Soviet cruise missiles were being developed “long before” the deployment of new American-made medium-range missiles in Europe last December, according to the Reagan Administration. The State Department discounted a claim by the Soviet Union that it tested long-range cruise missiles in response to the U.S. deployment of new medium-range weapons in Europe. A department spokesman, John Hughes said, “the Soviets have long had an active cruise missile program and have already deployed a substantial force of shorter-range cruise missiles.” The cruise is a pilotless, ground-hugging craft designed to evade radar. It evolved from the German Buzz Bomb of World War II. “The program was under development long before U.S. Pershing 2 and cruise missile deployment began.” He added that the Soviets have had medium-range cruise missiles deployed for at least a decade, both on submarines and on land.
The sixth poor Soviet grain harvest in a row appears likely. After a summer of hot, dry weather in some areas and unusually heavy rain in others, a cold snap now threatens to cut short the Siberian growing season. The United States estimates that Moscow will have to import 43 million tons of grain, only 3 million less than the record in 1982. The estimate comes at a time when heavy Soviet purchases of grain from the United States have already re-established America as a major supplier a year after the ending of the curb imposed by President Carter in response to the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. The United States and the Soviet Union signed a five-year grain agreement on August 25, 1983. The Soviet Union is also buying heavily from France, Canada and other grain producers.
The Soviet Union has not approached its crop target since the record of 235 million tons was set in 1978. Its best harvest since then was last year’s 190 million tons. This year the crucial July rainfall that farmers count on did not come to western Kazakhstan, the Urals, the north Caucasus and the Volga River basin. The parched crop is expected to be well below what they had hoped. Meanwhile, heavy rainfall has hurt the quantity and quality of the crop in the western and north-central Ukraine and western Russia. Now the early cold weather that moved in over the weekend from the Baltic Sea is chilling the northern half of the country as far south as the Ukraine, with temperatures dropping toward freezing.
The USSR performs an underground nuclear test.
Longshoremen at two ports in Northern Ireland voted today to defy a three-day-old British dock strike, in a growing rebellion against the walkout called to support the 24-week-old strike by coal miners. Striking dockworkers kept 19 ports shut, including Liverpool, Hull and Scotland’s 12 major ports. But more than a dozen others operated normally and exporters raced to get cargo out before other strike votes due to be taken later this week. The nearly unanimous anti-strike votes by dock workers at the Northern Ireland ports of Belfast and Larne on Monday indicated a growing split among the country’s 35,000 longshoremen. The Transport and General Workers Union suffered its first rebuff Sunday when 600 longshoremen at Immingham in northeast England voted almost unanimously against the strike.
French officials continued today to give assurances that no dangerous materials were released into the environment as a result of the sinking in the English Channel of a French freighter that was carrying uranium bound for the Soviet Union. Environmentalist groups accused French industry and Government leaders of secrecy and carelessness in transporting nuclear substances. Jean-Claude Hennequin, an official at the French Ministry of the Sea, said the shipment was regarded as so routine that points along the route were not given the warnings usually issued for “dangerous shipments.” The ship, the Mont Louis, collided with a car ferry off Ostend in Belgium Saturday and sank. The ship’s owner, the Compagnie Generale Maritime, said it was carrying 225 tons of uranium hexafluoride, a form of uranium used to make fuel for nuclear reactors, in 30 steel containers that raised the total weight of the shipment to 450 tons. The ship was going to Riga, in Soviet Latvia, after taking on cargo at the French ports of Le Havre and Dunkirk.
Articles on Monaco’s royal family are a staple of French magazines. The family has become a kind of Dallas/ Falcon Crest/Kennedy saga of regular weekly installments with exhaustive coverage of romances, marriages, deaths, annulments sought, perfect happiness denied.
Shimon Peres, leader of Israel’s Labor alignment, was threatened with revolt by the grouping’s left wing if he joins the rightist Likud bloc in a national unity government. Victor Shem-Tov, leader of Labor’s Mapam Party, told Israeli army radio that he would not sit in the same Cabinet with Likud. Shem-Tov controls six of Labor’s 44 Parliament seats, and their loss would cut Labor’s strength to less than Likud’s 41. President Chaim Herzog has given Peres three more weeks to form a cabinet, urging him to strike a partnership with Likud, headed by caretaker Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Military and political sources said today that fears that Lebanon’s Army could again break apart along religious lines have increased in the aftermath of the fighting Sunday along the Green Line dividing the two parts of the city. Units of the mostly Muslim Sixth Brigade in West Beirut and the Christian Fifth Brigade stationed in East Beirut fired on each other’s positions, a well-placed military source said, despite official denials issued today to the contrary. “Once it started, everybody became trigger-happy,” the source said. Although the fighting ended within four hours, the involvement of the regular soldiers along with local militiamen, coupled with the deteriorating political situation and the death in a helicopter crash of the Chief of Staff, has caused concern in the military command, the military and political sources said.
