Moscow has sought clarification from the United States of President Reagan’s proposal for wide-ranging “umbrella” talks on arms control, the State Department said. The Soviet inquiries have produced some hope within the Administration that Secretary of State George P. Shultz and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei A. Gromyko, might hold more detailed discussions on nuclear issues early next year. Administration officials said, however, that the Soviet Union had so far limited itself to asking questions, without making any commitment to resuming the suspended talks on medium- range missiles or strategic arms. Public Criticism by Soviet In public, the Soviet Union has criticized the proposals by the United States, arguing that the United States is trying to avoid making substantive concessions by coming up with procedural suggestions like the “umbrella talks” and the creation of a special arms-control “czar” who would deal directly with the President.
The West German Government demanded today that Rumania recall five diplomats. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the Rumanians had been involved in activities that it described as “irreconcilable with their diplomatic status.” Government officials described Bonn’s action as the most severe against East bloc diplomats within memory. The Government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl has generally played down such affairs, which usually involve purported espionage, in what appears to be an attempt to avoid souring relations with the Soviet bloc.
About 180 people seeking to emigrate from East Germany have taken refuge inside West German embassies in four East European capitals, Government officials here said today. The refugees included about 150 people in the West German Embassy in Prague, where a diplomatic standoff between East Germany and West Germany entered its seventh week. West German officials said that as many as 30 more East Germans had recently sought refuge in the Bonn Government’s embassies in Warsaw, Budapest and Bucharest, Rumania.
Fighting between rival militias in Lebanon broke out Thursday and continued today in the worst fighting since last July. Behind the clashes were tensions arising, in part, from the government’s efforts to extend it authority by pressing its drive to close down illegal ports. Rival militias exchanged rocket, machine-gun and small-arms fire throughout the day from positions all along the Green Line, which divides the city into Christian and Muslim sectors. Two cease-fires during the day failed to take hold and, as darkness fell, the boom of heavy artillery, punctuated by bursts of machine-gun fire, could be heard in West Beirut. The army closed four crossing points on the Green Line late Thursday night and kept them closed today.
Somber and horrified after a visit to drought-stricken Ethiopia, M. Peter McPherson, administrator of the Agency for International Development, said today that he had “never seen anything like” the famine that is devastating northern Ethiopia. “I’ve seen a lot of places around the world,” Mr. McPherson said, first as a Peace Corps volunteer 20 years ago in a Peruvian slum built on top of a garbage dump and more recently as foreign aid administrator. “But I’ve never seen anything like this, just never seen anything like this.”
In a solemn ceremony today, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi placed an urn containing his slain mother’s ashes under a tree on the Nehru family estate in northern India. He was surrounded by extraordinary security. The rite performed by the 40-year-old Prime Minister was the same one he carried out 20 years ago in honor of his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister.
At least 117 people in Indonesia have died of starvation in a remote district of West Irian province, the daily newspaper Sinar Harapan said today.
The Philippines’ third fatal hotel fire in 16 days killed seven people in Manila today and injured 13, the police said. Manila’s Mayor was quoted as saying that terrorists might be responsible. At least four foreigners, none of them American, were reported killed in the fire at the eight-story Las Palmas Hotel in the Eremita tourist quarter of the capital.
Punishment of CIA officials has been called for by the inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency for their roles in preparing a manual instructing Nicaraguan rebels in guerrilla warfare techniques, Congressional and intelligence officials said. The manual advises rebels to kidnap and “neutralize” Nicaraguan Government officials, a term interpreted by many within the United States intelligence community and by the Nicaraguan rebel leaders to mean assassinate. In a classified report on the manual submitted today to Congress, the inspector general “recommends that five or six officials be disciplined,” a Congressional aide familiar with the report said. The inspector general’s report is to provide the basis for the disciplinary actions.
U.S. officials are almost certain that no advanced jet fighter planes were aboard a Soviet freighter that reached Nicaragua this week. But Administration officials continued to threaten possible military action against Nicaragua if such aircraft were delivered. Officials said they would not rule out air strikes, sabotage or other military action to disable Soviet MIG fighters if they were delivered to Nicaragua. They reiterated that the Administration had no plans to invade Nicaragua.
Advanced jet planes for Nicaragua are not likely anytime soon, in the view of most foreign diplomats and independent military analysts in Managua. “The Russians have made it fairly clear that they aren’t going to donate the planes,” a senior Western diplomat said here a few days ago, “and the Sandinistas have no money to pay for them anywhere else. For strategic and financial reasons, these guys are going to have to live with pretty much what they have now.” But the diplomats said they believed that the government might well manage to obtain some less powerful aircraft to bolster its small air force.
