Leaders of the outlawed Solidarity trade union called for reforms in Poland’s Interior Ministry in the wake of reported confessions by three ministry security officers to the killing of a pro-Solidarity supporter, Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, last month. Lech Walesa, who headed Solidarity, and Władysław Frasyniuk sent their appeal to the Polish Parliament. An aide to Walesa said the texts of the letters will be made public later this week.
General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish leader, is to pay a one-day visit to Hungary on Friday. It will be General Jaruzelski’s first trip out of the country since the kidnapping and killing of a pro-Solidarity priest, the Rev. Jerzy Popiełuszko. A high government official noted that Hungary was the only Warsaw Pact nation in which the state-controlled press has been reporting more fully on the Popiełuszko case. The Hungarian press has commented on how the government in Warsaw has been threatened by the killing. In some of the other Eastern bloc nations and in the Soviet Union, the slaying has been reported, but there has been no mention that three security officers have been detained and charged with the crime.
The country house of Nobel Prize-winning author Boris Pasternak near Moscow, where he wrote “Doctor Zhivago,” has been closed after his heirs lost a two-year court battle with the Soviet Writers Union. Sources said that Pasternak’s son and daughter-in-law were evicted last month from the house where Pasternak died in 1960. His family had sought to stay in the home and preserve it as a museum for the writer, who fell into disfavor with Soviet authorities. The writers’ group, which owns the house and others in the colony, expelled Pasternak from the union after his novel was published in the West in 1957.
West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher said he had long been a personal friend of an executive of the giant Flick holding company who is involved in a political payoff scandal. But he denied that the relationship resulted in any wrongdoing. Testifying before a West German parliamentary committee, Genscher said he could not recall that his friendship with Eberhard von Brauchitsch influenced the government in granting huge tax breaks to the Flick company in the 1970s. Earlier, Chancellor Helmut Kohl told investigators his party had received large political contributions from Flick at a time when they were legal.
Portugal refused a residence permit for a Romanian Orthodox archbishop, Valerian Trifa, 70, deported from the United States last August for his alleged Nazi past. The Interior Ministry announcement means that Trifa now faces expulsion from Portugal, but it was not immediately clear which country would accept him. Trifa, who arrived in Lisbon on August 14, was admitted on a temporary visa. Archbishop Trifa, who had lived in the United States for more than 30 years, was stripped of his American citizenship and deported for what the Justice Department described as his activities with the Iron Guard, an anti- Semitic group blamed for massacring Jews in Rumania in World War II.
Israeli and Lebanese army officers began talks in Naqura, Lebanon on conditions for an Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon amid signs that the two sides were far apart. There were signs that the two sides were far apart. As expected, the most important differences involved who would maintain security in southern Lebanon if the Israelis pulled out. There was also a disagreement over what role the United Nations should play in the current negotiations.
Israeli officials say that they welcome President Reagan’s re-election. They say they do not expect him, as a second-term President, to try to press Israel into accepting American ideas for a Middle East peace. “All and all we are pleased with his re-election,” a senior Foreign Ministry official said Wednesday. “It is not that we thought Mondale would have been bad,” he went on, but Mr. Reagan “has certainly proved that he is a friend of Israel.”
France and Libya are about to complete withdrawal of the troops they sent to Chad to back opposing factions in the 20-year-old civil war, Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson said today. “The withdrawal will be completed in the coming hours,” Mr. Cheysson said in an address to Parliament. “Appeals have been made for reconciliation, which is undoubtedly possible. In this time of great misery, there are better things to do than fight a civil war.”
India has made formal diplomatic protests to the United States and Britain over television coverage of events in India and Britain after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi last week. The reports, according to Indian officials, showed Sikhs celebrating the assassination and inciting people to riot and murder.
Sikhs and Hindus throughout India offered prayers for peace and harmony today as the anniversary of the birth of the man who founded the Sikh religion was observed without serious incident. Army troops continued to patrol the streets of New Delhi in extra strength for fear of renewed violence after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi last week, and helicopter patrols scoured the city looking for evidence of trouble. Sikhs began to emerge from their homes, where many had hidden after Hindus began attacking Sikhs last week. The Sikhs headed for temples throughout the city to mark the 515th anniversary of the birth of the founder of Sikhism, the guru Nanak Dev. Crowds, though sparse, materialized at places like Bangla Sahib, the largest Sikh temple in the capital.
