About 100 threats a week against United States embassies and other installations abroad are being received by Government agencies, Administration officials said. “The volume is staggering,” a State Department official said. Intelligence officials said particular attention was being paid to a possibile terrorist attack against the United States not only in the Middle East but in such areas as Latin America as well. They said information has been received in the last month that cannot be disregarded pointing to an attempted terrorist attack an American installation just before the election on November 6 in the belief that this might hurt President Reagan’s re-election chances.
“The Iranians have read that they helped bring down Jimmy Carter in 1980,” a State Department official said. “Why not try to do the same to Reagan?” He was speaking of the holding of American hostages by radical Iranians, which was sanctioned by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The hostages were not released until Mr. Reagan’s Inauguration Day in 1981. Robert C. McFarlane, the White House national security adviser, said on the NBC News program “Today” that he expected terrorist attacks against Americans to continue. “I think the prospects are that there will be further attacks,” he said, “not only in Lebanon in the short term, but elsewhere in the Middle East.” The chances of new acts of terrorism, he said, are “about 70 percent.”
Poland’s government condemned the kidnapping of a pro-Solidarity priest as an act of “political banditry” aimed against the leadership of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski. Spokesman Jerzy Urban said the abduction of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko “was aimed against the many positive processes which are taking place in Poland, such as the normalizing of relations with Western countries.”
The Roman Catholic Church issued a report today charging that four Solidarity activists were kidnapped and beaten in February by a clandestine group near the place where a pro-Solidarity priest was abducted last Friday. The report was prepared by Solidarity activists in the region where the abductions were said to have occurred. The church made it public amid a search for the Rev. Jerzy Popiełuszko, an outspoken Warsaw priest who was abducted from his car near Torun by two unidentified assailants, one wearing a police uniform. The report said a group called the Anti-Solidarity Organization abducted four former Solidarity members near Torun in February and released them after 48 hours of beatings, death threats and interrogations. The report said the authorities did not investigate.
Amnesty International, issuing its annual report, cited human rights abuses in 117 countries and singled out the record number of U.S. prisoners on death row and the Soviet practice of confining dissidents to psychiatric hospitals. The London-based organization accused Iran and Saudi Arabia of inflicting “cruel and inhuman” floggings and amputations. And it pointed to torture by security forces in Chile and by both government and rebel forces in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. In the United States, the American Legal Defense Fund recently reported 1,420 prisoners on death row. Amnesty International opposes the death penalty.
Western nations welcomed an unexpected agreement on a budget freeze by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Diplomats said Third World delegates accepted the agreement on the 1986-87 budget in hopes it will persuade the Reagan Administration to reconsider halting U.S. participation in UNESCO at the end of this year. U.S. delegate Jean Gerard had told the UNESCO executive board that a zero-growth plan would be a “truly significant sign of change.”
Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko reportedly said the Kremlin is waiting for the United States to make the next move in the stalled arms negotiations. Visiting Finnish Foreign Minister Paavo Vayrynen, after a talk with Gromyko in Moscow, said Gromyko told him that the superpower talks cannot resume until Washington demonstrates “a will for constructive negotiations.” He reportedly added that Soviet leaders see no sign of American flexibility.
Konstantin U. Chernenko announced a long- term land reclamation program today that he said would reduce the ravages of fickle weather on Soviet crops. The Soviet leader presented the program at a daylong meeting of the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee, at which he also said that the 1984 grain crop would fall “substantially short” of plans and that the supply of animal feed would be tight. Although there had been speculation that the Central Committee might disclose changes in the leadership line-up, none were announced. Mr. Chernenko said the reclamation program envisaged a 60 percent expansion in the combined area of irrigation and drained swamps by the year 2000. So far, 82 million acres have been reclaimed from southern deserts and northern wetlands. The total area in crops and pasture is 1,370 million acres.
NBC airs BBC footage of the Ethiopian famine.
Iran said today that it had won a “spectacular victory” against Iraq in a battle in the central sector of the front. A statement said Iran had retaken 20 square miles of territory near Meimek in Ilam Province. The Tehran radio, describing the operation, put Iraqi casualties at 3,700 and gave no Iranian figures.
