A ship bound for an Iranian port sank in the Persian Gulf after being attacked by Iraqi jets Friday, State Department officials said. The 17,000-ton Panamanian-registered bulk carrier was apparently carrying steel to the port of Bandar Khomeini. It was the first reported case of a merchant ship being sunk in the Iran-Iraq war. Officials said they received first word about the 17,000-ton bulk carrier, Fidelity, from ships in the northern Persian Gulf that picked up survivors southwest of Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export terminal in the gulf. Shipping sources in Bahrain said the vessel went down today, 60 miles south-southwest of Kharg Island. The Fidelity, according to American officials, was apparently carrying steel for Bandar Khomeini, another Iranian port.
This substantiated, in part, Iraq’s assertion Friday that its planes had hit and set afire two ships in the gulf south of Kharg Island, as part of Iraq’s continuing efforts to cut off Iran’s ability to export oil through the gulf, in retaliation for Iran’s blocking of Iraqi oil exports through the gulf. A senior State Department official said he knew of no new reports today of attacks by either Iraq or Iran. As a result of Iraq’s stepped-up air attacks on shipping near Iran, Iran attacked Kuwaiti and Saudi oil tankers several days ago. This was apparently a sign that Iran intended to live up to its threat to block the oil shipping of all Persian Gulf countries if its ability to ship oil is stopped.
A high-ranking Iraqi official was quoted today as saying that Iraq had cut Iran’s oil exports by 55 percent with its blockade of Iranian oil terminals. The official, Iraq’s First Deputy Prime Minister, Taha Yasin Ramadan, added that his government would continue its blockade against Iran, the official Iraqi press agency said. Mr. Ramadan, who is also commander of Iraq’s paramilitary Popular Army, made the remarks in a speech to Popular Army soldiers in the southern town of Amara today, the press agency reported. Iraq’s decision to impose an economic blockade on Iran’s oil ports and terminals in the Persian Gulf was “a constant decision that will continue,” the agency quoted him as saying.
Peace in Lebanon is the aim of a policy statement agreed on by the Cabinet. Prime Minister Rashid Karami said it will provide a new national accord to bring peace to the country. The policy statement will not be made public before the Prime Minister delivers it in Parliament and asks for a vote of confidence. The Cabinet meeting was held after another day of artillery and rocket duels across the Green Line dividing Beirut into Christian and Muslim halves.
Polisario guerrillas asserted today that they had destroyed the port terminal at Aiun, the main town in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, according to a statement reported by the Algerian press agency. The statement by the so-called Saharan Information and Culture Ministry said units of its navy destroyed the terminal on Tuesday. It gave no other details. The port at Aiun includes a mile-long pier with a conveyor belt for loading ships with phosphate from mines 60 miles inland. There is also a small fishing harbor.
A Japanese official in Rome agreed with Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan that an accord was near on a package intended to raise the value of the yen and slow Japan’s export boom by making its goods less competitive. Mr. Regan said that if the agreement is acceptable to the United States and Japan, details would be made public in about 10 days.
Underground leaders of Poland’s banned Solidarity union have called for the unconditional release of all 576 of the nation’s political prisoners and repeated a call for a local election boycott June 17. A statement said the prisoners “should not be forced to make any morally ambiguous decision” to win release. Eleven imprisoned Solidarity activists have rejected government offers to drop charges against them if they agree to leave the country or pledge to avoid political activity.
The Soviet Union has given its second-highest award to a psychiatrist accused by the World Psychiatry Association in 1977 of abusing his profession to punish dissidents. The news agency Tass reported that the Order of the October Revolution was awarded to Andrei V. Snezhnevsky, director of Moscow’s Institute of Forensic Psychiatry. Critics of the Soviet psychiatric system say the institute is the main clinic for treatment of dissidents detained by the KGB. Snezhnevsky is believed to be responsible for developing the diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia,” used as justification for the forced treatment of Soviet dissidents with drug therapy.
Andrei D. Sakharov was removed from his apartment in Gorky to an unknown destination, his wife, Yelena G. Bonner, said in a telegram to his children in Moscow, sources close to his family said. Dr. Sakharov reportedly had been on a hunger strike since May 2 to get medical care in the West for his wife.