Iraq has won a military advantage in its war with Iran as a result of “massive arms sales” to Baghdad by France and the Soviet Union and an effective American-led boycott on military sales to Tehran, a staff report of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said. The report said that if Iran went ahead with a much-discussed ground assault against Iraq, this would “probably lead to a defeat for Iran.” If Iran failed in its attack, it went on, “its munition stocks would be almost depleted and the risk of a counteroffensive would exist.” Because of the shift in the military balance, Iran “faces a dilemma,” the report said. The Iranians have suffered more than 50,000 killed and wounded thus far in the four-year-old war “and lack of victory could destabilize the Government,” according to the report.
Iran’s military leaders, the survey said, “probably share a pessimistic assessment of their chances” in a frontal assault, which has been promised for months. It said the debate was continuing in Teheran and was complicated by “the poor health” of Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Iraq’s major goal, according to the report, is “to end the war quickly,” through holding off an Iranian assault and reducing Iran’s economic advantage by intensifying its attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf and possibly attacking Kharg Island, the principal Iranian oil terminal. “Because of recent French and Soviet arms sales, Iraq now has the capability to inflict severe damage on Kharg Island’s oil terminal,” the statement said. “It has probably refrained from attacking Kharg thus far because of the military costs and the political advantage of holding the threat over Iran’s head.”
Today, in the latest development in the “tanker war,” a Panamanian- registered tanker reported that it had been hit by a rocket about 70 miles northeast of Qatar on its way to the Saudi port of Ras Tanura to load oil, Lloyd’s of London said. It is presumed that the tanker, the 20,880-ton Cleo 1, was hit by an Iranian rocket, in retaliation for an Iraqi attack last Friday on a Cypriot-registered tanker, the Amethyst. Both tankers are owned by the Trodos shipping company of Greece. The Cleo 1 said she was proceeding to Dubai under emergency steering and had suffered no casualties.
A nationwide strike against martial-law rule in Bangladesh virtually paralyzed most cities, and police said 50 people were wounded in clashes between pro- and anti-government demonstrators in Dhaka, the capital. The six-hour strike was observed in large communities, with commerce and most traffic at a standstill.
The United States has signed an agreement to help China design the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, the Interior Department said. Specialists from the department’s Reclamation Bureau and from private U.S. companies will visit China late next month to begin designing the Three Gorges project on the Yangtze River. Bureau engineers assisted in early design work for a dam on the same site in the 1940s, but the project was shelved in 1947 during the political turmoil that preceded the Communist takeover. China will pay all the consultants’ costs. The dam is expected to be able to generate 13 million kilowatts of electricity, more than the 12.6 million kilowatts projected for the Iaipu dam being built by Brazil and Paraguay.
Fourteen South Pacific nations agreed to declare their region a nuclear-free zone, while stipulating that individual nations will retain the right to allow visits by U.S. nuclear-powered ships. Delegates from the 14 island countries, meeting in Tuvalu, approved a plan by Australian Prime Minister Robert Hawke to draw up a treaty designating the zone. The treaty would forbid members to possess or test nuclear weapons. The plan is not expected to deter France from continuing its underground nuclear tests at Mururoa atoll.
A U.S.-made C-47 aircraft dropping supplies to CIA-backed rebels in northern Nicaragua was shot down by government soldiers, Nicaragua’s Defense Ministry announced. A spokesman for the leftist Sandinistas said the plane was downed near Quilali, 150 miles from Managua, in the northern province of Nueva Segovia. There was no immediate word on casualties. Last October, Nicaraguan troops shot down a C-47, killing one crew member. Two other crewmen were captured and a fourth disappeared.
