Secret commando units have been created by the Pentagon, according to Administration officials and members of Congress. They said the elite units, which have raised concern in Congress, have tried to rescue missing Americans in danger spots abroad, took part in the invasion of Grenada and backed covert operations in Central America.
A decision to drop atomic bombs on North Korea and China if necessary to bring the Korean War to an end in 1953 is described in detail in official documents made public in Washington. The decision was made by the Administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who became President in January 1953 at a time when negotiations for an armistice had dragged on for two years.
The 10th summit conference of the seven major industrialized democracies opened in London in a mood of modest expectation generated by repeated official warnings that neither bold policy initiatives nor “magical solutions” were likely to be achieved.
President Reagan met separately today with the leaders of Japan, Italy, West Germany and France and gave fresh assurances that American interest rates would fall soon, perhaps this summer. Speaking to reporters at a picture-taking session at Winfield House, the Georgian residence of the American Ambassador here, Mr. Reagan said there could be “fluctuations” in interest rates, a comment that American officials interpreted as meaning that rates could rise somewhat before they fall. Asked if rates would come down in the summer, he said: “I’m going to stick with that prediction.”
The President and First Lady attend a reception at St. James Palace.
The Kremlin has supplied Iraq with sophisticated Soviet missiles capable of hitting targets deep inside Iran as well as Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal, foreign diplomats in Baghdad reported. The shipments reportedly include air-to-surface missiles that one diplomat said are similar to the French-made Exocet missile. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein announced last month that his forces would intensify their sea blockade of Iranian ports and that Iraq would acquire new weapons, but did not identify them.
Iran has protested to Saudi Arabia the downing of one of its planes. It was Iran’s first official acknowledgement of the loss in the aerial clash between Iranian and Saudi jets over the Gulf two days ago. In a report late Wednesday night monitored by the British Broadcasting Company and news agencies here, the Teheran radio said that the Saudi charge d’affaires had been summoned to the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday and given a strongly worded protest note. The Tehran radio said the note asserted that the Iranian plane had been flying over international waters when it was shot down.
The Soviet Union has officially informed the United States that dissident Andrei D. Sakharov is alive and that his wife, Yelena Bonner, is not in any danger, a senior American official said at the London economic summit. However, a State Department official in Washington said, “Until we have some eyewitness report from a dissident or other non-official source who has actually seen Sakharov alive, we do not believe what we hear from the Soviet government.” The official in London said unofficial sources have seen Bonner on a balcony and on a street. Sakharov recently was reported to have died.
Enrico Berlinguer, 62, leader of the Italian Communist Party, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while delivering a speech in the northern Italian city of Padua and was taken to a hospital in critical condition, party officials said. He reportedly underwent emergency surgery. Berlinguer is considered the architect of Eurocommunism, a moderate form of communism that stresses its independence from the Soviet Union. The Italian party claims 1.8 million members and is the largest in Western Europe.
Pope John Paul II said that aid to poor countries should not be tied to family planning. The Pope, reiterating Roman Catholic ideology against contraception, told Rafael Salas, the U.N.’s chief population official, that officially sponsored contraceptive programs have “profoundly negative effects.” The Pope said that making foreign aid conditional on population control programs was gravely unjust and led to sexual permissiveness among the young.
Leftist Turkish journalists said today that 82 journalists, writers and artists had been jailed since the 1980 military coup and that 181 others had been questioned or temporarily detained. About 30 of them are still in prison, the journalists said. A handbook published by the left-of- center Contemporary Journalists’ Association said those imprisoned ranged from the prominent rightist columnist Nazli Ilicak of the daily Tercuman, who served sentences in 1981 and 1982 for criticizing the military, to Saffet Tekin, who was sentenced to 15 years for translating Lenin. The list apparently included only cases arising directly from the work of the accused.
The first defendant to be tried and convicted in connection with a Jewish underground ring blamed for attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Noam Yinon, 27, a reserve army paratrooper, was convicted of possessing explosives intended for use by the terrorist group against Palestinians. Twenty-four other defendants, most of them settlers in the occupied West Bank or the Golan Heights, face a variety of charges — including murder — and are scheduled to appear at a pretrial hearing June 11.
Violence erupted in Indian cities arising from the Indian Army’s attack Wednesday on the Sikh shrine in Amritsar and the death of hundreds of people, including a radical Sikh leader. The army occupied the Golden Temple in an attempt to end Sikh terrorism.