Leaders of West Germany’s metalworkers’ union agreed to reopen talks with employers over a strike that has crippled much of the nation’s important automobile industry. However, a union official made it clear that he is not willing to immediately end the dispute over a 35-hour workweek that has threatened to idle more than 100,000 employees. The official said his union, IG Metall, wants negotiations conducted at the regional, not the national, level as soon as possible.
About 1,000 demonstrators marched through the West German resort of Bad Harzburg to protest a reunion of former members of Hitler’s Waffen-SS. Roughly 200 survivors of two elite Nazi divisions were in town for the three-day reunion — initially advertised as a symposium of economic experts — even though a court order had banned their holding a formal meeting. Police said the protest demonstration by union members, left-wingers and Nazi victims was conducted without incident. The protest organizers seek a nationwide ban on all SS reunions.
Pope John Paul II, at a Vatican meeting with Polish President Henryk Jablonski, referred to his homeland as “ill-fated.” The remark came at the end of a short private audience concluding two days of ceremonies that marked the 40th anniversary of the battle of Monte Cassino, in which Polish troops spearheaded an Allied assault on a German-held stronghold south of Rome. Speaking in the presence of church officials and correspondents, the Pope said that his links with Poland “help me… to understand ill-fated nations and to feel solidarity with them.”
Britain’s poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman, died at his vacation home in Cornwall. His widely popular work dealt with homely themes that appealed to both the casual reader and the intelligentsia. He was 77 years old.
Philippine police in the central city of Cebu fired on demonstrators charging election fraud. At least one person was killed and eight were wounded. The six-hour riot in Cebu, 350 miles south of Manila, erupted as President Ferdinand E. Marcos’ ruling party widened its lead in the unofficial count of votes from Monday’s parliamentary election. The count by a watchdog group showed Marcos’ party leading with 101 seats, the opposition 74 and independents 8. The official count declared Marcos candidates winners in 65 contests, opposition candidates in 38, the rest undecided.
The police said today that they were questioning 59 students accused of leading anti-Government demonstrations in Seoul on Friday, the fourth anniversary of the violent uprising in Kwangju. About 5,000 students from 14 universities in Seoul clashed violently with riot policemen after holding memorial services for the 189 people officially reported to have died in the revolt four years ago. More than 100 policemen and students were injured and eight police buses were damaged. The police said 807 students had been detained, but 748 were freed after receiving a warning. Demonstrations also took place at universities in Kwangju and other provincial areas.
Salvadoran President-elect Jose Napoleon Duarte arrived in Washington for talks this week with President Reagan and to lobby for increased U.S. military aid. “I believe that El Salvador has started on a new era, an era of democratic government,” he said, adding that he will tell members of Congress who oppose further aid to his country that El Salvador “needs to continue in this democratic process, and for that, we need aid.”
A surge of bombings in Chile by leftist opponents of President Augusto Pinochet has raised widespread concern that extremists are growing more radical and violent. The police reported that nearly 100 bombs had exploded in Santiago and several provincial cities in a week, damaging railway lines, police stations, foreign and domestic banks and power pylons.
Maoist guerrillas in Peru shot and killed 35 people and wounded 25 others in the remote Andean village of Pilccas this week, the police said Friday. The killing was the worst reported by the police since the Maoists killed 67 peasants in the town of Lucanamarca on Easter Sunday 1983. About 150 Shining Path guerrillas, who have been fighting for four years to overthrow the Government, took part in the attack 180 miles south of Ayacucho on Wednesday, the police said. The police said a survivor stumbled into the city of Andahuaylas in the neighboring state of Apurimac on Friday to report the killing and ask for protection. Army and police units patrolled Ayacucho Friday night and scattered gunfire was heard on the outskirts, reporters said.
Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger ended a weeklong trip through Europe and North Africa today and left for home, a day after signing an accord that extends United States rights to a vital mid-Atlantic air base for seven years. Before leaving for Washington today, Mr. Weinberger discussed defense issues with Prime Minister Mario Soares at the Pedras Rubras international airport in the northern industrial city of Oporto. Mr. Weinberger said the two NATO allies were in “full agreement in many areas.” Mr. Weinberger completed negotiations on American use of the air base at Lajes on the Azores Islands on Friday when he met with President Antonio Ramalho Eanes in Lisbon. The new accord spells out details of an agreement signed December 13. The base is a refueling center that has been used by American forces since 1951 and figures in contingency plans for the use of the Rapid Deployment Force. It was used for the American airlift to Israel during the 1973 Middle East War.
President Reagan participates in a radio address to the nation about summer jobs for teens. President Reagan renewed his campaign for a lower minimum wage for teenagers, urging Congress to support legislation authorizing employers to pay teenagers $2.50 an hour, 85 cents below the legal minimum wage, for summer work. The bill, which died in Congress last year, would apply to youths from 16 to 19. The plan is supported by the National Conference of Black Mayors but is opposed by the AFL-CIO. Reagan noted that overall teenage unemployment was 19.4% in April but among blacks it was 44.8%, which he called “a national tragedy.”
The President and First Lady, at Camp David for the weekend, watch the movie “Bounty.”
Walter F. Mondale’s inability to knock Gary Hart out of the Democratic Presidential contest has encouraged President Reagan’s campaign planners and stirred new doubts among some Democrats about Mr. Mondale’s strength for the general election, according to strategists in both parties. The Hart-Mondale struggle has also produced broad agreement among political professionals on both sides that, while the former Vice President is still the likely Democratic nominee, he may be sustaining political damage that could send him into the November election in a weakened condition. A Republican strategist involved in the Reagan re-election effort said some of Mr. Reagan’s political managers believe that a Democratic nomination struggle extending into June “would be the biggest single plus we could hope for in the general election.”
The Rev. Jesse Jackson has become more outspoken about what he views as a fundamental inequity in delegate-selection rules drafted by a Democratic Party commission in 1982 and that apparently are affecting the number of delegates allocated to him in primaries and caucuses. He believes he has fewer delegates in his camp than the popular vote would mandate, and says the delegate-selection process is in the hands of party bosses.
Air traffic controllers, fired during an illegal strike three years ago, lost a critical round in their legal fight to get their jobs back when a federal appellate court in Washington upheld the dismissals in 10 cases. About 11,400 air traffic controllers working for the Federal Aviation Administration were dismissed in August, 1981, when they refused to return to work after starting a strike. After unfavorable rulings by the Merit System Protection Board, about 2,500 of the controllers appealed their cases, subsequently consolidated into the 10 test cases.
It is getting more and more difficult for American workers to find and keep jobs that pay them middle-class wages, according to a new report released by economists Barry Bluestone of Boston College and Bennett Harrison of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The U.S. industries that grew fastest during the 1970s and are projected to grow the most during the rest of the century are generally those in which the average wage in 1980 fell below $12,500. Most of these jobs are in service industries. The industries that grew least in the 1970s and expect continued slow growth are generally those which in 1980 paid average wages above $22,000, according to the study. Almost all these jobs are in manufacturing.
A Soviet emigre and his U.S. firm have been charged with trying to export to the Soviet Union computer parts that can be used for military purposes, federal officials said. At a New York bail hearing, prosecutors charged that Yuri Geller, 32, had attempted to export $9,000 in computer circuitry without a license and said that evidence indicated Geller had planned to sell up to $500,000 a year in equipment to the Soviet Union. Bail was set at $200,000 for Geller, president of Industrial & Scientific Parts Services Inc., a Manhattan company that also was charged.
A Republic Airlines DC-9 was forced to land shortly after takeoff because of smoke from the air conditioning system, airline officials confirmed today. It was the second such incident involving Republic in a 24-hour period. Republic Flight 119 landed seven minutes after taking off from Memphis International Airport on Friday, Federal Aviation Administration officials said. No injuries were reported. Thursday, a Republic Boeing 727, Flight 554 from Memphis to Detroit, made an emergency stop in Cincinnati. Red Tyler, an airline spokesman, said that landing also was caused by a malfunctioning air conditioning unit.
