Mikhail S. Gorbachev, considered the second-ranking leader in the Soviet Union, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher met today for nearly five and a half hours and discussed the state of East-West relations and new efforts to reduce the risk of nuclear war. Mr. Gorbachev, who is visiting Britain in advance of the arms control negotiations scheduled for next month in Geneva, met with Mrs. Thatcher at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country home, for a lunch of beef and Dover sole. The subsequent talks lasted an hour longer than had originally been planned. Afterward, British sources described the discussion as having been “very constructive” and the lunch as relaxed and friendly.
President Francois Mitterrand, defending his foreign policies, said tonight that Libya had lost ground in black Africa because of the French intervention in Chad. “We have protected the countries of black Africa who demanded it of us,” Mr. Mitterrand said during an hourlong television interview by a panel of French journalists. The President’s foreign policies have been criticized in the French press since Libya failed to withdraw its troops from Chad last month after signing an agreement with France to do so. Mr. Mitterrand said that when he took office in 1981, Libya occupied or otherwise controlled all of Chad and, from its positions there, menaced such neighboring countries as Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic.
Twelve of 68 East Germans holed up in the West German Embassy in Prague, Czechoslovakia, demanding to emigrate to the West have confessed to being East German spies, the mass-circulation West German daily newspaper Bild reported. Bild’s sister Sunday newspaper, Bild am Sonntag, quoted West German government sources as saying 12 East German agents entered the mission posing as refugees with the intent of sowing unrest among those inside.
Italy’s Red Brigades urban guerrilla movement, weakened by a wave of arrests and defections over the last two years, claimed responsibility for botched raids in Rome and Bologna and warned that it will soon be back in business. In the latest incidents, a man identified as a fugitive member of the left-wing terrorist group was shot to death when he tried to hold up a security van in a Rome suburb, and a jeweler in Bologna shot to death the sister of a convicted Brigades member when she allegedly attempted to hold up his shop. Officials of Italy’s antiterrorist squad said they believed the anonymous call to the Italian news agency ANSA was authentic. The terrorists were active in Italy from the mid-1970’s and financed their operations primarily with robberies and kidnappings for ransom. The only major operation attributed to the Red Brigades since General Dozier’s rescue was the assassination in February of an American diplomat, Leamon Hunt, who was director of the Rome-based Multinational Force and Observers. The force supervises truce lines in Sinai set up by the Camp David accords.
Last month’s return of Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Josef Stalin, to the Soviet Union after 17 years in the West may not be the propaganda coup that Kremlin officials had hoped for, U.S. News and World Report said. Quoting friends of the 58-year-old woman, the magazine said she has quarreled with some of the relatives she most wanted to see and is now looking for a place to live in Soviet Georgia, her father’s birthplace. The magazine also said Alliluyeva’s 12-year-old daughter, Olga Peters, was judged unqualified to enter the eighth grade at a Moscow school.
Polish policemen broke up a march organized in Gdansk by supporters of the banned Solidarity trade union in memory of Poles killed while protesting food price increases 14 years ago. Lech Walesa, the outlawed union’s founder, led the memorial demonstration, which turned into the worst violence in Gdansk in months. At least 12 people were reported detained. After a commemorative mass this morning at St. Brigida’s church, Lech Walesa, the founder of the outlawed union, led a group of 3,000 people, according to an official Polish press agency account, toward the 120-foot- high steel monument. The monument was built in memory of the victims of the 1970 shootings during food protests in the Baltic seaport. Behind Mr. Walesa, in the worst violence in Gdansk in more than seven months, several people in the crowd were beaten by policemen who charged into the throng, according to some witnesses.
The Danish Navy called off a hunt today for what may have been a submarine in a fiord after three days of searching by helicopters and warships. The naval operations command said the search failed to support “the probability” that a submarine was hiding in the Isefjord, a neck of water jutting from the Kattegat Sea into the northwestern part of Zealand, the Danish main island. The search was started last Thursday after radar and visual sightings from a naval training station of what appeared to be a conning tower and periscope about two miles offshore.
Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez emerged today with a strengthened party leadership as his Socialists ended their national convention. Mr. Gonzalez was overwhelmingly re-elected party secretary general, winning 96 percent of the delegate votes.
