Britain and Nigeria agreed to allow each other’s aircraft to return home, ending a two-day diplomatic standoff caused by the attempted abduction from London of a wealthy Nigerian politician in exile. The British authorities prevented the kidnapping. Nigeria’s military Government has denied any role in the kidnapping. It detained the London-bound British jet and its 222 passengers after Britain grounded the cargo plane. The cargo plane was apparently to be used to fly the kidnapping victim to Lagos. All but 4 of the 17 people held here for questioning in the case were freed overnight and today. But Scotland Yard declined to disclose any information on the identities of the four or their suspected role in the abduction.
The BBC reported that two of the four who were still in custody were Israeli mercenaries, but it did not identify the source of this information. There has been no confirmation of Israeli involvement, and the Israeli Government issued a statement Friday denying any part in the plot. The Israeli Embassy in London said further that it had no way of confirming that any Israeli citizens were involved and that “we have not been informed by the British consular authorities that Israeli citizens are being held and in need of help.”
The U.S. would be ready to negotiate agreements with the Soviet Union on at least some aspects of space weaponry if a formula could be worked out for starting the talks in September, Secretary of State George P. Shultz said. Speaking to reporters aboard his Air Force plane en route here, Mr. Shultz acknowledged that the Administration had not completed its own internal review of what it would be willing to give up in the projected talks on placing curbs on the military use of space. But he said that despite concerns within the Administration on verification procedures in any space-weapons agreement, it was wrong to suggest, as Moscow and many in Washington have done, that the Administration was not interested in an agreement.
The Conference on European Security has adjourned for the summer, ending six months of speechmaking that, on the surface, accomplished little. The participants — all the nations of Europe except Albania, plus the United States and Canada — could not even agree on a format for further discussions. The talks ended Friday as they started, with criticism traded back and forth between East and West. But Western diplomats and representatives from neutral countries said the latest round of talks did help clarify some of the Soviet Union’s long-term bargaining objectives and they added that the Soviet Union had begun to address various Western proposals in at least some detail.
The French National Assembly has refused to put to a popular referendum — and thus delay — a bill sponsored by the Socialist government to increase state control over the nation’s schools. The measure, which brought out large-scale conservative demonstrations two weeks ago, would have placed private school budgets under control of regional committees, given teachers the option of becoming civil servants, and phased out government subsidies at schools where less than half the teachers chose not to accept civil-servant status.
The Lebanese Army, which took over control of Beirut this week from militia forces, announced today that three more crossing points between the predominantly Muslim and Christian sectors of the capital would be opened to civilian traffic Sunday. In a communiqué, the military command added that there was no security reason why Beirut’s port and international airport should not resume activity Monday. However, a problem of several thousand missing Lebanese, many of them believed to have been abducted during the civil war, appears to be slowing the final stages of the government’s peace plan.
Muslim leaders said Christian militiamen, helping the Israel Army when it stormed West Beirut in September 1982, abducted thousands of Muslim residents of the capital. Many Christians were seized by Muslim militiamen in retaliation. It is feared that a large number of those abducted have been killed. As many as 5,000 people may have been abducted since the Israeli invasion in 1982.
Many “Iraqi agents” were killed in Baghdad when an Iranian-backed Iraqi dissident group detonated a truck-bomb, according to Iran’s official press agency. It said the number of dead was in the “dozens.” Iran’s official news agency reported that an Iranian-backed Iraqi dissident group blew up a truck loaded with explosives at the headquarters of an Iraqi paramilitary group in Baghdad, “killing dozens of Iraqi agents.” Several ammunition and weapons depots were set ablaze in the attack carried out by the “Martyr Fallahi” group, according to the report.
Kuwait, the Persian Gulf state closest to the Iran-Iraq War front, has announced completion of an advanced air and naval defense system, and is at its highest state of alert “to face any developments in the region.” Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs Abdulaziz Hussein told a Saudi Arabian weekly that Kuwait would not remain idle in the face of further attacks. Three Kuwaiti vessels have been among oil tankers reportedly hit by Iranian warplanes in the gulf.
