Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson told Secretary of State George P. Shultz today that France was prepared to send its troops back to Chad if Libya did not promptly remove all its troops, French and American officials said today. In several hours of discussion at the State Department, including a working luncheon, Mr. Cheysson acknowledged that Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, had failed to keep his part of the bargain. As part of an agreement worked out in September, all French and Libyan troops were supposed to leave Chad. While Mr. Cheysson was discussing the situation here with Mr. Shultz, Defense Minister Charles Hernu of France met in Ndjamena, Chad, with President Hissen Habre to discuss the possibility of the return of the French.
The Polish Foreign Ministry warned Western reporters today that they risked prosecution if they attended news conferences given by illegal civic watchdog groups that have been set up to monitor police brutality. Ministry officials said journalists could face the same charges as organizers of the meetings. Representatives of Reuters, The Associated Press, United Press International and ABC News were given the warning personally by the ministry. The watchdog groups have been set up in Warsaw, Kraków, and Wrocław since the killing of a priest, the Rev. Jerzy Popiełuszko, by members of the security police last month. The Foreign Ministry said the warning applied only to meetings organized by the newly formed groups. Meetings between foreign reporters and individual Solidarity figures have not been prevented in the past.
A gunman linked to an Armenian terrorist group shot and killed a Turkish diplomat as the victim was driving his car in central Vienna. Police said the assailant, who escaped, fired six times at Evner Ergun, 52, deputy director of the Vienna-based U.N. Center for Social Development and Humanitarian Affairs. Anonymous callers to news agencies said the Armenian Revolutionary Army was responsible. The group has claimed responsibility for previous attacks against Turks. It was the second killing of a Turkish official since June 20, when a car bomb outside the Turkish Embassy killed Ozen Erdogan, a deputy counselor for foreign workers in Austria. The Armenian militants are seeking to avenge mass killings carried out during World War I by the Ottoman rulers.
More than 2,200 miners deserted Britain’s eight-month-old coal strike, the largest number to return to work on a single day since the walkout began on March 12, the National Coal Board reported. A board spokesman said that a total of about 63,000 miners — approximately a third of the total work force — have quit the strike. Mine union leader Arthur Scargill disputed the figure, saying only 50,000 have returned to work.
The Irish and British Prime Ministers met today for a long-awaited conference on the future of Northern Ireland. They emerged with no dramatic initiatives, but did agree to work toward finding some political framework acceptable to the province’s Roman Catholic nationalist minority as well as its Protestant loyalist majority. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain said at a news conference tonight that her talks with Garret FitzGerald, the Irish Prime Minister, had been “the fullest, frankest, most realistic bilateral meeting” she had ever had with him. They agreed to meet again early next year. “I have made it quite clear,” Mrs. Thatcher said, “that a unified Ireland was one solution that is out. A second solution was a confederation of two states. That is out. A third solution was joint authority. That is out — that is a derogation of sovereignty.”
A London spokesman for Animal Liberation Front, an animal rights group, disclosed that its claim that it had spiked some candy bars in Britain with rat poison was a hoax, designed to cause “economic loss and sabotage to companies involved in cruelty to animals.” The spokesman said the group aimed the hoax at Mars U.K., Ltd., because of its financial support for medical research using animals.
In a libel settlement, Korean Air Lines accepted a public apology and an undisclosed amount of money from a London-based military magazine over an article implying that a KAL Boeing 747 shot down by the Soviets last year was on a spy mission. Lawyers for KAL said the article in Defense Attache could not be “further from the truth” and that their client accepted “substantial” damages. All 269 people on the plane were killed. Lawyers for the magazine told the court in a public announcement that “there is no foundation for any suggestion that either Korean Air Lines or any of its staff on the aircraft concerned took part in a spy mission.” Lawyers for the airline said the magazine had agreed to publish an apology in its next issue.
World chess champion Anatoly Karpov and challenger Gary Kasparov played to a 16th consecutive draw, ending the 25th game of their title contest in Moscow after Kasparov’s 21st move. Karpov leads 4 to 0 in the match, which will end when one player wins six games.
Anthony William Gill, accused member of a hit team allegedly hired by Libya to kill an exiled dissident, was taken to a Cairo bank and forced to cash a $90,000 check paid by the regime of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, which was tricked into believing the dissident was dead. The money from the cashed check was immediately confiscated by Egyptian security men as evidence against the suspected hit squad. The target of the plot reportedly was Abdel-Hamid Bakoush, former Libyan prime minister.
Lebanese and Israeli negotiators, in the third round of U.N.-sponsored talks on the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon, said they made some progress on border security measures demanded by Israel. The talks will resume Wednesday.
