An enormous crowd in Warsaw turned out for the funeral of a slain Roman Catholic priest who was buried with eulogies from leaders of the church and the Solidarity movement he championed. As people clung to trees and perched on canted roofs to glimpse the plain coffin in front of a parish church, Jozef Cardinal Glemp, the Primate, praised the 37-year-old priest as a martyr who had entered Polish history. The slayers of the priest, the Rev. Jerzy Popiełuszko, have been identified as three security police officers. The crowd of mourners gathered overnight and grew to 200,000. The forbidden Solidarity banners were frequently displayed among the crowd.
Though the gathering was solemn, political professions were being made. As the day broke cold and misty, a crowd that had gathered overnight and then grew to 200,000 thronged the streets for six and seven blocks in every direction. Scattered throughout were the forbidden banners of Solidarity held aloft by members of outlawed chapters at factories, schools and shops from every city and region of Poland. The most direct political symbolism came when Lech Walesa, the Solidarity founder, rose to deliver a eulogy from the balcony of the church. He arrived from Gdansk on Friday, and today, before going to the church, he visited the Indian Embassy to sign a condolence book for Indira Gandhi.
In a powerful voice, he addressed himself to Father Popiełuszko. “We bid you farewell, servant of God, pledging that we shall never bow to oppression,” Mr. Walesa said. He was interrupted as the crowd took up the chant, “We pledge, we pledge.” Weeping priests and older women joined young people in the promise. “We shall act in solidarity with service to the fatherland and we shall respond with truth to lies and with good to evil,” Mr. Walesa went on. “We bid farewell to you solemnly and with dignity and hope for a just social peace in our country. Rest in peace. Solidarity is alive, for you have given your life for it.” There were shouts of “Solidarity! Solidarity!” as a sea of hands rose in the V-for-Victory salute. Cardinal Glemp paused several times during his euology to gain control over his emotions and cracking voice. He described the activist priest as a man whose life and death had inspired the nation.
A Czechoslovak dissident group, Charter 77, condemned the slaying of Father Popiełuszko and described him as a martyr, according to emigre sources in Vienna. In a letter made public Friday, the group described the murder as an “act of terrorism and blind hate.”
Protection of world leaders from assassination attempts has led to much more rigorous security steps. Such measures are newly apparent in London and Paris. Some European security men still find the United States Secret Service heavy-handed, but they no longer question the need for elaborate protective measures.
Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou last month became the first Western chief of government to visit Poland since martial law was imposed in 1981. That in itself was enough to upset his allies, but the Socialist leader – a former American citizen, wartime Navy sailor and University of California economics professor – went farther. He denounced Western esteem for the Solidarity labor union, contending it was motivated by the desire to “destabilize” the Soviet camp at Washington’s behest. Mr. Papandreou also praised General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish leader who crushed the liberalization, as a socialist patriot. And he dismissed Solidarity as a onetime “progressive” movement that had become “negative and dangerous.”
Close Papandreou associates urge Americans to pay attention to Greek actions, not rhetoric. The latter, they say, is mere retaliation against policies that “tilt” toward Turkey and against a history of “domination” that has been hurtful to national self-esteem. Greece’s heart, they insist, remains in the West. They stress that Mr. Papandreou signed an agreement that continues four American bases for at least five more years, despite his election vows to close them. The Socialists, they add, have faithfully carried out an earlier government’s agreement to let NATO’s Awacs surveillance planes use Greek bases. In seeking to account for Mr. Papandreou’s verbal batterings of the United States, experts point to reactions to the weight and duration of American influence since Washington helped non-Communist forces win the civil war of the late 1940’s.
Leaders of the Irish Republican Army’s political wing, Sinn Fein, assembled in Dublin under heavy security today for their annual two-day convention. Armed antiterrorist police ringed the Mansion House conference hall near the Irish Parliament, and the police searched for bombs. The I.R.A. has waged a guerrilla campaign to unite the Irish Republic and the British province of Northern Ireland. While the I.R.A. is outlawed on both sides of the border, Sinn Fein is legal. Last week John McMichael, a leader of the Ulster Defense Association, the largest of Northern Ireland’s Protestant paramilitary organizations, warned, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see attacks on I.R.A. personnel or against targets in the south of Ireland.”
