President Reagan urged the Soviet Bloc to “respond constructively” to the latest U.S. proposal at the European troop reduction talks even as the Warsaw Pact announced in Vienna that it was formally rejecting the move. The U.S. plan, aimed at ending a stalemate in the mutual and balanced force reduction talks, offered to drop a longstanding Western complaint that the Warsaw Pact is understating the size of its forces. In a Washington statement, Reagan said the proposal would have helped to “enhance the security of both sides.” In Vienna, as the talks resumed after a five-week Easter recess, the Soviet-led pact accused the West of sticking to “unrealistic positions” and being solely responsible for international tensions.
New attacks on Persian Gulf shipping were announced by Iraq and Iran. Iraq said its planes had attacked two “naval targets” leaving Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil terminal in the gulf. Hours later, Iran said its planes had retaliated by attacking an oil tanker off the coast of Saudi Arabia. Oil industry sources said Iraqi planes had attacked and narrowly missed the Arizona, a supertanker of Panamanian registry that had just taken on oil at Kharg Island and was heading southward in the gulf. There was no immediate confirmation of Iraq’s report that its forces had attacked a second vessel in the Kharg Island area, which it has declared an “exclusion zone” where any ship is liable to be attacked. Iran’s announcement that its planes had attacked a tanker off the Saudi coast was confirmed by Lloyd’s of London, the insurance exchange, and shipping sources here. They said two Iranian F-4 fighter-bombers struck the Chemical Venture, a 29,427-ton tanker of Liberian registry, at 4:55 P.M, setting it on fire.
A wider Persian Gulf war may be being planned by Iran, according to intelligence reports. Reagan Administration officials have reportedly told members of Congress that Teheran may send suicide planes carrying heavy explosives against oil tankers and may try to destroy the oilfields of Saudi Arabia. Congressional staff members said today that the officials had cited such reports as support for the tentative Administration decision, disclosed Wednesday, to provide Saudi Arabia with 1,200 portable Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The staff members said 200 missiles would be provided immediately and 1,000 later. They said the first 200 missiles, accompanied by 100 launchers, would be provided to the Saudis through the President’s emergency powers and would not have to be delayed for a 30- day Congressional review.
The House Speaker, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., said today that “there is going to be an escalation of the war after June 1.” Mr. O’Neill, Democrat of Massachusetts, who had a closed-door briefing on Tuesday from Secretary of State George P. Shultz, added that he could not say more on the subject. But he said the United States should not get involved in the Persian Gulf situation except in concert with Britain and France. A State Department official said later that intelligence analysts had said Iran might launch a major ground attack against Iraq during Ramadan, the Moslem month of dawn-to-dusk fasting, which begins June 1. Iranian forces, estimated to total hundreds of thousands of men, are said to have been massed near the Iraqi border for months.
Other officials said the intelligence analysts had warned that the conflict could also be widened by an Iranian attempt to destroy the oilfields of Saudi Arabia, which backs Iraq in the war, or by an Iranian decision to send suicide flights of small planes carrying heavy explosives into tankers in the gulf. The officials said such moves could lead to a Saudi decision to retaliate in strength using American-made F-15’s against Iranian installations. The officials said, however, that they thought it was unlikely that the situation would worsen to a point at which the Saudis might ask the United States to introduce naval and air power to help them.
Israeli planes attacked a Palestinian guerrilla base in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa region of Lebanon today, the Israeli military command in Tel Aviv reported. It was the second Israeli air raid on eastern Lebanon this week. The right-wing Christian Voice of Lebanon radio station here said the air raid at dusk set ablaze the base about eight miles west of the Syrian border, which was said to be occupied by Syrian-backed guerrillas. There were no immediate casualty reports. The radio reports did not disclose the number or type of planes in what it described as a 20-minute air strike.
The Israeli announcement said only that the planes attacked a “terrorist” headquarters at Bar Elias, about six miles west of the Lebanon-Syria border. The Israelis added that “accurate hits” were scored and that the planes returned safely to their base. Israeli planes attacked a military base of Iranian-backed Lebanese militiamen on Sunday at Janta, a mile west of the Syrian border. Today’s air strike was the Israelis’ 11th this year against targets in Lebanon.
