a Bahai representative accredited to the United Nations, told reporters in New York that about 700 Baha’is are held in Iranian jails without charges. The Baha’i faith, a 19th-Century offshoot of Islam, is regarded as a heresy by Iran’s Islamic regime.
The official Vietnam press agency reported today that Vietnamese troops and civilians killed or wounded hundreds of Chinese troops who crossed the border on Tuesday. The official New China News Agency reported clashes, but said they were with Vietnamese troops who occupied a strip of Chinese territory. The Vietnamese press agency accused Peking of sending “an infantry regiment from Kunming, southern China, across the border to carry out nibbling attacks” after firing more than 6,000 artillery shells into Vietnam. The Chinese press agency, in a report from China’s southern Yunnan Province, quoted military sources as saying Vietnamese fortifications had been destroyed and Vietnamese troops had suffered heavy casualties. Both China and Vietnam have reported border clashes since early last month.
The House of Representatives condemned Soviet treatment of dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, 62, and his ailing wife, Yelena Bonner, and approved a resolution calling on Soviet officials to let Bonner go to the West for medical treatment. Sakharov has been on a hunger strike aimed at forcing Soviet officials to allow his wife, who has a history of heart trouble, to leave. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier adopted a resolution similar to the House’s, and the State Department accused the Kremlin of “cruel and virtually incomprehensible” actions against the couple.
A West German appeals court today banned a group of Nazi veterans from holding a reunion next week, ruling that counterdemonstrations that are planned would threaten order and security. The court endorsed a decision by the town of Bad Harzburg to ban a meeting of some 800 members of the Hitler Youth and Adolf Hitler Waffen-SS divisions and their relatives. Bad Harzburg’s town manager, Horst Voigt, welcomed the court ruling.
Bonn’s leadership was set back over a plan that would have granted an amnesty to politicians and businessmen involved in illegally deducting political contributions from income taxes. Lacking enough votes, the conservative coalition led by Chancellor Helmut Kohl was forced to withdraw the proposal.
Anne Scargill, the wife of Arthur Scargill, who leads the National Union of Mineworkers, was one of 14 women arrested today as they urged coal miners to join a 10-week-old strike to protest plans to close unprofitable mines, the police said. The women were arrested in Nottinghamshire, where most miners have resisted joining the strike.
A court ordered today that the Communist-led CGT trade federation end its occupation of two of the five Citroën car plants near Paris, the company’s management said. It said the tribunal agreed to its request that strikers be evicted from the factories at Levallois and Nanterre, where they have paralyzed production since Monday. A Citroën spokesman said that it was up to the government’s local representative to order in the police, and that this might not be done if it seemed likely to disturb the peace. The trade federation said Tuesday night that it would continue occupying the plants, where it is protesting Citroën’s plan to cut 6,000 jobs from its work force of 43,000 in France.
A plan to aid El Salvador secretly by sending some military equipment there through the CIA has reportedly been developed by the Reagan Administration. The plan, submitted this month, was blocked by the House Intelligence Committee, according to members of Congress and Administration officials. The legislators said the panel had objected on the ground that the plan appeared to circumvent aid limits set by Congress.
Jose Napoleon Duarte was formally named El Salvador’s president-elect. He pledged to confront his country’s problems with “tolerance and comprehension.” At a ceremony, snubbed by his rightist foes, Duarte, along with Rodolfo Castillo Claramont, the new vice president, were officially presented letters by the National Elections Council certifying their victory. Duarte, who is scheduled to begin a five-year term on June 1, said, “We are committed to confronting all the phenomena that face us with the idea of making our people look for tolerance and comprehension instead of hatred and rancor.”
Jesse Helms was at the center of a dispute as he vehemently denied having disclosed information from the Senate intelligence committee. Senators Barry Goldwater and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the chairman and vice chairman of the committee, accused the North Carolina Senator of making public information about covert aid provided by the CIA to the successful campaign of Jose Napoleon Duarte, the President-elect of El Salvador.