Tensions between Thailand’s civilian government and the commander of the country’s armed forces erupted into an open confrontation today over the government’s decision to devalue the national currency. Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda, who has been away from his post since late August because of illness, suddenly reappeared in his office this morning to defend the decision Friday to devalue the baht by 17.3 percent. His return followed a televised attack on the government Wednesday night by Thailand’s Supreme Commander, General Arthit Kamlangek, who is known to have political ambitions and whose comments indicated he was particularly annoyed at the cost of the devaluation to the armed forces, which has plans to buy more weapons and aircraft from the United States.
The Philippine Supreme Court ordered the release today of a detained journalist who reported last year that the assassination of the opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. was a high-level military conspiracy. A civilian panel said last month that it had found evidence of such a conpiracy. The court directed the immediate release of Rommel Corro, editor and publisher of The Philippine Times, a tabloid that reported in September 1983 that a soldier shot Mr. Aquino in a conspiracy involving three generals. Mr. Corro, 38 years old, has been held in a suburban military camp for over a year. He was charged with sedition by a Government prosecutor, and an application for bail was denied. An official inquiry into the killing of Mr. Aquino last August confirmed Mr. Corro’s accusations.
Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos declared a state of emergency in six provinces as the death toll from Typhoon Agnes rose to 441. The typhoon battered the central Philippines about 300 miles south of Manila for two days with 125-m.p.h. winds, smashing buildings and causing floods and high waves. At least 300 people were missing and 350,000 were homeless, officials said.
New Zealand, described as an economic disaster by its finance minister, announced higher taxes on incomes and on cigarettes, alcohol and gasoline in an attempt to deal with a huge government deficit. The new budget, presented by Finance Minister Roger Douglas, was the first since the Labor Party swept to power in July.
Ford Motor Co. and the United Auto Workers union reached a tentative agreement on a new Canadian labor pact covering 14,200 workers. “I think this is a good agreement for Ford Canada and I’m glad we were able to do it without a strike,” Canadian UAW director Robert White said in Toronto. Wage provisions of the three-year pact are nearly identical to those in the contract reached with General Motors last month after a 12-day strike. The hourly rate (in U.S. money) for a Ford assembly line worker will go from $9.94 to $11.85 by the end of the pact.
Moscow has assured Washington that it has not shipped any advanced fighter planes to Nicaragua, Secretary of State George P. Shultz indicated. At the same time, Mr. Shultz, in an interview, said he planned to be directly involved with Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko in managing Soviet-American relations, including arms-control talks. He said he opposed the idea of naming a special “czar” to negotiate future arms-control accords. Such an idea has been discussed by some White House officials.
A Soviet ship that docked at the Nicaraguan port of Corinto Wednesday was carrying one or two helicopters for Nicaragua’s army, according to a senior Sandinista official. He denied that any advanced planes were on the vessel or aboard any other ship heading for Nicaragua.
The South African security police raided the offices of protest organizations and a black labor union federation here today, detaining at least six suspected leaders of a two- day work boycott that occurred this week. The authorities also seized political documents, printing materials and film found at the offices. While the raids were going on in Johannesburg, about 60 miles to the east at Secunda, 6,000 workers at the state-owned Sasol oil-from-coal plant were standing in lines waiting to be paid and bused to distant black homelands. They were told they had dismissed themselves by refusing to meet the management’s deadline for a return to work on Monday.
The NASA space shuttle Discovery rocketed into orbit on an eight-day mission (STS 51-A) to launch two new communications satellites and retrieve two stray ones in the first space salvage operation. NASA astronaut Anna Lee Fisher becomes the first “mom” to go into orbit aboard STS 51-A. After a one-day delay caused by dangerous high-altitude winds, the winged spaceship took off at 7:15 A.M. with five astronauts aboard, four men and a woman. The Discovery was reported cruising on course for its bold attempt to pick up two satellites and return them to earth for refurbishment and re-launching. Jay Greene, a flight director at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, said, “This is the most challenging flight we’ve flown.”
In a sequence of complex rocket-firing maneuvers, the astronauts must seek out and rendezvous with the two little satellites, Indonesia’s Palapa B-2 and Western Union’s Westar 6, next Monday and Wednesday. Then two space-walking astronauts are to bring the satellites into the shuttle cargo bay for the first recovery of used satellites, a salvage scheme arranged by the insurers of the craft that went into useless orbits last February. Officials of the Kennedy Space Center here proclaimed the launching of the 14th shuttle mission a “spectacular” success and expressed satisfaction over their ability for the first time to send a shuttle into space in less than one month after the return of the previous shuttle. But the officials conceded that they were not yet ready to maintain a once-a-month launching schedule, long been a goal of the shuttle progam. Serious problems with the heat-shielding tiles on the Challenger, the Discovery’s sister ship, wiped out chances of a mission in December.