British police charged four people with injecting a weed killer containing toxic mercury into supermarket turkeys as a protest against the slaughter of the birds for the Christmas dinner table. Contaminated birds were found in stores in northeastern Grimsby after phone calls from animal rights campaigners. A militant group called the Animal Liberation Front has threatened reprisals against the breeders. Last month, the group claimed to have poisoned candy bars as a protest against the use of monkeys in tooth-decay research. That threat was a hoax.
Israel’s main political blocs worked to prevent a dispute between religious factions from developing into a coalition crisis. The dispute — between the National Religious Party and the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Torah Guardians over control of key state religious functions — resulted in the resignation of the Sephardic party’s leader, Yitzhak Peretz, as Cabinet minister without portfolio. The right-wing Likud bloc, junior partner in the governing broad coalition, considers the party a main ally and has implied that it will leave the government unless a solution is found in the 48 hours before Peretz’s resignation takes effect. Analysts in Jerusalem predicted that such a crisis will be averted.
A religious ruling by a Saudi sheik that coeducation is corrupting Kuwaiti women and is contrary to the teachings of Islam has touched off a furor in Kuwait. Kuwaitis and Western residents said the Saudi sheik’s pronouncement, which implied that coeducation at Kuwait University had turned some student women into prostitutes, has pitted Kuwaiti liberals against fundamentalists. Kuwaiti political analysts said the incident could hurt the fundamentalists’ prospects in elections to the National Assembly, scheduled for February.
Iraq said today that its jet fighters had attacked a second supertanker in two days in the Persian Gulf. But marine salvage executives in Bahrain said the Iraqi planes instead raided the same ship they hit Saturday. A military spokesman in Baghdad said Iraqi warplanes had crippled another “large naval target.” But marine shipping and salvage company radio monitors received no distress signals from any ship in the gulf today. A salvage company executive said, “It seems the Iraqis are under the impression they hit a new vessel, when in fact their warplanes have fired an Exocet into the same ship that they had raided Saturday.” The first attack touched off a “huge blaze” in the engine room and quarters of the 240,830-ton Greek-owned supertanker Ninemia. The executive said that 2 of the 27 crewmen aboard were killed and that the other 25 were rescued by Iranian Air Force helicopters. “Firefighters had hardly managed to extinguish the blaze when the Iraqis came back and unleashed another Exocet into the Ninemia,” the executive said.
A ferocious and largely secret war is being fought by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan five years after its troops swept into the country. In an effort to subdue fierce resistance, high-altitude saturation bombing has demolished many villages in several regions of the country. Nearly every day, Soviet fighter bombers and helicopter gunships are on the lookout for guerrilla warriors who dominate the mountains and deserts.
The safe conversion into pesticide of some of the deadly methyl isocyanate remaining in a storage tank at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, was carried out by scientists and engineers. Their initial success gave them encouragement that further danger to the city could be eliminated. Three metric tons of the lethal substance were converted, and 12 more metric tons are to be converted over the next several days. Three metric tons of the lethal chemical were safely converted today at the Union Carbide plant, scientists and company officials said, and 12 metric tons remaining in a storage tank are to be converted in the next several days.
Sayed Jaffer, one of 1,000 residents of Bhopal who moved to a large tent at the edge of a sports stadium to wait out the detoxification process at the Union Carbide plant, listened to Government broadcasts over the state-run radio throughout the day. “We heard that the process at the plant began this morning and that it is going well,” he said. “We were afraid,” said Mr. Jaffer, “That is why we came here. That is why so many others have come.” He said he was a restaurant waiter and had come to the tent with his mother, a younger sister, a brother, a hen and 16 chickens.
China’s sweeping economic changes over the last six years under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership have produced an almost total reinterpretation of the nation’s official Communist ideology. The Chinese are evolving a more flexible system than Soviet-style Marxism. They have peeled away — some would say repudiated — familiar Marxist tenets that retarded China’s ability to modernize itself.
Mexican workers’ standard of living is being cut in half this year in the worst siege of the nation’s three-year-long economic crunch, a study by the Mexican Labor Federation said. A continuing price spiral for basic goods has severely damaged the living conditions of workers paid the minimum wage, the equivalent of $4 a day, the study said.
