American-Soviet “mutual restraint” in such areas as the deployment of new nuclear missiles in Europe would be an appropriate item for discussion when arms control talks are renewed, the Reagan Administration said. A spokesman for President Reagan made the comment in response to reports that the Administration had already decided to slow the rate of deployment of the Pershing 2, one of two types of medium-range missiles that are now being installed in Western Europe. “There are no preconditions and no change in our deployment schedule,” said the spokesman, Marlin M. Fitzwater. “We do, however, believe that mutual restraint is an appropriate item in the talks.” On Thursday the United States and the Soviet Union announced that Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko would meet in Geneva on January 7 and 8 to lay the groundwork for the negotiations. President Reagan hailed the development as “the first step on what will be a long and difficult road.” The announcements Thursday said the United States and the Soviet Union would consider “the whole range of questions” concerning nuclear arms and outer-space weapons.
Robert C. McFarlane, the President’s national security adviser, stressed again today that the agreement to renew talks in no way involved implicit concessions to the Russians to slow the rate of deployment of Pershing 2 missiles or to defer further space testing of an antisatellite defense system. “There are no hidden plans on our part to make voluntary concessions,” one Administration official said. The Russians have complained in the past about the deployment of the Pershings, which are ballistic missiles based in West Germany, and the space testing of an antisatellite system. But President Reagan has viewed both as important leverage in seeking to move the Soviet Union back to negotiations. The cruise missiles are subsonic drones, slower than the Pershings, and are guided to their targets by an internal navigation system. A total of 572 cruise and Pershing missiles are to be deployed in five Western European countries over five years.
A Solidarity activist who was a witness in cases of reported kidnappings of members of the banned Polish trade union has been arrested and charged with making illegal broadcasts, the official press agency P.A.P. said today. It said the police in Torun, 140 miles northwest of Warsaw, arrested the activist, Stanislaw Smigiel, an electrical engineer, on November 4 and found he had a transmitter tuned to broadcast on the frequency of Poland’s Channel 1 television network. Underground Solidarity literature has named Mr. Smigiel as a key witness in cases charging that seven union activists were kidnapped and beaten in the Torun area earlier this year.
Ten people were injured today in violence on British picket lines near struck coal mines, and the National Coal Board said 800 more miners had abandoned their eight-month-old walkout and returned to work. Seven policemen and three pickets were hurt outside mines in Scotland, Wales and Yorkshire, the police said. Twenty-five pickets were arrested. The number of strikers returning to work today increased the week’s total to about 5,800, short of the state-owned Coal Board’s prediction of 7,000. The board had set today as the last day for strikers in England and Wales to qualify for a pre-Christmas bonus of about $1,700. The coal board said the bonus helped entice more than 12,000 workers to abandon the strike this month. It has announced an extension of the deadline, saying it was possible for men returning to work on Monday to work enough shifts to qualify for the bonus. The president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, in a television interview, rejected the board’s claim that 63,000 of the country’s 189,000 miners were working. He said 48,000 were working.
UNESCO’s survival is threatened by Britain’s threat to withdraw, delegates to the agency said in Paris. Britain’s Foreign Secretary said Thursday that Britain was not satisfied that it was getting its money’s worth from UNESCO, and intended to quit by 1985 if changes were not made. The United States said it would quit the agency next month.
A majority of the West German Cabinet is now opposed to signing an international convention on controlling the use of the sea and its resources, a senior aide to Chancellor Helmut Kohl said this week. The United States has already announced it will not sign the accord, known as the International Law of the Sea Convention, and Bonn Government officials disclosed last month that President Reagan, in a letter to Mr. Kohl, had strongly urged West Germany to refrain as well because of provisions governing seabed mining. Five Common Market countries — France, Denmark, Greece, Ireland and the Netherlands — have signed the convention; three others — Belgium, Italy and Luxembourg — are understood to be awaiting a West German decision before committing themselves.
Pope John Paul II is said to have asked the Vatican to prepare a new statement on the theology of liberation, this time taking into account the views of the many Latin American bishops who support social activism by the clergy. Brazilian church sources here said the decision to consult the region’s bishops came after two leading Brazilian prelates complained to the Pope that a document critical of the theology issued by the Vatican in September reflected poor understanding of the Latin American reality. In their conversation with the Pope, in September, the two prelates also challenged the claim by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, author of the first document, that he had consulted the region’s bishops before issuing the statement, the sources said. The spokesman of the Brazilian National Bishops Conference confirmed the representations made to the Pope by the two prelates, Archbishop Jose Ivo Lorscheiter, the president of the bishops conference, and Aloisio Cardinal Lorscheider, president of Brazil’s commission on doctrine.
