Washington has sent 400 missiles to Saudi Arabia, which plans to establish a protected zone for shipping along the western coast of the Persian Gulf, according to Reagan Administration officials. They said the Saudis had bought the 400 Stinger antiaircraft missiles and 200 missile launches.
Oil exports from Kuwait have begun to be affected by the shipping war between Iran and Iraq, according to oil industry sources. Kuwait is geographically the most vulnerable country on the Persian Gulf.
Two of the four Arab terrorists who hijacked an Israeli bus last month were captured alive and then killed by Israeli security men, the Defense Ministry in Jerusalem announced. The Israeli commission found that no order had been given by superiors that the two be killed.
The American University of Beirut said it is taking “severe security measures” in response to a reported threat by pro-Iranian extremists to kidnap faculty members from the United States and other Westerners. The threat came from a Shia Muslim group called Hezbollah (Party of God) and was relayed by the US. Embassy. Hezbollah has militia units in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Plans for “terrorist actions against the American University of Beirut, the (U.S.) Embassy and Americans in general” were learned through “normal intelligence channels, embassy spokesman Jon Stewart said.
Libyan “people’s congresses” have decided to form hit squads to destroy training camps for saboteurs and assassins set up in neighboring Sudan, the official Libyan news agency Jana reported. The decision was made at meetings of Libyan men, women and children, the agency said, quoting a report in Libya’s Green March newspaper. After a guerrilla attack in Tripoli three weeks ago, Libya reported that some of the captured attackers implicated Sudan, Britain and the United States in the assault.
A victory by Egypt’s governing party was in prospect, according to parliamentary election returns. The center-right New Wafd Party was trailing a distant second in elections marred by two shootings and opposition accusations of vote-rigging.
A stronger world economy was pledged a year ago when the leaders of seven major industrial democracies met for three days in Williamsburg, Virginia. The economy has improved, but it is vastly more troubled than the leaders envisioned. One economist, C. Fred Bergsten, concludes: “Their promises were meaningless. They did nothing to follow them up.”
The International Olympic Committee said today that Konstantin U. Chernenko, the Soviet leader, may receive the committee’s president this week to hear a plea for a reversal of the Soviet-led boycott of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. But Olympic officials said the committee’s president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, considers the chances for a reversal of the boycott almost nonexistent. A spokesman for the Olympic Committee said Mr. Samaranch “will meet Mr. Chernenko or another senior Soviet official for a final effort to persuade the Soviet Union to reverse its decision.” The spokesman said Mr. Samaranch, who was Spain’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1977 to 1980, would go to Moscow on Wednesday.
The Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda said today that President Reagan wanted United States athletes to win “at any price” at the Olympics in Los Angeles to help his re-election bid. But the paper said Soviet bloc athletes who have pulled out would have won anyway.
Angry dairy farmers kidnaped Francis Ranc, head of the French Milk Board, and held him captive for eight hours to protest milk production limits set by the European Common Market. Ranc was seized at Rennes, France, when he stepped from a train. He was taken to a nearby farm, where farmers told him of their opposition to the government’s decision to cut milk production by 2.9% as part of an effort to reduce the market’s soaring dairy surplus, the National Confederation of Farmer-Workers Union said. Ranc was later released unharmed.
George Soros founds the Soros Foundation Budapest, supposedly to help countries free themselves from communism.
Police in New Delhi opened fire on 2,000 chanting Hindus who stormed Bangladesh’s embassy to protest a new property-takeover law that largely affects Hindus who fled predominantly Muslim Bangladesh for India. A bystander was killed and three were wounded. The demonstrators occupied the building, shattered windows and overturned furniture as office personnel fled.
Japan’s largest labor federation announced that it will step up Protests against U.S. plans to station Tomahawk nuclear cruise missiles on ships based in Japan next month. The 42-million-member General Council of Trade Unions of Japan said it will organize nationwide protests beginning Friday and culminating in sit-down protests Sunday at U.S. and Japanese bases. A spokesman asserted that the demonstrations will bring out “millions of people” at sites including Yokosuka, Sasebo, Iwakuni and Misawa.
Nineteen people were killed today in a fire in a downtown Taipei, Taiwan hotel. The police said three of the victims died when they jumped from windows of the 14-story building. The police said 53 people were injured in the blaze, the worst fire in Taipei since 1966, when a fire killed 28 people in a theater. The police said most of the 90 guests in the 240-room Time Hotel were asleep when the fire began in a second-floor restaurant. The cause of the blaze was under investigation, the police said. The identities of the dead were not immediately known.