Syria is seeking to persuade Iran to moderate its policies on a number of Middle East issues and to prevail upon its followers in the region to do the same, according to Arab diplomats and some press reports here. The Arab diplomats said President Hafez al-Assad is seeking Iranian cooperation to end the four-year war with Iraq and improve relations between Iran and France. He is also believed to be seeking Iran’s support for the troop withdrawal negotiations between Lebanon and Israel that resumed last week.
Food supplies were cut off for thousands of famine victims as secessionist rebels seized a major refuge center in northern Ethiopia, according to sources in the relief effort. They said the center, at Korem, which contains up to 40,000 refugees, 15,000 of them children, had been overrun after a daylong battle between the rebels and Government troops. Western relief officials said they have been unable to reach the refugee camp at Korem, which shelters 40,000 starving people, since the Tigre Peoples Liberation Front occupied the town Sunday.
Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, speaking on the 67th anniversary of his mother’s birth, told tens of thousands of his cheering countrymen here today that India in recent days had shown the world that “this country is not shaken by bullets” and that it “cannot break so easily.” He also drew a huge roar of approval when he said that “we have to take revenge” for his mother’s killing. He quickly added that this should not be accomplished “through anger or hatred,” but “only by all of us putting our full might to keep the country strong and united.” This, he said, “is how we should remember Indira Gandhi.”
While hundreds of thousands of Tokyo residents were still making do with temporary outdoor telephones, some banks and post offices had their computer services restored today after a fire put them out of operation Friday. To the relief of many bank customers, most cash machines in the area were working again. The fire Friday in a utility tunnel knocked out phone and telecommunications services for many of the residents of Setagaya Ward and some in the adjacent Meguro Ward. Most hospitals, schools and police and fire stations in the affected areas still did not have working telephones today, phone company officials said. Officials are now predicting that residential telephone service can be restored by the end of the month.
A senior government official in the Philippines said that President Ferdinand E. Marcos is hospitalized near Manila after kidney surgery last week but is in no danger of dying. The official declined to be named. However, a palace spokesman brushed aside the reports and said Marcos is performing his official duties as usual. The spokesman, who made the statement on the Government-controlled television, quoted Amante Bigornia, the Deputy Information Minister. Mr. Bigornia’s statement added that Mr. Marcos met Sunday night with two Cabinet ministers and Lieutenant General Fidel V. Ramos, Acting Chief of Staff.
An inferno engulfed a slum area near Mexico City as a storage center for 5 million liters of liquefied butane gas exploded in flames, reportedly killing at least 261 people and seriously injuring 500. The authorities said that 100,000 people had been evacuated in buses from the neighborhood of wooden shacks. A tremendous blast shook the crowded suburb of Tlalnepantla, eight miles northwest of the capital, at 5:42 A.M. (6:42 A.M. New York time). This was followed by perhaps a dozen more explosions, residents said. Balls of fire shot into the air and rained fiery debris on homes and businesses. Plumes of dark smoke rose a mile into the sky as the fire raged out of control for more than seven hours.
[Ed: Deaths ultimately were over 500, and the number burned severely over 5,000. The settlement of San Juan Ixhuatepec (popularly known as San Juanico), a municipality of Tlalnepantla de Baz, was completely destroyed.]
A Salvadoran Army officer accused of plotting the 1981 slayings of the head of the country’s land-redistribution program and two United States labor advisers has been exonerated by the country’s Supreme Court. The officer, Lieut. Isidro Lopez Sibrian, was given a “definitive stay of proceedings” in the shooting deaths of the two Americans, Michael P. Hammer and Mark D. Pearlman, and Jose Rodolfo Viera, the head of the Salvadoran Institute for Agrarian Reform. “He’s scot free,” said a United States official in San Salvador. “I deplore it and we deplore it.”
Honduras has asked the United States for a fleet of F-5 fighter planes as part of a package of significantly expanded military and economic aid it is seeking to negotiate with Washington. Officials said the Honduran request was for 12 of the F-5 planes, along with military aid averaging more than $100 million a year for the next four years and a doubling of economic assistance. United States officials here say they are interpreting the request for increased aid as an indication that Honduran officials, contrary to recent public statements, are seeking a closer relationship with Washington. But Honduran sources indicated that the request symbolizes continuing concern over the benefit that Honduras is receiving from its links with the United States as well as growing discomfort over the increasing military assistance being provided to neighboring El Salvador.
The United States suspended its cocaine eradication program in Peru today after gunmen burst into a jungle campsite over the weekend. The death toll of Peruvians working on the project rose by 2 today to 19. At the same time, unconfirmed accounts suggested that the attack might have been carried out by members of Shining Path, the Maoist guerrilla movement. First police reports identified the attackers as narcotics terrorists. Government officials have said the guerrillas, active in the area since midsummer, were linked to narcotics traffickers.
