Iran was condemned by the United Nations Security Council for air attacks on commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf. The Council’s action, which was approved by 13 to 0 with Nicaragua and Zimbabwe abstaining, was a compromise between a group of Persian Gulf countries, led by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and several third world members of the Council. The third world group tried in long negotiations to soften the anti-Iranian tone of the Arab position. In the principal concession made to the third world group, the text did not condemn Iran by name. It “condemns attacks on commercial ships in the gulf region and in particular the recent attacks on ships en route to and from ports of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.” The resolution is directed at Iran, which was accused by the six countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council of carrying out such attacks.
At least six large tankers have reportedly loaded oil at the Iranian terminal at Kharg Island in the last two days or are in the process of doing so, taking advantage of Iran’s large discounts while risking an attack by Iraq. In Tehran, the speaker of the Iranian Parliament said his country was prepared to enter talks to head off a disaster in the Persian Gulf, which he defined as intervention by the superpowers or a major disruption of the waterway, Reuters reported. The speaker, Hojatolislam Hashemi Rafsanjani, said, “As far as it is possible, we will prevent such a disaster for humanity from happening by diplomacy and appropriate talks and meetings,” the news agency said.
A leading Iranian politician said today that Iran was prepared to enter talks to head off a disaster in the Persian Gulf. Hojatolislam Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Speaker of Parliament, told a prayer meeting that there was a conspiracy to dry up Iran’s oil income and force it to surrender in the war with Iraq. He said Iran did not seek a disaster in the gulf. He defined that as intervention by the superpowers or a major disruption of the waterway, through which a sixth of the non-Communist world’s oil flows. “As far as it is possible, we will prevent such a disaster for humanity from happening by diplomacy and appropriate talks and meetings,” the Hojatolislam said. “We will strongly refrain from it but not to the point of losing the honor and spirit of our revolution,” he added.
Israel’s Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Levy, has reprimanded the head of the army’s southern command, Major General Moshe Bar-Kochba, who was in overall charge of the area where two Arabs who had helped hijack a passenger bus were beaten to death by Israeli security men last month. The Israeli radio said the reprimand was issued in accordance with a recommendation of an inquiry commission that found that two of the four hijackers, who held about 35 passengers hostage for 10 hours, were captured alive and then killed with blows to the back of their heads.
The radio said that General Bar-Kochba was not present when they were beaten, but that another senior officer, who was not named, took part in the beatings. He has retained an attorney, according to the radio report. The bus, which was hijacked from Tel Aviv to the occupied Gaza Strip, was held overnight by four terrorists, who threatened to blow it up with its passengers unless 500 Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli jails. When Israeli troops stormed the bus, they killed one Israeli woman and two of the hijackers and wounded seven other passengers.
A decision on missile deployment in the Netherlands will be delayed under an agreement reached by the Cabinet in The Hague. The ministers also voted to link the stationing of cruise missiles on Dutch soil to progress in the stalled American-Soviet arms control talks. The decision came as President Reagan left on a trip to several European countries during which he is expected to appeal to Moscow for a thaw in the relations. Foreign ministers of the 16 North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries, meeting in Washington earlier this week, restated the alliance’s policy of maintaining a strong defense, while staying open to negotiations with the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.
At a news conference after a one- hour Cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers said the government, evidently to avoid a serious Cabinet crisis, would send a note to Parliament calling for a decision on the stationing of cruise missiles in the Netherlands to be delayed until November 1, 1985. Government officials said tonight that Foreign Minister Hans van den Broek explained the Dutch position to Secretary of State George P. Shultz this week in Washington. The officials said the Foreign Minister told Mr. Schultz that the compromise decision was a last effort to preserve government unity. If the government fell, Mr. van den Broek is said to have warned Mr. Shultz, it would probably be replaced by a Socialist-led government strongly opposed to any deployment.
The NATO alliance agreed in 1979 to counter the stationing of Soviet SS-20 missiles aimed at Western Europe by deploying 572 Pershing 2 and cruise missiles in West Germany, Britain, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. The agreement called for deployment beginning in the fall of 1983 if disarmament talks between the United States and the Soviet Union in Geneva failed to produce results. Deployment of the weapons has been resisted by antimissile and political groups in all the countries scheduled to receive them. NATO officials have expressed concern that the departure of any one country from the plan could weaken the resolve of other nations involved, diminishing the pressure on Moscow to resume negotiations to limit nuclear weapons in Europe.
The President, arriving in Ireland for the start of a European trip, appealed for universal recognition of “the rights of individual liberty” and for “tolerance and reconciliation” among Roman Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. The President and First Lady take residence in Ashford Castle Perhaps the highlight of Mr. Reagan’s visit to Ireland will occur today in Ballyporeen, where researchers have found a baptismal record of his great-grandfather, Michael Regan.
Normandy’s beaches bear few scars of the largest and most successful amphibious invasion in history — the Allied landings of June 6, 1944, under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. On Wednesday, the visitors will be headed by President Reagan, Queen Elizabeth II, President Francois Mitterrand and other leaders in ceremonies to mark the 40th anniversary of the landings.
