The trial of four Solidarity advisers on charges of plotting to overthrow the Polish system was adjourned by a military court in Warsaw. The tribunal cited a pending decision in Parliament this weekend on a general amnesty for political prisoners. The defendants are Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik, Zbigniew Romaszewski and Henryk Wujec.
The announcement had spurred speculation whether an amnesty would affect the four Solidarity advisers. Several people associated with the Solidarity movement, which is now banned, said that the extent of the amnesty would be signaled by what happened in court today. “If they go ahead with the case this morning and let Jacek testify,” a former Solidarity official said, “it would indicate that the powers will let the trial run its course. If there is an adjournment, it would suggest that they do not want Kuron and Michnik to use the trial as a forum and that the four could be amnestied.” The trial, which opened Friday and then adjourned until today, was to have resumed with a statement by Mr. Kuron, who was expected to deliver his own indictment of the Government. Many people believe that he forced the Government to convene the trial by staging a brief hunger strike to further his demand for a hearing.
Britain and Argentina began talks on their dispute over the Falkland Islands. The negotiations, in Bern, Switzerland, are the first public talks between the two countries since Britain won an 11-week war in the islands two years ago. The talks, called “an informal exchange of ideas” by Argentina, were arranged through the mediation of Switzerland and Brazil and had no formal agenda.
British grants to John Z. DeLorean for his auto manufacturing plant in economically blighted Northern Ireland were assailed by a multiparty Parliamentary committee in London. The panel accused successive Labor and Conservative governments of “one of the gravest cases of the misuse of public resources” for many years.
A truck containing what Soviet officials called nine tons of diplomatic baggage left Switzerland for West Germany, ending a one-week customs dispute. The Geneva-bound tractor-trailer truck entered the country last week from Moscow, and Swiss customs officials sealed it at the border when accompanying Soviet officials refused to declare its contents or allow inspection, claiming that it was not subject to customs control. During the impasse, the truck sat on the grounds of the Soviet mission to the United Nations.
The Central Committee of the French Communist Party decided early this morning to put off a decision on joining the government being formed by the new Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius. The Communist leader, Georges Marchais, said at a 3 A.M. news conference that the party had not been satisfied with the responses that Mr. Fabius gave to Communist leaders Wednesday night on economic policy and unemployment. Mr. Marchais’s statement, which came after a four-hour Central Committee meeting, raised the possibility that the Communists, junior partners in the Socialist-led Government since 1981, would no longer participate in the governing coalition. But Mr. Marchais avoided responding to questions on the subject. “That’s a question that will be examined in good time,” he said.
Israel said its gunboats seized a Lebanese ship that was involved in a Palestine Liberation Organization attempt to land terrorists in Israel for a “mass murder attack.” The military command said the gunboats stopped the 750-ton ship Ulah off the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli “several days ago,” adding that its eight crew members are still being interrogated. The military command said it captured the ship after it had earlier lowered a rubber dinghy with four guerrillas for an abortive attack on an unspecified Israeli target. The four guerrillas escaped.
A Sikh sect rebuffed efforts by the religion’s head priests and went ahead with volunteer work to repair the Golden Temple in Amritsar, damaged in last month’s assault by Indian troops who routed Sikh extremists. Santa Singh, leader of the Nihang sect, led a workforce of nearly 1,000 people, including women and children carrying baskets on their heads to clear debris. Five Sikh high priests and the Sikhs’ Akali Dal party objected, saying repairs should begin only after the troops withdraw.
The British Government today ruled out holding a referendum in Hong Kong to assess public opinion on the acceptability of any agreement on China’s takeover of the colony in 1997. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, told Parliament there were drawbacks to a referendum and the Government instead proposed setting up an office in the colony to assess the views of the public. “In the special political circumstances of Hong Kong, it is important to avoid the risk of provoking factional divisions or disturbances which could themselves leave the result of a referendum open to real doubt,” he said. His statement came hours after the Hong Kong government published plans to make the colony of 5.3 million people more democratic before sovereignty is transferred back to China.
A change in Mexico’s policy in Central America is sensed by Reagan Administration officials. They said they believed that Mexico was retreating from its strong support of the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua and the leftist insurgents in El Salvador. Salvadoran rebels living in Mexico say they are feeling pressure from the Mexican Government of President Miguel de la Madrid to curtail their public activities. Mexico has halted all shipments of oil to Nicaragua pending payment of old oil bills, sent its Foreign Minister to El Salvador for the first time in four years last month, and noticeably has not repeated past public statements endorsing the Salvadoran guerrillas.
About 1,000 people led by opposition politicians defied a police ban and marched on Parliament in Nassau to demand the resignation of Bahamian Prime Minister Lynden O. Pindling. A royal commission is investigating charges that Pindling and members of his Progressive Liberal Party government took huge payoffs to allow the Bahamas to become a haven for drug smugglers.