The rabbi’s role as teacher and sage is being challenged by a computer at Bar Ilan University in Israel. The computer, programmed by the Responsa Project team at Bar Ilan’s Center for Computers and Jewish Heritage to be a research tool, contains in its memory banks all the major works of responsa — Jewish legal questions and answers — and only recently recorded the 36-volume Babylonian Talmud, in addition to the complete Old Testament.
Yasser Arafat’s supporters in the Palestine Liberation Organizaition said today that they had legitimized his leadership by assembling a quorum of delegates at a meeting here of the Palestinian parliament in exile. “They’ve stuck their finger in Syria’s eye,” a European diplomat said. The Syrians back rebel factions opposed to Mr. Arafat.
Ethiopian food relief is tapering off, Ethiopian officials said. It is possible, they say, that within weeks many of the camps and feeding centers may begin to run short. There are still the scenes of horror: a mother who thrusts her baby at a visitor so that he may better view the baby’s loose flesh, covered with sores, and the infant’s sunken, yellowed eyes. There are the old men, sitting on the ground, their faces vacant, looking as if they are waiting for the dust to claim them. There are the rows of wasted bodies covered with ragged shrouds and innumerable flies, the dawn harvest of another night of hunger in this northeast African nation. But that is no longer the only kind of scene a visitor sees in Makale, the site of one of Ethiopia’s largest famine refugee populations, about 300 miles north of the capital of Addis Ababa.
There are also hundreds of infants, eating vitamin-enriched porridge and high-calorie biscuits. There are older children, running and playing. There are neat rows of white tents providing families with shelter from the evening cold, and there are doctors and nurses. “We’ve come a long way in a short time,” said Sister Margaret of Catholic Social Action, a relief agency working in Makale. “The feeding program is working. The children in particular are responding very well.” The question is whether the ground gained here and at other famine-relief centers can be held. Ethiopian Government officials say that in recent days, the flow of emergency food supplies gathered in an international relief effort that includes the United States and the Soviet Union has begun to taper off. It is possible, they say, that within a matter of weeks, many of the camps and feeding centers may begin to run short of food.
The police in Amritsar interrogated an Associated Press reporter for five hours today in connection with a dispatch published abroad about the army assault last June on the Golden Temple, the holiest of Sikh shrines. The reporter, Brahma Chellaney, 27 years old, was asked to reveal his sources for a report that said some Sikhs had been tied up and shot by soldiers. Mr. Chellaney declined to answer, citing journalistic ethics and the constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press. The Indian Government has called his report baseless, also challenging his statement that 1,000 Sikhs and 200 soldiers were killed. It said 492 Sikhs and 93 soldiers had been killed.
Fighting in Panmunjom, the truce area separating North and South Korea, broke out between North Korean troops and United Nations Command soldiers over an apparent defection by a Soviet citizen. At least two North Korean soldiers and one South Korean were reported killed and an American soldier was wounded. It was the most serious incident in the truce area in eight years. At least two North Korean soldiers and one South Korean were reported killed, and an American soldier, identified as Pfc. Michael A. Burgoyne, 20 years old, of Portland, Michigan, was wounded. A military spokesman said Friday night that the condition of the American soldier was “stable.” The shootings came at a time when tensions had begun to ease between North and South Korea, bitter enemies that maintain hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides of a 151-mile-long buffer zone separating their countries.
Muslim rebels kidnapped two American tourists this week on a remote island in the southern Philippines, a United states Embassy spokesman said today. Alan Croghan, the embassy spokesman in Manila, identified the hostages as John Rabaner and Helmut Herref, who were reportedly seized from a bus with two Filipino guides on Jolo Island, 580 miles south of Manila, late Monday. Their hometowns were not immediately known. The police in the regional command center in Zamboanga said the report from Jolo did not say whether the kidnappers had made any demands.