Thousands of striking miners clashed with the police today outside a coking plant in Yorkshire, in the fourth consecutive day of violence in a coal strike that has lasted three months. One miner’s skull was fractured and 14 other people were injured in the fighting, officials said. Nineteen pickets were arrested. The trouble began when pickets threw bricks, stones and other objects at the police and then charged police lines to try to stop delivery trucks leaving the coking plant, the police said.
The President of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, said today that in the future the committee would have to consider political factors when seeking a site for the Games. Mr. Samaranch spoke at a news conference after he returned from an unsuccessful mission to Moscow aimed at getting Soviet leaders to reverse their decision to boycott the Summer Games. “When I.O.C. members choose a new Olympic city for 1992,” he said at a news conference, “they have to study all the technical problems, but also the political problems of this city or this country.” The Olympic Committee president was here for the celebration of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the modern Olympics in Paris. President Francois Mitterrand of France announced that Paris would seek to act as host for the 1992 Olympic Games.
Ethiopia said today that it would not send a team to Los Angeles, depriving the Games of some of the world’s best distance runners. Ethiopia is the 12th nation and the first African country to join the Soviet-led boycott.
George P. Shultz flew to Nicaragua from El Salvador to confer with officials of the Sandinista Government, which the Reagan Administration has been trying to undercut. The Secretary of State met in private at the Managua airport with Daniel Ortega Saavedra, coordinator of Nicaragua’s governing junta, in a surprise trip that the White House said Mr. Shultz made at President Reagan’s direction.
Eden Pastora Gomez was flown to Venezuela aboard a hospital plane sent by Caracas after Costa Rican leaders asked him to leave their country. As he departed, the anti-Sandinista leader blamed the CIA for an explosion Wednesday that killed several of his soldiers and two journalists and wounded him and more than 20 soldiers and journalists as he was holding a news conference just inside the Nicaraguan border.
The nation’s unemployment rate fell three-tenths of a point in May to 7.4 percent, the Labor Department reported. The jobless rate had dropped rapidly in 1983 and remained unchanged from February through April. Last month, for the first time, more than half of all adult women in the country held jobs. The May figures showed broadly distributed gains in employment with reduced jobless rates for all major categories: adult men, adult women, teenagers, whites, blacks and Hispanic workers. The President, hailing the news as he departed for his European trip, said, “I leave with happy news for the economic summit.”
Economists said today’s labor-market data, which were somewhat better than expected, reflected continued strong economic growth but without any appreciable acceleration of inflation. “We’re still getting the best of both worlds,” said Robert Ortner, chief economist at the Commerce Department. “The economy is growing and the inflationary pressures are still down.”
Gary Hart distanced himself from the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s positions on Israel in an apparent effort to diminish the fears of Jewish voters that the Colorado Senator might pick the black minister as his running mate if he won the Democratic Presidential nomination. Mr. Hart, in three appearances this morning, stressed that Mr. Jackson could not run on the Democratic ticket with Mr. Hart unless the civil rights leader changed his views. “That is not about to happen by the convention,” said Mark Green, a senior Hart adviser. Mr. Jackson was denounced as an anti-Semite Thursday by Nathan Perlmutter, the head of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.
An accord on generic drugs was reached by two trade associations after months of negotiations. They agreed on proposed legislation that could double the number of cheaper generic drugs on the market over the next three to five years and cut the cost of many popular drugs in half or more. In return, the patent life of many higher-priced brand-name drugs would be extended. Wider availability of low-cost generics could save consumers about $1 billion in drug costs over the next dozen years, according to estimates by the Food and Drug Administration.
Six thousand Twin Cities nurses went on strike today at nearly half the area’s hospitals while supervisors and nonunion nurses handled emergency cases. The nurses walked out at 6:30 AM at 15 of 33 hospitals in Minneapolis and St. Paul and set up picket lines. Hospital administrators had been preparing for the strike by sending some patients home and by putting some of the staff on part time. Negotiations between the registered nurses and hospital administrators broke off Thursday. “To our knowledge this is the largest registered nurses’ strike in the history of the country in number of nurses,” said Bob Wiesner, a labor relations representative for the Minnesota Nurses Association.
A janitor found a bomb in a Chicago building and a passerby spotted another explosive in downtown Milwaukee yesterday, bringing to 17 the number of homemade bombs discovered in three states in a week. Building managers in Chicago increased security against the bombs, which have been found in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois since the Memorial Day weekend. Some of the bombs were trip-wired, baited with dollar bills and accompanied by notes saying they were planted by a “Gay Strike Force.” Three were detonated accidentally, and one injured woman in Milwaukee. The bomb was discovered this morning near a downtown railroad siding a few blocks from where two devices were found Thursday.
John Z. DeLorean’s attorney attacked the Government’s star witness today and argued with prosecutors, prompting the judge to threaten the lawyers with jail. “I don’t want to see any more outbursts like we experienced this afternoon,” Federal District Judge Robert Takasugi told the lawyers after the jury left for the day. “Otherwise, we’ll be adding to the inmate population. Please be careful. I’m not running a nursery school.”