The Speaker of Liberia’s interim National Assembly, Major General Nicholas Podier, has been arrested in an alleged plot to overthrow the government, the Liberian Justice Ministry said. Podier, previously deputy head of state under President Samuel K. Doe, was named by former Justice Minister Isaac Nyeplu, who surrendered to police last week and spoke of the alleged plot on television. Nyeplu said Podier told him that four men now under house arrest had asked him to join in a conspiracy to overthrow Doe. Protests over the arrests led to violent demonstrations at Monrovia University last week.
The “War Against Indiscipline” is launched by the Buhari regime in Nigeria. The War Against Indiscipline was a mass mobilisation program in Nigeria, organized by the military dictatorship with the aim of correcting social maladjustment. By July 1985, newspapers such as Concord and The Guardian that were critical of corruption and mismanagement of the economy in the previous administration began panning the WAI campaign and accusing military officials of engaging in abusive practices under the cover of fighting indiscipline. Others viewed the measure as an exhortation from the military command at the top to the people below. The program was gradually discontinued after a military coup deposed Major-General Muhammadu Buhari’s military regime.
At least 10,000 black nationalist guerrillas who fought against white rule when this country was known as Rhodesia were buried in shallow graves southeast of here, Information Minister Nathan Shamuyarira said Sunday night. He said on state-run television that earlier estimates of 4,000 guerrillas buried at Rusape, 90 miles southeast of Harare, were proved incorrect recently after the government was shown army records of those killed. The government has said the victims were killed and buried by troops of the former white minority government. Mr. Shamuyarira said some of the guerrillas were killed as late as February 1980, when Britain, the former colonial master, was conducting the country’s first general elections under independence, Mr. Shamuyarira said. Four other mass graves found in around the country had been covered with tar, although these contained fewer remains, he said. The government has declared the Rusape site a national shrine.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan announces the ‘Teacher in Space’ project The first citizen passenger to fly aloft aboard a space shuttle will be an elementary or secondary schoolteacher, President Reagan announced. Thousands of Americans have flooded the national space agency in recent years with requests for the honor. The space agency said it expected to fly the teacher aloft in late 1985 or early 1986 and thereafter would fly from two to four private citizens a year on shuttle missions.
President Reagan addresses parents and students of Jefferson Junior High School, Washington, D.C.
Blacks’ enthusiasm over the Presidential candicacy of the Rev. Jesse Jackson is complicating Walter F. Mondale’s campaign, particularly in the South, where local backers of the two men are continuing to battle one another. Many Jackson partisans are angry at those blacks who worked for Mr. Mondale’s Democratic Presidential nomination, and old rivalries contribute to the disunity.
Walter F. Mondale was accused by Vice President Bush of being “so hot” for an arms control agreement with Moscow that “he will do almost anything to get it.” Mr. Bush praised President Reagan’s arms buildup at the unveiling by the Grumman Aerospace Corporation of an experimental aircraft in Calverton, Long Island, New York.
Striking teachers boycotted orientation meetings as contract disputes over salaries, class size and teacher vacancies threatened to delay school openings across Illinois. Classes for more than 10,000 students were canceled by strikes at a suburban Chicago community college, and teachers in several other districts threatened to man the picket lines later in the week. In Rockford, 500 teachers voted overwhelmingly to strike in a dispute over a new contract. The teachers are seeking an increase of 6.4%, while the board has offered an increase of about 3.8%.
Like civil rights protesters of another era, almost 600 black students from Tennessee State University marched on the federal courthouse in Nashville-but this time their banners favored segregation. The chanting, clapping and singing students-only two of them white-were protesting a proposed settlement of a 16-year-old desegregation lawsuit. The peaceful gathering protested a proposal for the state to recruit as many whites as blacks to the campus by 1993. Whites make up only 10% of the student body at the school, built for blacks when education was segregated under laws outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1950s.
A 22-year labor contract that contains $1-an-hour pay raises has been ratified by workers at the Litton Industries microwave-oven plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a union official announced. The official said the pact is a landmark agreement that is being hailed nationwide. But Mike Dolen, plant general manager, said the raises for 1,900 workers are similar to what the company has awarded every August. The contract means the average wage will go from $5.20 an hour to $6.20 by August, 1986.
A swarm of blazes, most of them out of control, continued to rage in central and eastern Montana, where 40,000 acres of range and timberland have been blackened since Saturday, officials said. More than 200 residents of Nelson and York, two small communities northeast of Helena, were urged to evacuate as the biggest of a half-dozen fires near the state capital swept eastward and leaped across the Missouri River ahead of 70m.p.h. winds, said Lewis and Clark County Undersheriff Ed Schilds.