Two Israeli officers were charged with criminal complicity in the bombing attacks on three Arab mayors in the West Bank in 1980. One officer is said to have provided Jewish terrorists with intelligence information about the mayors; the other was accused of knowing the location of one of the bombs, but standing by and failing to warn an Israeli Druze demolitions expert as he approached the spot and was blinded by the explosion. Two of the Mayors were crippled in the attacks. Fifteen Jewish settlers from the West Bank and the Golan Heights have been indicted in connection with the assaults, and 10 others have been charged with several other acts of terrorism against Arabs, including a submachine-gun and grenade attack last summer on the Islamic College in Hebron, in which 3 Arabs were killed and 33 wounded.
Israeli police released Rabbi Moshe Levinger after 11 days of questioning regarding allegations that he had information about a Jewish underground group’s plans for attacking Palestinians on the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River. Israel radio said that police still have not decided whether to prosecute Levinger. Meanwhile, two Israeli army officers were indicted on charges of helping the group plan terrorist attacks against West Bank Palestinians.
Libya arrested three more Britons between May 13 and May 15 and is holding them incommunicado with two who were arrested on April 17, the British Government said today. The Foreign Office said Libya was not allowing access to the men by consular officials and was refusing to say why they were detained. “It is a matter of deep concern,” a spokesman said. The two arrests in April took place within hours after policemen surrounded the Libyan Embassy in London in response to the fatal shooting of a policewoman during a demonstration. Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Libya because of the shooting, and the Foreign Office said it was seeking access to the five detained men through the Italian Embassy in Tripoli.
The Official Unionist Party, the largest political party in Northern Ireland, announced that it is ending a six-month boycott of a provincial assembly set up to promote power-sharing between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Unionist leader James Molyneaux said he is ending the boycott because he has a duty to fill an apparent power vacuum after Northern Ireland Secretary James Prior, the minister who set up the assembly, indicated that he is ready to quit. The party, representing Protestants loyal to Britain, walked out of the assembly last November in protest against the shooting of three church elders by Irish guerrillas.
Poland’s Communist authorities rejected new demands by officially sanctioned unions for a greater voice in wage and price policy. Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Rakowski, speaking to union members, urged “self-sacrifice” in the face of 16% price rises predicted for this year. “This must mean temporary resignation from demands, even justified ones,” Rakowski said in remarks reported in the government-controlled press.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the Nobel Peace Prize, sent a letter today to Konstantin U. Chernenko, the Soviet leader, asking him to allow Andrei D. Sakharov and his wife, Yelena G. Bonner, to leave the Soviet Union if they wish. Jakob Sverdrup, director of the Nobel Institute, said it was the first time the committee has defended one of its laureates. Mr. Sakharov, a physicist and advocate of human rights who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, is in internal exile in Gorky where he is on a hunger strike to put pressure on the authorities to allow his wife to have medical treatment in the West. Miss Bonner is also fasting. The letter said the committee was “concerned and alarmed” and felt it was its duty “in this special situation” to ask Mr. Chernenko to let Mr. Sakharov and his wife leave the Soviet Union if they wished.
Denmark expelled two members of the staff of a Soviet trade delegation today after charging they were involved in espionage. They were the third and fourth Soviet officials to be ordered to leave Denmark since 1981. The expulsions of five other people from the Communist bloc have been announced this week in London and Brussels. According to the Foreign Ministry, the Soviet charge d’affaires was told that the two trade delegation staff members must leave within 14 days.
Hindus and Muslims battled with rocks, knives and firebombs in Bombay, and thousands of Indian army troops moved in to quell violence that has killed nearly 200 people. State police said 3,765 people have been arrested and 688 injured in eight days of violence. The subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 into Muslim Pakistan and mostly Hindu India, but millions of Muslims remained in India and now make up 11% of the population.
The South Korean youth who fired a toy cap pistol near Pope John Paul II during the pontiff’s visit to Seoul on May 6 will be treated at a hospital for schizophrenia and will not be indicted, city prosecutors Isaid. They said an examination found that Lee Joon Kyu, 22, needs to be confined in a hospital for some time. No one was injured in the cap gun incident.
Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos has abandoned plans to add 18 appointed members to the 200-member National Assembly after major opposition gains in the May 14 election, a government spokesman said. Marcos also called off a special session of the outgoing assembly that was to have approved the measure. Opponents had charged that Marcos was trying to dilute the opposition gains by enlarging the assembly.
Five former Salvadoran guardsmen were convicted of aggravated homicide in the 1980 deaths of four United States churchwomen. A five-member jury returned the verdict after deliberating for one hour.