A Cuban-exile combat unit will fight alongside Nicaraguan rebels seeking the overthrow of the Sandinista Government, a Cuban exile leader, Huber Matos, said. Mr. Matos, who was been a close associate of Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution but later broke with him and was imprisoned for 20 years, said he had begun organizing the unit. “This is also our war,” Mr. Matos said, “since they, like us, are fighting against Castro and the Russians.”
The archbishop of San Salvador said there were three apparent death squad killings last week, activity that had virtually ceased since government-rebel peace talks began October 15. In his weekly homily, Arturo Rivera y Damas said the three victims were mutilated, usually a sign of right-wing death squad murders.
Members of a Canadian fact-finding mission said today that they had found no evidence to substantiate reports that famine relief aid was being sold commercially or was being misused. The leader of the mission added, however, that he favored further investigations into the reports, which were published earlier this month in the Canadian and British press, “I feel some more work has got to be done in the area of monitoring,” said David S. MacDonald, Canadian Emergency Coordinator for Relief in Africa. Mr. MacDonald spoke to reporters before his departure from Addis Ababa this morning. He had spent five days in Ethiopia at the head of a 13-member delegation.
Bishop Stephen Naidoo became the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cape Town today. He is the first Indian to hold that rank in the church in South Africa. He succeeded Owen Cardinal McCann, 77 years old, who retired after 34 years in the post. Archbishop Naidoo, one of 800,000 South Africans of Indian descent, set three main goals: to halt the decline in religious commitment in society, to help narrow the material gap between the rich and the poor, and to reverse the erosion of human rights.
The Air Force and the space agency will for the first time restrict news coverage of the next shuttle flight in late January to keep the public — and the Soviet Union —in the dark about a top-secret military payload on board. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Air Force were expected to announce guidelines today for coverage of this first secret shuttle mission and future classified military flights. The shuttle Discovery is tentatively scheduled to blast off January 23. But the exact launching time and crew conversations will not be made public.
The President and First Lady host an Open House Christmas Reception for the White House and Executive Office of the President staff and their families.
Hospital care for the poor is being cut in many states in an effort to control Medicaid costs. When Medicaid recipients exhaust the available days of hospital care, they may be transferred to a county hospital or reclassified as charity cases at private hospitals. In two years, Mississippi has twice lowered its annual limit, from 30 days to 20 and then to 15. “It all revolves around money,” said Billy F. Simmons, director of the Medicaid program in Mississippi. “The state’s been broke. It does not have any more money to put into the Medicaid program, so we have to make the money go further.”
Pre-kindergarten for 3-to 5-year-olds is getting more attention among educators and political leaders in light of mounting evidence that it results in better-adjusted children and reduced public spending. Five states recently enacted laws making kindergarten attendance compulsory, and others, including Connecticut, are considering similar measures. New York increased aid for prekindergarten programs this year and half-day kindergarten classes were extended to a full day.
William J. Schroeder got out of bed, with assistance, for the first time since his stroke Thursday night. But his doctors said he appeared withdrawn and they were concerned that if he did not snap out of a slump he might lose his will to live. His desire for life had been a main force in his recovery from his artificial heart operation. Mr. Schroeder was reported to be alert as he sat in a chair for an hour talking with his family, and he showed no evidence of paralysis. His speech was described as improved, clear, lucid, without slurring and not difficult to understand. But the activity quickly tired him out and “he was not as responsive” when he returned to bed, according to George Atkins, director of public affairs for Humana.
An explosion and fire ripped through a barge docked in the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet near the town of Hopedale tonight. Two people were believed to have been killed and one was injured, Coast Guard officials said. The barge had been carrying oil, and officials said they feared the barge may have enough residual oil on board to cause more explosions. All but two members of the crew had been accounted for tonight, said Petty Officer Michael Mullen of the Coast Guard. He said the missing crew members were feared dead. A fire continued to burn on the barge tonight, and Mr. Mullen said heavy fog was hampering firefighting efforts. The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet is a man-made channel cut through St. Bernard Parish in southeast Louisiana, linking a section of the river to Breton Sound in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates voted to accept a tentative agreement, ending the 2-week-old strike that has idled 430,000 students and 35,000 employees in the nation’s third-largest school system. The 605-59 vote followed an all-night bargaining session in which weary negotiators hammered out the pact that will allow schools to reopen today. The one-year agreement provides a 4.5% salary increase. Teachers’ annual salaries currently range from $15,471 to $30,759. Although the 28,000 teachers will not vote on the contract proposal until Thursday, they are expected to return to their classrooms Monday. The other unions were expected to follow the teachers’ lead. The strike had halted classes for 431,000 students in the country’s third largest school system.