Peace talks in El Salvador between rebel leaders and Government representatives next week will be held without President Jose Napoleon Duarte. Mr. Duarte said he will stay away because the meeting is intended to deal only with procedural matters for future negotiations.
More than 10 American diplomats and their families have left Colombia because of threats from drug traffickers angered by a United States-Colombian crackdown on international cocaine smuggling, a United States Embassy spokesman said today. The spokesman said “more than 10” diplomats and their families left this week and would not return for at least 40 to 45 days. “The embassy is carrying on normally, although with extra security precautions,” she said. In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Kathleen Lang, said about 100 United States employees were assigned to the embassy in Bogota. She confirmed that there had been “threats reportedly made against U.S. and Colombian officials who are cooperating in combating illegal drug trade.”
The Chilean military government announced today that it had banished nine leftist leaders into internal exile, and the governor’s office in Concepcion Province reported that left-wing guerrillas had killed a navy conscript. In Santiago, thousands of Roman Catholics gathered in churches, work places and universities to pray for an end to Chile’s political strife. Archbishop Juan Francisco Fresno of Santiago had called for the “day of fasting and prayer” to ease tension after President Augusto Pinochet’s declaration on November 6 of a state of siege.
The USSR performs a nuclear test at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeast Kazakhstan.
The U.S. is using its foreign aid funds to reduce the price of its own exports in what it describes as an attempt to counter such countries as France that unabashedly subsidize their exports. The United States recently allocated $4.2 million, which was to have helped the southern African country of Botswana buy commodities, to reduce the interest rate that Botswana will pay on a loan if it buys locomotives from General Electric or General Motors. When and if Botswana signs the contract for the locomotives, it will get the $4.2 million, which it can apply to the financing costs.
Bypassing the Senate, President Reagan appointed 11 people today to the Legal Services Corporation’s board of directors. The same 11 people previously failed to gain Senate confirmation, and one of the 11 did not get a Senate committee’s approval. Congress is not in session now, and the President used his authority to make recess appointments in the action today. The recess appointments enabled the President to avoid the Senate nomination process, and the appointees may serve without Senate confirmation through the Congressional session next year.
President Reagan participates in yet another annual Reagan tradition: the Annual Brush Burning at Rancho del Cielo.
A permanent artificial heart implant in a 52-year-old man will take place in an operation scheduled Sunday morning at the Humana Heart Institute International in Louisville, Kentucky, doctors there said. It will be the second such operation. The man, William J. Schroeder, is a retired quality assurance specialist and Army ammunition depot worker from Jasper, a town in southern Indiana. He and his wife, Margaret, have been married 32 years and they have six children, ranging in age from 19 to 31, and five grandchildren. Mr. Schroeder is recuperating from gall bladder surgery he underwent November 17, one day after he was unanimously chosen for an artificial heart by a selection committee at Humana Heart Institute International, where the operation is be performed at 8 AM Eastern Standard Time.
If Denver’s voluntary driving limits do not work in its latest attempt to reduce the city’s high carbon monoxide levels, the next step might be taxing driving or rationing drivers’ time behind the wheel. The latest of Colorado’s antipollution effort is a $700,000 public awareness campaign to persuade drivers not to use their car one day a week, and instead take the bus, a bike or join a carpool.
Governor Martha Layne Collins’s husband said today that a 1.3-inch piece of glass his wife swallowed “most probably” came from a carrot-and-bean dish she ate on a Pan American World Airways jet, but an airline spokesman said that was “highly improbable.” Mrs. Collins underwent emergency surgery in London Wednesday in which a four-inch section of her small intestine was removed. Mr. Collins told reporters here that the surgeons found, among carrots and beans in her intestinal tract, a piece of glass that had punctured her small intestine. A Pan Am spokesman, Jeff Kreindler, said he doubted the glass had been in the vegetables served on the flight. “We do not use glass in any step of the storage, preparation or provisioning of vegetables,” he said.”No one can say it’s impossible, but it’s highly, highly improbable.” Mrs. Collins had gone to London to study the effects of acid rain in Europe. Her delegation, sponsored by the National Governors Association, included three other Governors.