Iraq said today that its warplanes and helicopter gunships continued strikes against Iranian positions in the central sector. Iraqi jets made 100 sorties and helicopter gunships made 10 combat missions, leaving Iranian positions in flames before all the aircraft returned to base safely, the Iraqi High Command said.
Soviet troops in Afghanistan looted and pillaged Kandahar twice in one week in a search for rebels who have turned the country’s second largest city into a virtual no man’s land, Western diplomats said in New Delhi. Rebels then raided three military posts around Kandahar, 280 miles southeast of Kabul, killing four Afghan soldiers and capturing a “large number,” the diplomats said.
The French Communist Party today suspended links with the ruling People’s Democratic Party in Afghanistan to protest the jailing of a Jacques Abouchar, a French journalist. Mr. Abouchar, who represents the Antenne 2 television channel, was jailed by a Kabul court last weekend for 18 years for illegal entry after being detained by Soviet troops while traveling with Afghan rebels. A French Communist Party statement said: “The Communist Party severely condemns the verdict on Jacques Abouchar, whose rapid trial can only shock, and at which he did not have the help of a French lawyer. The party has decided to suspend relations with the Afghanistan People’s Democratic Party until this demand is satisfied.”
The slaying of Benigno Aquino Jr., the Philippine opposition leader, was the result of a military plot, according to the five-member group investigating the 1983 murder. After a nearly yearlong inquiry, the panel unanimously rejected the contention of the military that Mr. Aquino had been killed by a lone gunman hired by Communists.
President Ferdinand E. Marcos announced today that he would refer the findings of the citizen’s panel investigating the assassination last year of the opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. to a special court “because military men are involved.” The assassination had ignited an outpouring of anti-Government protest and worsened the Philippines’ economic problems. The five-member board unanimously rejected the government assertions that a lone Communist gunman, Rolando Galman, was somehow able to penetrate a 1,199-man security guard around the Manila International Airport and shoot Mr. Aquino at point- blank range. However, the board was split over how high up in the military hierarchy to go in naming officers involved in the alleged conspiracy. In particular, the board split over naming General Fabian C. Ver, chief of staff of the armed forces, and a close associate of President Ferdinand E. Marcos.
Australian lawmakers rejected a recommendation that two frozen embryos be destroyed and instead passed an amendment calling for an attempt to implant them in a surrogate mother. The special amendment, passed by the Victoria state Parliament, also provides for children resulting from the procedures to be adopted. The embryos have been in legal limbo since the death in a plane crash last year of Mario and Elsa Rios of Los Angeles. They had been trying to have a test-tube baby in a Melbourne hospital, where the wife’s egg was impregnated by a donor’s sperm.
The death of four senior Salvadoran officers was reported by an Army spokesman in San Salvador. He said the leading combat commander of the Salvadoran Army, Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, was among those killed in a helicopter crash in rebel-held territory. Their deaths appear to be the most significant setback the Army has suffered in five years of war here. An army spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Ricardo Cienfuegos, said at a news conference tonight that Monterrosa died at about four o’clock this afternoon near the town of Joateca in Morazan Province, 120 miles northeast of the capital.
Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government sent a strong protest to the United States over a guerrilla handbook prepared by the CIA for Nicaraguan rightist rebels. The manual “constitutes new material proof of the official policy of state terrorism against the Nicaraguan people,” said a letter dispatched to Secretary of State George P. Shultz. The manual contains “how-to” instructions that appear to endorse tactics such as kidnapping and assassinations. In Washington, the CIA told Congress it has ordered the manual recalled.
The opposition newspaper La Prensa did not appear Monday after 10 articles it planned to publish were censored by the Government. Six of the articles concerned the announcement by an opposition presidential candidate, Virgilio Godoy Reyes, that he and his Independent Liberal Party were quitting the election campaign.
The Vatican radio said today that four kidnapped missionaries, including a Roman Catholic priest from New York, had been released by Sudanese guerrillas after seven weeks. The radio said the four were freed Thursday and flown to the Catholic Mill Hill mission in Khartoum. “They are in good health,” the Rev. Pallhuber Heinrich, proctor general of the Rome congregation of the Mill Hill missionaries, said. He said the freed Mill Hill missionaries were the Rev. Peter Curtin Major, 45, of Syracuse, New York, and the Rev. John Ashworth from Britain. The two other victims were identified as the Rev. Zachariah Chatin, a Sudanese Catholic priest, and the Rev. John Konb, a Sudanese Presbyterian.