About 100 people were killed and 50 injured by a landslide in southwestern China that was caused by heavy rains, a provincial radio reported today. The report said the landslide, which occurred Sunday in Dongchuan in Yunnan Province, buried a supply and marketing cooperative, a bank and a post office. The radio report in the province capital of Kunming said dozens of homes were flattened and more than 50 people were taken to the hospital. No further details were immediately available.
A contingent of 1,300 Salvadoran troops arrived in Honduras to join U.S. and Honduran soldiers in military exercises intended to exert pressure on leftist Nicaragua. The maneuvers, the second phase of Grenadier I war games, will stress land tactics, in conjunction with U.S. Navy exercises off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Central America. El Salvador’s rebel Radio Venceremos denounced the maneuvers, saying they will be synchronized with a major attack planned by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army against the guerrillas in northeastern El Salvador, near Honduras.
Thousands of people took to the streets in Bogota, Colombia, waving white handkerchiefs as a sign of peace to celebrate the start of a yearlong truce between the government and the country’s largest guerrilla force. The truce, signed March 28 by the 15,000-member Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, is the first cease-fire ever agreed to by any Colombian rebel group. The guerrillas agreed to stop fighting for a year to give President Belisario Betancur a chance to improve conditions for the poor.
A white Senator who is also a prominent cattle rancher in Zimbabwe’s troubled Matabeleland Province criticized the army today for avoiding combat with anti-government rebels. He said he and other white ranchers will leave of the region because of what he called a lack of protection from the army. There was no immediate reaction from the government or the army. “The army is not prepared for direct contact in which they might be injured by the dissidents,” Senator Max Rosenfels said in an interview from his ranch near Marula in the southern province. “If the forces of law and order are not prepared to combat the dissidents, how can we be expected to live here?” Senator Rosenfels’ decision to quit his cattle ranch of more than 5,000 acres follows the death of a neighboring white rancher, Ian Burchall, at the hands of the rebels last week. The rebels have killed more than 40 white farmers in the last two years. The deaths of some 200 black peasant farmers have also been blamed on the rebels.
A state funeral was held as the remains of the only American known to have died in the Vietnam War who is still unidentified were enshrined in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day (in the United States). The ceremony was led by President Reagan, whose voice choked with emotion. Under gray, occasionally rainy, skies, the Vietnam Unknown was pulled on a black caisson along a crowded seven-mile route from the Capitol to Virginia.
Three-hundred Vietnam veterans, denied a place in the official march, proceeded silently in their own tribute far behind the caisson bearing the unknown serviceman who had been their comrade in arms. When the ragtag band of veterans wearing combat fatigues or blue jeans unexpectedly came into view, the crowds erupted in applause.
A ban on testing antimissile arms and a limit to development of even more exotic technologies for so-called “Star Wars” was urged with near unanimity at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The gathering was notable for the passion and urgency expressed both among the experts and in the audience. The Reagan Administration declined an invitation to present its view.
An educated eye is critical to scientific discoveries, according to experts attending the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. One session stressed that for centuries all theories of science have started and ended with thoughtful observations of nature.
A shift in breeding programs for both plants and animals is being planned by Federal agricultural scientists. They are charting an ambitious and, some say, overdue change in emphasis from conventional methods to genetic engineering and related biotechnologies. Top officials say that over the next few years they hope to quadruple their spending on the advanced research.
Six pipe bombs have been found in St. Cloud, Minnesota., the third city in two states where such explosives have turned up in the last four days, authorities said. The homemade explosives, similar to another detonated Sunday in Stillwater, Minnesota, and six others found late last week in La Crosse, Wisconsin, were dismantled near downtown St. Cloud. No serious injuries have resulted from any of the bombings. The potentially deadly tripwire bombs in St. Cloud were accompanied by notes claiming that they were planted by the North Central Gay Strike Force Against Public and Police Oppression, a group that authorities doubt exists.
Two bomb threats at a nursing home today forced the evacuation of 24 elderly residents. The incident occurred as the police investigated a rash of pipe bombs discovered in Wisconsin and Minnesota. No bomb was found in a three-hour search at the Villa Rest Home in Lewiston, a village in southeast Minnesota.
The last group of tourists climbed down from the crown of the Statue of Liberty. Then the national monument on Liberty Island was closed for two years while Lady Liberty receives a $39-million face lift. The Statue of Liberty’s rehabilitation will include a new interior staircase and a new torch, a strengthening of the arm that holds the torch and replacement of 1,600 rusted armatures that hold her copper skin to the frame.
