Responsibility for bombing the American Embassy near East Beirut last month was laid to a Muslim militant group in Lebanon. United States Intelligence agencies said the group, known as Hezbollah, was based in eastern Lebanon and was also involved in terrorist attacks last year against the United States Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut and the American Embassy in Kuwait.
West Germany closed its embassy in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to visitors after it became “filled to capacity” with more than 40 East Germans seeking political asylum in the West, a government spokesman said. Spokesman Peter Boenisch said in Bonn that negotiations have begun with East Germany but that Communist authorities “advised that they are no longer prepared to grant permission to emigrate to asylum-seekers who try to force it.” There was no indication that the closure will affect Bonn’s diplomatic relations with Czechoslovakia.
A Government spokesman said today that Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou did not approve of the shooting down of the Korean Air Lines passenger jet by the Russians last year, despite his assertion Wednesday that the plane was on an “espionage operation for the American C.I.A.” “Condemning the espionage mission is one thing, and approving the shooting down of the plane is another,” the spokesman, Dimitrios Maroudas, told reporters. “The Prime Minister’s statement did not mean approval of the downing of the plane.” The Greek leader, who has often provoked criticism from Greece’s Western partners for his pro-Soviet policies, made the assertion Wednesday night in a speech before the legislators of his Socialist Party.
A Pentagon spokesman, Michael Burch, described Mr. Papandreou’s accusation today as “a completely irresponsible statement by the Government. “I believe that they know better,” Mr. Burch said.
The militant leftist leader of Britain’s nearly seven-month-old coal miners’ strike, Arthur Scargill, defied a contempt of court summons and said he would go to jail rather than abandon the walkout. At the High Court in London, a justice adjourned the contempt case against Scargill for six days to give him “time to reflect.” Scargill, the miners’ union president, was declared in contempt of court last week when he announced that he would ignore a High Court ruling declaring the strike illegal because no national ballot of miners was taken.
A diver today found the last container of uranium hexafluoride trapped in the wreck of a French freighter, ending a six-week search for the radioactive cargo. Divers had been plumbing the depths for the 15-ton cylinder since Saturday, when all but the last of 30 such barrels were retrieved from the freighter Mont Louis. The vessel sank August 25 after colliding with a North Sea passenger ferry. The final container was retrieved today after it was found by a Dutch diver. He had first unsuccessfully searched the forward section of the ship’s hull, the spot where the yellow cylinder was believed to be, loose from its chains and hidden by a mass of other cargo. When he could not find it, the unidentified diver swam six to nine feet up inside the hull, where he bumped into an unexpected object. It proved to be the container.
Three men described by Israeli police as Jewish religious fanatics were convicted in Jerusalem of planting booby-trapped grenades at Christian and Muslim holy sites that injured a nun and a Muslim clergyman. Israel Armed Forces radio said the three, arrested in March, confessed to 14 attacks and attempted attacks against churches and mosques since last year. Under a plea bargain agreement, charges on 11 counts of attempted murder were changed to “causing grievous harm,” the radio said. The three were identified as Amram Dery, 25, his cousin, David Dery, 22, and Uri Ben-Ayoun, 24.
Lebanon wants America to negotiate the withdrawal of 15,000 Israeli troops from its lands instead of negotiating directly with Israel, according to Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Rashid Karami. Mr. Karami’s comments, which came in an interview in Manhattan, underscored the problems that have arisen since the new Israeli Government said it was ready to withdraw from southern Lebanon in a matter of months if its security needs in northern Israel were met.
In addition to rejecting direct talks with the Israelis, Mr. Karami also said his Government would not accept Israel’s proposal that the South Lebanese Army, a Lebanese militia that Israel is now supporting in southern Lebanon, remain and play a major role in providing security for northern Israel once the 15,000 Israeli soldiers leave. He insisted that the Lebanese Government’s army could police the area in southern Lebanon adequately, with the assistance of United Nations forces. Mr. Karami’s position was immediately scorned by senior Israeli officials who were in New York yesterday with Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir. One said that if Mr. Karami was serious “he may have to wait a long time before we leave.”
Libya denied Egyptian charges that it plotted to bomb the Aswan Dam and block the Suez Canal, calling the accusations “a pretext for aggression.” A commentary by the Libyan news agency Jana said the charges were designed to detract attention from Egypt’s domestic problems and to show its support for U.S. policies. The press agency characterized the accusations as “pure fabrication designed as a pretext for an aggression” against Libya. Al Akhbar quoted Mr. Mubarak as saying that Egypt had received information about a Libyan conspiracy against the dam and canal that was confirmed by a Libyan Air Force pilot who defected to Egypt in May.