A Soviet newspaper charged that U.S. instructors are taking part in guerrilla raids inside Afghanistan. An article in Soviet Russia also alleged that the United States is coordinating and financing the guerrilla war against the Soviet-backed Afghan government. Moscow regularly blames Washington for the conflict, but only rarely charges that U.S. personnel operate in Afghanistan. A State Department spokesman said the charges are baseless.
The French National Assembly has refused to put to a popular referendum — and thus delay — a bill sponsored by the Socialist government to increase state control over the nation’s schools. The measure, which brought out large-scale conservative demonstrations two weeks ago, would have placed private school budgets under control of regional committees, given teachers the option of becoming civil servants, and phased out government subsidies at schools where less than half the teachers chose not to accept civil-servant status. Critics say the bill would encroach on parents’ freedom to choose their children’s form of education. Most of France’s estimated 10,000 private schools are Roman Catholic and are heavily subsidized by the Government. About one out of every six French children attends a private school.
At least 51 guerrillas of the Communist New People’s Army were killed by Philippine troops in the fiercest fighting of the year, the government announced in Manila. The armed forces chief of staff, General Fabian Ver, said the drive was begun late last month on northern Luzon Island, as well as on the southern island of Mindanao. Among the military’s targets — with an $11,000 price on his head, according to a provincial field commander — is a fugitive Roman Catholic priest, Father Conrado Ballweg, 39, who is said to be leading some of the insurgents.
A Buckingham Palace spokesman said today that Queen Elizabeth II was “annoyed” over the possibility that her planned two-week visit to Canada next week might have to be canceled if the new Canadian leader, John Turner, called elections for this summer. The statement came as Mr. Turner held four hours of talks with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Mr. Turner was also scheduled to see the Queen. Mr. Turner, who succeeded Pierre Elliott Trudeau as Prime Minister, is under pressure from his Cabinet to call an election this summer. Mr. Turner has given no indication as to his plans, but there has been speculation in Ottawa that he would pick September 4 as polling day. The Palace spokesman repeated today that if Mr. Turner called elections, the Queen would cancel her visit. “We have made this quite clear,” a spokesman said, adding it would be the first time the Queen canceled a foreign visit because it clashed with an election campaign.
A Canadian ship pilot who was in control when a luxury liner ran aground off Vancouver Island committed “an error of judgment” and has been suspended for 90 days. The Pacific Pilotage Authority’s board confirmed a 15-day suspension of the pilot, Capt. G.G. Ruddick, and added 75 days more, refusing to specify the error Ruddick committed. A Canadian Coast Guard investigation is continuing. the authority said. The stricken liner began taking on water after it struck rocks but made it to a private dock, where all 787 aboard were evacuated.
Nicaragua has named a moderate, Education Minister Carlos Tunnerman, as ambassador to Washington in what was described as an effort to defuse Managua’s confrontation with the United States. In April, the Reagan Administration had refused to accept the nomination of Nora Astorga, a veteran Sandinista guerrilla activist and attorney, reportedly because of her alleged involvement in the 1978 assassination of General Reynaldo Perez Vega. He was a key officer of the ousted regime of Anastasio Somoza and was said to have CIA links.
Guerrillas killed eight policemen in an ambush in a remote Andean village today, a police official reported. The ambush by the Shining Path guerrillas was the latest in a series of attacks that have reportedly claimed 250 lives in the last two weeks. The police spokesman in Ayacucho, 360 miles east of Lima, said 20 policemen were on patrol when they were ambushed by the guerrillas. He said the police had received an urgent radio message asking for reinforcements and that a combined army and marine force was sent to the area. On Friday Peru’s Government extended a nationwide state of emergency for another 30 days because of the recent attacks by Shining Path. On Thursday, the police said, the guerrillas killed 27 peasants, including children, in the village of Chichuas, 62 miles from Ayacucho.
