Paul H. Nitze discussed the sharp splits within the Reagan Administration over how to deal with the Russians. Mr. Nitze, who was named as “special adviser” to Secretary of State George P. Shultz during next month’s arms-control talks with Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, said Mr. Shultz should approach the talks hopeful of progress “until that’s proved to be wrong.” In his first interview since being named by President Reagan on Wednesday as Mr. Shultz’s “special adviser” for the Gromyko talks, Mr. Nitze looked philosophically at the sharp splits within the Administration over how to deal with the Russians. The 77-year-old veteran negotiator said the clashes between the State Department and the Defense Department were “natural differences of point of view” that have persisted within the Washington bureaucracy since the immediate postwar years.
Mr. Nitze was asked if he found it awkward dealing with such colleagues as Edward L. Rowny, the head of the delegation to the strategic arms reduction talks, who until this week was Mr. Nitze’s equal in protocol terms, or with Kenneth L. Adelman, the head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. “I don’t find it so,” he said. “The problems are difficult, but the relationships are not.” As to the state of relations with the Russians today, he said, “One can’t tell until one talks to them” in Geneva. “I believe it is important to follow the hopeful hypothesis until that’s demonstrated to be wrong.” “One ought to go into this with hope and open eyes,” he said.
The former second-ranking member of the Solidarity underground and another Solidarity member will be freed under the terms of this summer’s amnesty, the Polish television announced tonight. Bogdan Lis, a 31-year-old former shipyard mechanic and former Communist Party member, has been held since his arrest in June, along with Piotr Mierzejewski, a former Solidarity member, while the authorities weighed a case of high treason against them. Such a charge, which carries a death penalty, was specifically exempted from the amnesty proclaimed on June 22 when 652 political prisoners were released. Their release was seen, in part, as a conciliatory gesture toward the West.
Roland Dumas, a close friend of President Francois Mitterrand, was named Foreign Minister today, replacing Claude Cheysson. Mr. Dumas, a 62-year-old lawyer, was Minister of European Affairs and Government spokesman. The President announced on Tuesday that Mr. Cheysson would become a member of the European Commission, the European Economic Community’s executive body. It is a job he held before his appointment as Foreign Minister after the Socialist election victory in 1981.
The brother-in-law of Tomasso Buscetta, the former Mafia chieftain whose dislosures led to one of Italy’s biggest anti-crime operations, was killed tonight, the police said. Pietro Busetta, 60 years old, the husband of one of Mr. Buscetta’s three sisters, was shot dead in Bagheria, an agricultural town outside Palermo, they said. The police said Mr. Busetta was shot several times at close range by a gunman after he and his wife, Serafina, got out of their car near their apartment. The gunman escaped. Working on Mr. Buscetta’s disclosures, the police have arrested more than 120 people since September and magistrates issued a total of 366 arrest warrants. Earlier today in Palermo, Leonardo Vitale, 44, another former Mafia member who turned informer, died, five days after being ambushed by gunmen outside his home.
Arab hijackers threatened to kill more of their hostages aboard a Kuwaiti airliner in Tehran and said that they had killed two American and two Kuwaiti passengers, the Iranian press agency reported. Reports from Tehran indicated that about 50 people, including the four or five hijackers, were still on the plane, and that passengers had been tied to their seats. Soon afterward, it said, shots were heard from inside the plane at the airport in Tehran. There was no word on whether more passengers had been killed, but the agency reported that “the situation inside the plane seems to be critical.”
Anti-Ethiopian rebels charged today that government planes bombed and strafed famine victims fleeing into the Sudan, killing as many as 18 people and wounding 56. Guerrillas from the Tigre People’s Liberation Front said in a statement issued in Khartoum and London that the aircraft attacked the refugees December 3 near the village of Shelalr, inside rebel-controlled areas of Ethiopia. There was no independent confirmation of the rebel claims, but a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Nairobi said the report should not be dismissed out of hand. The area where the rebels said the attack took place is near the town of Kassala, which borders an area controlled by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, another guerrilla group fighting the Ethiopian Government. The rebels said the victims had been fleeing a government resettlement program in which up to 2.4 million people are expected to be relocated, mostly from Tigre and Eritrea to government-controlled southern areas, in the next year.
As shops reopened in Bhopal, India today and survivors returned home, many people were still searching for missing relatives, four days after poison gas escaped from a chemical plant here. Those overcome by the gas continued to arrive at hospitals on foot, on stretchers and in the arms of relatives. Doctors reported stillbirths and a chilling list of potential aftereffects. The smoke of cremation fires still hung over the city of 900,000 residents, and relief workers were removing the carcasses of thousands of buffaloes, dogs, birds, horses and chickens from city streets.
