Margaret Thatcher escaped unhurt when a powerful explosion damaged the English seaside hotel where the Prime Minister and other ministers were staying for the annual Conservative Party conference, her office in London said. A police spokesman said at least 20 people had been injured, but it was not known whether their injuries were serious or whether any members of the Prime Minister’s entourage were on the casualty list. Two policemen were among those hurt. The Associated Press reported that at least two people were known to have been killed.
The blast, apparently caused by a bomb, blew out dozens of windows and tore a long gash in the upper three stories of the facade of the Grand Hotel. It was heard more than a mile away. Cabinet ministers and other senior officials were among those who rushed down fire escapes or fought their way through the smoke that filled the central stairway of the hotel. They were in Brighton for the Conservative Party’s annual conference, which is to end later today. According to an aide, Mrs. Thatcher was at work in her suite on the fifth floor of the Victorian structure when the explosion occurred at 2:50 AM. The room “seemed to lift and then subside,” the aide told reporters, and the Prime Minister suggested that they had better get out of the hotel quickly. She was spirited out a back door and driven away at high speed in a police patrol car. Later, at the main Brighton police station, Mrs. Thatcher said all the windows in her sitting room were blown out and the bathroom in her suite was badly damaged. She said she feared that many people might be buried under the rubble in the dusty hallways of the hotel.
The police refused to confirm officially that the explosion was caused by a bomb rather than a gas leak or a similar accident. But other sources said a bomb had almost certainly been planted on the fifth or sixth floor of the hotel, and one source said that another “suspicious package” had been found by the police at the adjacent Metropole Hotel, where many of the other ranking delegates to the conference have been lodged this week. When the explosion happened, Mrs. Thatcher was working on the speech with which she would close the conference. She is a very light sleeper and often works late into the night.
Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said in Stresa, Italy, today that the Soviet Union had substantially increased the number of SS-20 nuclear missiles trained on Western Europe. He declined to say how many more of the medium-range missiles had been deployed. Mr. Weinberger made the comment in remarks to reporters at the close of the first day of a meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization defense ministers on nuclear strategy. Mr. Weinberger said that United States intelligence had pinpointed the number of additional SS-20’s deployed by the Russians this year, but that the figure would not be made public now. The most recent estimate by NATO, released last December, was 378 SS-20’s.
A single newspaper reporter would be included in a national press pool that would be formed to cover the initial stages of any surprise military operation, the Pentagon announced in reversing a decision. On Wednesday department officials disclosed that a pool to cover the operations, such as the United States invasion of Grenada a year ago, would include representatives from news agencies, radio, television and news magazines but not from newspapers. Pentagon officials had said the news agencies could provide coverage for newspapers. Newspaper executives immediately protested the decision.
A commuter train crashed into a standing freight train near a northwest London station in the evening rush hour today, killing at least 6 people and injuring 60, the authorities said. The passenger train, carring as many as 500 people from London’s Euston station on a run to Bletchley, 45 miles to the northwest, apparently hit the side of the freight a short distance from Wembley Central station, a Fire Department spokesman said. The accident occurred at 6:10 PM. Alex Murray, a spokesman for British Rail, said the eight-car passenger train was switching tracks when it hit the freight and the first two coaches overturned.
Six small bombs exploded in Marseilles, four went off in the southern city of Toulon, and one blew up at the Biarritz airport early today. The airport bomb destroyed a radio navigation installation. The other blasts caused little damage. No injuries were reported. Responsibility for the Marseilles and Toulon bombings was claimed by the Corsican National Liberation Front. An anonymous caller said the bombs were planted to back demands that arrested members of the underground group be granted the status of political prisoners. A French Basque group claimed responsibility for planting the airport bomb. President Francois Mitterrand is due to visit the Biarritz area on Friday.
Italian police arrested the entire city administration of the Sicilian city of Isola Delle Femmine, northwest of Palermo, for allegedly working as a criminal organization with connections to the Mafia, sources said in Rome. The politicians of Isola Delle Femmine allegedly favored friends and relatives as well as the Mafia in granting public building contracts. Meanwhile, five top members of the state prosecutor’s office in Catania were transferred for failure to fulfill their duties and one was arrested for alleged links to the Mafia, authorities said.