A United Nations agency has approved a plan to promote development of the world’s fishing resources, which produce nearly one fourth of the animal protein consumed in the world. Representatives of 150 countries attended the World Fisheries Conference, an eight-day meeting sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The conference ended Friday in Rome. The conference emphasized the need to develop small fisheries in developing countries, called for increased self-reliance by the fishing industries of coastal nations and urged greater international trade in fish products.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservatism in the term just ended was unmatched in the Court’s recent history. A grouping of Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, and Justices William H. Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, Byron R. White, and Lewis F. Powell Jr., prevailed in most of the decisions that split the Court along ideological lines. Their decisions accepted the Reagan Administration’s interpretation of Federal statutes, and, in a decision upholding the Government’s authority to restrict travel to Cuba, they deferred to the Administration’s views on foreign policy.
Social Security experts criticized President Reagan’s latest statements about the program, saying his remark in a television interview that many people, especially young people, now paying in, will never be able to receive as much as they are paying in tax contributions, was misleading. Robert M. Ball, a former Commissioner of Social Security, Walter F. Mondale and Alicia H. Munnell, a vice president and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, also disagreed with Mr. Reagan.
President Reagan participates in a national radio address on crime in America. President Reagan said Saturday Americans are “fed up with fear in our streets” and urged them to write their congressmen to prod them into acting on his package of bills to crack down on crime. It was the second time in as many days, and the fourth time in recent weeks, Reagan raised the issue, sounding a popular campaign theme used to great effect by President Nixon in his 1968 campaign.
Citing a drastic drop in crime during his tenure, Reagan said in his weekly paid political radio address from Camp David, Maryland: “Believe me, we in the administration are trying to speak up for you, the millions of Americans who are fed up with crime, fed up with fear in our streets and neighborhoods, fed up with lenient judges, fed up with a criminal justice system that too often treats criminals better than it does their victims.” He said, “Too many Americans have had to suffer the effects of crime, while too many of our leaders I have stuck to the old discredited liberal illusions about crime, illusions that refuse to hold criminals responsible for their actions.”
President Reagan rides his horse around the Camp David grounds.
The President and First Lady watch the movie “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”
Three prominent Mayors have emerged as serious contenders for Walter F. Mondale’s running mate, according to Mondale campaign aides, who are divided over Senator Gary Hart’s prospects for second place on the Democratic ticket. The mayors are Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, Dianne Feinstein, of San Francisco, and Henry G. Cisneros, of San Antonio. Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro of Queens, remains a leading candidate despite a somewhat disappointing meeting with Mr. Mondale last week, the aides said.
An Amtrak train derailed in Williston, Vermont, killing at least four people and injuring more than a hundred of the 275 people aboard. The 13- car train went off the track while crossing a washed-out culvert. The train was bound from Washington to Montreal. Officials said tonight that two people were believed to be still inside the sleeping car, which overturned in a shallow pool of water. Rescue workers using blowtorches and a crane continued searching for survivors late into the night. “Bodies were just falling every which way,” said one passenger on the northbound Montrealer, Frank Coles of New York City. “People were screaming for help.” The crushed car at the bottom of the gully was a sleeper with 10 to 20 compartments, rescue workers told United Press International. “The compartments are crushed and pancaked on one another,” said one worker, Charles Logsdon.
A paddlewheel boat capsized on the Tennessee River in Huntsville, Alabama, killing 11 of the 18 people aboard. The triple-deck boat overturned in a severe thunderstorm trapping passengers under it. The accident was one of several that occurred while rainstorms lashed much of the eastern half of the country. Rains that washed out a culvert were blamed for the deaths of at least four passengers and injuries to scores more in a derailment of Amtrak’s Montrealer near Burlington, Vermont. The boat, with 18 passengers aboard, left Ditto Landing, a Huntsville municipal boat harbor, at 10 A.M. It was returning to the landing when it ran into a thunderstorm at 11:10 A.M., said Alabama Marine Police Patrolman John W. Clifton. About 25 minutes later, he said, a “wind shear” struck the boat broadside, about half a mile east of the landing, knocking the 27-foot-high vessel upside down and trapping all 18 aboard under water. Seven escaped, including the captain, Frank May.
