Secretary of State George P. Shultz told the NATO foreign ministers today that the United States was approaching the new negotiations on arms control with the Soviet Union in “a positive, extremely serious and open-minded way,” a senior American diplomat said. Briefing reporters on Mr. Shultz’s long presentation at the opening of the annual December meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ministers, the senior American diplomat and other Western diplomats said that Mr. Shultz gave his colleagues his personal commitment to seek results from the new round of talks with the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei A. Gromyko, Jan. 7 and 8 in Geneva. Mr. Shultz seemed to accomplish his major task for this NATO session — winning public allied support for American goals at the meeting with Mr. Gromyko, even though he was unable to provide the allies with details of the still-undecided American negotiating positions.
At the end of the closed-door meeting, one participant said, the Secretary General of the alliance, Lord Carrington, proposed without dissent that the foreign ministers include in their communique on Friday that they were appreciative of the “full explication and analysis” provided by Mr. Shultz. He proposed that they say that “Secretary Shultz goes to Geneva with our encouragement and support.”
Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who is widely regarded as second-in-command in the Soviet Union, had his first substantive conversation with Americans two weeks ago and told them that Moscow was ready for reciprocal cuts in military spending with the United States. President Reagan spoke of the possibility of such mutual budget reductions in a speech to the United Nations in September. Mr. Gorbachev met in a Kremlin conference room December 3 with Dwayne O. Andreas, the American chairman of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade and Economic Council, and James H. Giffen, president of the council. The council, which has Soviet and United States co-chairmen, was established in 1973 by the two Governments to make trade easier. Its members include 220 American companies and 125 Soviet foreign trade concerns.
Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, in a statement on the third anniversary of martial law in Poland, called for action to revive independent trade unions in Poland and said that his banned union is still alive. “I call on all union activists to take up this action now,” Walesa said. Meanwhile, Poland’s Communist regime marked the martial law anniversary with a vow to fight political opponents as well as to pursue domestic reforms. Under martial law, in effect in Poland from December 13, 1981, until July 22, 1983, more than 6,000 union activists were interned.
A State Department official, Gregory J. Newell, said he is recommending that three other agencies get the $47 million budgeted for the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for 1985, now that U.S. departure from the U.N. body is virtually certain at the end of this year. Another State Department official said the three agencies are the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Information Agency and the U.N. Development Program.
A U.S. decision to leave UNESCO is expected to be announced formally by President Reagan next week, Administration officials said. Mr. Reagan’s reported decision to quit the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization will come nearly one year after Secretary of State George P. Shultz announced that the United States would withdraw at the end of 1984 unless the organization made substantive changes. Gregory J. Newell, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, said today: “The final decision has not yet been made, although the likelihood of the United States reversing the decision of last December is quite unlikely, given the fact that there has been little or no significant or concrete improvement in UNESCO.
A federal judge in New York ruled that a member of the Irish Republican Army, convicted in Northern Ireland of murdering a British soldier, cannot be extradited because his crime was a political act. The decision by U.S. District Judge John E. Sprizzo means that Joseph Patrick Thomas Doherty, who escaped from an Ulster prison in 1981, can remain in the United States at least for the time being. Sprizzo upheld Doherty’s assertion that the crime represents a political act and is not covered by the U.S.-British extradition treaty.
The publisher and editor of a leading Greek newspaper won a one-month delay today in their trial on charges of tapping the telephones of The New York Times bureau in Athens. The presiding judge postponed the trial to January 8 over the objections of the prosecutor when the attorney for the publisher, George Bobolas, produced a doctor’s certificate saying his client was too ill to attend the proceedings. On October 3, an Athens district attorney filed charges against Mr. Bobolas, publisher of the leftist daily Ethnos, and the editor, Alexander Filipopoulos. The charges were filed after Ethnos published what it said were extracts of a telephone conversation between Paul Anastasiades, a 34-year old Cypriot journalist who is a correspondent for The Daily Telegraph of London and a part-time correspondent for the New York Times, and a lawyer, Panayotis Zotos. The newspaper assserted that Mr. Zotos and Mr. Anastasiades, who writes under the name Paul Anastasi, had held a “cryptic” conversation about plans to undermine democracy in Greece and eliminate members of the Ethnos staff. The newspaper called Mr. Zotos a C.I.A. agent.
The Swiss Council of States, the upper house of Parliament, approved legislation in favor of Switzerland’s entry into the United Nations, but the final decision will be made in a national referendum, probably before the end of the year. The council’s 24-16 vote gave final parliamentary blessing to the move. But public opinion polls raise doubts that the Swiss electorate will support the move for U.N. membership.