The press agency also denounced a statement Wednesday by Alan Romberg, a U.S. State Department spokesman, that the Egyptian accusations were consistent with previous “aggression in the area” by the Libyan ruler, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. “Romberg’s statements strongly confirm that the Egyptian regime’s policy is run from Washington and not in the Egyptian capital and that the charges fabricated by the Egyptian regime are, in fact, American charges couched in Egyptian terms,” the press agency said. Mr. Romberg also said that the United States had “persuasive circumstantial evidence” that Libya was involved in the mining of the Red Sea. Egypt has also directed accusations at Libya but has said it had no conclusive proof. Explosions in the Red Sea and Gulf of Suez have damaged at least 19 ships since July 9.
Nine Afghan rebels have been sentenced to death and one to 15 years in jail for setting off a bomb at the Kabul airport August 31 that killed 13 people and wounded 207, the official Kabul radio reported today. The radio, monitored in Pakistan, said the death sentence handed down by a revolutionary court would be carried out after approval by the Revolutionary Council. The radio gave casualty figures for the first time. Western diplomats had earlier estimated 28 people were killed and 350 wounded.
Vietnam said today that it agreed in principle to an American proposal for the emigration of some 40,000 Vietnamese to the United States, including some 10,000 political prisoners and 8,000 American soldiers’ children and their mothers. Vietnam’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Lê Mai, said his country was ready to allow the migration if Washington would accept all “criminals” being held in Vietnamese “re-education” camps. “If the U.S. Government agreed to receive all the criminals, the two countries can sit down and talk,” he told reporters after a daylong meeting with Robert L. Funseth, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State involved in refugee programs, at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan called for “steady efforts… to clear the way for a substantial improvement in relations with the Soviet Union and its East European allies.” The statement, in Chun’s budget message to the National Assembly, was his first conciliatory gesture to Moscow since September, 1983, when the Soviets shot down a Korean Air Lines jetliner that strayed over Soviet territory, killing all 269 people aboard. South Korea, host to the 1988 Summer Olympics, has no formal diplomatic links with any Communist country.
Communist insurgents could take power in the Philippines within a decade unless President Ferdinand E. Marcos institutes basic reforms, Richard L. Armitage, U.S. assistant secretary of defense, told a House subcommittee on foreign affairs. He said the Communist New People’s Army has grown to 10,000 armed men and has influence in about 20% of Philippine villages. A Communist victory “would be quite devastating for the United States,” Armitage added.
Eden Pastora Gomez returned to Nicaragua to resume his 17-month- old battle to topple the Sandinista Government in Managua even though he has sold his gold Rolex watch to pay overdue bills, close advisers have deserted him and CIA financing has been cut off. “We are fighting alone, immensely alone,” Mr. Pastora said, raising hands scarred by a bomb that killed five others during a news conference four months ago at Tauro Camp, a clandestine base in Nicaragua, across the Costa Rican border.
Argentina and Chile announced tonight that they had reached “full understanding” in their century-old territorial dispute over the Beagle Channel. President Raul Alfonsin of Argentina, speaking at a ceremony in which he received an award for his work on human rights, did not give any details of the agreement but read the text of a communiqué also made public in Rome and in Santiago, Chile. The disputed area is at the southern tip of South America.
America refused to give sanctuary to six political fugitives in South Africa who face detention without charge or trial. The fugitives are members of two groups that organized a boycott of August elections for a new three-chamber parliament. Ambassador Herman Nickel said in a message to the fugitives’ lawyers that the United States Government did not provide sanctuary but had in the past granted temporary refuge “in the exceptional cases of imminent bodily harm to the visitor.” “This is not, in our judgment, the position in which your clients find themselves,” Mr. Nickel said of the six fugitives. The message was distributed to reporters by the embassy as a press release.
The Senate passed a spending bill to finance operations of the Government for the next 12 months, but the action came too late to avert a one-day furlough of 500,000 Federal employees. The House of Representatives passed its version of the bill September 25. Lawmakers must still resolve many differences between the two versions and it was uncertain whether President Reagan would sign any compromise.
President Reagan and Vice President Bush participate in a briefing for a group of incumbent Republican Members of Congress and Congressional candidates.
President Reagan participates in two practice sessions for the debate.
George Bush resumed campaigning in Memphis, as his staff portrayed the Vice President as an ordinary taxpayer at war with the Internal Revenue Service. On Wednesday, he released tax information that showed he paid the revenue service $198,000 in back taxes and interest.
