Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher today signed the agreement formally committing Britain to surrender Hong Kong to China in 1997 in return for terms guaranteeing a 50-year extension of its capitalist economic system. “We have accomplished a task of historical significance,” Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang said after he and Mrs. Thatcher exchanged red velvet binders containing Chinese and English copies of the accord. Mrs. Thatcher responded by calling the pact “a landmark in the life of the territory, in the course of Anglo-Chinese relations and in the history of international diplomacy.”
Moments earlier, before onlookers who included China’s pre-eminent leader, Deng Xiaoping, and a live-television audience in Hong Kong, the two Government leaders signed the document that will put an end to a century and a half of British rule in the enclave that began as a replenishment station for the British Navy and grew to become one of the most thriving outposts of free enterprise in Asia. The agreement will assume binding effect only after it is ratified. Britain’s Parliament approved the accord last week, and China’s nominal legislature, the National People’s Congress, is to take similar action before July 1. A joint consultative body will monitor progress toward the transfer.
Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger said today that it was “vital” that the United States pursue its program of research into a new generation of defensive space weapons. He said that Europeans who felt such weapons would only defend the United States from Soviet attack and leave Europe vulnerable were wrong. “The strategic defense initiative of the kind we’re planning will be equally effective and perhaps can secure earlier success in dealing with intermediate range missiles than strategic range weapons,” he said at a news conference at the Foreign Press Center. “There’s not the slightest possibility that America would be decoupled from Europe by the pursuit of this vital initiative.”
Moscow launched a scale model of what American experts called a small re-usable, winged spaceplane. It orbited the earth once, glided back into the atmosphere and splashed down in the Black Sea. The unmanned flight, the fourth in an ambitious new shuttle program, was seen as new evidence of the growing competition to develop advanced instruments for using space for military as well as peaceful operations. The Soviet Union reported launching a spacecraft into orbit that made a “controlled descent” back to Earth and splashed down in the Black Sea, and a newspaper said it was a small-scale version of a winged, reusable space shuttle. The craft, Cosmos 1614, carried scientific equipment for measuring elements of the flight and relaying the data back to ground controllers, the official Soviet news agency Tass said. The New York Times in today’s editions quoted U.S. space experts as saying Cosmos 1614 is a one-third-scale model of a winged space plane and that it has been tested twice before.
The U.S. will withdraw from UNESCO at the end of this month, the Government announced. The United States formally withdrew from the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, citing the agency’s “endemic hostility towards institutions of a free society.” Gregory Newell, assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, announced that UNESCO had failed to reform since the United States gave it notice almost a year ago. The $47 million U.S. contribution, 25% of the UNESCO’s budget, will be redistributed to other organizations. In Wednesday’s editions of The Times, the figure was erroneously listed as $57 million.
Key benefits will be lost to American scientists, scholars and cultural groups because of a United States withdrawal from UNESCO, according to many experts who have worked through the organization’s agencies and related programs. They generally contend the Reagan Administration did not take the adverse effect of withdrawal for Americans sufficiently into account.
An effort to upgrade the health care of children, begun two years ago, is starting to save lives in dramatic numbers, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund. It predicted that within 10 to 15 years infant death rates might decline by as much as 5 percent or more a year in many third world countries.
The Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, and Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez of Spain met for five hours today on the Mediterranean island of Majorca and discussed North Africa and relations between the two nations. The meeting was held under the sponsorship of Bruno Kreisky, the former Austrian Chancellor, a personal friend of both leaders, at a country estate 12 miles outside Palma. Mr. Gonzalez, speaking to reporters after the meeting, acknowledged that the United States might be displeased by his friendly talks with the Libyan leader. “But Spain makes its own foreign policy,” he said. “We have respect for our allies but that does not mean we always follow their wishes.”
World chess champion Anatoly Karpov and challenger Gary Kasparov played to their 28th draw in the 34th game of their title match in Moscow. Karpov, who has a 5-1 lead in the series, remained one game short of retaining his crown. Competition is scheduled to resume Friday.
Officials of Israel’s two major parties and two religious factions worked out a compromise to save the 98-day-old national unity government from collapse, Israel radio reported. The report said the compromise over the issue of control of religious affairs would bring the tiny ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Torah Guardians (Shas) party back into the coalition. The Likud bloc canceled a meeting of its Cabinet ministers called for today to discuss leaving the government. The report of the compromise could not immediately be confirmed.
Israel, on the eve of the last round of troop-withdrawal talks before a holiday recess, said it will not resume the deadlocked negotiations with Lebanon early next month, as originally scheduled. State-run Israel television said today’s 11th round of military talks in Naqoura, Lebanon, “will be the last. There will be no further meetings.” The broadcast report was not independently confirmed.
Israel made its biggest aid request ever to the United States, asking for $4.05 billion in economic and military assistance for the 1986 fiscal year and an additional $800 million in emergency financing for the current fiscal year.
In hopes of breaking the deadlock between Lebanon and Israel over the proposed withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon, Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy States met today with President Amin Gemayel. Mr. Murphy flew here from Syria, where he had met with Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam and Foreign Minister Faruk al-Sharaa. The Syrian press agency said that the talks had focused on the United Nations’ role in the proposed withdrawal.