The warning followed exchanges between Howard Weitzman, a defense lawyer, and the prosecution’s chief witness, James Hoffman. Hollering and laughing sarcastically at some responses, Mr. Weitzman tripped up Mr. Hoffman on several relatively minor inconsistencies in his testimony. At one point, the judge said, “Mr. Weitzman, give Mr. Hoffman a chance to finish his answers.” He also admonished Mr. Hoffman several times for what he said were evasive answers.
Lawmen in Warrenton, North Carolina, alerted by a telephone tap, rushed into a downtown coin laundry and convenience store today and captured two of the six inmates who staged a bomb hoax the night before to flee Virginia’s “escape-proof” death row. The fugitives were not armed and did not resist, said Dorsey Kapps, a Virginia prison spokesman. They were seized as they sat on a bench in the shop, eating snacks and drinking wine. A short time later, dozens of lawmen surrounded a warehouse near the downtown area, believing that one or more of the fugitives were hiding inside. The authorities said a man was seen running from the coin laundry when the two other men, Earl Clanton, 30 years old, of Petersburg, Virginia, and Derick Peterson, 32, of Hampton, Virginia, were captured, and the police believe he may be one of the escapees.
A Federal appeals court today overturned a lower court order that required the Government to release more than 1,000 Cuban refugees from a federal penitentiary unless it could prove they posed a danger to society. The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit said Federal District Judge Marvin Shoob was wrong when he ruled last summer that excludable aliens who cannot be deported have some Constitutional rights. The Cubans imprisoned in Atlanta were among 125,000 refugees who came to this country in the 1980 “Freedom Flotilla” from Cuba. They have been caught in a legal limbo since immigration officials ruled that they should be deported because they admitted to committing crimes in Cuba.
The Castro Government, however, has refused to allow any of the refugees to return. The United States Government has continued to hold them in prison on the ground they are violent and a threat to society. The appellate court, however, said the Cubans, as excludable aliens, have no Constitutional rights and cannot challenge their detention by the Government on Constitutional grounds.
Exotic animals, from llamas to lions, were put on the auction block today, drawing breeders, ranchers and game park operators from around the country. Protesters who charged the animals were being exploited also attended. “Most people in the wildlife industry are in it for the money,” said Beverly Roper of Marietta, Georgia, one of a few demonstrators who paraded with signs. “Exploitation is the word.” The three-day auction offered llamas, sheep, goats, elk, buffalo, wolf cubs, bears, a lion and a tiger, a giraffe from California named Slim, tropical birds and ostriches. “It’s the first exotic animal auction we’ve ever had,” said Jack Napier, the auction manager, adding the auction was expected to raise about $750,000. About 1,000 animals were put up for sale.
Genetically modified organisms would be released into the environment in strictly controlled field tests under experiments proposed by two biotechnology companies that were approved by the chief federal advisory committee on gene-splicing policy. The panel recommended unanimously that the National Institutes of Health approve the plans. The unanimous votes are almost certain to lead to further controversy over gene-splicing research. A University of California, Berkeley, experiment similar to one endorsed today by the committee has been halted twice in recent months by court action. The committee approved a proposal, similar to the California experiment, from Advanced Genetic Sciences of Greenwich, Connecticut, to spray a test field with bacteria called Pseudomonas syringae after a modification to remove one of the bacterial genes. Scientists speaking at the meeting today noted that the bacteria occur naturally in the environment. The researchers said they could not imagine any circumstances in which harm could result from the experiment.
Douglas H Mitchell, QC of Calgary becomes 6th CFL Commissioner.
Russian super heavyweight weightlifter Alexander Gunyashev snatches a world record 211 kg.
Phillies first baseman Len Matuszek has no putouts in a 12–3 loss to the Cubs. It is the 18th time in Major League history a first baseman has done this.
At home against the Orioles, the Tigers slap Scott McGregor for six runs in the 2nd and coast to a 14–2 win. Dan Petry tosses six shutout innings and Alan Trammell, Chet Lemon, and Lance Parrish go deep to thrill the 47,252 fans.
At Shea, the Cardinals jump on reliever Jesse Orosco for 4 runs in the top of the 9th to defeat the Mets, 5–1. Doc Gooden allows a run in 7 innings, while Joaquin Andujar allows a run in 8. The Cards steal 6 bases on Gooden and catcher Mike Fitzgerald. Hubie Brooks has a hit for the Mets to extend his hitting streak to 24 straight games.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1124.35 (+19.50).
Born:
Nikki Glaser, American comedian and actress (“Not Safe with Nikki Glaser”), in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Naidangiin Tüvshinbayar, Mongolian judoka (Olympic gold -100kg 2008; silver 2012; first Mongolian Olympic gold medalist), in Saikhan sum, Bulgan Province, Mongolia.
Wilkin Castillo, Dominican MLB pinch hitter, left fielder, and catcher (Cincinnati Reds, Miami Marlins), in Bani, Dominican Republic.
Died:
Nate Nelson, 52, American singer (Flamingos – I Only Have Eyes for You), of heart failure.
History Diaries 