A Federal agent accused of selling secrets to Soviet spies had a record of discipline problems at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to law-enforcement sources in Los Angeles. Richard W. Miller had a record of discipline problems at the Federal Bureau of Investigation long before his arrest on charges of selling secrets to Soviet spies, according to law-enforcement sources. They say that agents in the Los Angeles office are rankled and that some of them question why superiors allowed Mr. Miller to work in the high-security area of counterintelligence.
Morale at the bureau in Los Angeles was severely shaken by the dismissal and arrest of the first agent in FBI history to be accused of espionage. Mr. Miller, who worked for the bureau for 20 years, appeared before a Federal Magistrate in San Diego today. He was ordered held for a preliminary hearing in Los Angeles October 15. The Associated Press quoted his lawyer as saying Mr. Miller would plead not guility to the charges of conspiracy to provide national defense information to a foreign government. In the tension and emotion of the last two days, speculation has arisen within the agency here that personal favoritism based on religion, coupled with a bureau tradition of protecting its own people, may have influenced some officials in the Los Angeles division to shield Mr. Miller.
Present and former officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation insisted today that espionage charges against a bureau agent represented an isolated event and not a broader security problem. “I see no evidence of a breakdown in discipline or moral values,” said W. Raymond Wannall, former assistant director in charge of the bureau’s intelligence division. “I don’t see where this calls for any reorganization or change.” Mr. Wannall and James R. Malley, president of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, both said they were gratified that the bureau had conducted its own investigation and arrested the suspect agent, Richard W. Miller. Mr. Miller, who was arrested in San Diego Tuesday night, has been accused of conspiring to sell classified documents to a female Soviet agent in whom he had a sexual interest. According to the bureau, he gave the woman, Swetlana Ogorodnikova, classified materials on American foreign counterintelligence that she passed on to the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco.
John W. Hinckley Jr., confined to a mental hospital after shooting President Reagan in 1981, may not receive the greater privileges he was seeking, a Federal district judge ruled today. Mr. Hinckley had asked that he be given unrestricted access to telephones and journalists and be permitted daily strolls in the yard of the hospital. Judge Barrington D. Parker rejected the request on the advice of psychiatrists. Mr. Hinckley has been confined at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital since June 1982.
Acknowledging the rapid growth of women in the American workforce, a House committee urged a major increase in federal tax breaks for child care and incentives for schools and employers to provide day care for the children of working mothers. Rep. George Miller (D-California), chairman of the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, said that 45% of all mothers with children less than a year old work outside the home and that the percentage is expected to increase.
Wildlife agents arrested 20 people suspected of poaching in raids in several states that signaled the end of a three-year undercover investigation into illegal big game hunting. The Federal and state agents carried out the raids in Montana, Colorado, California, Wyoming, Texas, Florida, Maine and Nebraska.
A Hong Kong immigrant wanted in the killing of 13 persons last year at a gambling den in Seattle’s Chinatown was arrested in Canada, the FBI announced. Wai-Chiu (Tony) Ng, 27, was captured “without incident” in Calgary, Alberta, and his extradition will be requested. Ng was one of three young immigrants from Hong Kong charged with 13 counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder in the shooting of gamblers and employees at the Wah Mee gambling club on February 19, 1983. The other two men — Benjamin Ng, 21, no relation to Tony Ng, and Kwan Fai (Willie) Mak, 23 — were convicted of the murders last year.
Former House Judiciary Committee member Charles E. Wiggins was confirmed as a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Wiggins, a Republican, sat on the panel that voted articles of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon. Wiggins, 56, who lives in Virginia, served for 12 years as a congressman from northern Orange County, California.
The Justice Department charged in a civil suit that the owners of four large apartment complexes in the predominantly white suburbs of Mount Prospect and Palatine, northwest of Chicago, refused to rent to blacks. It was the 10th housing discrimination case filed in the Chicago area since the Reagan Administration took office.
The legalization of abortion in the United States has led to an “arrogant cynicism” about life that has permitted “the deliberate killing of handicapped infants” in hospital nurseries, Bishop Francis J. Mugavero charged in a pastoral letter to be read this weekend at Roman Catholic masses in Brooklyn and Queens. The letter will be read as part of the observance of “Respect Life Sunday” in Catholic churches around the country. The statement by the Bishop, leader of the Ddocese of Brooklyn, drew conclusions about abortion that went beyond those drawn in the Sunday messages prepared by other prelates, including Archbishop John J. O’Connor of New York. Bishop Mugavero wrote: “Abortion has led our society to accept other evils and worst of all, it has encouraged acceptance of the falsehood that man controls the right over life and death. From this arrogant cynicism our country now has come to accept the deliberate killing of handicapped infants in many of our hospital nurseries.”