Baby Fae’s mother reaffirmed her confidence in the operation that gave her baby a baboon heart, according to a statement made public by the Loma Linda University Hospital in California. The infant’s doctors said she was “doing very nicely.” The mother and child have not had any physical contact for about three days because the mother has a cold. “We need peace of mind for a while,” she said in the statement read by a spokesman at the Loma Linda University Medical Center. “Please let us enjoy our precious child.” She also reaffirmed an earlier expression of confidence in the operation. “We feel we have done right for her,” she said. She added that she was grateful for the many letters of support she and her husband had received.
President Reagan enjoys a horseback ride at Rancho del Cielo.
A simpler tax code that President Reagan plans to propose may be submitted to Congress early for bipartisan help, an Administration official said. Mr. Reagan’s proposal, which he is to decide on next month after receiving a Treasury Department study, is expected to involve some form of a modified flat tax.
T. H. Bell announced his resignation as Secretary of Education and said he had witnessed the start of “a real renaissance of American education.” Mr. Bell strongly reaffirmed the Federal role in education.
A special issue of Newsweek features confidential Presidential campaign information gathered over the last year on the basis it would not be published until after Election Day. The issue prompted concern by some journalists, who called the arrangement unethical.
The trial of Mayor Roger Hedgecock of San Diego began with jury selection two days after the city’s voters re-elected him to a new term by a margin of 57.9 percent to 42.1 percent. Mayor Hedgecock is charged in a felony criminal indictment with one count of conspiring to violate California laws regulating campaign contributions and 14 counts of perjury for allegedly filing false campaign disclosure forms.
No quick settlement is expected in the strike by 6,400 aerospace workers seeking pay raises at the Fort Worth, Texas, General Dynamics plant, a union spokesman says. A company spokesman, Z. Joe Thornton, said Wednesday that the plant was maintaining its construction schedule of 15 F-16 jet fighters a month by using nonstriking hourly employees and salaried and supervisory personnel. Dean Girardot, a representative of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said he was not optimistic about an early settlement of the strike that began Sunday night. Pat Lane, president of the union’s local here, said the company was offering bonuses instead of increases in the hourly wage. Retirement pay and holiday time off also entered into the dispute, he said.
The National Council of Churches, which has been criticized for some of its programs of social activism, elected a new leader who endorsed those policies but said they must be firmly rooted in Christian belief. The new leader of the council is the Rev. Arie Brouwer.
New rules on the use of smokestacks by power plants and factories were proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency as a means of complying with the Clean Air Act. The agency said the proposals for tall smokestacks could cost companies $300 million to $1.4 billion in annual operating costs.
Bombing evidence against 5 suspects was reported by FBI agents. They said handwritten descriptions of two corporate offices bombed in the New York metropolitan area in recent months, a timing device similar to one on a bomb planted at a third company and bomb-making booklets and equipment had been found in the rented homes of purported radical fugitives arrested in Ohio.
Train shipments of spent nuclear fuel will proceed from a Minnesota power plant to Illinois over the objections of local officials who have called for a state review of the transportation plan, utility officials said in St. Paul, Minn. Thirty shipments of highly radioactive spent fuel rods will be undertaken over five years, said Tom Bushee, a spokesman for Northern States Power Co. The company plans to transport 1,058 fuel assemblies, each containing 64 rods, about 500 miles from its plant in Monticello to a General Electric storage site in Morris, Illinois, Bushee said.
Senator Robert J. Dole (R-Kansas), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, suggested that Administration and congressional leaders meet this year, perhaps after Thanksgiving, to begin work on a spending freeze or other plan to reduce the federal deficit. In a speech to an annual gathering of clients of a New York brokerage firm, Dole said he thinks Congress may seriously consider an across-the-board spending freeze, making some exceptions for defense spending and programs that benefit low-income groups.
Timolol, a drug used to combat heart disease, appears to help lessen the frequency of chronic migraine headaches that afflict millions, researchers for Merck Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories in West Point, Pennsylvania, said in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Few side effects occurred during the study of 94 patients, they said. The drug-timolol maleate-has been marketed since 1981 under the trade name Blocadren for use in cardiovascular diseases.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charged the Massachusetts Department of Public Safety with age discrimination in the hiring of state troopers and asked a federal court to halt a trainee exam scheduled for Saturday. The suit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston seeks to have the examination delayed until the state removes prohibitions against hiring people between 40 and 70 years of age. A hearing on the EEOC request was scheduled for 10:30 AM today.