Heavily armed extremists trained in guerrilla warfare are lurking in the isolated hills of northern Arkansas, and police should wear bulletproof vests to protect themselves, Governor Bill Clinton warned. State Police Director Tommy Goodwin and Clinton said their decision to specially train and equip state troopers stemmed from allegations that extremist groups were linked to the slayings of two Arkansas law officers. Goodwin said he could not say how many and what kind of extremists resided in the state, but mentioned “Posse Comitatus,” which preaches defiance of the Internal Revenue Service and federal law enforcement agents.
The American Jewish Congress yesterday threw its support behind a call by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to renew historical ties between the black and Jewish communities. Henry Siegman, who heads the Jewish organization, said, “We call on the Jewish Community to respond warmly to the N.A.A.C.P.’s call to form coalitions to further our common objectives in the areas of social justice and human rights.”
The nation’s graduate schools asked the Reagan Administration to increase the ceiling on federally guaranteed student loans to close a tuition gap they said could knock students out of high-priced professional programs. With tuition rising 14% a year in some schools, students will be priced out of the market for law, medical, dental, veterinary and other graduate degrees, school associations said in a petition to Education Secretary Terrel H. Bell. The groups asked Bell to increase the annual ceiling from $5,000 to $8,000 for schools with yearly tuition costs of $5,000 or more.
David Leroy Washington, one of two inmates scheduled for execution this week in Florida, won a stay from Dade County Circuit Judge Herbert Klein, who ruled the state must await a federal appeals court ruling on a similar case. Washington, 34, on Death Row for the slayings of three persons, had been scheduled for execution early Thursday along with Jimmie Lee Smith, who killed a woman and her 12-year-old daughter.
Two George Washington University economists have disputed a widely circulated theory that the American middle class is being eroded by permanent changes in the economy. Sar A. Levitan and Peter E. Carlson contend there has been little change. In fact, among full-time year-round workers, they say the middle-third increased its share of total earnings from 1970 to 1982. They made their report after analyzing the proportion of national earnings and income received by the middle-third of American workers and families over the last dozen years.
A bomb exploded in front of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Annapolis, Maryland, blowing a 16-square-foot hole in a wall. No one was injured. Police said no one claimed responsibility for the bombing, which was the 11th this year at offices of members of the National Abortion Federation. On Wednesday, a bomb that police said could have blown up the federation’s three-story headquarters in Washington malfunctioned and exploded, causing moderate damage. The explosion occurred about 1:30 AM outside the Planned Parenthood clinic on Bay Ridge Avenue and tore a large chunk from the building’s exterior wall and a nearby sidewalk, said Sgt. Richard Brown, a spokesman for the Annapolis Police Department. On Wednesday a bomb exploded at the National Abortion Federation offices in Washington, and its leaders called Friday for Federal help to end a “reign of terror” against such clinics.
At least two men who vowed they “would be back” after being thrown out of a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, bar fired five shots into the crowded nightspot, killing a doorman and injuring three others. The angry customers, described by witnesses as “two Latin males, or possibly three,” fired a .45-caliber gun as they drove past Penrod’s nightclub, police said. Police said at least 300 persons were in the popular tourist hangout at the time.
The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press have made a new wage offer to the Council of Newspaper Unions, which delayed its strike deadline Friday afternoon and agreed to resume negotiations early next week. The city’s two major daily newspapers on Friday offered the council, which represents three unions and 1,400 employees, wage increases averaging $25 a week the first year, and $20 the second and third years. The same proposal has been accepted tentatively by three other unions. The council is seeking raises of $34, $31, and $31. The papers previously offered the council raises averaging $18, $15, and $14.