A Philadelphia doctor was charged with murder today after the authorities said he had illegally tried to perform an abortion and denied care to the baby, which died. The mother was 32 weeks’ pregnant when Dr. Joseph Melnick performed the operation September 12, said Edward Rendell, the District Attorney. The 3-pound, 9-ounce baby died about 90 minutes after birth because she lacked oxygen and the normal care given after birth, according to the medical examiner who performed the autopsy. Hillel Levinson and Richard Sprague, Dr. Melnick’s attorneys, called the charges “untrue.”
Government scientists say that a recent outbreak at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, shows that measles, the disappearing childhood disease, remains a problem on American college campuses. Thirty-seven measles cases between April and June were traced to an outbreak among students and others at Dartmouth, the national Centers for Disease Control reported. In 1980, only 1.5% of the nation’s 13,506 measles cases occurred on campuses, but 19.8% of last year’s cases were at colleges.
Unionized officers aboard 66 commercial tankers have started a “job action” against five companies in a contract dispute, threatening to shut down all the tankers as soon as they dock, a union official said today. The International Organization of Masters, Mates and Pilots, representing ship captains and first mates, is “refusing to man the ships,” said Sam Thompson, spokesman for the 15,000- member union, which is based here. The companies are the Maritime Overseas Corporation of New York, with 21 ships; Marine Transport Lines of New York, 17 ships; Moore-McCormack of New York, five ships; the Keystone Shipping Company of Philadelphia, 20 ships, and the Trinidad Corporation of St. Louis, three ships.
The Environmental Protection Agency, jumping into the genetic engineering fracas, established the first government controls on pesticides developed from genetically altered bacteria. In an interim policy statement expected to be published next week, the agency said that researchers must get EPA approval before they can test any genetically engineered pesticide outside the laboratory. Research so far on a new generation of microbial pesticides developed through recombinant DNA research has been confined to sites where they could not be released into the environment.
In Game Three of the National League Championship Series, the San Diego Padres take a lead in an National League Championship Series game for the first time, and they go on to down the Chicago Cubs. The series moved to San Diego, and the Padres staved off elimination with a convincing 7–1 win. During pregame ceremonies, the normally reserved Padres shortstop Garry Templeton encouraged the crowd by waving his cap. He ended a Cubs’ rally in the first inning with an acrobatic catch of a line drive from Leon Durham. However, San Diego actually fell behind 1–0 in the second when Chicago’s Keith Moreland doubled and came home on Cey’s single to center. The Cubs threatened to score more that inning, but Templeton made another excellent play, diving to his right on a line drive from Dernier that appeared destined for left field. But the Cubs would get no more off Padres starter Ed Whitson, while San Diego’s bats finally came to life with seven runs in the fifth and sixth off of Dennis Eckersley. Terry Kennedy and Kevin McReynolds led off the fifth with back-to-back singles, then scored on Garry Templeton’s double, giving San Diego their first lead of the series at 2–1. One out later, Templeton scored on Alan Wiggins’s single to make it 3–1, Padres. Next inning, Tony Gwynn hit a leadoff single, moved to second on a groundout and scored on Graig Nettles’s single. George Frazier relieved Eckersley and allowed a single to Kennedy before McReynolds’s three-run home run gave the Padres a commanding 7–1 lead. Rich Gossage pitched a dominating ninth inning to wrap up the win for San Diego, their first postseason win in franchise history.
“It was the loudest crowd I’ve ever heard anywhere”, said Gossage, a former New York Yankee. Gwynn agreed as well. Jack Murphy Stadium played “Cub-Busters”, a parody of the theme song from the 1984 movie Ghostbusters. Cub-Busters T-shirts inspired from the movie were popular attire for Padres fans. Prior to the game, fans in the parking lot were lynching teddy bears, and singing the “We ain’t ‘fraid o’ no Cubs” lyrics from “Cub-Busters”.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1187.39 (+4.53)
Born:
Zach Miller, NFL tight end (Jacksonville Jaguars, Chicago Bears), in Wahoo, Nebraska.
Kelly Talavou, NFL defensive tackle (Baltimore Ravens), in Santa Ana, California.
Drew Stubbs, MLB centerfielder (Cincinnati Reds, Cleveland Indians, Colorado Rockies, Texas Rangers, Atlanta Braves, Baltimore Orioles, San Francisco Giants), in Atlanta, Texas.
Petri Kontiola, Finnish NHL centre (Chicago Blackhawks), in Seinäjoki, Finland.
Álvaro Parente, Portuguese auto racer (British F3 Championship, 2005; Formula Renault 3.5 Series, 2007), in Porto, Portugal.
Lena Katina, Russian pop singer (t.A.T.u. – “All the Things She Said”), in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union.
History Diaries 