A crackdown on South African blacks was announced by a police spokesman. He said about 7,000 army troops and police officers raided the black township of Sebokeng just before dawn, searching the township’s 20,000 houses and arresting about 350 people on charges ranging from possession of firearms to having pornographic material. The troops then moved on to two neighboring townships after violence flared in them.
A coalition of religious leaders called a news conference in Washington to condemn “the ideology of nuclear Armageddon,” and the session became an abrasive exchange on religion in politics after leaders of the religious right accused the speakers of subjecting President Reagan to an unfair test of faith.
A letter signed by “Ronnie Reagan” in 1960 that likened John F. Kennedy’s program to those of Marx and Hitler was made public by Walter F. Mondale. Mr. Mondale, in campaign stops before big and enthusiastic crowds in Youngstown, Ohio, and the University of Michigan, said Mr. Reagan sent the hand-written letter to Richard M. Nixon during the 1960 Presidential campaign.
President Reagan campaigns in Oregon and then leaves for Ohio. The President, despite loud heckling, pledged to continue the “second American revolution” as dissenters shouted, “There you go again!” Several dozen hecklers shouted repeatedly in a generally friendly rally of 4,000 people at the University of Portland in Oregon, presenting the most vocal dissent Mr. Reagan has heard in his campaign.
The economy under the President looks healthier than it did in the 1970’s. But it will be months, perhaps years, before economists know whether the Reagan Administration has built a sounder economy or merely the illusion of one.
Airplane safety rules adopted by the Federal Aviation Administration will require airplanes carrying more than 30 passengers to install a fire-blocking layer in seat cushions in about two years. The flame-retardant material covers the foam portion of the cushion and should delay by 40 to 60 seconds the time that it takes for the foam to catch fire after an accident — adding precious extra time for passengers to escape. A second new regulation requires these planes to be equipped in two years with emergency floor-level lighting to keep aisles visible as smoke spreads through the passenger cabin.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced the first housing development grants awarded under a program intended to assist inner-city neighborhoods and rural communities. The grants, totaling $288 million for 141 projects in 34 states, are targeted for building new rental units or performing major renovation work. More than 20% of the 14,462 rental units to be created must be set aside for lower income families, those with incomes below 80% of the median income in a locality. Projects are slated for a dozen cities in California.
Control of radioactive material in the air is not necessary now, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, because, it said, they do not represent unreasonable risks to public health. Environmental groups accused the agency of violating a court order and the Clean Air Act.
The STS 51-A launch vehicle, with the Space Shuttle orbiter Discovery, moves to the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center.
The deaths of CIA employees on secret missions are cloaked in anonymity. No one mentioned where or how Richard C. Spicer died when his family and friends buried him Monday in Warren, Pennsylvania, mourners said. The 53-year-old pilot was reportedly one of four CIA employees who were killed in a plane crash in El Salvador last Friday.
Strikes by teachers in five states idled 40,000 students and Chicago teachers faced a December 3 deadline for a walkout that would affect an additional 400,000 students. In Idaho, teachers in Twin Falls were locked out of school for the second day, but school board members said they were determined to open school today. The teachers staged a one-day walkout Friday and the school board then locked them out. Negotiations were scheduled in the Roselle, New Jersey, School District, where teachers struck Monday in a dispute over money.
Film made for a CBS documentary on the Vietnam War but not used shows that an Army officer told the network that President Lyndon B. Johnson knew about a dispute over official estimates of enemy troop strength, a lawyer for General William C. Westmoreland said. Outtakes — film not used when the documentary was broadcast — of an interview with Colonel Gains Hawkins were played for a federal jury in Manhattan in Westmoreland’s libel suit against CBS. The outtakes showed that Hawkins, chief of an intelligence unit in Vietnam, told CBS producer George Crile, a defendant in the suit, that he believed Johnson “certainly” had access to a dispute over estimates of enemy troop strength in 1967.
An ex-Green Beret booted from his Texas State Guard command for being too “gung-ho” says he’ll form the group into a private armed militia. Robert Holloway, former commander of the disbanded 105th Texas State Guard Battalion, said the militia will be “capable of assuming any role, to include combat in defense of state or country.” The National State Defense Force Association will be ready to be activated if the governor calls upon them for help during a war or other disaster, he said. “I’m neutral politically,” said Holloway, 36. “We are not survivalists… We’re not a pack of weirdos or crazies. It’s just a method of keeping the guys together.”