Musicians resumed bargaining today with Las Vegas resorts where weekend gamblers were greeted by more striker demonstrations and arrests. About 30 pickets were arrested in front of the Desert Inn Hotel on Friday. The Nevada Resort Association, which bargains for 16 of the richest struck hotel-casinos, sued the international culinary union Friday for more than $30 million. The suit charges the union breached its contract before the strike by encouraging people to boycott casinos that might be struck.
Clerical work is being done at home for some companies by employees who are using home computer terminals and advanced telephone technology. This kind of homework is being done mostly by women. It may become a major labor issue similar to commercial home knitting, which was banned 42 years ago by the federal government to prevent garment companies from dodging minimum wage and child labor laws.
Patterns of drug use are changing in the New York City area because of plentiful supplies of heroin and cocaine. Heroin addiction, while still more prevalent among the poor, has recently risen among the white middle class, rehabilitation experts say. Cocaine appears to be contributing to the increase in heroin addiction. A state study has found that cocaine abusers have become addicted to heroin after experimenting with that drug to overcome the mental anxieties created by cocaine, which has become, in the meantime, widely available on the streets.
The STS 41-D vehicle with the new NASA orbiter Discovery moves to launch complex LC-39A in preparation for its maiden mission at the Kennedy Space Center.
The Alabama, the nation’s sixth Trident submarine, was christened at Groton, Connecticut, amid praise from the House Armed Services Committee’s leading Republican and protests by an estimated 500 anti-nuclear demonstrators. “If I may be so bold as to speak for all within my state, it is my judgment that they wholeheartedly support the deterrent potential represented by this great boat,” Alabama Rep. William L. Dickinson told guests at the Electric Boat Shipyard ceremony. Outside the gates, the demonstrators showed statements from Alabama residents protesting the submarine. Forty-two of the protesters were arrested. The Alabama, built at a cost of about $1 billion, will be commissioned sometime in 1985.
As much as 5 inches of rain soaked areas from Nebraska to southeast Texas, but volunteers took advantage of mild weather in the Rockies to ease the threat of flooding from a near-record snowpack. There were reports of flooding in southeast Nebraska. Farther west, the Snake River continued to rise along the Oregon-Idaho border, forcing officials to close Ontario State Park near Interstate 84. In Oakley, a critical flood point in south-central Idaho, work crews were attempting to complete a second flood diversion channel to relieve pressure on the reservoir behind Oakley Dam. The reservoir had risen to within two feet of the spillway but then began falling.
“King Of Suede” by Weird Al Yankovic hits #62.
Pat LaFontaine scores 2 goals within 22 sec in an NHL playoff game.
Stanley Cup Final, Northlands Coliseum, Edmonton, Alberta: Wayne Gretzky scores twice as the Edmonton Oilers beat the New York Islanders, 5–2 for a 4–1 series win; it is the Oilers’ first Stanley Cup title.
The St. Louis Cards score 6 in the 1st inning in an easy 9–1 win over the Cincinnati Reds. Joaquin Andujar wins his 7th complete game and leads the National League in wins, complete games, and innings pitched. In his Major League debut, the Reds’ rookie outfielder Eric Davis pinch hits wearing no number. Like Joe Horlen in 1961, the Reds only available road uniform has no number.
Pat Sheridan clubs a 4th inning grand slam, off Charlie Hough, to lead the Kansas City Royals to a 6–2 victory over the Texas Rangers.
109th Preakness: Puerto Rican jockey Ángel Cordero Jr., aboard Gate Dancer wins his second Pimlico classic.
Born:
Marcedes Lewis, NFL tight end (Pro Bowl 2010; Jacksonville Jaguars, Green Bay Packers, Chicago Bears), in Los Alamitos, California.
Kerri Gardin, WNBA forward (Connecticut Sun, Washington Mystics), in Burke County, North Carolina.
Died:
Bill Holland, 76, American auto racer (Indianapolis 500 1949; runner-up 1947, 1948, 1950).
John Betjeman, 77, poet (“Mount Zion”) and English Poet Laureate (1972-1984).
History Diaries 