Union Carbide’s chairman was arrested as he arrived in Bhopal, India, and charged with criminal conspiracy in connection with the insecticide plant gas leak that killed an estimated 2,100 people and injured many thousands more. Warren M. Anderson, the chairman, was later freed on bail. Two senior officials of Union Carbide India Ltd. who were arrested with him remain in custody. After his release, the 63-year-old American executive arrived here early this evening on a plane provided by the Indian Government and went directly to the United States Embassy. A diplomatic source there said Mr. Anderson “looked fine” and had reported no mistreatment by Indian authorities.
More than 100 people were shot dead after a guerrilla attack on an army convoy in northwest Sri Lanka, official sources said today. The informants said 102 bodies were recovered from several locations after the attack on Tuesday in Mannar, a coastal district about 185 miles northwest of the capital, Colombo. Initial reports Tuesday quoted officials and residents as saying that as many as 53 people were killed. The informants, who had access to official reports from the area, confirmed assertions from residents that most of the victims were Tamil civilians killed by Sinhalese army troops. The shootings occurred after Tamil separatists detonated land mines that destroyed an army jeep, killing one soldier and wounding six others. The Government has denied that soldiers went on a rampage but has acknowledged that some civilians were killed in a “mopping up” operation.
The second-ranking American diplomat in Laos was expelled November 24 because he violated a curfew, the Foreign Ministry disclosed this week. But diplomats speculated that the Communist Government was worried that the diplomat, Robert C. Porter, was mixing too freely with Laotian people. A Laotian official said Mr. Porter violated a curfew barring foreign diplomats from “any movement or activity” after 10 PM. The official said Mr. Porter was on his way home after attending a party on November 23 when he was stopped, taken for interrogation by the police, and given 48 hours to leave the country. No public explanation has been given for Mr. Porter’s departure. The Reagan Administration, also without explanation, subsequently directed Sythongma Thandanouvong, a second secretary in the Laotian Embassy in Washington, to leave the United States. The Laotian left on November 29.
President Ferdinand E. Marcos, recovering from lung disorders that required his isolation for 24 days, has called for changes in the schedule of forthcoming elections, including one that enables him to choose his possible successor. Deputy Prime Minister Jose Rono, floor leader of the ruling party, said at a news conference today that Mr. Marcos had instructed him to hasten the preparation of electoral legislation and call a party caucus early next month. “We have only till late January to submit the bill” to the National Assembly, Mr. Rono said. Another of Mr. Marcos’s political lieutenants, Assemblyman Leonardo Perez, chairman of the Committee on Revision of Laws, said in an interview that because of the President’s recent illness “it is good for our party to be prepared.” Explaining the proposed legislative changes, Mr. Rono stressed the need to synchronize elections for local officials, national executives and Members of Parliament, now scheduled, respectively, in 1986, 1987 and 1990. Mr. Rono also said one of the proposals is to elect a new president simultaneously with local government officials in January 1986. A vice president would also be elected for the first time since the onset of martial rule in 1972.
New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange criticized France today for the detonation earlier in the day of a 70- kiloton nuclear device at the French Government’s Mururoa Atoll testing site in the South Pacific. “It does not matter whether the tests are large or small,” he said. “What is offensive to New Zealanders is that the French continue their testing at all — despite the unequivocal official and public opposition evident not only within New Zealand, but also throughout the South Pacific region.”
Foreign investments in Canada are expected to be made easier under a change of policy proposed by the new Progressive Conservative Government. The Government plan would abolish the Foreign Investment Review Agency, established 10 years ago by the Liberals under former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The agency was held responsible for a slowdown in foreign investing because of the time it required to approve new investments from abroad. The policies were widely criticized, especially in the United States, which is the largest foreign investor in Canada, as being excessively bureaucratic and frightening away new investors. The new policy “is saying to the world that we want to encourage as much investment as possible,” Sinclair Stevens, the Minister of Industry, said. He added, “When we say we want to dismantle needless barriers to enterprise in this country, we mean it.”
Police officers and soldiers in Santiago, Chile sealed off a slum neighborhood with tanks and rounded up more than 5,000 men in house-to-house searches today. The action came after terrorists killed a policeman and bombed a subway station overnight. It was the fourth major sweep of a slum neighborhood since President Augusto Pinochet decreed a 90-day state of siege on November 6 to combat unrest and terrorism against his 11-year-old regime.
President Reagan meets with recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Desmond M. Tutu to discuss apartheid in South Africa. President Reagan rejected a plea for tougher United States actions in South Africa from Bishop Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s Anglican prelate. He said he was opposed to apartheid in South Africa and that the Administration would rely on diplomacy to deal with it. The two men met as the South African Embassy in Washington announced that the Pretoria Government had released 11 prisoners and freed five others on bail. Mr. Reagan said the release was the result of quiet diplomacy.