More than 155 Pentecostal Christians in the Soviet Far East are completing a month-long hunger strike to press their requests to emigrate, Western diplomats said. The protest, which began September 15 and is to continue through Monday, involves 55 adults and more than 100 children in the village of Chuguevka, about 4,000 miles east of Moscow on the coast of the Sea of Japan, sources reported. Seven members of the fundamentalist faith, who took sanctuary in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow for almost five years, were granted exit visas in 1982.
Soviet grandmasters Anatoly Karpov and Gary Kasparov agreed to a draw without resuming play in the 11th game of their world chess championship. The game was adjourned Wednesday after Kasparov’s 41st move. Karpov, 33, retains a 4-0 lead in the series and needs two more victories to retain his championship. The draw was the seventh in the championship series, in which draws are not scored. The next game in the Moscow match is scheduled for today.
The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Jaroslav Seifert, a Czechoslovak poet, the Swedish Academy announced. The award to Mr. Seifert, who is 83 years old and considered his country’s national poet, cited work that “provides a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man.”
Iran and Iraq may both mount offensives in the coming months in their Persian Gulf War, but neither is likely to gain a decisive advantage, a report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies said. Robert O’Neill, director of the authoritative London-based institute, says the sides remain balanced despite the fact that Iraq has almost doubled its tank force from 2,360 to 4,820 and has increased its combat aircraft force from 330 to 580. Iran, however, still holds an overwhelming advantage in army manpower and reserve strength.
The death toll from an Iraqi air attack on a Liberian-registered tanker in the Persian Gulf has risen to nine with the deaths of two Hong Kong seamen in a Tehran hospital, the ship’s owners said. The tanker was hit on Monday as it steamed toward Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal. In all, six Hong Kong sailors, two Britons and an Indian died.
Lieutenant General H. M. Ershad, President of Bangladesh, said today he would gradually lift martial law starting next month if opposition parties agreed to participate in parliamentary elections in December. Addressing a crowd of more than 100,000 people at a pro-Government rally, General Ershad said that martial law, which has been in effect for 30 months, will continue if the opposition insists on boycotting the elections scheduled for December 8. General Ershad, who took power in a bloodless coup in March 1982, said martial law will be completely ended the day an elected parliament goes into session. He said if the opposition agrees to participate in elections, military courts would be eliminated and two martial- law administration offices would be abolished beginning Nov. 1, marking the first phase of the lifting of martial law. The country’s principal opposition parties, which are grouped in alliances of 15 parties and 7 parties, have threatened to boycott the elections unless General Ershad lifts martial law first and allows a neutral caretaker government to conduct the elections.
Benigno S. Aquino Jr. was shot to death by one of his Philippine Government escorts in a wide-ranging military conspiracy, according to a key document being considered in the inquiry into the assassination of the opposition leader. The document is a 497-page memorandum compiled by four lawyers who assisted the citizens’ panel that has been investigating the slaying. The lawyers did most of the questioning and cross-examination of the 193 witnesses during the panel’s 11-month investigation.
Salvadoran rebel leaders said they would attend a meeting with President Jose Napoleon Duarte on Monday unless they find that security is inadequate at the site. In an interview, a rebel leader, Ruben Zamora, said here that efforts to resolve security and other procedural issues with Mr. Duarte before the meeting had so far been unproductive. Later, at a news conference, Mr. Zamora and another guerrilla leader, Guillermo Manuel Ungo, said that they intended to travel to El Salvador on Monday to meet with Mr. Duarte despite the unresolved procedural issues about the meeting. Mr. Zamora also said that the rebels had supplied a “detailed document with our positions to the Government of El Salvador” but as yet there had been no response by the Salvadoran Government.
The guerrillas’ position about meeting with Mr. Duarte appeared to shift during the day from one that focused on security considerations to a more receptive attitude.
Six black high schools in the South African township of Atteridgeville reopened after being shut down for five months by a boycott. Only about a third of the students returned to the school near Pretoria, and they were dismissed early to study the government’s plan for democratically elected student councils, one of the boycotting students’ demands. Job Schoeman of the Department of Education and Training said 2,300 students showed up for school in the six high schools in Atteridgeville Township outside Pretoria. Mr. Schoeman said other boycotts continued in townships east and south of Johannesburg, with more than 100,000 black students staying away from classes. The boycotts were begun for a variety of reasons, including charges of inferior education for blacks.