Former Democratic presidential adviser McGeorge Bundy accused the Reagan Administration of pursuing a nuclear policy full of half-truths and said there is no hope for further arms negotiations with the Soviet Union for at least a decade. Bundy, special assistant for national security under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, said in a New York speech that a major part of the problem is that the Reagan Administration has pursued an aggressive arms buildup while assuring the Soviet Union that its position is moderate.
Officials searched today for new sources of water to replace at least 10 private wells contaminated by a suspected cancer-causing pesticide. Paul Fleuriel, director of Civil Defense, said today that officials planned to ask Gov. Michael S. Dukakis on Tuesday for emergency aid to test more of the community’s 210 wells for traces of the pesticide EDB. Officials in nearby Deerfield and Hatfield, meanwhile, offered to supply water until a more permanent solution was found, Mr. Fleuriel said. The town declared a water emergency Saturday after high levels of ethylene dibromides in 10 of 22 private wells tested. The National Guard sent four water tanks to this western Massachusetts town of 3,200 people for drinking, cooking and bathing. EDB was used from 1948 until two years ago to fumigate soil on tobacco fields here, according to Ai Annis, a Whately Selectman.
A suspect has been arrested in a daytime robbery of more than $1 million in cash from an armored car company and another man is being sought. The police said the robbers’ plans were foiled when an air-conditioning mechanic working across from the Armored Transport Company became suspicious and wrote down the license number of a rental van used in the getaway Sunday afternoon. The van was sighted by a police officer five hours later at Concord, California, a suburb of San Francisco. The van was stopped and Gary Pierce, a freelance bodyguard, was arrested when contraband from the robbery was found in the vehicle, the police said. Sixteen suitcases stuffed with money and checks were later found in Mr. Pierce’s home in nearby Pleasant Hill, California, the police said. A second suspect, Thomas Pheil, 22 years old, of Clayton, California, a former employee of the armored car company, was being sought.
Protection of the nation’s endangered animals and plants is lagging and the government’s review of species threatened with extinction could take nearly a century to complete, an environmental study warned. The report by Defenders of Wildlife, a Washington-based national conservation group, found the backlog of animals and plants awaiting consideration for status as threatened or endangered species has grown to 3,827.
Wildlife refuges are threatened increasingly. Some managers and other workers at the refuges agreed with conservationists in saying that the policies of the Reagan Administration were loosening protections of the National Wildlife Refuge System and the wildlife.
Victims of assaults by family members are nearly twice as likely to be attacked again if the police do not arrest the attacker, according to a federally funded experimental study. James K. Stewart of the Justice Department said the results show “the police should use arrests quite frequently in typical domestic violence cases if they want to reduce assaults.” In 35% of the cases where police did not make an arrest, victims surveyed later said there was a repeated assault within six months. But in those cases where police made an arrest, only 19% of the victims reported repeated violence.
The vice president of marketing for the New Orleans World’s Fair was fired the same day that ticket prices were slashed to stimulate attendance, spokeswoman Jeanne Nathan confirmed. Nathan refused to explain why Jeff Stack was fired. Stack offered no explanation either, but said he has hired an attorney to learn whether he has grounds to sue for breach of contract. Stack, 41, was hired by the fair after he served as marketing vice president for the Marriott Amusement Park in Palo Alto, California. He was fired as the fair announced a series of across-the-board price reductions over the next 30 days.
Technicians preparing the shuttle Discovery for its maiden flight next month plan a 14-hour countdown today to a simulated firing of the orbiter’s three main engines. If the test goes well, the rockets will be fired for a 20-second test Friday in the last major hurdle before Discovery makes its inaugural flight. The exact launch date for Discovery and its six-member crew will be set after the results of the test firing are analyzed.
A boycott of a television station in Jackson, Mississippi, is being urged by black and union leaders. The new owner of the station, WLBT-TV, which commands Mississippi’s largest broadcast audience, has dismissed the station’s most popular anchor and its longtime manager, both of whom are black. Critics say the new owners are decreasing minority involvement in the station’s operation and have been engaging in union- breaking tactics.
Reggie Jackson hits a 4th-inning grand slam off Dennis Rasmussen to lead the California Angels to a 6–2 victory over the New York Yankees.
Born:
Beth Allen, New Zealand actress (“The Legend of William Tell”), in Titirangi, Auckland, New Zealand.
Marcus Thomas, NFL running back (Detroit Lions), in Phoenix, Arizona.
Died:
Eric Morecambe [John Bartholomew], 58, British comedian (“Morecambe & Wise”, “Piccadilly Palace”), of a heart attack.
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