Richard W. Murphy, assistant U.S. secretary of state, met with Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and other officials in Tel Aviv to brief them on his visits earlier in the week to Beirut and Damascus. Murphy is making his third swing through the region in recent weeks, trying to help negotiate an Israeli troop withdrawal from Lebanon. Tel Aviv sources said the negotiations “are basically still at the same impasse.”
Israel is becoming increasingly convinced that its withdrawal talks with the Lebanese Government are a waste of time, and it is now seriously considering a redeployment of Israeli troops in southern Lebanon on its own, official Israeli political sources said today. The sources spoke after the meeting this afternoon between the special United States envoy, Richard W. Murphy, and all the top Israeli military and Foreign Ministry decision makers on Lebanon, including Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The sources said Mr. Murphy brought back a “big zero” from his visits of the last few days to Beirut and Damascus. The Syrians indicated to him that they were holding firm to their position that Israel withdraw unconditionally and without any special security arrangements beyond those provided by the Lebanese Army. “The Syrians are trying to play a little brinksmanship, and it is not going to work,” one official said. “We have not reached the end of the road yet, but the chances of the talks producing anything is becoming slimmer and slimmer. If we have not made any progress by the time the talks recess for Christmas, then we will have to review our options.”
Israeli troops raided eight Shiite Muslim villages in southern Lebanon before dawn today, and a top Lebanese official accused them of killing four people. The Israeli Army said in Tel Aviv that its troops arrested 14 guerrilla suspects but made no mention of casualties. A military source in northern Israel said that two bodies were found by Israeli troops but that the deaths “were not as a result of the operation.” A spokesman for the United Nations troops in Lebanon said that three bodies had been recovered but that he did not have any details. Nabih Berri, Lebanon’s Minister for the South and leader of the Shiite Amal movement, named three of the four people he said were killed when Israeli troops entered several villages — two women and a man. Mr. Berri called for people in southern Lebanon to assemble Friday in mosques, churches and clubs to protest the operation and stage a general strike on Saturday.
United States intelligence officials said today that they had no hard evidence indicating Iranian complicity in the hijacking of a Kuwaiti airliner to Iran last week. The officials said that radio communications had been monitored between Iranian authorities and the Arab gunmen who hijacked the plane and killed two American passengers at the Tehran airport. Based on information from this and other sources, the intelligence officials said, they felt there was nothing to indicate that Iranians had been involved in planning the hijacking or in the violence aboard the aircraft. These officials did not, however, rule out the possibility that investigation might produce such evidence.
Masses of Indians fled Bhopal after an announcement that the Union Carbide plant there would be started up again Sunday to neutralize what remains of a toxic chemical that leaked December 3 and killed at least 2,000 people. By the tens of thousands and using any vehicle available, the residents left, abandoning jobs and homes, crippling many services and activities. By train and bus and car and plane, by auto rickshaw and two-wheeled tonga and on foot the citizens left, abandoning jobs and homes, crippling many services and business activities. No count of those leaving was possible, but informed estimates were that at least 100,000 of the city’s 900,000 people had fled in the last 24 hours, joining another 100,000 who left immediately after the deadly escape of methyl isocyanate gas on December 3.
Vietnam appears to be starting a public campaign against dissidents at home while it steps up military activities against the Chinese on its northern border and rebel forces in Cambodia. According to diplomatic reports from Hanoi this week, the Vietnamese are preparing to put on trial in Hồ Chí Minh City, the former Saigon, a group of at least 100 people accused of plotting to overthrow the Hanoi Government. Some Western reporters are being given permission to go to Vietnam for the trial, according to Vienamese diplomats here. Reports from Hanoi this week quoting foreign diplomats there, said that the dissidents were being described as rebels trained and armed in China and Thailand. The Thais have denied any involvement in or knowledge of such activities.
The Canadian government will apologize officially to Japanese Canadians interned in World War II, Multiculturalism Minister Jack Murta said. Government officials have also been instructed to open negotiations with the Japanese Canadian community over possible financial compensation, Murta added. About 21,000 Japanese Canadians, mostly citizens by birth or naturalization, were interned in 1942. Their property, homes, businesses and fishing boats were confiscated and only token restitution was paid.