Extra military aid for El Salvador totaling $61.75 million was approved by the House, but the representatives voted against further financing for Nicaraguan rebels. The vote appeared to be at once a vote of confidence for President-elect Jose Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador and a rebuff to President Reagan’s policy toward Nicaragua. Reversing what had been a fairly strong Democratic vote against aid to El Salvador two weeks ago, 115 Democrats joined an almost solid Republican vote to approve the emergency military aid package for El Salvador by 267 to 154. Only five Republicans joined 149 Democrats, mostly liberals from California and northern states, in opposing the measure.
William J. Casey was praised by President Reagan for his performance as Director of Central Intelligence, but Mr. Reagan had no comment on a Congressional report charging that crimes may have been committed in the 1980 Reagan campaign directed by Mr. Casey. The White House dismissed as “highly farfetched” questions about Mr. Casey’s possible resignation. President Reagan participated in groundbreaking ceremonies for an addition of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Walking side by side with Mr. Casey on the agency’s well-guarded 219-acre campus, Mr. Reagan broke ground for an addition to the headquarters building and praised the work of the agency and its director as “an inspiration to your fellow Americans.”
President Reagan meets with Ensign Kristine Holdereid, the first woman to ever top the graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.
The median weekly family income rose by 7.5% over the last year to $488 in the first quarter of 1984, far outstripping inflation, the Labor Department reported. The Consumer Price Index over the same period increased 4.5%. Median earnings for individuals with full-time jobs also advanced more rapidly than prices, up 5.4% to $325 a week in the first quarter. The report also showed that more than half of the nation’s 40.3 million wage-earning families contained at least two earners. The median weekly income for white families was $503, considerably higher than black families, $353, or Latino families, $390.
Federal Aviation Administration chief Don Engen played down the significance of recently reported near-collisions involving airliners. saying concerns about an unsafe air traffic system is based on misunderstanding. “The system is, in fact, safe.” Engen declared in an address in Washington to the Regional Airline Association. He insisted that air traffic was being held down to safe levels that can be handled by the controllers.
Boston police arrested 39 transit workers as they collected and counted fares and charged them with skimming quarters, dimes and nickels from bus and trolley boxes. State officials have estimated losses in the Boston-area transit system at more than $700,000 a year since 1981. Most of the mid-morning arrests took place at the transit counting room, where all tokens, paper money and coins taken in are counted. About 150 state police and transit authority police participated in the arrests during the surprise raids.
William N. Moore, 33, sentenced to die for killing a man in a 1974 holdup, was spared execution Thursday in Georgia’s electric chair after a federal appeals court refused to lift a stay and the state attorney general decided not to appeal the ruling. Prison officials, who had been preparing for the execution, canceled Moore’s death watch a half hour after the federal court refused to lift a stay it had issued on Wednesday, a prison spokesman said.
Four families have become the first to agree to sell their homes in a $42-million federal buy-out of Centralia, Pennsylvania, a coal town plagued by a 22-year-old underground mine fire. The four were among 19 families who received sale offers last week from the Columbia County Redevelopment Authority, which is administering the buy-out for the government, authority spokeswoman Lynda Pinizzotto said. Appraisers base their assessments on the value of comparable properties.
The Rhode Island Supreme Court denied a request by the state to review its April 27 decision ordering a new trial for Claus von Bulow. saying the state had failed to obtain a search warrant before going through his belongings. A spokesman for Attorney General Dennis J. Roberts II said the state will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Von Bulow was convicted in March, 1982, of twice trying to kill his heiress wife. Martha, with insulin injections. She remains in a coma.
Charles Proffitt, whose initial death sentence prompted the Supreme Court to reinstate capital punishment in 1976, today was sentenced again to die in Florida’s electric chair. Mr. Proffitt, 38 years old, was convicted of stabbing Robinson High School wrestling coach Joel Ronnie Medgebow in a 1973 burglary in Tampa. At Mr. Proffitt’s original sentencing March 21, 1974, Circuit Judge Walter N. Burnside followed the jury’s recommendation and imposed the death penalty. In 1976 the case became the basis of the Supreme Court ruling that Florida’s new capital punishment law was constitutional. After a round of appeals, the 11th United States Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled Mr. Proffitt was entitled to a new sentence.
David Kennedy’s death was an accident due to “combined drug intoxication” from cocaine and two other drugs, according to an autopsy report released by the Palm Beach County, Florida, prosecutor’s office. Cocaine and the drugs meperidine and thioridazine killed the 28-year-old son of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the report said. Meperidine is the chemical name of the painkiller Demerol. Thioridazine is the chemical name of the tranquilizer Mellaril. No toxicology report listing the levels of drugs in Kennedy’s body accompanied the autopsy report. Kennedy was found dead April 25 in his room at the posh Brazilian Court Hotel. Authorities already had said Kennedy died from the three-drug combination, but a court had refused to release the autopsy report until now.