Cambodia’s official press agency said today that Thai forces had fired gas shells into the western Cambodian province of Pursat, “affecting many people.” Lieutenant General Samphau Srikacha, head of information at the Thai Supreme Command Headquarters, denied the accusation. “We do not have chemical shells in our forces,” General Srikacha said. The Cambodian press agency, monitored in Bangkok, said shells containing an unspecified gas were fired last week in Pursat. It also said gas canisters were fired from Thailand into northwestern Battambang Province in Cambodia three times in early 1982. The press agency suggested that Thailand was using chemical weapons to support guerrillas who are fighting Vietnamese occupation troops in Cambodia.
Nicaragua has engaged in widespread repression of its Indian population, but Sandinista authorities have recently made significant progress in curbing abuses, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported. The commission, an arm of the Organization of American States, said that an undetermined number of Miskito Indians have been murdered and subjected to torture, arbitrary detention and forced relocation since the leftist Sandinistas took power in 1979. But the commission said that during its two-year investigation, “significant advances were made” toward improving human rights.
A House subcommittee voted along party lines to deny President Reagan any additional military aid for El Salvador in the current fiscal year beyond the $62 million already approved by Congress. Rep. Jack Kemp of New York, the ranking Republican on the Appropriations subcommittee, said GOP members will ask the full committee to overturn the move. No date for committee action has been set.
Zambia and Angola say that some progress is being made in the withdrawal of South African troops from southern Angola but that the disengagement is proceeding too slowly. After meeting in Luanda on Wednesday, the Zambian President, Kenneth D. Kaunda, and the Angolan leader, Eduardo dos Santos, said in a joint communique that independence for South-West Africa should be a condition for withdrawing Cuban troops from Angola and not the other way around, as South Africa and the United States have demanded. The Cuban troops support the Marxist Government of Mr. dos Santos. The South African forces, which were to have completed their withdrawal by the end of last month, have been attacking guerrillas of the South-West Africa People’s Organization who are based in southern Angola.
Postmaster General William F. Bolger told postal employees that the U.S. Postal Service’s electronic mail business will not be abandoned despite orders to sell its $40-million computerized E-COM service. He stressed that the 22-year-old electronic mail service will operate as usual until next year. The Postal Service Board of Governors has directed postal management to immediately seek proposals from private parties who might buy the computerized mail equipment and reimburse the Postal Service.
A House subcommittee, bowing to pressure from the tobacco industry, voted to call for a study of how to develop a self-snuffing cigarette instead of ordering its development. A bill calling for development of a safer cigarette was amended by voice vote to call only for the setting up of a 15-member commission to make a 30-month study of ways of developing the fire-safe cigarette.
Smith College, Nancy Reagan’s alma mater, has deferred plans to honor the First Lady until after the Presidential election in November, according to officials at Smith. Mrs. Reagan graduated from Smith in 1943 with a bachelor’s degree in theater. “The college had been considering for a while an appropriate way to honor Mrs. Reagan,” Mary Callahan, a college spokesman said. “But since this is an election year the college feels we don’t want to take any action that may be construed as partisan.”
Walter F. Mondale began the search for a Vice-Presidential running mate while pressure mounted among Democratic Party leaders for Gary Hart to accept Mr. Mondale as the party’s Presidential nominee and drop his threat to oppose Mr. Mondale all the way to the convention.
Senator Hart, after meetings on Capitol Hill, said some members of Congress were encouraging him to continue his candidacy. However, there were some signs that he was being urged to withdraw or, at least, modify his approach. House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. remarked to Mr. Hart, “You’ll make a great President, but not this year.”
Mr. Mondale pressed a new strategy after Senator Hart unexpectedly defeated him in the New Hampshire primary and Maine caucuses three months ago. He attacked the Coloradan, offering himself as an experienced legislator and former Vice President fighting for his political life against a younger man in a contest that had abruptly turned into “tinsel” and “polling gimmicks.”
Drinking-related deaths of young people on the nation’s highways prompted the House to approve legislation that would cut Federal highway funds to any state where the legal drinking age was below 21. The provision, proposed by Representative James J. Howard, Democrat of New Jersey, was added by voice vote to a bill allocating $5.2 billion in funds for highway construction.