Five former Salvadoran guardsmen accused of murdering four American churchwomen in December 1980 will go on trial next week, a Salvadoran criminal court judge said. In a telephone interview, he said the “evidence looks good.”
The Sandinista government is placing the Nicaraguan economy on a wartime footing, reducing subsidies for some key food items and transportation, a government source in Managua said. The measures are to be announced Saturday. He said the program will affect only Nicaragua’s “Pacific zone,” the western third of the country where most of the populace lives. Attacks by CIA-supported rebels opposed to the leftist government have disrupted food supplies and transportation.
Chile’s military government announced a ban on all private vehicular traffic at night in Santiago, the nation’s capital, after a series of bomb explosions in major Chilean cities. An official statement reported by the news agency Orbe said the ban will be in effect for an indefinite period from 1 am to 5 am beginning Friday. The wave of bomb attacks followed the junta’s approval of a tough, new anti-terrorist law.
The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front said today that its forces had killed about 700 Ethiopian soldiers in a battle around the guerrilla stronghold of Nakfa on May 12-13, and many more Ethiopian soldiers were killed, wounded or captured in subsequent ambushes. The Ethiopian Government had no immediate comment. The guerrilla group, the largest of several that have been fighting for the secession of the province of Eritrea from Ethiopia for 23 years, gave no figures for its own losses.
The police patrolled a black township today where the South African Government had closed schools after four months of classroom boycotts and violence in which a teenager died. Barend du Plessis, the Education and Training Minister, said Tuesday night that the six schools closed in Atteridgeville, six miles west of Pretoria, would remain closed at least until the end of the year. Mr. Du Plessis, whose department is responsible only for education of blacks, issued a statement that forces of subversion were at work in Atteridgeville, intimidating and manipulating pupils. Witnesses said policemen in camouflage uniforms were patrolling the township in Land-Rovers. No clashes were reported, and most pupils appeared to be staying home.
In February, a girl died from injuries at Atteridgeville after a clash between the police and pupils, who were striking to protest corporal punishment, a bar on the readmission of pupils who had failed examinations and a demand for a greater student voice in school policy.
Guinea-Bissau adopts a constitution.
A compromise on the MX missile that would keep the weapon in the nation’s arsenal but in a significantly reduced and restricted form was approved by a 229 to 199 vote in the House. Under the plan, the budget would include $1.8 billion to finance the production of 15 missiles, half the weapons approved by the House Armed Services Committee. The winning tally in that vote included 146 Republicans and 72 Democrats. Only 18 Republicans defected from President Reagan and joined 194 Democrats in voting to knock out the entire amount.
The plan, drafted by Representative Les Aspin, a Wisconsin Democrat, represents a face-saving concession by President Reagan, who had originally requested 40 missiles and made urgent appeals for his full production request. Mr. Reagan reluctantly endorsed the compromise hours before the House acted. It had become clear that he had no alternative. “This was the best they could get,” said Mr. Aspin. An Aspin aide added that the Administration “was not at all happy” with the compromise, and “had to be convinced they couldn’t win.”
President Reagan addresses a meeting of the American Retail Federation.
The President and First Lady attend the Annual White House News Photographers Association Dinner.
President Reagan will visit the Bethesda Naval Center Friday for a routine physical examination, his spokesman said today. The President will fly by helicopter to the hospital complex in suburban Bethesda, Maryland, in the morning.
After Gary Hart’s sweeping victories in Tuesday’s Democratic Presidential primaries in Oregon and Nebraska, the campaign entered three weeks of stepped-up competition for the uncommitted delegates who could decide the nomination. Senator Hart, Walter F. Mondale, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson prepared for marathon campaigning in advance of the four key primaries on June 5.
The cause of David Kennedy’s death was “multiple ingestion” of three drugs found in his body fluids, according to the authorities in Palm Beach, Florida. They said the drugs were cocaine, Demerol and Mellaril. The authorities also announced the arrest of two men in connection with Mr. Kennedy’s death.