A Bush-Ferraro debate was marked by repeated clashes over President Reagan’s policies. Vice President Bush offered impassioned defenses of Mr. Reagan. In contrast, Geraldine A. Ferraro spoke at a deliberately slow pace as she hammered at Mr. Reagan’s record and accused him of negligence in the bombings of American facilities in Lebanon.
The President said his performance in the Sunday debate with Walter F. Mondale resulted from too much study and too little relaxation. Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, the general chairman of the Republican re-election campaign, said the President had been “brutalized” and “smothered” by the debate preparation process.
President Reagan participates in a ceremony in observance of Minority Enterprise Development Week.
President Reagan receives two sculptures from Tony Quinn.
President Reagan enjoys lunch with Vice President Bush.
Walter F. Mondale attracted an unusually large crowd of perhaps 10,000 people outside the Capitol steps and told them the Presidential race was now “wide open.” It was an unusually attentive crowd, like those at other big rallies in Detroit and Pittsburgh after Mr. Mondale’s debate Sunday with President Reagan.
Walter F. Mondale’s performance in the Presidential debate has sharply boosted his fund-raising efforts. New York’s loyal Democrats and affluent political figures jostled one another Wednesday night to pick up tickets for a $1,000-a-plate black-tie dinner for Mr. Mondale.
The first U.S. female space walker is Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan. She floated outside the shuttle Challenger, 140 miles above the earth, for more than three hours with Lieutenant Commander David C. Leestma. They also successfully tested a system for refueling satellites in space.
The Senate went on record today in favor of ratification of the United Nations treaty condemning genocide. The vote, which did not constitute formal approval of the treaty, was the Senate’s first official declaration on the issue since it received the matter 35 years ago. The treaty makes it an international crime to kill or harm national, ethnic, racial or religious groups or members of those groups. It has its roots in the genocide inflicted upon European Jews in World War II by Nazi Germany. It has been ratified by 96 nations.
A $470 billion spending bill won final approval in Congress. Jubilant but exhausted, the lawmakers also put the finishing touches on an increase in the debt limit as the 98th Congress prepared to adjourn.
An immigration bill died as Congress adjourned. The legislators had shaped comprehensive legislation after much labor, but failed to pass it. The issue was put over to next year, when action will have to start all over again. Democrats and Republicans blamed each other.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied a fourth appeal from attorneys for Linwood Briley, clearing the way for his execution Friday night at the Richmond, Virginia, prison. Briley, 30, a leader of the biggest Death Row breakout in U.S. history last May, was convicted of the 1979 murder of a Richmond country and western disc jockey. Briley, his brothers, James and Anthony, and Duncan Meekins were linked to 11 murders in the Richmond area in 1979. Meekins testified for the prosecution and received a life sentence. James is also on Death Row, while Anthony is serving a life sentence.
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger blocked temporarily the planned abortion of a retarded, deaf and blind woman who was apparently sexually assaulted in a Baltimore state institution. Burger, acting on an emergency request aimed at preventing 19-year-old Wendy Marie Baker from obtaining the abortion sought for her by a guardian, postponed a lower court’s authorization for the abortion and ordered that the guardian file a response by today. When Miss Baker became pregnant, about six months ago, she was splitting her time between state schools for the blind and for the retarded. Officials said they were not sure where the assault took place because Miss Baker could not tell them. The state court that authorized the abortion also appointed Gerard E. Mitchell to act as attorney for the fetus. Mr. Mitchell appealed to Chief Justice Burger after the Maryland Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, refused to review an appeal on Wednesday.
Two quintuplets born to a 22-year-old woman have died as the remaining three prematurely born infants fought for their lives in incubators. The first baby died shortly after Melissa Graser gave birth to the girls by Caesarean section. The second died shortly before noon at Polyclinic Hospital in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where she and the three other infants were transferred after their birth in nearby York. Another infant was in extremely critical condition.