Two members of the United States Navy’s special forces team died in Honduras Wednesday in a demolition accident while trying to help Honduran villagers, the Pentagon said today. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Lake, a Pentagon spokesman, said Quartermaster Seaman Arthur A. Fusco, 23 years old, of Durham, New Hampshire, a member of Seal Team 4, and Engineman 2d Class Michael R. Uyeda, 22, of West Valley City, Utah, who was attached to Special Boat Unit 24 of the Special Warfare Group, were trying to clear a river logjam that had isolated the villagers. After setting explosive charges, the two apparently failed to move far enough away in their 13-foot boat and were caught in the blast, Colonel Lake said.
Masses of Ethiopians were carried from the famine-stricken northern areas to more fertile lands in the west and south. An armada of buses, trucks and Soviet helicopters and troop transport planes is carrying tens of thousands of hungry, destitute peasants at the start of a huge resettlement program. It is the opening wave of what may become one of the largest resettlement programs in recent history. Over the course of a year, the Ethiopian Government plans to relocate 1.5 million farmers at a cost of $35 million, according to Birhanu Derressa, deputy commissioner of the Government’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission. If the plan is successful, many more will be moved the following year. In the last two weeks, 70,000 have already been resettled, Mr. Birhanu said. Huge convoys that sometimes include more than 100 vehicles have carried up to 7,000 settlers southward at a time, he added.
Deposed President Mohammed Khouna Ould Haidalla of Mauritania flew home to Nouakchott and was immediately arrested, informed sources in Dakar, Senegal, reported. The sources said that the ousted leader was taken to a military barracks. Meanwhile, Radio Nouakchott announced the new government of Colonel Sid Ahmed. Ould Taya, the armed forces chief of staff who led the coup. It included eight members of Haidalla’s regime. Haidalla was attending a Franco-African summit meeting in Burundi when he was overthrown.
Only limited savings in the budget for the Pentagon will be accepted by President Reagan, backing the position of Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, according to a senior Administration official. Unless Mr. Reagan seeks further cuts in domestic spending, the tentative decision, backing the position of Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, means that cutbacks in previously proposed military spending will fall far short of the $58 billion over three years that was recommended by Mr. Reagan’s budget working group. Unless the President proposes further cuts in domestic spending, he will also fall short of his goal of reducing the deficit, now running more than $200 billion a year, to $100 billion in 1988. The official, who requested anonymity, said no final word had come from Mr. Reagan. But the President’s reaction in a meeting Wednesday with Secretary Weinberger and the budget working group, he said, “is tantamount to” a final decision.
Plans for a space-based defense against ballistic missiles face serious trouble next year as Congress tries to cut the military budget, according to Representative Joseph P. Addabbo, Democrat of Queens, the chairman of the House subcommittee on military appropriations.
The President and First Lady ceremonially light the White House’s Christmas Tree.
President Reagan participates in a photo opportunity with athletes and committee officials of the 1985 World Games for the Deaf.
William J. Schroeder had a stroke but was partially recovering from it, according to a doctor attending the second artificial heart recipient. The doctor, Allan Lansing, said Mr. Schroeder’s condition had shown some improvement since he suffered the stroke at 6 PM. The setback was not believed to be life-threatening, said Dr. Allan Lansing, chairman and medical director of the Humana Heart Institute International, where Mr. Schroeder received his heart November 25. Mr. Schroeder’s condition was downgraded from satisfactory to serious but stable, and he was moved from a private room into the coronary care unit at Humana Hospital-Audubon, said Bob Irvine, a hospital spokesman. Mr. Schroeder was alert and responding “perfectly well” to his doctors a few hours after the stroke, Dr. Lansing said at a 10 PM news conference. His right side was partly paralyzed, he said, and his speech was slurred. However, Dr. Lansing added, Mr. Schroeder recognized his wife and his physicians, including Dr. William C. DeVries, the surgeon who led the implant team.
Lawyers for retired General William C. Westmoreland suffered an apparent setback in their $120-million libel suit against CBS when a Manhattan federal judge barred them from using an internal network report as evidence. U.S. District Judge Pierre N. Leval ruled that most of the report, compiled in 1982 by CBS executive Burton Benjamin, is not relevant to the issues in the 10-week-old libel trial. At issue is a CBS documentary, aired in January, 1982, that charged Westmoreland with suppressing information about enemy strength in 1967 in an effort to make it appear that U.S. troops were winning the Vietnam War.
A TIME magazine executive conceded that TIMEe’s Jerusalem correspondent was placed on probation because of inaccurate reporting two years before writing the article that prompted a $50-million libel suit by Israel’s Ariel Sharon. Sharon is suing Time Inc. in federal court in Manhattan, contending a 1983 TIME article falsely accused him of encouraging the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Beirut. At issue is TIME’s cover story, “The Verdict Is Guilty.” based on reporting by TIME’s Jerusalem correspondent David Halevy, who has testified that he relied on “confidential sources.”