Plans to curb veterans’ benefits in health care are being considered by the Reagan Administration to help control the cost of the program as millions of World War II veterans reach the age of 65. At that age, a veteran is eligible for medical care on request, without regard to financial need, if space is available in Veterans Administration facilities. Reagan Administration officials said they were considering proposals to charge veterans at least a nominal amount for health-care services; to make benefits contingent upon financial need, or to curb benefits for veterans who sought treatment for illneses and disabilities unrelated to their military service. The push for the latest proposals came from White House policy analysts, the Office of Management and Budget and the President’s survey on cost control. They have warned of huge growth in the veterans’ health system unless Congress changes the law in the next few years.
President Reagan places a call to Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina).
President Reagan participates in a meeting with members of the California Farm Bureau and Santa Barbara’s County Sheriffs’s Department’s Operation I.D. Program.
The national debt has been growing considerably faster than the economy. Administration officials said President Reagan’s senior economic team was emphasizing that point in urging spending cuts. The advisers have stressed that the debt’s growing share of the American economy and the prospect that it could force interest rates higher are more serious than any one year’s deficit. Using that argument, the officials said, the nine-member economic “core group” is pressing Mr. Reagan to accept targets for a fairly steep decline in Federal spending for the next three years. With the deficit now at more than 5 percent of the national output of goods and services, the proposed goals were to push it down to 4 percent of the gross national product in the fiscal year 1986, which begins next October; to 3 percent in the fiscal year 1987, and to 2 percent in 1988.
Many farm families’ emotions are being devastated by a record number of farm sales, foreclosures and bankruptcies. Experts say the trouble takes a variety of forms — abuse of wives, children or even animals, alcoholism, severe depression and suicide.
Two bombs, exploding 11 minutes apart, destroyed an abortion clinic and damaged a family planning center in the Washington suburb of Wheaton, Maryland, in what a Planned Parenthood official condemned as “terrorist, violent acts.” The first bomb gutted the Metropolitan Medical and Women’s Center, the site of a large anti-abortion demonstration over the weekend. The second blast shattered windows and did other damage to a building two miles away where Planned Parenthood of Washington has an office, fire authorities said. No one was injured in either explosion. Damage was estimated at $350,000 in the first blast and $50,000 in the second, authorities said. No group claimed responsibility. The bombings were the latest in a string of violent incidents at abortion centers around the country.
A Rhode Island law requiring a doctor to inform husbands before performing an abortion interferes with the “fundamental right” of women to have an abortion and therefore is unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge Raymond J. Pettine ruled in Providence. He said the requirement conflicts with women’s right to an abortion, a right affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, because it delays and could block a woman’s decision to proceed.
The federal government might be able to save billions of dollars in health care costs if unnecessary hospitalization of patients is reduced, a Senate panel was told. If the low-cost patterns of care were the norm, the nation would not be faced with the pending bankruptcy of the Medicare trust fund, Dr. John E. Wennberg of Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire, told the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on labor, health and human services.
A House subcommittee chairman has formally requested Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. to come up with a plan for taking over General Dynamics Corp.’s submarine yards in Connecticut and Rhode Island because of gifts the company allegedly gave now-retired Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. In a letter to Lehman, Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Michigan), said an investigation by his staff shows General Dynamics gave gratuities to Rickover in 1977 when he was in charge of the Navy’s nuclear programs.
Environmental Protection Agency scientists proposed new guidelines for assessing cancer risks that spell out when agency scientists may downgrade the significance of liver tumors in laboratory mice. The agency’s research chief, Bernard Goldstein, said the proposal also requires EPA scientists as a general rule to count all tumors, both benign and malignant, in assessing their animal test results.
The thousands of Cubans who arrived in the United States during a 1980 boatlift can begin applying for permanent-residence status next month because of inaction by Congress on immigration legislation, officials announced in Miami. The applications will be accepted after the government formally puts the Cuban Adjustment Act back into active use. The 18-year-old act was put on hold for three years as federal legislators wrangled over immigration reform proposals, none of which has passed Congress. Officials said the program would be applied to the 125,000 boatlift refugees as early as Dec. 3.
A local ordinance in Indianapolis that defines pornography as sexual discrimination and allows women to ask for court bans of the material was declared unconstitutional by a federal court judge who said it violates the right of free speech. City-County Council members said they will appeal the ruling. U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker said she agrees with the council’s efforts to protect the rights of women, but that the ordinance restricts the sale and distribution of pornography.