Three former Philadelphia police officers were convicted of taking bribes in a racketeering conspiracy that extorted $350,000 to protect illegal gambling in the city. Two other former officers were acquitted. The verdicts brought to 17 the number of former officers found guilty of corruption since the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating Philadelphia’s Police Department three and a half years ago. Former Lieutenant Albert Mazzo, 41 years old, and former Officer John Anderson, 41, were acquitted of all charges of conspiracy, racketeering and extortion. Those convicted were former Officers Thomas (Dutch) Volkmar, 34, George Novak, 31, and Andrew Kelly, 44. Judge Daniel Huyett 3d of District Court did not set a date for sentencing.
A would-be kidnapper shot an 11-year-old boy to death Thursday when he tried to prevent the abduction of his 13-year-old cousin, the authorities said. The police said they arrested Horace E. Kelley, 25, of San Bernardino. The boy, Daniel David Osentowski of Rancho Cucamonga, was visiting relatives for the holiday. He and his cousin, whose name was not released, had walked to a store about a block from the girl’s home, the police said. The attacker, who apparently followed them in a van, stopped and grabbed the girl. Daniel tried to flag down passing drivers, then returned to where his cousin was being held. The girl pulled free and escaped. As she fled, she heard gunshots, the police said. Daniel was shot once in the head and once in the chest, apparently at close range, the police said. Based on information from the girl and from motorists who saw the van, the police arrested Mr. Kelley three and a half hours later and booked him for investigation of murder.
The last of five inmates who escaped from a southern Virignia prison was captured tonight about a half-mile from the institution, the authorities said. The four other escapees had been captured earlier in the day. Anthony Fox, 28 years old, who was serving a life sentence plus 335 years for rape, sodomy and abduction, was seen about 8 PM walking along a highway, and was arrested about an hour later. The escape Thursday was the first from the $24.6 million Nottoway Correctional Center.
An inmate in a Texas prison was stabbed to death today, the 23rd prisoner killed in a year of record violence in the state’s penal system. The fatal stabbing of Eddie Roy Jones, 31 years old, may be linked to a gang of white supremacists at the Ellis I Unit prison, said Charles Brown, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Corrections. Mr. Jones was black, Mr. Brown said, and two men suspected of killing him are white. “Officials at the scene say it might be gang-related,” Mr. Brown said. There are several inmate gangs at the maximum-security institution outside Huntsville, including the Aryan Brotherhood, which Mr. Brown said was linked to the killing.
It is too early to tell whether the 1984-1985 influenza season will be serious or mild, but the flu vaccine available this winter should protect most people, Federal health officials said today. “We’re beginning to see some sporadic, isolated cases of influenza, which is what we usually see in November,” said Nancy Kater, an epidemic intelligence service officer with the Centers for Disease Control. “Usually in December or January is when we begin to have confirmation of outbreaks.” The agency reported that isolated cases of flu were confirmed last month in Texas and Nevada.
Up to 1,000 people living along a 10-mile stretch of ocean front were evacuated tonight as heavy seas battered the Florida coast, killing one man, beaching a cargo vessel, flooding roads and destroying a pier. Governor Bob Graham declared a state of emergency for Volusia and St. Johns Counties tonight, said Mick Collins, an official with the Florida division of emergency management. The authorities in Indian River County ordered the evacuation of 800 to 1,000 people from ocean front property between Vero Beach and Sebastian Inlet, a civil defense spokesman said. The area is 40 miles north of West Palm Beach. The evacuation was ordered after a restaurant and part of a motel collapsed.
“A Christmas Carol” directed by Clive Donner starring George C. Scott premieres in the UK.
Boston College QB Doug Flutie passes for 472 yards, including the game-ending 48-yard touchdown (The “Hail Mary Pass”) to beat Miami 47–45.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1220.3 (+18.78)
Born:
Justin Turner, MLB third baseman, second baseman, and first baseman (All-Star 2017, 2021; World Series Champions-Dodgers, 2020; Baltimore Orioles, New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers, Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays, Seattle Mariners), in Long Beach, California.
Casper Wells, MLB outfielder (Detroit Tigers, Seattle Mariners, Oakland A’s, Chicago White Sox, Philadelphia Phillies), in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Robert Coello, MLB pitcher (Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays, Los Angeles Angels), in Bayonne, New Jersey.
Adrianne Ross, WNBA guard (San Antonio Silver Stars), in Hobbs, New Mexico.
Lucas Grabeel, American actor and singer (“High School Musical”), in Springfield, Missouri.
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