Five inmates escaped from the maximum-security wing of a state prison for women in East Lyme, Connecticut, apparently by squeezing between the steel bars covering a window, authorities said. Investigators were trying to determine how they slipped through the bars, which are 15 inches high and 7¾ inches apart, said Connie Wilks, a spokeswoman for the state prison system. The women ranged in size from 5 feet 2 inches and 110 pounds, to 5 feet 6 inches and 150 pounds.
Virginia’s Board of Education is taking another look at two high school textbooks from which the publisher cut 420 lines of two Shakespeare plays because the passages may have been thought too sexually explicit. The publisher, Scott, Foresman & Co. of Glenview, Illinois, deleted 100 lines of “Hamlet,” one of the works in its anthology for 12th-graders, and 320 lines from “Romeo and Juliet” for ninth-graders.
The television actor David Soul preached to the defiant followers of a jailed pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church today, calling for discussions with business leaders in an effort to ease the problems of blue-collar unemployment in this depressed steel valley. “There’s been virtually no dialogue” between Pittsburgh corporate leaders and members of the Network to Save the Mon-Ohio Valley and the Denominational Ministry Strategy, Mr. Soul told 60 to 80 supporters of the Rev. D. Douglas Roth. The activist organizations blame Pittsburgh corporations for contributing to unemployment by investing money overseas. Mr. Soul’s brother, the Rev. Daniel Solberg, is affiliated with the two groups. Mr. Roth was arrested November 13 and jailed on civil contempt of court charges after the synod suspended him and he refused to relinquish his pulpit.
The nation’s economy will expand in 1985, but sluggishly, with higher interest rates and a slight rise in inflation, a group of economists predicted. In New York, the Economic Forum of the Conference Board forecast a 3% growth rate for the economy next year and said that “neither recession nor an outbreak of inflation are on the horizon.” It predicted that the inflation rate would rise to 4.5% from 3.8%. The forum said that its projected growth rate would not be enough to curb the federal budget deficit.
Women are second-class citizens on many college campuses, victims of discrimination that can be as blatant as a wet T-shirt contest or as subtle as an adviser’s discouraging word, a feminists’ study concludes. “Women students are often treated differently than men even when they attend the same institutions, share the same classrooms, work with the same advisers, live in the same residence halls and use the same student services,” the report said. It was released in Washington by Bernice R. Sandler and Roberta M. Hall of the Project on the Status and Education of Women.
The USS Scorpion, a submarine that sank in 1968 with all 99 members of its crew, probably was disabled by an accidental explosion of a torpedo, according to investigators and documents recently declassified under the Freedom of Information Act. The submarine’s crew was attempting to disarm a Mark 37 torpedo, which had been activated by a mechanical malfunction in a piece of testing equipment, when the charge detonated, the Virginian-Pilot and the Ledger-Star of Norfolk, Virginia, reported.
A Vermont man was jailed on trespassing charges after he was reported to have harassed a shopping center Santa Claus and to have told children there is no Santa Claus. Brian Pearl, 25 years old, of Essex, pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a trespassing charge and was held in $50 bail. The police said he had yelled at children in line to see Burlington Square Mall’s Santa and told toddlers there was “no such thing.” District Judge Linda Levitt offered to release Mr. Pearl “if he would not return to the mall and would not harass any other Santas,” but he said he could not promise to comply. “I think he was acting out of religious principles,” the judge said. Officers said Mr. Pearl was a fundamentalist Christian.