Provincetown-Boston Airline, which was grounded earlier this month because of safety violations, said today it had been forced to delay resumption of flights until the end of the Thanksgiving holiday period. The carrier, the nation’s largest commuter airline, had originally planned to restart flights on Tuesday but the airline said the Thanksgiving holiday was expected to delay its recertification by the Federal Aviation Administration. The process requires the airline to submit detailed operating, maintenance and training plans that meet all government regulations. Last week the agency approved a plan for the airline to begin flying some of its smaller planes on a limited basis. That plan, contingent on the carrier being recertified, called for Provincetown-Boston to fly 56 aircraft to all 35 cities in its system. Before its grounding November 10, the airline had operated 105 aircraft on more than 500 daily flights.
3,000 fugitives have been arrested in eight East Coast states over 10 weeks in what the authorities describe as the biggest manhunt in the nation’s history. The main targets of the operation by local, state and Federal officers were career criminals, with a record of several crimes.
An usual group of viruses has been linked to three human diseases: cancer, the acquired immune deficiency syndrome and hepatitis. The viruses, called retroviruses, have been much studied because of the clues they offer on the nature of cancer and the basic organization of life.
Research on the nature of love indicates that women, on average, report loving their best friends as much as they do their lovers. Women also generally report liking their best friends a bit more than they do their lovers. In one recent study, the best indicator of how satisfied and happy a couple are in a relationship is not how much or how little the partners love one another, but rather how equal their love is.
Measuring schools’ effectiveness should be improved, according to an increasing number of people. Proposals for improvement include comprehensive nationwide tests of what students have learned.
Fire broke out aboard a military helicopter as it lifted a piece of artillery in a training mission today, killing three Marines, injuring at least 11 others and leaving three missing, officials said. Seventeen people were aboard the $22 million CH-53E helicopter, the Marines’ newest and largest, including five crew members and 12 passengers, and rescuers were combing the area tonight for the missing, said Lieutenant S. B. Jack of Camp Lejeune, who provided the casualty figures. The helicopter was lifting a 155-millimeter howitzer when the craft caught fire, said Captain Craig Fisher of the base’s public affairs office. He said the helicopter was on a routine training mission in support of the First Battalion of the 10th Marine Regiment.
George D. Aiken died in a nursing home in Montpelier, Vermont, at the age of 92. Mr. Aiken, an independent-minded Republican who served in the Senate for 34 years, was noted as a maverick whose championship of liberal legislation often won him the enmity of other Republicans.
An 8-year-old boy, said to be depressed over accusations that he stole $4 at school, was on a hospital life support system today after being found hanging by his belt from his bunk bed, police officials said. The child, Popo Walker, a second- grader, was in critical condition at Lakeland Regional Medical Center. The police said the child was “believed brain dead” but the hospital refused comment on the report. The boy’s father, Charles Davis, told The Tampa Tribune that his son became depressed after classmates accused him of stealing $4 from their teacher’s purse at North Lakeland Elementary School. “He said he ain’t going back because he didn’t steal anything,” Mr. Davis said.
Lieutenant Jim Lewis said he was undecided whether to term the case an accident or a suicide attempt. “I still have to talk to more people,” he said. The school principal, Herb Peaslee, said he met with the child on Friday to calm him down about the accusations and explain to him that the teacher believed him. School officials said an aunt had had a conference with them earlier because she was concerned that students were teasing him about his name. Popo is his father’s nickname but the youth’s given name.
NFL Monday Night Football:
Pittsburgh Steelers 24, New Orleans Saints 27
Richard Todd threw two touchdown passes tonight in leading the New Orleans Saints to a 27–24 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers. Despite the loss Pittsburgh (6–6) still holds a two-game lead over Cincinnati in the American Conference Central Division. New Orleans (6–6) still has a chance at a wild-card berth in the National Conference. Todd, who turned 31 tonight, threw 28 yards for a score to Larry Hardy, a tight end, with 17 seconds left in the first half, and 21 yards to another tight end, Junior Miller, midway through the final quarter. The Saints’ Dennis Winston, a linebacker and former Steeler, returned an interception 47 yards for a touchdown in the fourth quarter. Pittsburgh scored twice in the second quarter: a 76-yard punt return by Louis Lipps and a 14-yard pass from Mark Malone to John Stallworth. It was Stallworth’s 52d touchdown reception, breaking a club record he shared with Lynn Swann. Lipps scored again when he took a 25-yard pass from Scott Campbell, the Steelers’ third-string quarterback, with 1:17 left.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1185.29 (-2.65)
Born:
Lindsay Ellingson, American model, in San Diego, California.
Died:
George D. Aiken, 92, American politician (Senator-R-Vermont, 1941-1975).
History Diaries 