Four Israeli soldiers, including a young woman, are being held in connection with the revenge attack on an Arab bus in Jerusalem last Sunday, Israeli police announced. The police said today that they had arrested an 18- year-old soldier from a crack army unit on suspicion of firing a rocket at an Arab bus in Jerusalem last week. Three other soldiers, including a woman, were also detained in connection with the attack Sunday in which one Arab was killed and 10 others were wounded. The police said the three were being questioned about their relations with the main suspect. None of the suspects were identified. One Arab passenger was killed and 10 wounded when an anti-tank rocket was fired at the bus in reprisal for the shooting deaths of two young Israeli hikers near Bethlehem last week. An Arab suspect, vho police said confessed to killing the hikers, is being held.
The Lebanese army, under orders to sink ships if necessary. sealed off 13 illegal ports run by private militias that have cost the government $800 million annually. in lost customs revenue. The crackdown is considered a major test of the military’s ability to enforce government authority over the Muslim and Christian militiamen who control the lucrative smuggling trade. It is also part of a Syrian-mediated security plan for the capital that was negotiated earlier this year and aimed at ending nine years of factional fighting in Lebanon.
Egypt’s security authorities have been accused by the state’s top security court of torturing defendants in a recent mass trial of Muslim fundamentalists, the semi-official newspaper Al Ahram reported. During the nearly two-year trial of 302 fundamentalists belonging to the outlawed Al Jihad (Holy War), who are accused of attempting to overthrow the government following the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, “it is established beyond doubt that security authorities subjected the majority of the defendants to physical abuse,” the court said.
Four military transport planes from the Soviet Union and Britain arrived in Addis Ababa to begin a large-scale airlift of food to millions of Ethiopians threatened by famine. All four aircraft are to ferry emergency food supplies to the 6.4 million people the Ethiopian government says are suffering through one of the worst droughts Africa has ever experienced. Western donor countries began rushing aid to the African nation last month after television reports said up to a million of the country’s 14 million people could die of hunger.
Indira Gandhi’s body was cremated in New Delhi in a traditional Hindu funeral ceremony witnessed by tens of thousands of people, including nearly 100 foreign leaders and dignitaries. Rajiv Gandhi, Mrs. Gandhi’s 40-year-old son and her successor as Prime Minister of India, lit the cremation pyre, bringing to a symbolic end the drama that began when his mother was shot to death Wednesday by two men identified as Sikh members of her bodyguard. As a red sun set, hundreds of other families also mourned the loss of loved ones. By most estimates, violence that erupted after Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination has claimed nearly 1,000 lives — more than 500 in the New Delhi area alone — and the toll seems sure to rise as reports filter in of new outbreaks of rioting, arson and lynchings.
A mob attacked a Sikh community near New Delhi, killing at least 95 people, according to police estimates, and destroying a substantial part of the community in a rampage of murder, arson and looting. Bodies and possessions of the inhabitants were set afire. An estimated three thousand people die in the 3-day anti-Sikh riost in India. This morning there were only wailing women, uncomprehending neighbors and piles of ashes where men had been burned in Block 32, a Sikh community of perhaps a thousand people in a corner of this poor settlement a few miles from New Delhi. The neighborhood itself had vanished. “The mob came,” an elderly Muslim neighbor named Ali said. “They were about 1,000 strong. Allah knows where they came from.’
Four military transport planes from the Soviet Union and Britain arrived in Addis Ababa to begin a large-scale airlift of food to millions of Ethiopians threatened by famine. All four aircraft are to ferry emergency food supplies to the 6.4 million people the Ethiopian government says are suffering through one of the worst droughts Africa has ever experienced. Western donor countries began rushing aid to the African nation last month after television reports said up to a million of the country’s 14 million people could die of hunger.