By aiming a laser beam at the arms of sickle- cell anemia victims, doctors say they have discovered that they can determine the severity of the disease and possibly test experimental treatments. The development was reported Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine by researchers of the Government’s National Institute of Arthritis, Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Sweden unexpectedly took the lead over the United States in the 1984 Davis Cup final in Goteborg. Mats Wilander crushed Jimmy Connors, and Henrik Sundstrom followed with a straight-set upset of John McEnroe, the world’s top-ranked player. Alan Mills, the referee, was said to be considering defaulting Connors in Tuesday’s singles as a penalty for obscene remarks made to the chair umpire following his defeat.
After five days of intense negotiations, Mayor W. Wilson Goode and a team of four city negotiators were feeling secure today in a promise that the Philadelphia Eagles will remain there. A handshake Saturday night ended the threat from the team’s financially troubled owner, Leonard Tose, that after 51 years in a city of enthusiastic fans, the country’s fourth-largest television market, the team might move to Phoenix.
NFL Football:
Philadelphia Eagles 10, Atlanta Falcons 26
Chicago Bears 30, Detroit Lions 13
Buffalo Bills 21, Cincinnati Bengals 52
Cleveland Browns 27, Houston Oilers 20
Green Bay Packers 38, Minnesota Vikings 14
Kansas City Chiefs 42, San Diego Chargers 21
Indianapolis Colts 10, New England Patriots 16
Pittsburgh Steelers 13, Los Angeles Raiders 7
New York Jets 21, Tampa Bay Buccaneers 41
St. Louis Cardinals 27, Washington Redskins 29
The Atlanta Falcons got more than they bargained for Sunday when they decided to test third-string rookie quarterback Dave Archer under fire. Archer, a free agent from Iowa State who had thrown only one pass all season, passed for one touchdown and set up another to help the Falcons (4–12) end a nine-game losing streak with a 26–10 victory over the Eagles. “David played well,” Falcon Coach Dan Henning said. “He had things happen that are normal for a new quarterback playing his first game. He was put in to find out what he could do under game conditions.” Archer, who entered the game midway through the second quarter, put Atlanta ahead, 13–3, with a 16-yard touchdown pass to Arthur Cox with 2:45 left in the first half and threw a 34-yard pass to Stacey Bailey early in the third quarter to set up Gerald Riggs’ two-yard run for his 13th touchdown of the season.
Greg Landry, playing his first National Football League game in almost three years, passed for one touchdown and ran for another and the Chicago defense set an NFL season record for sacks as the playoff-bound Chicago Bears beat the Detroit Lions today, 30–13. The Bears’ Walter Payton became the first player to exceed 2,000 total yards for two consecutive seasons. He picked up 62 rushing yards on 22 carries for 1,684 rushing yards and 2,052 yards total offense this season. The Bears’ defense sacked the Lions’ quarterbacks — including the first-time starter John Witkowski, the rookie from Columbia — 12 times to give Chicago 72 for the season, breaking the previous mark of 67 set by the Oakland Raiders in 1967. The Bears equaled the single-game record held by two other teams.
The Bengals’ Ken Anderson threw three first-half touchdown passes, one of them to the departing receiver Cris Collinsworth, as Cincinnati finished its season at 8–8 after an 0–5 start, pounding the Buffalo Bills, 52–21. Anderson, making his first start since suffering a separation of his left shoulder November 11, directed the Bengals to a 28–7 halftime lead. Anderson connected on 16 of his 20 tosses for 206 yards before the intermission. Buffalo (2–14) finished with the league’s worst record under Coach Kay Stephenson. The Bills stunned Cincinnati with an early score behind their second- year quarterback, Joe Dufek, marching 77 yards with the opening kickoff for a 7–0 lead. Greg Bell went the final 5 yards for the score. But Anderson took over from there, leading the Bengals to touchdowns on their next four possessions. Cincinnati tied it on Anderson’s 12- yard touchdown pass to Collinsworth, the Bengals’ leading receiver, who is under contract with the Tampa Bay Bandits of the United States Football League next season.