The income tax simplification proposed by the Treasury Department was praised by President Reagan as “the best and most complete” he had seen, but he stopped short of offering it as his own. At a news conference at the White House, Mr. Reagan came closer to confirming that he might trim the military budget’s rate of growth, saying he would ask Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger to “see what he can contribute” to the deficit-cutting package the White House is proposing to Congress. “There are only two things” in the budget discussion that cannot be changed, Mr. Reagan said. “One of them is Social Security and the other is the interest on the debt.”
The Reagan Administration’s tentative budget proposals came under attack today from a wide range of interested parties, including supporters of child nutrition programs, farmers, city and county officials, veterans and Federal employees. Without waiting for President Reagan to submit the proposals to Congress, lobbyists are planning strategy to protect programs of interest to them. The fight over the budget is being waged according to unwritten but well-understood rules of political etiquette. Administration officials expected the unauthorized disclosure of budget details that occurred after President Reagan met with his Cabinet on Wednesday. The disclosures suggested the overall shape of the budget and the dramatic nature of specific cuts.
President Reagan participates in a ceremony to present the Lloyd’s of London Silver Medal to the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery. President Reagan today presented silver medals to the five members of the crew of the space shuttle Discovery that retrieved two errant satellites last month. The medals were awarded by Lloyd’s, the British syndicate of insurance underwriters, for “extraordinary and meritorious efforts in rescuing and preserving property.”
The President and First Lady leave for Camp David with their new puppy, Fuzzy.
In an unexpected decline, the nation’s unemployment rate fell three-tenths of a percentage point in November, to 7 percent, the Labor Department reported today. Except for June 1984, when the rate briefly touched 7 percent, this was the lowest level since President Reagan took office in January 1981. Private analysts, most of whom had expected little or no change in unemployment, said the fresh decline provided reassurance that the sharp slowdown in economic growth since midyear was only a pause and that a recession did not loom. “It’s a promising development,” said Richard D. Rippe, a senior vice president at Dean Witter Reynolds.
William J. Schroeder was removed from intensive care and given a private room in his Louisville, Kentucky, hospital after a dramatic improvement in his general condition. Mr. Schroeder had shown marked improvement in “all functions in the past 24 hours,” said a spokesman for the medical team that implanted his artificial heart November 25. Not only have Mr. Schroeder’s strength and appetite improved, said Dr. Allan M. Lansing, chief medical spokesman for the artificial heart team, but a nurse noted a “dramatic improvement in his spirits” as he talked about going home to Jasper, Indiana. Mr. Schroeder was moved today from the coronary care unit, where he has been since the implant, to a private room. As part of his exercise program, Mr. Schroeder today used a trapeze bar over his bed to pull himself up and then to let himself down. Such strength was surprising to doctors since, less than two weeks ago, Mr. Schroeder could not raise his head off his pillow.
Governor Martha Layne Collins arrived home in Kentucky today, 16 days after undergoing emergency surgery in Britain to remove a shard of glass from her intestines. Mrs. Collins was marking her 48th birthday today with her family and a few friends. She was in Britain with other American governors to study acid rain when she suffered a perforation of the intestine and underwent emergency surgery November 21 at the London Clinic. The Governor has said she believed the glass had been in a meal she ate on her flight to Britain. Doctors have directed her not to return to work until January.
The Rev. Billy Graham, after a revival meeting at a women’s prison, praised the convicted murderer, Margie Velma Barfield, for the “big impact” she made on inmates’ lives before her execution, but refused to speak against capital punishment. Mr. Graham led a prayer meeting this week at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women, where Mrs. Barfield was imprisoned until she died by lethal injection November 2. Mrs. Barfield poisoned her 74-year-old mother, her boyfriend and two elderly Lumberton, North Carolina, residents. She said she had undergone a religious conversion in prison, and later counseled other inmates. But Mr. Graham said in an interview published Friday that he was not convinced capital punishment is wrong.
The Library of Congress called today for an effort by the Government and private groups to eliminate illiteracy in the nation by 1989, the bicentennial of the United States Constitution. More than 23 million adults, one in eight nationwide, cannot read, the report said, and only half the people in the country read “some books” each year. The report, “Books in Our Future,” outlined a program by which the Library, private organizations, Congress and the executive branch could promote reading.