About 1,500 South Korean students clashed with the police today at a university in Seoul during a demonstration on demands for campus autonomy. Some 3,000 students held a rally at Yonsei University in western Seoul, and about half tried to march off campus for a street protest. Students threw rocks at the police, who countered with tear gas. There were no immediate reports of arrests or injuries. Organizers said the students included representatives of 17 South Korean universities. They demanded that campus democracy be guaranteed and that elected students’ associations be allowed to replace government-sponsored student defense corps. The protest was held on Students Day, commemorating a student uprising against Japan. The day was being observed for the first time in 12 years.
At the conclusion of two weeks of discussion, China characterized the fifth round of normalization talks with the Soviet Union as useful, and both sides expressed willingness to expand economic, trade, scientific and cultural exchanges. The talks were held in Peking and will reconvene in Moscow in April, a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement said.
A Chinese-American writer killed in California last month was about to publish two books on conflicts in the Taiwanese Government, the official China Daily said today. The writer, Henry Liu, 52 years old, was killed Oct. 15 outside his home in Daly City, Calif., shortly after he had published a criticial biography of President Chiang Ching-kuo of Taiwan. The English-language newspaper quoted Cheng Siyuan, identified as a former Nationalist official and a friend of the author, as saying “the information would have damaged the regime.” He did not elaborate on what information the author planned to reveal, but he was quoted as saying it would “make headlines when disclosed.” “The timing of the killing shows this was a premeditated murder aimed at silencing him before he could expose some historical facts to the disadvantage of some people in Taiwan,” the paper quoted Mr. Cheng as saying.
A leader of El Salvador’s leftwing rebels believes that they cannot rely on a military victory to gain power because of possible U.S. intervention, the Sunday Times of London reported. The newspaper quoted Ruben Zamora as saying, “We now believe that the military struggle by itself is not capable of bringing a solution to El Salvador because of the threat of direct military intervention by the United States.” But he added that a political solution is possible only if the insurgents are militarily strong. according to the newspaper.
Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordova told a crowd in his hometown of La Paz that conspirators who planned to assassinate him and overthrow his government also intended to wipe out the country’s top military command. The Miami-based plot was disclosed by the FBI, which has accused two Honduran businessmen and six U.S. citizens or residents. Also implicated was General Jose Bueso Rosa, military attache at the Honduran Embassy in Santiago, Chile, who has surrendered to Chilean police.
The Chilean Government used emergency powers today to transfer 115 people to an internal exile camp in northern Chile, a police spokesman said. The men were driven in buses to the fishing village of Pisagua, more than 1,000 miles north of the capital, which has been used before as a prison camp. They will join 140 sent there last week. The government has said that all those sentenced to three months of internal exile and rehabilitation are ordinary criminals and that there is no political motive for the decision. Under special powers adopted by President Augusto Pinochet, people can be sent into internal exile without charges, and no appeal is possible. In the past those powers have been used principally against opponents of the 11- year-old military government.
In at least three countries of Africa, men, women and children are dying of hunger. In many others, malnutrition is widespread, and the threat of famine looms. And in other countries of the continent, drought has made grossly insufficient harvests a certainty. Furthermore, according to figures compiled by United Nations and other agencies, drought has depleted stocks in South Africa and Zimbabwe, the only two countries of the continent that normally export food to their neighbors. South Africa has been forced to import large quantities of grain. “We are not yet at the bottom of the abyss,” said Edouard Saouma, director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, in an interview at his headquarters here. “The worst is yet to come.”
Unusually bad weather is causing suffering and uncertainty in southern Africa, in the traditional drought belt that extends across the continent below the Sahara from Mauritania to the Sudan, and in eastern Africa. In the north, Morocco is experiencing exceptional shortfalls in harvests. Acute famine is killing people in unknown numbers not only in Ethiopia in the east, whose plight is receiving worldwide attention and therefore a measure of relief. With far less heed being paid to their distress, people are also dying in Chad, in the center of the continent, and in Mozambique in the southeast. Pockets of famine are also thought to exist in Rwanda, Zambia and Angola, but information channels from Africa are feeble, and the truth may never be known.