F-14 Tomcat fighter jets thundered low over the smooth green hills of Puerto Rico today and headed eastward toward an unseen fleet of ships far out to sea. The scene was part of the training exercise, code- named Comptuex 1-85, going on this month with ships and planes of the United States Second Fleet, an event that the Navy said today had been planned for more than a year. But coming at a time when relations between the United States and Nicaragua have beeen further strained over a Soviet freighter’s delivery of what Washington had suggested might be MIG fighters, the exercise stirred fears this week that it is a smokescreen for staging an armed intervention in the Central American country. Aside from the noise of the jets filling the sky over eastern Puerto Rico, activity at the 8,000-acre base here today appeared routine and calm.
United States military officers said today that the recent arrival of Soviet helicopter gunships in Nicaragua would add only a limited military capacity to the armed forces of that nation and that the additional capacity would be more defensive than offensive. The officers also suggested that the deployment of Soviet-built radar, which was believed to have arrived recently in Nicaragua, would be defensive if linked with Soviet-made surface- to-air missiles already in Nicaragua. If the Soviet Union furnished Nicaragua with MIG-21 fighters, the subject of widespread speculation this week, even that would add more to the defensive than to the offensive power of the Nicaraguans, the officers said.
Salvadoran guerrillas overran a town in a predawn assault, according to rebel radio broadcasts and a Salvadoran army spokesman, but were forced to turn back after government paratroopers counterattacked in a surprise helicopter assault. The attack on the town, Suchitoto, was the first major attack by the guerrillas in six months. According to army troops and residents interviewed here after the fighting ended this afternoon, several hundred guerrillas attacked Government military guard posts around the town at 2 AM. Suchitoto is about 30 miles northeast of the capital of San Salvador in the center of some of the most contested territory in the country. Paratroopers and the army’s First Brigade counterattacked at 6 AM and succeeded in driving the rebels out by noon. The town was defended by more than 300 heavily armed troops of the national police infantry battalion, equivalent to a regular army unit.
The police in Santiago, Chile arrested 107 people today in raids on private homes and two labor unions, according to government and church sources. The arrests, which took place in three cities, included members of the Popular Democratic Front, a coalition of Marxist parties. Police sweeps began Tuesday night after President Augusto Pinochet imposed a state of siege. In Valparaiso, west of the capital, the police set off an explosion in front of a home before entering to arrest six members of a family, according to church officials. About 14 members of a mining union, and 7 members of a farm workers’ union were arrested at their Santiago offices. Both unions are Marxist-led. Other arrests took place in Antofagasta, a northern town. Church officials said that four people arrested in raids Wednesday against the offices of the Marxist coaliton and the Socialist Bloc had been released.
Rebels in Zimbabwe assassinated a state senator from the ruling party today, setting off riots that left one person dead and 180 wounded, the Government said. Home Affairs Minister Simbi Mubako said the Senator, Moven Ndlovu, 50 years old, was gunned down by three rebels at his home in the southern town of Beitbridge on the border with South Africa. A hospital spokesman in the town said one person died in the riots and 184 people were injured.
The president of one of South Africa’s largest black labor federations was detained today, three days after his group joined a protest strike in Transvaal Province, union officials said. The president of the Federation of South African Trade Unions, Chris Dlamini, was the eighth person reported held without charge since hundreds of thousands of workers stayed home Monday and Tuesday.
The Producer Price Index fell by two-tenths of 1 percent in October in its third successive monthly decline, the Labor Department reported. For the first 10 months of 1984, the index for finished goods which measures industrial price changes that may influence consumer prices, rose by a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.5 percent. That pace was more than the 1983 rise of six-tenths of 1 percent, but short of the acceleration economists expected for the second year of the business-cycle upswing. For the 12 months through October, the index was up 1.4 percent.
President Reagan and his ranch hands take most of the day to cut a couple of downed oak trees.
President Reagan today signed a major piece of environmental legislation that tightens Federal standards for the disposal of toxic wastes and extends controls to small companies. Environmentalists said they were pleasantly surprised by the President’s action on the bill, which expands the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976. They said the bill was the only major environmental legislation enacted since Mr. Reagan took office on Jan. 20, 1981. In one of many legislative actions today, the President also approved a bill that for the first time protects the manufacturers of tiny computer chips from piracy by imitators.