Delaying a genetic engineering test, Federal District Judge John J. Sirica ordered the National Institutes of Health to put off the first planned outdoor experiment using genetically engineered organisms. Judge Sirica instructed the agency not to authorize any experiments that would release such organisms into the environment until a full hearing is held.
Thirty years of desegregation efforts have dismantled the dual school system based on race that prevailed in the South in 1954. Today, around the country, three decades after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, only one-third of black students are in virtually all- black schools. The effects of the ruling seem more striking than some expected at the time, yet less thorough than many hoped.
A dam break chased hundreds of persons from three small towns in southern Wyoming. An earthen dam 32 feet high on Sweetwater Creek, about three miles northeast of Slater, Colorado, collapsed, emptying all 419 acre-feet of water in Grieve Reservoir into the already flood-swollen Little Snake River. That forced about 600 persons to evacuate along a 20-mile stretch through the Wyoming towns of Savery, Dixon and Baggs, just across the border. Elsewhere, owners of about 40 condominiums in Colorado’s ritzy Vail ski resort were digging out of a mudslide.
The Reagan Administration, softening its criteria to win support of minority groups, proposed that employers be allowed to pay teenagers a sub-minimum wage of $2.50 an hour for summer jobs. The minimum wage is $3.35 an hour. Labor Secretary Raymond J. Donovan said the legislation, to be introduced in Congress today by Sen. Charles H. Percy (R-Illinois) and Rep. Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad), is aimed at cutting the nation’s 44.8% unemployment rate among black teenagers and 19.4% overall teenage rate. The overall civilian jobless rate for April was 7.8%.
A Black Muslim Marine being court-martialed in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for staying behind when his unit went to Lebanon testified that he feared bringing “disgrace to my people” and might have killed fellow Muslims if he had been forced to fire a machine gun. But Marine prosecutor Captain James Marino said Corporal Alfred Griffin was guilty of “simple unauthorized absence without leave.” Imam Nurridin Faiv, a New York state chaplain and an Army veteran, testified that the Koran forbids aggression except to defend oneself, family, or nation.
The Justice Department said a federal judge misread the law and exceeded his constitutional authority in ordering the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate how the 1980 Reagan campaign obtained briefing papers from the Carter White House. In a 24-page petition to the U.S. Court of Appeals, the department asked for a stay of the order until the court can rule. Two law professors sued to have an independent counsel named after Attorney General William French Smith refused to invoke the 1978 Ethics in Government Act in the briefing papers case.
Records of two secret 1980 funds used for Ronald Reagan’s transition to the presidency — one of them a $1-million foundation headed by Attorney General-designate Edwin Meese III — will be provided to the special prosecutor investigating Meese, according to Drew Lewis, a director of the Presidential Transition Foundation Inc. Lewis said that the fund records will be turned over to independent counsel Jacob A. Stein in about two weeks.
Three former Internal Revenue Service workers have been indicted for taking bribes, along with a businessman said to have defrauded the Government of millions of dollars. The businessman, Herbert Orlowitz, 55 years old, and the three men were indicted Tuesday. United States Attorney Edward Dennis Jr. said of the case, “It could result in indictments of as many of six more persons.” Mr. Orlowitz was accused of giving $200,000 in bribes to the three employees and $150,000 to an undercover revenue agent to influence examination of returns. The indictment said he also promised the agent and one employee, Irving Suval, 57, another $150,000 to prepare a false report on a claim for a fraudulent $1 million refund. The two other former employees indicted were Martin Forman, 62, and Edward Berry, 45. All were charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and bribery of a public official.