The president of the American Postal Workers Union, which is deadlocked in a bitter contract dispute with the U.S. Postal Service, charged that the Reagan Administration is trying to intimidate the union by investigating the political activities of union President Moe Biller and other union leaders. The Postal Service acknowledged that “certain material in APWU publications relating to political activity” was forwarded to the Merit Systems Protection Board’s special counsel’s office, but it denied any attempt to intimidate Biller.
The United Automobile Workers union unveiled a series of television commercials today to tell the public it is struggling with auto companies in this year’s negotiations to keep American jobs at home and keep the nation strong. “We wanted to go directly to the American public with the message,” Owen F. Bieber, the union president, said at a news conference. The first 30-second spot, showing a car on a New York pier being gradually obscured by crates of foreign auto parts, was shown for the first time this morning on NBC’s “Today” show.
Illinois State Lottery fever surged upward with the announcement that this week’s grand prize game is projected to pay at least a record $28 million and could reach $30 million. The stakes skyrocketed because no player picked the winning combination for last week’s $19-million Illinois State Lottery grand prize jackpot — the third straight rollover since August 11, Supt. Michael J. Jones announced.
A government “sting” operation against links between organized crime and the Chicago area’s $75-million-a-year prostitution business was terminated when a key informant told the Washington Post about the operation, called Operation Safe Bet, authorities said. The informant had turned over his illicit credit card laundering service to the FBI in March, 1980, investigators said. The FBI then placed undercover agents in the credit card processing firm, which handled $30 million in payments to suburban sex clubs,
An inquiry into gang-style murders has brought the Honolulu prosecutor, Charles F. Marsland Jr., a Republican, and Hawaii’s Democratic Governor, George Ariyoshi, into a public conflict that has significant implications for the state’s political future. Mr. Marsland said the controversy centered on a confessed killer-for- hire who has named his accomplices and his employers.
A record prison population of 454,136, almost double the total of 10 years ago at a time when crime rates are declining, was reported by the Justice Department. A major reason for the sharply increased number of inmates in Federal and state prisons, according to Federal officials and other experts, is the public’s desire for maintaining law and order.
General Motors and lawyers for a paralyzed 22-year-old man reached a settlement today in a $50 million lawsuit that charged the company manufactured an unsafe Pontiac Trans Am. The lawyers refused to disclose the terms, but both sides said they were pleased. The plaintiff, Pat Davis, filed the lawsuit after he was crippled and confined to a wheelchair in a crash on January 11, 1980. He will get a home, transportation and rehabilitation, his lawyer said. Mr. Davis’s lawyers had said the car was unsafe and that G.M. used celebrities such as Burt Reynolds to lure youngsters into buying the auto. Mr. Davis was crippled when the car in which he was a passenger crashed into a pole at 90 miles an hour. The driver of the car testified that he was trying to mimic the film star at the time of the crash.
Atlanta’s zoo would be rebuilt under a management plan that civic leaders, businessmen and politicians say they hope to complete next month. After it became known that several of the zoo’s animals had died after being sold or lent to private businesses, experts across the country condemned the dilapidated, 35-acre zoo as one of the worst in the nation.
A deadly form of hepatitis caused by two viruses that act in concert in a manner never previously detected has been discovered by scientists. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people around the world have the newly diagnosed and mysterious form of the disease, called delta hepatitis.
Films portraying extreme violence against women sexually stimulated nearly a third of the men who watched them as part of a study, even though the films contained relatively little that was explicitly sexual, according to a new study. Moreover, several researchers have found that repeated viewings of films such as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” instill attitudes in the minds of viewers that are similar to those found in rapists.
Nikola Tesla invented the first radio, devised the system of electric power distribution now used throughout the world and also invented the polyphase electric motor, the bladeless steam turbine and the radio-guided torpedo. The world of science is belatedly recognizing the genius of the eccentric inventor.