President Reagan opened a new campaign for military aid to El Salvador and to CIA-backed Nicaraguan rebels, denouncing leftist-ruled Nicaragua as “a totalitarian dungeon.” Speaking to a meeting of conservative activists in Washington, Reagan urged Congress to vote for $21 million in new funding for the Nicaraguan guerrillas and $117 million for the Salvadoran armed forces, which are battling leftist rebels. Democrats have said they will oppose the increased aid when Congress returns on Monday.
Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte, on a trip aimed at consolidating El Salvador’s improved image in Western Europe since elections in May, thanked the West German Government today for a decision to resume economic aid. The aid was suspended five years ago because of El Salvador’s human-rights record. “This fills me with happiness and satisfaction,” Mr. Duarte, who is on the first leg of a Western European tour, said at a news conference here, “because I can go back to my country and say that the doors of Germany are open to help the poor people of El Salvador, those who suffer.”
The South African police said today that a 24-year-old black man died while in their custody early Monday in the town of Parys, a small settlement south of Johannesburg that had been gripped the day before by riots. But police officials denied assertions by civil rights activists and lawyers that the man, Johannes Ngalo, had been detained in connection with unrest set off by rent increases in the black township of Tumahole. They said the man had been arrested in a white residential area for drunken behavior. Mr. Ngalo was detained some time on Sunday — the precise timing differs in the versions provided by activists and the police — and he was found dead in a police cell at 4.30 AM Monday. According to Priscilla Jana, a lawyer acting for his family, the police did not notify the family until 8 AM Tuesday. In the last 20 years, about 50 political detainees have died in South African police custody.
Unrest erupted in Tumahole township when about 1,000 youths rioted to protest against rent increases. The police used tear gas to disperse the crowds.
The Soviet Union reported that three cosmonauts, including a woman, have docked their Soyuz spacecraft with the Salyut 7 orbiting space station. Moscow radio said the new arrivals will join three male cosmonauts who have been aboard the station since February. The official Tass news agency said that the cosmonauts, veterans Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Svetlana Savitskaya, a flight engineer on her second mission to the space station, and rookie Igor Volk are all doing well. They are expected to stay in the space station for about a week. Savitskaya, 35, who visited Salyut 7 in 1982, became the first woman to make more than one space flight.
Democratic Convention: Walter F. Mondale won the 1984 Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party tonight, capping a grinding campaign that tested his stamina and exposed deep divisions within the ranks of his party. Delegates to the 39th Democratic National Convention nominated the former Vice President on the first ballot. When his tally passed a nominating majority of 1,967 delegates, jubilation swept over Mr. Mondale’s supporters, who triumphantly waved blue-and-white placards bearing the name of the new nominee. In defeating Senator Gary Hart and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Mr. Mondale was put over the top by 115 votes from New Jersey, which had passed on the first call of the states.
Immediately after the votes were cast, a party torn for months by intense rivalries at last enjoyed a hard-won moment as Mr. Hart and Mr. Jackson called for unity. Then, Mr. Mondale swept into the Moscone Center to join them. At the moment of their appearance, in a striking tableau usually reserved for a convention’s final night, the low-ceilinged hall resounded with celebration. Mr. Mondale thanked those who supported him and appealed for the help of all Democrats in the general election against President Reagan.
Walter F. Mondale is preparing a strategy against President Reagan that will build on his natural political base in the industrial Northeast and Middle West and will hinge on winning crucial electoral votes in several Southern and farm states.
American Jewish leaders welcomed the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s reaffirmation of the traditional bonds between blacks and Jews but disagreed with the foreign policy aspects of his Tuesday night speech to the Democratic National Convention.
Hispanic Americans were optimistic that their campaign to block Congressional enactment of a comprehensive immigration bill would succeed. As evidence of progress, they noted that the Democratic National Convention had adopted a platform denouncing the measure.
San Francisco seems to be absorbing with relative ease the influx of thousands of Democrats, journalists and political addicts attending the party’s national convention. People are hawking not only souvenirs, food and drink but also ideas and are passing out leaflets and staging generally well-behaved demonstrations in confined areas.
At least 21 people were killed and a dozen others wounded when a heavily armed man opened fire at a McDonald’s restaurant in the Southern California town of San Ysidro, the authorities said. They said that police sharpshooters surrounded the restaurant and killed the berserk gunman, 41-year-old James Oliver Huberty, with one shot. At the time, the massacre was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history, being surpassed seven years later by the Luby’s shooting. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in California’s history.