Charles T. Manatt, the Democratic Party chairman, asserted today that in future Presidential elections the party should balance its ticket regionally and reach out for independent and blue-collar voters with a message of economic growth and opportunity. Mr. Manatt’s comments reflected what Gov. Charles S. Robb of Virginia, chairman of the Democratic Governors’ Conference, called “the hand- wringing and hand-holding” after the party’s overwhelming Presidential defeat last Tuesday. In the three days since the election, Democratic politicians around the country have been voicing concern that the latest defeat has underscored a long-term decline of party support among conservative voters, especially Southern whites, and more recent disaffection among urban blue-collar Roman Catholic voters in the North, as well as the party’s difficulties this year in appealing to younger independent- minded voters.
The astronauts of the space shuttle Discovery successfully deployed a communications satellite today and, with a couple of carefully timed orbital maneuvers, began stalking the two errant satellites they intend to pick up and return to earth. The deployment of Anik D-2, a Canadian satellite, came at 4:05 P.M., Eastern standard time, as the Discovery soared over the east coast of Africa on its 22nd orbit since the launching Thursday. “Looks like we have room to pick up a satellite or two,” Dr. Joseph P. Allen, a physicist, said after controlling the release of the Canadian satellite from the shuttle cockpit. A second communications satellite, Leasat 1, is scheduled to be released Saturday morning to complete the mission’s deliveries. Then the astronauts are to turn their full attention to the quest that sets this mission apart from all other shuttle flights: the first attempt to salvage a spacecraft.
A Federal jury today convicted three Ku Klux Klan members of civil rights violations in what prosecutors called racially motivated beatings in western Georgia in 1982 and 1983. A fourth Klan member was convicted of perjury in the case by a second jury, which returned its verdict Wednesday night. Mailon Wood, 54 years old, of Buchanan, Ga., and Kenneth Davis, 39, of Tallapoosa, Ga., were convicted on charges stemming from the 1982 beating of Peggy Jo French, a white woman who said that her masked assailants had warned her not to associate further with blacks.
A jury awarded $100,000 in damages to Vanessa Redgrave from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which canceled her scheduled 1982 performance as narrator in Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex.” But the jury in Boston found the orchestra had not blacklisted the actress for political reasons, violating her civil rights. Both Miss Redgrave, an outspoken supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Boston Symphony claimed victory after the verdict in Federal District Court here. “The verdict was a victory because it showed the B.S.O. had no cause to cancel my contract,” said Miss Redgrave, 47 years old. Had the jury found otherwise, she added, “nobody’s contract would have been safe in this country.”
A dismissed minister who leads unemployed steelworkers was ordered arrested in his church today for contempt of court, but his supporters turned away the sheriff, who said, “I’m not going to kick in the door of a church.” The minister, the Rev. D. Douglas Roth, was said by his allies to be praying inside Trinity Lutheran Church, which was barricaded shut as about a dozen union supporters stood outside. Sheriff Eugene Coon of Allegheny County said Mr. Roth would have to leave the church eventually.
Mr. Roth has refused to leave his pulpit in the Pittsburgh suburb of Clairton despite his dismissal by church superiors because of his involvement with the Denominational Ministry Strategy, a group of clergymen who attribute the region’s decline to the policies of the United States Steel Corporation and a bank holding company, the Mellon National Corporation. His dismissal was upheld in a temporary injunction in Common Pleas Court, and he was subsequently found guilty of civil contempt for ignoring the order. Mr. Roth, 33 years old, has been living and preaching in the church since Sunday in violation of orders from both his superiors and the courts.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation today joined the investigation of a five-hour attack on the apartment of a black family who moved into an all-white Chicago enclave, but the tenant said he would not to return to the neighborhood. Spencer Goffer, 31 years old, an automobile mechanic who moved in less than a week ago with his girlfriend and his 8-year-old son, said about a dozen white youths threw bricks and pipes through the window of his second-floor apartment Wednesday intermittently from about 1 AM to 6 AM. Mr. Goffer said he had been unable to call the police because his phone had not been connected. The four-square-block neighborhood, “The Island,” bordering the suburbs of Cicero, Oak Park and Berwyn, is the last all-white neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side.
Semiconductor plants are harmful to health, employees claim in a series of legal actions. The employees say their health is endangered by exposure to the toxic gases and chemicals that are critical to the manufacture of the semiconductors, or microchips, that drive computers. From a distance, Silicon Valley is the envy of every community seeking to lure high-technology industry. Its myriad electronics companies, 330 in this small suburb of San Jose alone, employ more than 50,000 workers in what most people consider one of the nation’s cleanest industries — no dangerous assembly lines, no belching smokestacks, no rivers turned yellow by pollutants. But the microelectronics industry — in California and elsewhere — is scrambling to counter allegations that the reputation for cleanliness is a myth. In a wave of legal actions, workers are charging they have suffered a range of health problems.