The Texas Supreme Court today upheld a decision that allows the husbands of two women killed in an accident involving a drunken driver to sue the driver’s employer. The 1978 accident occurred about 30 minutes after Robert Matheson was sent home from his job at the Otis Engineering Corporation because he was drunk. He died in the accident. Larry and Clifford Clark, the widowers, sued Otis, saying the company had not taken reasonable steps to make sure Mr. Matheson would not create a dangerous situation. He was known to have a problem with drinking.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission refused by a 3–1 vote to allow the export of goods-ranging from faulty heaters to unsafe toys-that have been recalled as hazardous. “Should we be exporting pacifiers that could cause cancer, rattles that could choke babies, baby cribs that could cause a child to suffocate, fireworks that could maim?” asked Chairwoman Nancy Harvey Steorts. “I believe not.” Terrence Scanlon, casting the dissenting vote, said commissioners have no right to be “international nannies.”
The nation’s principal non-prescription drug manufacturers said they will voluntarily begin listing on package labels the colorings, preservatives and other inactive ingredients that are in their products. Dr. Mark Novitch, acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said the action by the Proprietary Assn. was “very welcome. The listing of inactive ingredients will help avoid those rare but serious situations in which an individual is allergic to even small amounts of a substance.”
A planned San Francisco “unconvention” for thousands of demonstrators who want their own gathering at the time of the Democratic National Convention in July has been rejected by the city’s Recreation and Park Commission. But organizers said after their permit application was denied Tuesday that they would take the dispute to City Hall.
The U.S. performs a nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site.
Irwin Shaw died of a heart attack in a hospital in Davos, Switzerland, at the age of 71. For more than 40 years, Mr. Shaw was a prolific and successful writer of short stories, novels, plays and screenplays.
“When Doves Cry” single released by Prince Rogers Nelson (Billboard Song of the Year, 1984).
Juventus of Italy win 24th European Cup Winner’s Cup against Porto of Portugal 2–1 in Basel.
Pitcher Steve Carlton lifts a grand slam off Fernando Valenzuela to lead the Phillies to a 7–2 win over the Dodgers.
Catcher Carlton Fisk hits for the cycle in a losing effort as Kansas City tops Chicago, 7–6. Fisk’s only triple of the year comes in the cycle and he joins the Pirates Bill Salkeld (1945) as the only catcher this century to hit his lone season triple in a cycle.
The Twins sell 51,863 tickets to their 8–7 loss to the Blue Jays, but only 6,346 fans show up for the game. The skewed numbers are the result of a massive ticket buyout plan organized by Minneapolis businessman Harvey Mackay to keep the Twins in Minnesota; if the club does not sell 2.41 million tickets this season it can break its lease with the Metrodome. Taking advantage of reduced prices on the Family Day promotion, Mackay pays $218,718 for 44,166 tickets.
The Orioles release veteran pitcher Jim Palmer, who was 0–3 with a 9.17 ERA this season. Palmer is asked to retire and accept a job with the organization, but he declines, hoping to find a roster spot on another Major League team.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1153.16 (+2.30).
Born:
Tomáš Fleischmann, Czech National hockey team and NHL left wing (Olympics, 2010; Washington Capitals, Colorado Avalanche, Florida Panthers, Anaheim Ducks, Montreal Canadiens, Chicago Blackhawks), in Kopřivnice, Czechoslovakia.
Rick Rypien, Canadian NHL centre (Vancouver Canucks), in Blairmore, Alberta, Canada (d. 2011, suicide).
Jensen Lewis, MLB pitcher (Cleveland Indians), in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Rafael Martín, MLB pitcher (Washington Nationals), in San Fernando, California.
Brandon Mann, MLB pitcher (Texas Rangers), in Tacoma, Washington.
Quincy Douby, NBA point guard (Sacramento Kings, Toronto Raptors), in Brooklyn, New York, New York.
Pania Rose, Australian fashion model, in Perth, Western Australia, Australia.
Died:
Andy Kaufman, 35, American comedian and actor (Latka – “Taxi”), of cancer.
Irwin Shaw, 71, American writer (“Rich Man, Poor Man”).
Wessel Couzijn, 71, Dutch sculptor and cartoonist (Auschwitz-monument).
History Diaries 