Over the next two years, according to a new Federal estimate, 1.4 million Americans will be treated in doctors’ offices, or not at all, for medical problems that until now would have meant admission to a hospital. That is one result expected from a new Federal program to control Medicare expenses. And many delegates to a national medical convention here this week said in speeches and interviews that they found the prospect troubling, even though many agreed that, in theory, the number of hospital admissions could be reduced.
While many surgical procedures, such as biopsies and cataract operations, are now performed in doctors’ offices in certain areas of the country, the new Federal rules would mean the procedures would be performed outside hospitals much more often. One concern among many of the doctors attending the annual convention of the American Medical Peer Review Association is that no one will monitor the quality of care delivered in offices. In addition, doctors here asked in conversations and speeches whether it was “compassionate medicine” to perform more breast biopsies, plastic surgery, cataract operations and other procedures in their offices, even if it saved money.
Education Secretary Terrel H. Bell said he is setting up a task force of business and education experts to explore how computers and other technology can be used to improve the schools. “It’s extremely important that this movement toward high technology be carefully planned and administered to give students the maximum benefits,” Bell said.
Paul Kirk, treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and a former aide to Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), has emerged as the apparent front-runner in the contest for Democratic national chairman. Kirk claimed at a press conference in Washington that he has already won the support of more than 100 of the 377 members of the national committee, which will choose a successor to Chairman Charles T. Manatt on February 1.
Two men who eluded intensive searches by hiding in rugged mountains since July, when they allegedly kidnaped an athlete and killed one of her would-be rescuers, were captured by a sheriff who sneaked up on them in the woods, authorities said in Bozeman, Montana. Don Nichols, 53, and his son, Dan Nichols, 23, were surprised at a campsite in southwest Montana and captured by Madison County Sheriff Johnny France. The two were the object of searches since Kari Swenson, 23, a Montana State University student and member of the U.S. women’s biathlon team, was kidnaped as she jogged along a mountain trail near Big Sky on July 15. She was later rescued.
Federal health officials in Atlanta called for an immediate postponement of some vaccinations against three childhood diseases — diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus — because of a severe shortage of the vaccine DPT. The national Centers for Disease Control said that if current use continues, supplies of DPT will be very limited by January. More whooping cough deaths of children may result from a year-long shortage in the vaccine against the potentially fatal illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The Federal agency recommended that doctors delay the booster shots usually administered to children aged 18 months and 5 years to provide more immunization for infants, who are most at risk.
More treatment in doctors’ offices rather than in hospitals is expected to result from a new Federal program to control Medicare expenses. A Federal estimate shows that over the next two years about l.4 million Americans with medical problems that would have required admission to a hospital before now are going to be treated in doctors’ offices or not at all.
New nuclear artillery shells for the Army can be converted to neutron bombs, according to sources in Congress and the Pentagon. Production of neutron bombs is forbidden by Congress, but the sources said the design of the new shells would enable the Army to alter them in the field if Congress reversed itself.
Comparable worth, the concept that men and women should get the same pay for doing jobs of similar difficulty and requiring equivalent skills, is drawing increasing attention from the courts, the Reagan Administration and researchers. Litigation is pending around the country in which many public employee unions are seeking to upset longstanding pay patterns that they argue discriminate against women.
A ban on bias against homosexuals by organizations receiving money from New York City generated more controversy. Archbishop John J. O’Connor startled Mayor Koch by suggesting he might consider operating the archdiocese’s social programs without government funds rather than comply with the ban. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York is prepared to give up $72 million a year in city funds for social programs rather than comply with a mayoral order banning discrimination against homosexuals, Archbishop John J. O’Connor said. The archbishop made the surprise announcement in answers to questions during a City Hall press conference on another matter with Mayor Edward I. Koch. O’Connor said the church does not discriminate against homosexuals in hiring for social programs it operates with the help of city funds. However, he said the church objected to the encroachment of government regulations into church activities.
The Chinese citizen whose body was found hanging Wednesday on the roof of the Chinese Consulate General in Manhattan had sought asylum in the United States, but had come to regret his decision in the hours before he committed suicide, according to officials at the consulate and the State and Justice Departments. The Chinese citizen was Zhang Xin, a 49-year-old engineer.
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Kevin Klein, Canadian NHL defenseman (Nashville Predators, New York Rangers), in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
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