The Presidential candidates visited some of the more closely contested states. President Reagan’s campaign officials said he was ahead in 48 states and that their polls gave him a national lead of 22 points. Walter F. Mondale struggled to cut into the strong overall lead that Mr. Reagan appeared to hold. He urged voters to ignore the polls and appealed to Democrats to return to the fold.
President Reagan addresses a crowd of 14,000 at the State House Convention Center in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Reagan warned voters today that if they chose to replace him with Walter F. Mondale the nation would be left wandering “an endless desert of worsening inflation and recession.” Closing out his re-election campaign with five days of politicking around the nation, Mr. Reagan accused Mr. Mondale of avoiding his own record and assisting in Carter Administration policies that “made America weak.” Through a long day of speaking in Arkansas, Iowa and Wisconsin, Mr. Reagan repeatedly sought to identify Mr. Mondale and other Democratic critics with what he characterized as the sweeping failures of the Carter years. It was a theme he used in his weekly paid political address over the radio. “They would have us forget their legacy of an America second best, double-digit inflation, record taxes and interest rates at home, growing instability and threats to peace abroad,” he declared in the broadcast.
President Reagan visits the birthplace of John Wayne.
Walter F. Mondale pleaded quietly and emotionally today for labor, farm and blue-collar votes in the industrial Middle West. But as he arrived at St. Louis’s Lambert Field late this afternoon, he also vigorously attacked Vice President Bush, saying Mr. Bush “has almost disqualified himself as an effective national leader in this last month.” “There’s a deep character flaw in this person that’s become obvious to the American people,” Mr. Mondale told reporters. The Democratic Presidential nominee spoke in response to a question about Mr. Bush’s remark Friday that there were a lot of “idiots” who failed to understand that President Reagan had restored the nation’s pride.
Moral Majority is confident of approval by voters Election Day of its conservative causes and candidates. It and other fundamentalist groups of the religious right are looking back at their surprising rise in politics and ahead to increased influence on the American system.
Florida’s beleaguered citrus industry has won a battle against the Mediterranean fruit fly, which has been eliminated in a four-month campaign that cost $1.5 million, but it still is fighting a more serious menace-a tree-killing citrus canker. Doyle Conner, Florida agriculture commissioner, and Harvey Ford, deputy administrator of the U.S. Agriculture Department’s plant protection and quarantine section, jointly announced the eradication of the Medflies, some of which were found to have been brought in by ships docking at the Port of Miami.
An anonymous caller claimed that “The Wolverines” were responsible for a bomb that blasted through a door and damaged a reception area at the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union. Police said there were no injuries. Radio station WTOP reported that it received a call from a male who claimed that the Wolverines caused the blast. The Wolverines was the name of a group of high school students who fought the Soviet army in the movie “Red Dawn.” The caller made no mention of the movie or of a motive.
Two young girls who were found strangled after they disappeared while trick-or-treating with another child were sexually abused before they were strangled with a cord or wire, Decatur, Illinois, authorities said. The bodies of Sherry Gordon, 12, and her cousin, Theresa Hall, 9, were found in separate bedrooms of a vacant apartment near their homes. Theresa’s sister Patricia, 7, was found cowering in a closet, apparently unharmed, by two maintenance workers. Police said the girls last were seen late Wednesday entering a housing project accompanied by a young adult male.
A young boy shot his teenage brother, then killed himself in what may have begun as a fantasy associated with the game Dungeons and Dragons, officials said in Lafayette, Colorado. Daniel Ethan Erwin, 16, and Stephen Ray Erwin, 12, were found lying side by side-the younger boy’s legs crossed over his brother’s, an investigator said. There was speculation that the boys may have been carrying out a fantasy associated with the game, Police Chief Larry Stallcup said.
[Ed: Rolling my eyes…]
A Wells Fargo guard and her brother, a former police officer, have been convicted of a $6.6-million robbery at the Wells Fargo armored car terminal in Memphis, Tennessee, last November, the third-largest cash robbery in the nation. Marie (Sue) Reitmeyer and retired. New Orleans police Sgt. James Frank Broussard were found guilty on three counts of robbery, interstate transportation of stolen money and conspiracy. Reitmeyer, 37, and Broussard, 41, face up to 35 years in prison and fines of up to $30,000.