A woman dying of cancer who tried to commit suicide by stabbing herself in the abdomen can refuse surgery for her self-inflicted wounds even though she will probably die, a judge has ruled. Naomi Schumann, 55 years old, is dying of breast cancer she has had for five years and is not expected to live another year, her attorney said. She was in stable but serious condition today at Martin Memorial Hospital in Stuart, Florida after stabbing herself four times with a butcher knife at her home Sunday. Attorneys for the hospital sought an emergency injunction Monday ordering life-saving surgery after Mrs. Schumann refused an operation.
A serious shortage of timber by the year 2000 is in prospect in Maine, the most heavily forested state in the nation. The shortage, according to experts, has been caused by a major infestation of spruce budworm, the fact that much of Maine’s spruce and fir forest is coming to maturity at the same time and a rapid expansion of the paper business in the 1960’s and ’70’s.
“New crime cartels” from Asia are spreading in America, according to Attorney General William French Smith. He was the first witness to testify as the President’s Commission on Organized Crime opened three days of hearings in Manhattan.
A former Pennsylvania state employee, four other people and two corporations have been indicted by a federal grand jury that alleged they took part in a scheme to pay thousands of dollars in kickbacks for a state contract, a federal prosecutor said today. The indictment accuses the defendants of a “large-scale organized effort to bribe Pennsylvania public officials” in order to get a no-bid state contract to recover overpayments of Social Security taxes, which were made by 200,000 state public school employees from 1979 to 1981, said David Dart Queen, a United States Attorney. The contract was awarded by the Treasury Department in May to Computer Technology Associates Inc.
The wife of the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, has filed a $5 million suit against Mr. Hubbard’s son, charging “massive fraud” in his 1982 effort to have his father declared legally dead or mentally incompetent. The suit was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court Monday by Mr. Hubbard’s third wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, the stepmother of Mr. Hubbard’s oldest son, Ronald DeWolf. The suit charges that Mr. DeWolf and his Massachussetts attorney, Michael Flynn, attempted a “massive hoax” while trying to have Mr. DeWolf declared trustee of the Hubbard estate. Mr. DeWolf, a Nevada resident, legally changed his name from L. Ron Hubbard Jr. in 1972.
Incessant thunderstorms dumped almost 12 inches of rain over Louisiana’s bayou country, flooding homes and businesses and forcing evacuation of hundreds of people. One person was killed when a car was swept off a road. National Guard trucks were the only vehicles that could get around the flooded streets and roads, and centers for evacuees were set up at schools and National Guard armories. Widespread flooding was reported throughout Lafayette, Vermilion, St. Martin and Iberia parishes. Governor Edwin Edwards declared the four parishes a disaster area.
James C. Petrillo died in a Chicago hospital at the age of 92. As president of the American Federation of Musicians, Mr. Petrillo was one of the nation’s most storied and controversial union leaders and a man who exercised immense authority in the American music world.
Oskar Werner died of a heart attack at the age of 61. The Viennese star was best known abroad for his roles in films such as “Jules and Jim” and “Ship of Fools.”
Rick Sutcliffe, who was 16–1 for the Cubs after arriving from Cleveland 2 days before the June 15th trading deadline, is a unanimous choice as National League Cy Young Award winner. Overall, Sutcliffe was 20–6 with a 3.64 ERA.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1213.01 (-4.19)
Born:
Meghan McCain, American columnist, author, and TV host (“The View,” 2017-21), daughter of Senator John McCain, in Phoenix, Arizona.
Izabel Goulart, Brazilian model (Victoria’s Secret), in ão Carlos, Brazil.
Died:
Oskar Werner [Bschließmayer], 61, Austrian stage and screen actor (“The Spy Who Came In from the Cold”; “Ship of Fools”; “Fahrenheit 451”), of a heart attack.
David Gorcey, 63, actor (“Angel’s Alley”), in a diabetic coma.
James Petrillo, 92, American labor leader (American Federation of Musicians president, 1940-58), and radio orchestra music director (WBBM Chicago).
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