Thousands of gallons of black and yellow oil from a tanker that was damaged by explosions October 31 washed ashore north of San Francisco today, staining two beaches at Point Reyes, killing 50 sea birds and threatening thousands more, the Coast Guard said. About 150 oil-covered birds have been washed ashore and rescued in the last few days. The birds were cleaned with a grease-cutting solvent at the Marin Wildlife Center in San Rafael. A small patch of black oil washed ashore today at Drake’s Beach near Point Reyes, 25 miles north of San Francisco. A yellow lubricating oil made an intermittent 3-mile-long strip on the beach from the point northward. Two miles offshore a dark brown sheen of oil streched for more than a mile toward the shore. A skimming vessel began cleaning up the oil that escaped from the sunken stern section of the Puerto Rican, a crippled tanker that split apart Saturday after a storm. The 632-foot ship was severely damaged Oct. 31 by three explosions that poured 2,500 gallons of oil into the sea.
A federal district judge in Massachusetts today refused to stop a state police qualifying examination, rejecting arguments by the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that the test would perpetuate age discrimination. The judge, Joseph L. Tauro, declined to issue a temporary restraining order against the tests. The commission had charged deliberate discrimination through a state law banning state police candidates over the age of 29, saying the statute violated Federal employment guidelines for people 40 to 70 years old. Judge Tauro ruled the commission had failed to prove that it could win its case in a full hearing or that there were no other remedies available.
Fresh Florida citrus, denied to residents of the state for almost two months, went on sale again today in stores, markets and roadside stands. The shipment and sale of Florida oranges, limes and grapefruit were banned in the state in early September to prevent the spread of citrus canker, a plant disease threatening the commercial citrus industry. Residents had to buy fruit shipped in from abroad or from other states. Sales of fresh citrus in Florida amount to about $150 million a year, spokesmen for the citrus industry say. Agriculture Commissioner Doyle Conner of Florida lifted the ban Wednesday for fruit from groves certified free of the disease, provided the fruit was dipped in a chlorine solution to kill surface bacteria and was shipped in sealed containers. A ban by the Federal Agriculture Department on shipments of Florida fruit to other citrus-producing states remains in effect.
The statue at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (“3 Servicemen”) is unveiled. A bronze statue of three wary, weary American servicemen was unveiled today by veterans who said they hoped to dispel the “myth” that survivors of the Vietnam war were outcasts in their homeland. The unveiling ceremony, attended by about 4,000 people, sounded the themes of healing and pride that President Reagan is expected to stress Sunday when he formally accepts the completed Vietnam Veterans Memorial for the Government. The first part of the monument, a roll of the nation’s 58,022 Vietnam dead and missing, etched in black granite, was opened on Veterans Day in 1982 as part of a “national salute” to servicemen of the Vietnam era. The second part is the statue, which, like the monument, was paid for by private contributions.
James Cagney was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital early yesterday, but officials there said the 85-year-old actor was in stable condition with fluid in his lungs. Dr. Nicholas DePasquale, chief of cardiology at the hospital, said the actor’s prognosis “is good and he will probably be home in a few days.”
Wes Craven’s horror film “A Nightmare on Elm Street” premieres in the United States.
Larry Holmes TKOs Bonecrusher Smith in 12 for heavyweight boxing title. Larry Holmes said he beat James (Bonecrusher) Smith with one good hand tonight. But the victory, a 12th-round knockout in the cold desert night, was certainly not the anticipated mismatch. Holmes, saying he fought with a thumb he broke in July – “on a Friday the 13th,” he said before holding up X-rays of the thumb – admitted he was hurt several times by the awkward challenger who had only 15 previous pro fights.
Jari Kurri scored three goals and Wayne Gretzky had two goals and four assists as the Edmonton Oilers defeated the Washington Capitals, 8–5, tonight and set a National Hockey League record of 15 consecutive unbeaten games at the start of a season. Edmonton’s defending Stanley Cup champions have a 12–0–3 mark, which tops by one the unbeaten string of the Montreal Canadiens, set at the start of the 1943–44 season. Gretzky, who has 15 goals and 28 assists, scoring at least a point in every Edmonton game this season, assisted on goals by Mike Krushelnyski and Kurri in the first period after the Capitals had taken a 1–0 lead on a goal by Bryan Erickson.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1218.97 (-9.72)
Born:
Joel Zumaya, MLB pitcher (Detroit Tigers), in Chula Vista, California.
Tyler Clutts, NFL fullback (Chicago Bears, Houston Texans, Miami Dolphins, Dallas Cowboys), in Clovis, Californai.
Delta Goodrem, Australian singer, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
French Montana [Karim Kharbouch], American rapper, in Casablanca, Morocco.
History Diaries 