Authorities cut off a “major source of heroin” from Nepal by infiltrating an international ring they say was headed by a man who allegedly directed his 15-year-old daughter to distribute drugs. Thirty-seven persons, including the girl and another juvenile, were arrested in New Jersey, New York, Miami and Montreal in early morning raids that also netted $20 million worth of heroin buried in Harriman, New York. The operation was also delivering up to 250 kilograms of cocaine at a time by private plane from Colombia, authorities said.
Ku Klux Klan membership has dropped about 35 percent in the past two years, but the decline in the organization’s strength might lead frustrated Klansmen to consider waging their own “campaign of terror,” to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith says. In 1982, the league said, the Klan had 8,000 to 10,000 members. In a report issued Thursday, the league attributed the decline partly to the Klan’s failure to achieve segregation. It warned, however, that the organization is not “about to expire.”
Velma Barfield, the first woman executed in the United States in 22 years, was buried in Parkton, North Carolina, as about 200 relatives and friends watched. Barfield, 52, was executed by lethal injection Friday for killing fiance Stuart Taylor with poison. Before her 1978 trial, she also confessed to killing her mother and two elderly persons she had cared for as a live-in housekeeper and nurse. Prosecutors said she killed to cover check forgeries.
Sixteen years after construction on the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant began, engineers today heated the core of one of its two nuclear reactors. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission permit for operation of the reactor was authorized Aug. 2, but delivery was delayed Aug. 17 by an appellate court in response to a petition filed by opponents. The court lifted that stay Wednesday. On Friday the commission granted a license to the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Nancy Culver of the Mothers for Peace said her group would go to court.
George Yant, who chased deer hunters off his Minnesota farm with a gun a year ago, was sentenced Friday to five years in prison. The sentencing came less than a day before the opening of the deer season. Farmers feuding with the hunters say they trespass and threaten livestock. Law-enforcement officials say landowners can ask hunters to leave, but threatening them with guns is illegal. Mr. Yant was convicted in October of second-degree assault.
The Federal Fish and Wildlife Service has gone to court to protect the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker on a Louisiana wildlife refuge where a petroleum company intends to begin drilling natural gas wells next week. Federal District Judge Nauman Scott is to resume a hearing Tuesday on the service’s request for a temporary order to prevent the Terronne Petroleum Company from drilling on the D’Arbonne National Wildlife Refuge. The company said it would start drilling at 31 sites without federal permits that the agency said were necessary. The company disagrees with drilling conditions of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Hospitals are setting up ethics panels that are coming to play crucial roles in life-and-death decisions for thousands of patients. The committees, which are being established without fanfare, are made of doctors, nurses, administrators, clergymen and social workers. These groups are setting policy guidelines for such decisions as who is to be connected to a life-saving dialysis machine, and if a critically ill patient may be resuscitated by machine.
The Army could call as many as 133,000 draftees and inactive reservists to active duty within 30 days of a wartime emergency but would be capable of teaching only half of them the skills needed to fight, the General Accounting Office has reported. Even within four months of an all-out mobilization, there would still be a drastic shortage of electronics experts and other specialists needed for modern warfare, according to a report released Thursday by the accounting office, an investigative arm of Congress. The shortage, the report said, would be in “trained and experienced personnel, such as supervisory technicians or tank commanders, positions that could not be filled by newly trained inductees.”
Born:
LaMarr Woodley, NFL outside linebacker (NFL Champions, Super Bowl 43-Steelers, 2008; Pro Bowl, 2009; Pittsburgh Steelers, Oakland Raiders, Arizona Cardinals), in Saginaw, Michigan.
Jonathan Herrera, Venezuelan MLB second baseman, shortstop, and third baseman (Colorado Rockies,, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs), in Maracaibo, Venezuela.
Brandon Dickson, MLB pitcher (St. Louis Cardinals), in Montgomery, Alabama.
Ryo Nishikido, Japanese Idol (member of the band NEWS ad Kanjani8), in Kadoma, Japan.
History Diaries 