Dave Kingman hits a double and homer to help Oakland score 7 runs in the 7th inning, but that’s all the A’s score in losing to the Yankees, 8–7. The Yankees had led, 6–0, but Oakland pounded three pitchers — Joe Cowley, Jay Howell and Dave Righetti — for seven runs in the seventh. Kingman led the surge, leading off the inning with his 32nd home run, off Cowley, then hitting a three-run double off Righetti. With his team trailing, 7–6, heading into the eighth inning, Bobby Meacham, the Yankees’ rookie shortstop, homered with Willie Randolph on to lift New York to its fourth straight victory and send Oakland to its 10th straight loss. Bill Caudill loses.
The Toronto Blue Jays downed the Minnesota Twins 5–2. Rance Mulliniks of Toronto set a club record for consecutive hits. He got three hits in his first three times at bat, giving him eight straight over four games. Mulliniks was replaced by a pinch- hitter in the seventh inning after the Twins had pulled to 4-2. With the count 3 and 1 on Mulliniks, a left- handed hitter, he was taken out of the game when the Twins brought in Pete Filson, a left-handed pitcher. Garth Iorg, the pinch-hitter, grounded out. Mulliniks has 9 hits in 10 times at bat in the series. He has reached base 10 straight times, including eight hits and two walks. Dennis Lamp (6-7) won his first start of the season after 49 relief appearances for the Blue Jays. He pitched hitless ball for the first three innings and then allowed three hits before Ron Musselman took over in the sixth for his first save.
Pat Sheridan and Darryl Motley each hit doubles in a six-run seventh inning that carried the Kansas City Royals to a 7–4 win over the Chicago White Sox. The White Sox have lost five of their last six games and 13 of their last 17. They went ahead 1-0 in the fourth on Greg Walker’s 18th home run. Frank White of the Royals made it 1-1 with his 14th home run in the sixth. Bret Saberhagen (7-9) scattered four hits through seventh innings. Dan Quisenberry came on in the eighth for his 35th save.
Bert Blyleven pitched a four-hitter, and Joe Carter hit two home runs to help Cleveland end a four-game losing streak, as the Indians defeated the Milwaukee Brewers, 7–1. Blyleven, who has won five straight games, improved his record to 15-5. He walked three and struck out three, working his seventh complete game of the season. Carter’s first home run came with one out in the sixth off Mike Caldwell (6-12) to break a 1-1 tie. He hit a bases-empty homer in the eighth, his sixth of the season.
The Baltimore Orioles downed the California Angels, 7–6, in ten innings. Al Bumbry, Eddie Murray, and Cal Ripken, Jr. homered for the Orioles. Rich Dauer’s sacrifice fly provided the winning run.
Ivan DeJesus hit a two-run double to lead a four-run fourth inning, and Jerry Koosman earned his 14th victory tonight as the Philadelphia Phillies beat the San Diego Padres, 9–1. Koosman (14–10) pitched seven innings and gave up six hits. Bill Campbell and Tug McGraw finished up in relief. The only run off Koosman came in the seventh on a double by Alan Wiggins. The victory was the eighth in 11 games for the third-place Phillies, who trail the Chicago Cubs by five and a half games and the Mets by half a game in the National League East.
Fernando Valenzuela, who not long ago was an awesome rookie himself, has learned for the second time this season what it must have been like for older pitchers to pitch against him in 1981. Valenzuela encountered Dwight Gooden at Shea Stadium last night, and the New York Mets’ brilliant rookie sizzled just as he did when he opposed Valenzuela in Los Angeles on May 11, when he gave up four hits and struck out 11. This time Gooden allowed five hits and struck out 12 as the Mets defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers, 5–1.
The San Francisco Giants edged the Montreal Expos 5–4. Bob Brenly of San Francisco doubled home a run with one out in the 11th inning to break a 3-3 tie, then the pitcher Frank Williams made it 5-3 with a run-scoring single. Williams (9-2) gave up a run in the bottom of the 11th on an r.b.i. single by Gary Carter. Carter leads the National League with 94 runs batted in. After the Montreal reliever Jeff Reardon (5-7) retired the first batter in the 11th, Jeff Leonard drew a walk and stole second. Brenly followed by blooping a double just inside the right-field foul line.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1227.92 (-8.61).
Born:
Amanda Fuller, American actress (“Last Man Standing”), in Sacramento, California.
Died:
Billy Sands, 73, American actor (Phil Silvers Show, McHale’s Navy).
Bernard Youens [Popley], 69, British actor (Coronation Street, Somewhere in Politics), dies from a heart attack.
History Diaries 