Heart disorders can be detected by a simple screening test developed by scientists at the University of Minnesota. The test shows how age, disease or drugs affect the resilience of the human heart muscle. As it loses suppleness it becomes less efficient in pumping blood, with potentially adverse effects on health.
Abductions of children have generated growing concern and led to the founding of scores of volunteer and professional groups and profit-seeking enterprises.
A 71-year-old California woman described as a “sweet little old thing” faces up to 11 years in prison for strangling her 92-year-old ailing husband with a nylon stocking. Dorothy Agnes Healy, of La Jolla, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death March 20 but her motive remains a mystery. She is to be sentenced June 19. Deputy District Attorney Brian P. Hochvert says he feels for her, but, “You don’t just kill another human being and walk away from it.”
A Virginia woman was charged today with murder in the stabbing death of her 6-year- old daughter, one of two children whose bodies were found after a house fire, the authorities said. Judge Thomas A. Fortkort of the Fairfax County Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court ordered Nancy Lee Kantarian, 30 years old, held without bond pending psychiatric testing to determine whether she is competent to stand trial. Mrs. Kantarian allegedly killed her daughter, Talia, by stabbing her numerous times before a two-alarm fire of “suspicious origin” damaged their home in Great Falls late Wednesday, prosecutors said. The body of another daughter, Jamie, 5, was also discovered in the house after the fire.
The state will seek a court order to force-feed a fasting prisoner, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office said today. Joel Caulk, convicted of rape, has lost about 60 pounds since refusing to eat solid food about two months ago. He has made no demands and the officials believe he simply prefers death to imprisonment. The Correction Department said Mr. Caulk was in “relatively stable condition” and continued to drink fruit juices and water.
In Alton, Illinois, meanwhile, Federal District Judge William Beatty ruled Wednesday that Marion Federal Penitentiary officials may, under Federal prison procedures, force-feed three fasting prisoners if a doctor decides it is necessary.
Two banks have changed their policies, saying they will reimburse customers who are forced at gunpoint to make withdrawals from automatic teller machines. The banks’ policies on theft from the machines came under scrutiny after a rash of robberies here, the authorities said. A rapist forced three women to make cash withdrawals ranging from $140 to $500 from the machines and a man was robbed of his card, his secret access code and $500 by a man poking a gun in his ribs. Texas Federal Savings and the Union Bank and Trust Company, which refused earlier this month to reimburse three victims, have refunded customers’ stolen money and will make compensations in the future, bank officials said.
Revival of musical “The Wiz” opens at Lunt-Fontanne Theater, NYC; runs for 13 performances.
Detroit (35-5) beats California 5–1 for its 17th consecutive win on the road, breaking the American League record set by the 1912 Senators, and tying the Major League mark set by the 1916 Giants. The Tigers’ Jack Morris (9–1) allows 4 hits in 9 innings to win, and he is backed by homers from Lance Parrish and Alan Trammell. The Tigers will finally lose tomorrow in Seattle, 7–3.
An hour after beating Baltimore 3–2, Oakland fires manager Steve Boros and replaces him with coach Jackie Moore. Boros, who was criticized as being “too nice,” had led the A’s to a 20–24 start, just 2½ games off the pace in the weak American League West.
Let’s play two! Steve Goodman sings “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” from the aisle and the Chicago Cubs sweep Atlanta. In game 1 against the Braves at Wrigley, Leon Durham has a pair of 3-run homers off Pascual Perez to lead the Cubs to a 10–7 win. Bob Dernier is 5-for-5, the same thing he did against the Braves last year when he was with the Phillies. Ron Cey has a 3-run homer in game 2 as the Cubs win, 7–5.
At Exhibition Field, the Toronto Blue Jays edge the Montreal Expos, 6–5, in 13 innings. The Pearson Cup match draws 24,768 fans, the biggest is the series history.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1103.43 (-10.37).
Born:
Sarah Hagan, American actress (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), in Austin, Texas.
Brodney Pool, NFL safety (Cleveland Browns, New York Jets), in Corpus Christi, Texas
Héctor Ambriz, MLB pitcher (Cleveland Indians, Houston Astros, San Diego Padres), in Orange, California.
Died:
Vincent J. McMahon, 69, American professional wrestling promoter, from pancreatic cancer.
History Diaries 