Chester Eugene Adamsky, a former executive for a Massachusetts military contractor, has pleaded guilty to Federal charges that he took $237,000 in bribes to grant subcontracts to other companies and to overlook fraud. Mr. Adamsky, a former program executive with the Raytheon Corporation, made the plea under an agreement that prosecutors would not pursue other charges. He agreed to testify in a trial next year against Alpha Industries Inc. of Woburn, Mass., and Anthony DeCarolis, its vice president for sales. Mr. Adamsky, 50 years old, had a job overseeing programs at Raytheon’s electromagnetic systems division in Goleta, California. Alpha and Mr. DeCarolis are accused of paying $57,000 in kickbacks to Mr. Adamsky in order to get subcontracts from Raytheon to provide parts for a radar-jamming device for jet fighters.
Waves washed frightened passengers “right off the deck” when a 190-foot schooner was wrecked on a West Indies sand bar by Hurricane Klaus, but all 103 persons aboard were rescued, survivors said in Phillipsburg, St. Maarten. The two-masted Yankee Clipper, on a one-week island-hopping trip, became stuck on the sand bar about a mile off the island, and it was not until hours later that all 68 passengers and 35 crew members were rescued. “A wave washed me right off the deck,” said passenger Dick Barnes of Orchard Lake, Michigan. “I had to be rescued three times.”
John Z. DeLorean’s unusual public appeal for money to pay legal expenses has brought calls from people across the nation offering to help the former automobile maker, a DeLorean spokesman said today. “It really has been tremendous,” said Suzi Cozad, a public relations executive handling Mr. DeLorean’s campaign. She said the calls had come from “everywhere from Santa Rosa to Ohio — we’ve had no less than 15 calls just this morning.” Mr. DeLorean, 59 years old, was acquitted of cocaine conspiracy charges in August. He personally drafted the $5,000 full-page ad in the Wednesday issue of The Los Angeles Herald Examiner that asked readers to donate $5 to $100 each to help him pay the cost of his long trial. Mr. DeLorean, whose assets were frozen by his creditors, reportedly owes his lawyers, Howard Weitzman and Donald Re, over $1 million for his defense. The ad said Mr. DeLorean “has been unable to work or to provide income to his family for the past two years” and refers to legal battles stemming from the financial collapse of the sports car company he founded in Northern Ireland.
The founder and former artistic director of the renowned Children’s Theatre Co. in Minneapolis was sentenced to one year in jail and 15 years’ probation for having sex with three boys who were students at the theater. John Clark Donahue, 46, was ordered to undergo testing and treatment and to have no unsupervised contact with children or involvement with the theater during his probation.
Children in day-care centers come down with a bacterial infection that can cause meningitis and respiratory diseases at almost twice the rate of stay-at-home youngsters, according to a study by Drs. Stephen Redmond of the Monroe County (New York) Department of Health and Michael Pichichero of the University of Rochester School of Medicine. They said they studied records of all cases of the disease — hemophilus influenza type b — in Monroe (New York) County in 1982 and 1983, and found the younger the day-care child, the greater the odds of getting the disease, as opposed to children who remained at home. The difference disappeared after the age of 5, however.
High waves prevented vessels from cleaning up a five-mile-long oil spill from the tanker Puerto Rican, a 632-foot ship that was hit by explosions and then broke apart in a storm near San Francisco. The slick is about three miles off Point Reyes and has broken into patches, Coast Guard spokesman Mike Kelley said. Eight-foot waves “kept cleanup sweepers out, but they also are helping to break up the oil,” Kelley said. The oil has moved about 13 miles from the Farallon Islands, a nature preserve that was briefly threatened by the spill. The tanker was rocked by explosions October 31 about 10 miles off of the Golden Gate. One crewman was presumed killed; the other 28 people aboard were rescued. The Coast Guard is investigating the cause of the explosions. Sabotage has now been ruled out.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1228.69 (-4.53)
Born:
Darryl Watkins, NBA center (Sacramento Kings, New Orleans Hornets), in Paterson, New Jersey.
Dee Davis, WNBA guard (Houston Comets), in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Riley Armstrong, Canadian NHL right wing (San Jose Sharks), in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.
Died:
Carl Gustav Sparre Olsen, 81, Norwegian composer.
[Ed: He’s lost weight. He is probably beginning to fear the worst. As a closeted Gay man, he is well aware of the toll AIDS is taking.]
History Diaries 