A woman riding a new stand-up roller coaster at a St. Louis area amusement park fell to her death, authorities said. A spokesman for Six Flags Over Mid-America Park said the mother of three children, identified as Stella Holcomb of Indianapolis, may have been ill. The ride has shoulder harnesses, knee and shin restraints and when the car returned, “all restraints were locked into place,” the spokesman said. A similar stand-up roller coaster opened earlier this year at Cincinnati’s King’s Island.
Big hospital bills are being examined by auditors hired by nearly every commercial insurance company and large corporation in the nation. Concern over rising health costs is resulting in the detection of computer billing errors that a few years ago would have been unnoticed.
Singer Frankie Valli (50) marries Randy Clohessy (24).
Al Cowens clouted a three-run homer and Jim Presley hit a two-run double as the Seattle Mariners ended a six-game losing streak with an 8–4 victory today over the Blue Jays. The loss ended Toronto’s winning streak at four and it made Jim Clancy the American League’s first 10-game loser.
The Orioles get complete game victories from Scott McGregor and Mike Flanagan as they beat the Royals, 6–2 and 8–0. Flanagan allows 3 hits in the game 2 shutout. In game 1, Eddie Murray hits his second grand slam in less than three weeks.
The New York Mets rose to dramatic heights last night in Shea Stadium when they routed Mario Soto inside four innings, whipped the Cincinnati Reds, 14–4, and climbed back into first place in the National League’s East. They kept a crowd of 35,004 roaring as the rookie Dwight Gooden outpitched Soto while the Mets made a shambles of the heralded “strikeout duel” between the two pitchers. They also won their fourth straight game and the eighth in their last nine, and they produced some of their most rousing feats in a rousing season: The 14 runs were the most they had scored in a game in five years, their 18 hits were the most they had delivered this season and their seven runs in the fourth inning equaled their best time at bat this season.
Harry Spilman singled past a drawn-in infield with none out in the ninth inning to score Terry Puhl with the go-ahead run as the Houston Astros edged the Montreal Expos, 3–2. Puhl opened the ninth with a walk off the reliever Bob James (3–3). Mark Bailey followed with a sacrifice bunt, but James, attempting to retire Puhl at second, struck Puhl’s leg with the throw, and Puhl raced to third. Spilman then bounced a single beyond the reach of the second baseman Bryan Little to make a winner of the reliever Frank DiPino (2–5). DiPino worked the final one and two-thirds innings, pitching out of an eighth-inning jam.
Mike Krukow held Chicago to six hits over eight and two-thirds innings and drove in the go-ahead run with a sacrifice fly today to help the San Francisco Giants end a four-game losing streak with a 7–2 victory over the Cubs. Krukow (5–7) walked four and struck out five before being relieved by Gary Lavelle. The victory was the Giants’ first over the Cubs in seven games this season.
Wimbledon Women’s Tennis: Martina Navratilova beats Chris Evert 7–6, 6–2 for her 26th Grand Slam title. Martina Navratilova’s victory at Wimbledon over Chris Evert Lloyd gave Miss Navratilova her fifth Wimbledon singles title, her third in a row. She also evened her 11-year rivalry with Mrs. Lloyd at 30 victories apiece.
Born:
Ashton Youboty, NFL cornerback (Buffalo Bills, Jacksonville Jaguars), in Monrovia, Liberia.
Biren Ealy, NFL wide receiver (Tennessee Titans, Green Bay Packers), in Clarksville, Tennessee.
Darryl Boyce, Canadian NHL centre (Toronto Blue Jays, Columbus Blue Jackets), in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Alfredo Fígaro, Dominican MLB pitcher (Detroit Tigers, Milwaukee Brewers), in Samana, Dominican Republic.
Chris Hunter, NBA center (Golden State Warriors), in Gary, Indiana.
Eric Dawson, NBA center (San Antonio Spurs), in San Antonio, Texas.
Marie-Mai, French-Canadian singer, in Varennes, Quebec, Canada.
Died:
Carl Boenish, 43, American father of BASE jumping.
Flora Robson, 82, English actress (“The Sea Hawk”, “Great Day”, “Frieda”).
History Diaries 