The Polish Ecumenical Council has expressed its support for the Rev. Douglas Roth, a Lutheran pastor who is in jail as a result of his battle with both the church and Pennsylvania authorities, the Lutheran Council U.S.A. said today. The council made public a letter from the Polish Council to Claire Randall, general secretary to the National Council of Churches, in which the Polish church leaders gave “their support to the Rev. Douglas Roth’s “defense of the unemployed.” Mr. Roth was jailed November 13 after he refused to leave his congregation despite being dismissed as pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Clairton, Pa. He is serving a 90-day sentence for contempt of court for refusing to turn the church over to officials of the Western Pennsylvania-West Virginia Synod of the Lutheran Church in America. Mr. Roth and about 20 other Pittsburgh area pastors are part of the Denominational Ministry Strategy, which has strongly criticized the United States Steel Corportion and the Mellon Bank for unemployment in the Pittsburgh area. The letter from the Polish Ecumenical Council was signed by Andrzej Wojtowicz, the council’s secretary for foreign relations, and a Polish Lutheran Bishop, Janusz Narzynski.
A man arrested for yelling “Jump!” to a college student threatening to leap from a water tank faces felony charges that could bring a prison term. “That kind of behavior is poor citizenship and extremely irresponsible — it’s also against the law,” Sgt. Paul Kern said Thursday. Sergeant Kern said the police would file a complaint with the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office. The suspect, Nathan Biggs, 26 years old, of San Mateo, California, was booked Wednesday on suspicion of encouraging a suicide, a felony punishable by up to three years in prison. The police eventually talked the would-be suicide off a 100-foot ladder on a water tank in a shopping center.
Duke University named Dr. H. Keith Brodie its seventh president today, ending a 10-month search for a successor to Terry Sanford. Dr. Brodie, chancellor since 1982, was selected unanimously by the school’s board of trustees. Dr. Brodie will assume his post next July 1. Mr. Sanford, 67 years old, a former Governor of North Carolina, is retiring after 14 years as president. He is to become chairman of a company that plans to develop a planned community in the area and has also indicated an interest in being appointed chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The university is in the midst of a $200 million fund raising campaign. Dr. Brodie, 44 years old, is a native of Stamford, Connecticut. He is a graduate of Princeton University and of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is married and has four children. He has been at Duke for 10 years, where he taught psychiatry and has served as acting provost as well as chancellor.
A Red Bluff, California mill worker has been ordered to stand trial on charges that he kidnapped a woman, then enslaved and tortured her for seven years. Judge Dennis Murray of Justice Court on Thursday ordered the defendant, Cameron Hooker, to stand trial after two days of testimony by the unidentified woman and Mr. Hooker’s wife at a preliminary hearing. According to testimony, Mr. Hooker, 31 years old, kidnapped the woman at knifepoint in May 1977, imprisoned her in locked boxes for long periods and forced her to commit sexual acts, usually while bound to a bed or homemade torture rack.
Looting of ancient Indian artifacts in the Southwest has increased as the market for the relics grows. The recent plunder of a Anasazi Indian grave site in southeastern Utah was only one among thousands of such raids on archeological sites throughout that region.
Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls’ rookie star, hit a 20-foot jumper with five seconds remaining tonight that defeated the Knicks, 95–93. With three defenders pressing him, Jordan rose out of the pile, and his off-balance shot ended a Knick comeback from a 15-point third-quarter deficit.
In a straight trade, the New York Mets send pitcher Walt Terrell to the Detroit Tigers for third baseman Howard Johnson. Hojo will start for 8 years in New York. Terrell will have 6 seasons in Detroit, interrupted by stays with 4 other teams.
The New York Yankees and Rickey Henderson, who began contract negotiations $13 million apart, called a recess early this morning in their effort to reach an agreement that would complete the Yankees’ seven-player trade with the Oakland A’s.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1163.21 (-7.28)
Born:
Milan Michálek, Czech National Team and NHL right wing and left wing (Olympics, 2010, 2014; NHL All-Star, 2012; San Jose Sharks, Ottawa Senators, Toronto Maple Leafs), in Jindrichuv Hradec, Czechoslovakia.
Francis Wathier, Canadian NHL left wing (Dallas Stars), in St. Isidore, Ontario, Canada.
Aaron Gray, NBA center (Chicago Bulls, New Orleans Hornets, Toronto Raptors, Sacramento Kings), in Tarzana, California.
Mike Baxter, MLB rightfielder and pinch hitter (San Diego Padres, New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago Cubs), in Queens, New York, New York.
Robert Kubica, Polish race car driver (1st Pole to compete in Formula One), in Kraków, Poland.
Died:
Jeanne Cagney, 65, American stage, screen, and radio actress (“Lion is in the Streets”; “Quicksand”; “Yankee Doodle Dandy”), of lung cancer.
Lonnie “LeeRoy” Yarbrough, 46, American race car (Nascar) driver, of head injury from a fall.
History Diaries 