Opening arguments began in New York in retired General William C. Westmoreland’s $120-million libel suit against the CBS documentary “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.” Westmoreland contends it falsely accused him of deceiving President Lyndon B. Johnson about enemy troop strength before the 1968 Tet offensive in South Vietnam. Westmoreland lawyer Dan Burt called the program “a work of fiction” and CBS lawyer David Boies said the jury would find that the 1982 broadcast “is true, is accurate and is well supported.”
Striking Disneyland unions said today that they would file an $18 million lawsuit over citizens’ arrests by park officials involving six union leaders who picketed near ticket booths. The suit, which was to be filed in Orange County Superior Court, asserts the arrests by Disneyland officials “caused humiliation, emotional distress and damage to the reputations” of those taken into custody, a union spokesman Bob Bleiweiss, said. The arrests occurred Monday when the union leaders and 150 strikers defied a court order barring them from picketing near the park’s main ticket booths. The unions contend the order was improperly issued and the state Supreme Court has blocked further enforcement pending an appeal.
A federal grand jury in Rochester, New York, has indicted five men in connection with a scheme in which authorities said 21 jobs at Eastman Kodak Co. were sold for up to $1,000 apiece. Four of the defendants face three to eight counts each in the alleged violation of the Hobbs Act, which prohibits interference with commerce by means of extortion. Each count is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The indictment alleges that in 1981 and 1982, 21 Kodak job applicants paid from $500 to $1,000 each to four of the defendants to land jobs at Kodak.
A federal judge in Denver sentenced Cattle King Packing Co. owner Rudy (Butch) Stanko Jr. to six years in prison and fined him $70,000 on his conviction of selling contaminated meat to commercial buyers. U.S. District Judge Sherman Finesilver said Cattle King had betrayed “a trusting and uninformed public” who expect to find untainted meat at supermarkets and restaurants. Stanko’s packing plants had been among the largest suppliers of ground beef to the federal school lunch program.
The Miami City Commission has approved a $1.1-million settlement with the parents of a black man killed by a Latino police officer, whose acquittal sparked civil disturbances. The settlement stemmed from the 1982 shooting of Nevell Johnson Jr. in a video arcade by Miami police officer Luis Alvarez. It ends all claims by Johnson’s family against the city, Alvarez, and former Police Chief Kenneth Harms. A unanimous vote by the four commissioners present Wednesday awarded the family $250,000 in cash. The city will also buy an annuity for $210,000 that will pay Mr. Johnson’s parents and siblings monthly benefits guaranteed to total $539,000. These are estimated to reach $847,000 over their lifetimes. The actual total cost to the city for the package is nearly $460,000. Mayor Maurice Ferre called the settlement “very fair.”
Ratification of a tentative pact between the General Motors Corporation and the United Automobile Workers appeared likely as historically militant locals in Flint and Pontiac approved the agreement by substantial margins. However, some top union leaders cautioned against premature optimism.
Directors of the debt-ridden World’s Fair have cut six top executives from the payroll but retained the president, despite a “no confidence” vote by a state- operated committee overseeing the exposition’s finances. The cuts Wednesday were designed to trim expenses in the six-month fair’s final days and will save about $434,000 in executive salaries before the closing November 11, said Floyd Lewis, chairman of Louisiana World Exposition, the private company putting on the fair. Although the president, Petr Spurney, was kept on, his salary was cut. The publicly appointed Fiscal and Finance Committee, charging that the fair had been poorly managed, had recommended replacing Mr. Spurney. However, Gov. Edwin Edwards’s representative on the committee said the panel could not force this. The changes leave only three top fair executives on salary.
August Wilson’s stage drama “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”, starring Theresa Merritt, and Charles S. Dutton, opens at the Cort Theatre, NYC; runs for 276 performances.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1183.08 (+5.85)
Born:
Martha MacIsaac, Canadian actress (“Superbad”), in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Max Ramírez, Venezuelan MLB catcher and first baseman (Texas Rangers), in Barquisimeto, Venezuela.
Dominique Zeigler, NFL wide receiver (San Francisco 49ers), in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Olaniyi Sobomehin, NFL running back (New Orleans Saints), in Portland, Oregon.
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