On July 15, 1984, James Huberty had commented to his wife, Etna, that he suspected he had a mental health problem. Two days later, on the morning of July 17, he called a San Diego mental health clinic, requesting an appointment. Leaving his contact details with the receptionist, Huberty was assured the clinic would return his call within hours. According to his wife, Huberty sat quietly beside the telephone for several hours, awaiting the return call, before abruptly walking out of the family home and riding to an unknown destination on his motorcycle. Unbeknownst to Huberty, the receptionist had misspelled his name as “Shouberty”. His polite demeanor conveyed no sense of urgency to the operator, and he had elaborated in the phone call that he had never been hospitalized for mental health issues; therefore, the call had been logged as a “non-crisis” inquiry, to be handled within 48 hours.
That was yesterday. Today, he killed 21 people.
Without any ceremony, President Reagan today quietly signed the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984. It will raise taxes by about $50 billion and reduce spending by $13 billion through 1987. This legislation is the main portion of the “down payment” toward reducing the budget deficit that Congress and the Administration have been working on this year. The rest of the down payment is still unresolved. The Government must decide how much to save by slowing the growth of the military budget. Depending on that decision, which Congress is expected to wrestle with when it returns next week, the deficit reduction through 1987 is expected to total between $140 billion and $180 billion. Although President Reagan is philosophically opposed to raising taxes, he supported this deficit reduction package, which includes most of the particular tax increases his Administration proposed this year.
President Reagan participates in a meeting to discuss a budget issue concerning privatization of LANDSAT with the budget review board.
President Reagan meets with representatives of leading aerospace companies.
President Reagan addresses the Executive Committee and volunteers of the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control.
The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, must begin an 18-month prison sentence Friday for income tax evasion, a federal judge ruled in Waterbury, Connecticut. Moon, 64, spiritual leader of 3 million church followers worldwide, was convicted in 1982 for failing to pay taxes on $162,000 in interest earned on nearly $2 million kept in New York bank accounts. Moon claims the money was all church contributions and he was merely the custodian. His appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was refused on May 14.
Three Mile Island plant owners are preparing to remove the top of the unit 2 reactor vessel next week to provide access to the radioactive debris inside nearly five and a half years after the plant experienced the nation’s worst commercial nuclear accident.
A heavily armed special force of law officers was assembled today with tracking dogs and helicopters to renew the back-country search for Don Nichols and his son, Dan, who were suspected of abducting a woman athlete, then shooting her and a would-be rescuer. The authorities say the two men kidnapped Kari A. Swenson, 23 years old, of Bozeman, a member of the United States women’s biathlon team, while she was jogging Sunday in the mountains several miles from the ranch where she worked. Miss Swenson was chained to a tree when two searchers arrived at the Nichols’ camp Monday morning, the authorities said. Miss Swenson was shot in the chest and one of the searchers was shot to death. Miss Swenson, rescued about four hours later, has been in stable condition in a hospital at Bozeman.
Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. charged before a House subcommittee that the $2.5-million TF-30 jet engines used in the $20-million F-14 Tomcat fighters since 1971 are so “terrible” they have caused 24 accidents, including one last weekend in the Arabian Sea. Captain Lee Tillotson, the Navy’s F-14 program coordinator, said, “I don’t think there’s any question” that the problem engine creates a greater risk for pilots in combat because of “a very high probability of engine stalling. From the very start, you essentially teach the pilots to fly the engine as a priority over flying the airplane,” Tillotson said in an interview.
Consumer groups and business associations alike condemned a Consumer Product Safety Commission proposal to give safety endorsements to specific products, saying that to do so would stall future safety innovations. The groups also said the endorsements — which might apply only to one safety feature of a given product — could mislead consumers into thinking that the product as a whole had been found safe by the commission. “The commission’s role is to correct safety problems… It is not to promote the sale of products,” Mark Silbergeld, a Consumers Union official, told a hearing before the commission.
Three persons, including a retired New Orleans police sergeant, were arrested in New Orleans by the FBI in the $6.5-million Thanksgiving Day, 1983, robbery of a Wells Fargo terminal in Memphis, Tennessee, authorities said. No money was recovered from the robbery, which a prosecutor said was masterminded by the retired sergeant, James F. Broussard, 41, of New Orleans, the brother of a Wells Fargo guard, who also was arrested. Broussard’s sister, Marie D. Reitmeyer, 36, of Memphis, a former Wells Fargo guard, was said to have been on duty during the robbery.
Two more postal unions broke off contract negotiations with the U.S. Postal Service, imperiling talks for 600,000 workers as a Friday deadline approached. Labor negotiations between the two largest mail-carriers unions — with 500,000 members — and the Postal Service remained stalled. Postal officials say they have contingency plans in event of a walkout.
The final 13 cases involving children born with deformed limbs after their mothers took the drug thalidomide during pregnancy were settled out of court in Cleveland. The drug’s manufacturer, Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., must provide for the lifetime care of the 13 Canadian victims, now in their mid-20s. Thalidomide, a sedative, was never legally available in the United States.