A federal grand jury indicted 13 men arrested in Louisiana last week on charges they plotted to overthrow the government of Haiti. Authorities said 11 of them had signed an agreement saying they were “enlisting ourselves and our services, in noble cause, for the liberation of Haiti, at considerable personal risk.” Most of the men are Haitian citizens living in the United States.
Trailways bus lines has offered runaway children a free ride home on its buses anywhere in the country. Under the program, dubbed Operation Home Free, runaways can contact local police to get free bus transportation. Norman Darwick, executive director of the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, said police will take care of coordination of the trips. More than 1 million children are reported missing each year, he said.
The United States has apparently won its war against the illegal distribution of the sedative Quaalude, once popular among middle-class youths, federal officials said. U.S. pharmaceutical companies stopped producing Quaaludes last year, noted Frank Chellino, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Miami. He said the number of real and counterfeit Quaaludes circulating throughout the country has dropped from a high of about 450 million in 1980 to “virtually none” today. He said 700,000 Quaalude tablets were seized in Miami last year, compared to only 34 so far this year.
Prosecutors asked a grand jury today to investigate six East St. Louis street gangs suspected of three murders and the firebombing of a police detective’s home. John Baricevic, the State’s Attorney for St. Clair County, said the police believed the investigation could be the best way to stop violence and intimidation in East St. Louis. The largest gang has been identified as the Black Gangster Disciple Nation, which has about 200 members in the impoverished city of 55,000 people just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.
A comprehensive immigration bill will be brought to the House floor next week, Democratic leaders agreed, but they expressed doubts about whether it would be approved. More than half of the 268 House Democrats attended a party caucus to discuss the measure, but most speakers were said to have criticized it.
Acid rain contamination similar to that in the Northeast and Canada is now endangering the southern United States, according to a report issued by a coalition of environmental and public health organizations. The report said that rainfall over much of the 13-state area of the South was now 10 to 20 times more acidic than normal rainfall.
A Stanford professor resigned as chairman of the university’s Department of Medicine after an ethics committee found him guilty of “grossly negligent scholarship.” Dr. Kenneth Melmon, who retained his professorship, was censured for plagiarizing 24 percent of a chapter in a medical textbook.
Fewer people are smoking cigarettes but more are dipping snuff and chewing tobacco, federal officials said today. The national Centers for Disease Control said the use of “smokeless tobacco” products had increased at an annual rate of about 11 percent since 1974. “An estimated 22 million individuals use smokeless tobacco, with the average user between the ages of 18 years and 30 years,” the federal health agency said. It warned, “Use of smokeless tobacco products has been linked to oral and pharyngeal cancer, tooth loss and gum disease.” The agency reported that while both the per capita cigarette consumption and the number of smokers had declined, smokers were smoking more, with each increasing the number of cigarettes smoked by about 1 percent annually.
Strikes were ending in Las Vegas, Nevada. Four thousand culinary workers and bartenders began returning to five casino hotels as settlements continued in a 67-day walkout. The musicians’ union has a tentative accord with four hotels and has planned talks with the fifth.
Eighteen inches of heavy, wet snow buried the Colorado high country and forced as many as 500 persons in Aspen to evacuate their homes and condominiums below a crumbling hillside. The snowstorm knocked out power to other resort towns and closed Interstate 70 temporarily. A 20-acre block of earth, 30 feet deep, was creeping slowly down a steep ski slope above Aspen, threatening a 16-block area. Elsewhere, heavy rain swelled Vermont rivers and dozens of people fled their flooded homes.
Tornadoes tore through the Middle West from Louisiana to Minnesota late yesterday, killing two people and injuring at least 24. Clusters of tornadoes spread over Iowa last night. The police in Ringgold County in south-central Iowa said one person was killed by a falling tree. At least eight others were reported injured in other parts of the state, and at least a half-dozen houses were destroyed or damaged. Another fatality was recorded when a storm moved through Eagleton, Missouri, destroying a mobile home. Elsewhere, a tornado injured 10 people and destroyed several buildings in Albert Lea, Minnesota. Tornadoes also hit extreme Northeastern Kansas, injuring at least six people and destroying an undetermined amount of farm buildings.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1132.44 (-1.40).
Born:
Justin Berg, MLB pitcher (Chicago Cubs), in Antigo, Wisconsin.
Died:
George Givot, 81, actor (“Versatile Vaudeville”).
History Diaries 