Earnest Byner, a seldom-used 10th-round draft choice, ran for 188 yards and 2 touchdowns to lift the Cleveland Browns to a 27–20 victory over the Houston Oilers. The rookie from East Carolina bolted 54 yards in the fourth quarter to set up a 29-yard field goal by Matt Bahr to give the Browns (5–11) a 7-point cushion. Warren Moon set up each Houston score with passes, including a 32-yarder to Williams and tosses of 43 and 47 yards to Smith, who had 167 yards on 7 catches. The Oilers, despite a surge in the final part of the season, finished at 3–13.
The Green Bay Packers routed the Minnesota Vikings, 38–14. Lynn Dickey, playing only the first half, completed 16 of 20 passes for 198 yards and threw for 2 touchdowns and ran for another and gave Green Bay a 31–0 halftime lead. The cornerback Mark Lee set up scores with an interception and a fumble as the Packers (8–8) finished in second place in the Central Division. James Lofton caught 5 passes for 91 yards to set a Packer receiving yardage record for a single season with 1,361 yards in 62 catches.
The Kansas City Chiefs (8–8) closed with their third straight victory, downing the San Diego Chargers, 42–21. For the first time in its history, San Diego (7–9) did not win a game against its AFC West opponents, going 0–8. Earnest Jackson gained 79 yards on 19 carries for San Diego and won the AFC rushing title with 1,179 yards.
The New England Patriots edged the Indianapolis Colts, winning 16–10. Craig James rushed for 138 yards, and Tony Franklin kicked three field goals as New England (9–7) ended its season in second place in the American Conference East. Only 22,383, attended the game, the smallest crowd ever for the Patriots in Sullivan Stadium. It was the fifth straight loss for the Colts (4–12).
Walter Abercrombie rushed for 111 yards on 28 carries and Pittsburgh’s defense stymied the Los Angeles Raiders as the Steelers won, 13–7, today to take the American Conference Central Division title and earn a berth in the playoffs. The loss cost the Raiders the home-field advantage in next Sunday’s AFC wild-card playoff game. Los Angeles (11–5) will play at Seattle, which lost to Denver Saturday to finish 12–4. Had the Raiders beaten Pittsburgh, they would have played the Seahawks in Los Angeles. The Steelers (9–7) needed to beat or tie the Raiders to win the division title because Cincinnati had defeated Buffalo earlier to finish with an 8–8 mark. Had the Steelers lost and finished at 8–8, the Bengals would have won the AFC Central title because of a better record in division games.
In the confusion of a season-ending 41–21 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the New York Jets were humbled and embarrassed today. And so were the National Football League and the Buccaneers. In an unusual, noisy last few minutes, the Buccaneers first tried an onside kick after taking a 27-point lead, then allowed the Jets to score so they could get the ball back and enable James Wilder to go for the league season record for total yardage. The Jets shouted and cursed at John McKay, who was coaching his final game for the Buccaneers. And Wilder did not get the record, missing by 16 yards. That was the only consolation for the Jets, who ended their second straight 7–9 season with an inept performance. They were never in the game, trailing by 17–0 before the end of the first half and seeming to have little will against what appeared to be a more-motivated Tampa Bay team.
With the division championship on the line, the Washington Redskins and the St. Louis Cardinals today created one of the most glorious games of this National Football League season. The game ended only when Neil O’Donoghue of the Cardinals raced onto the field with the seconds ticking away and missed a 50-yard field-goal attempt as time expired. That not only insured a 29–27 victory for the Redskins, but also the championship of the Eastern Division of the National Conference for the second consecutive year. As such, they will play the Los Angeles Rams or the Chicago Bears, the Central Division champion, in two weeks in Washington. Art Monk, the Redskins’ wide receiver, caught 11 passes to give him 106 for the season, a league record. The old record, 101, was held by Charley Hennigan of the 1964 Houston Oilers. Monk caught two touchdown passes and squirmed his way for a first down on a third-and-19 play to keep alive the Redskins’ final scoring drive.
Born:
Theo James, English actor (“Divergent”, “The Time Traveler’s Wife”), in High Wycombe, England, United Kingdom.
Stanley McClover, NFL defensive end (Carolina Panthers, Houston Texans), in Chicago, Illinois.
Died:
Debs Garms, 77, American baseball utility player (World Series 1944 St. Louis Cardinals; NL batting champion 1940 Pittsburgh Pirates).
History Diaries 