About 8% of the nation’s cropland is so “highly erosive” that no amount of careful tillage can keep it from washing away, an Agriculture Department report said. It said about 33 million acres of land will lose more than five tons of soil per acre each year from water erosion no matter what kind of cultivation methods farmers use-except putting it to permanent sod or less-intensive land use. A loss of five tons per acre is the most that soil can lose in a year and still maintain its productivity.
In a predawn sweep, sheriff’s deputies in Maryland’s Prince George’s County today awoke 80 people and jailed them on charges of failing to pay child support. After the arrests, another 60 people surrendered to the authorities in connection with nonsupport cases. “It’s a shame we have to lock people up to get them to do their basic responsibilities, like putting food on the kitchen table,” said Irv Smith, a spokesman for the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department. Two weeks ago, the county, in a mass mailing, offered amnesty to the 2,700 residents wanted for nonsupport. Only 21 took the opportunity and officials obtained arrest warrants for 400 delinquent parents.
A Continental Trailways bus today slammed into the rear of a tractor-trailer in Wyoming, killing one bus passenger and injuring 12 people, the authorities said. Darwin Diede, 51 years old, of Ipswich, South Dakota, who had been working in Colorado and was on the way home, was crushed to death, said Coroner Roger Radomsky of Laramie County. The bus was on the way from Denver to Rapid City, South Dakota. The bus driver was hospitalized in critical condition and the truck driver was hospitalized in satisfactory condition. The other injured were treated at area hospitals and released.
Hospital emergency helicopter services are proliferating around the country, generating a debate on their value and cost. Proponents say the helicopters save lives by speeding people to hospitals in emergencies, particularly in rural areas. Critics contend the helicopters are often dispatched unnecessarily and that their use is driving up the cost of care for all patients.
As the New York Yankees continued their second-half surge yesterday with a 3–1 victory over the Texas Rangers, they also made the first move in their plan to shed some of their high-priced veteran players. Roy Smalley was the first to go, moving in a trade last night to the Chicago White Sox. The Yankees, whose victory over the Rangers was their seventh in eight games since the All-Star break, made the deal for two minor league players to be named. A club source said the Yankees would choose the players from a list of minor leaguers later in the season.
Dave Kingman hit his league-leading 26th home run and drove in three runs, and Ray Burris held the Boston Red Sox to four hits, as the Oakland A’s won, 7–2. Burris (9-4) took a no-hitter into the sixth inning. Jackie Gutierrez hit a routine grounder to Donnie Hill, the Oakland shortstop, and beat it out for Boston’s first hit. Tony Armas hit his 25th home run in the seventh for the first Red Sox run.
Mike Schmidt drove in four runs with a pair of homers and a bases-loaded single tonight to power the Philadelphia Phillies to a 7–5 victory over the Cincinnati Reds, completing a three-game sweep. It was the Phillies’ first three-game sweep at 14-year-old Riverfront Stadium. Their last sweep in Cincinnati came in July 1956 at Crosley Field. The Phillies strung together six consecutive singles with two out in the third inning for four runs off Jeff Russell (4–11), the starter. Schmidt’s two-run single opened the floodgates, and Tim Corcoran and Sixto Lezcano followed with run-scoring singles. Schmidt drilled bases-empty home runs in the fifth and seventh, giving him 20 for the season and three in his last three games.
The New York Mets survived seven innings of three-hit pitching by Nolan Ryan tonight and defeated the Houston Astros, 3–1, on a two-run home run by Keith Hernandez. It was the 14th victory in the last 17 games for the Mets, and their 8th in 12 games against the Astros this year.
At Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Darrell Porter belts a 2-out 11th inning walk-off grand slam to give the Cardinals an 8–4 win over the San Francisco Giants. All the runs are charged to Bob Lacey.
The Pirates’ Tony Pena had three hits and drove in two runs to back the six-hit pitching of Larry McWilliams as Pittsburgh stopped the Los Angeles Dodgers, 5–2. McWilliams (5–8) survived seven walks with the help of two double plays and a throw by the right fielder, Doug Frobel, that halted a fifth-inning Dodger rally.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1111.64 (-11.26).
Born:
Allen Craig, MLB outfielder and first baseman (World Series Champions-Cardinals, 2011; All-Star, 2013; St. Louis Cardinals, Boston Red Sox), in Mission Viejo, California.
Charles Gordon, NFL cornerback (Minnesota Vikings), in Carson, California.
[No, it wasn’t an automatic weapon. It was a semi-automatic carbine, a pump action shotgun, and a pistol. But that isn’t sensational enough for the media, hence the original AP caption.]
History Diaries 