The toxic gas that escaped from a Union Carbide Corporation plant in Bhopal, India, on December 3 killed at least 2,000 people and injured perhaps 150,000, but it has so far caused remarkably little lasting damage to the stunned survivors. Indian doctors interviewed in recent days say they are surprised and pleased that almost none of the consequences predicted when the disaster struck — blindness, mental retardation, paralysis, damage to the heart, liver, and kidneys, widespread secondary infections — seem to be occuring with any significant frequency. “As we can look at it right now, it does not appear that the morbidity will be very high,” said Dr. N. P. Mishra, head of the Department of Medicine at Gandhi Medical College. The only thing that worries us is whether the people with grossly damaged lungs are going to be left with something that will interfere with their normal functioning later on. But that is an apprehension. We do not have any support for that.”
With India’s election five days away, indications are that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress Party will win a landslide victory at the polls and a commanding majority in Parliament. Two polls published in the last two days show his party running strongly almost everywhere. One poll predicted that it would widen the two-thirds majority it gained five years ago with Indira Gandhi at its head. “We are seeing the same signal all over the country,” said Aroon Purie, the editor of the biweekly magazine India Today, whose poll showed Congress winning 366 seats in Parliament compared with 353 in 1980.
Four Sri Lankan soldiers and four Tamil separatist guerrillas were killed today in a clash in Sri Lanka’s northeastern region, a Government spokesman said. The spokesman said the gunfight broke out after guerrillas land mines blasted two trucks carrying 27 soldiers near the town of Padaviya.
Pakistanis voted in a referendum Wednesday on whether they supported the rule of President Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq and today the election commission announced that incomplete results indicated that 96 percent of those who voted approved. The voters were asked to say whether they approved President Zia’s Islamic legal changes and plans for general elections by March. President Zia, who seized power in 1977, has said approval will be regarded as a mandate for five more years as President. Information Secretary Mujib-ur- Rehman Khan told journalists the results were rushed out in response to foreign news reports estimating a low turnout in the poll. The commission had planned to announce a single national result Saturday.
China performs a nuclear test at Lop Nor, People’s Republic of China.
Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte used his first veto to kill two clauses in an electoral bill that would have helped the nation’s right-wing parties to form an alliance and that would have barred his son, Alejandro, from seeking reelection as San Salvador’s mayor. For nationwide legislative elections scheduled for March, the two largest right-wing parties, Arena and the National Conciliation Party, sought to place their traditional party symbols on ballots — important with a widely illiterate electorate — even if they had formed a new coalition.
The African famine killed about 1 million children in 1984, but many millions more died from the Third World’s “silent emergency” of poor health services, the U.N. Children’s Fund’s executive director, James P. Grant, said. Presenting UNICEF’s annual report on the world’s children, Grant said 40,000 a day — about 15 million a year — die in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and half could be saved by four simple low-cost measures, ranging from a 10-cent anti-dehydration solution to a $5 series of immunizations.
Secretary of State George P. Shultz, in the first of a reported string of appointments that could anger conservatives, tapped career diplomat Morton Abramowitz for the senior State Department post of director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “The secretary is carrying out the President’s wishes that the best people that can be found to implement his foreign policy should be found,” department spokesman John Hughes said.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice William H. Rehnquist, in his first interview on network television, says it would be “a recipe for anarchy” if the Supreme Court automatically supported civil liberties claims. The court under Chief Justice Warren E. Burger “has decided some cases against claims of civil liberties that perhaps” the court under former Chief Justice Earl Warren “might have decided the other way,” Rehnquist said, “But I don’t regard that as an unfortunate chipping away of civil liberties….”
President Reagan participates in a meeting to discuss the upcoming meeting on arms control in Geneva.
President Reagan meets with Richard J. Whalen, Chairman and Editorial Director, Worldwide Information Resources, Ltd.
A stern means test for veterans under the age of 65 seeking health benefits would be established under new rules being drafted by the Reagan Administration. Under the proposed regulations, the Veterans Administration would deny services to those who could afford to pay for private medical care.
A group of nuns, threatened by the Vatican with expulsion from their orders because they signed an Oct. 7 newspaper advertisement criticizing the Roman Catholic Church’s inflexibility on abortion, denounced the church as giving women “no real voice or power.” About 40 of the advertisement’s 97 signers — who included 24 nuns, several other clergy, theologians and laity — met in Washington and called on Catholics to write to the Vatican, “stating your belief in diversity, pluralism and honest discussion of church issues.” However, the nuns said they have not decided whether they will heed the Vatican’s insistence that they retract their statements.
General William C. Westmoreland’s $120-million libel suit in New York against CBS for its program — “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception” — adjourned until January 3 for a holiday recess following the first glimpse of how the network intends to counter 11 weeks of testimony supporting the general. CBS’s defense began to emerge in the cross examination of CBS producer George Crile, who accused Westmoreland of distorting estimates of enemy troop strength in Vietnam and charged that Westmoreland’s behavior leading up to the crucial days of the Tet offensive was “an intelligence atrocity.”
A $1 monthly telephone surcharge for residential and single-line business customers, starting next June 1, will be added to bills sent by the nation’s 1,400 local telephone companies under a unanimous authorization by the five-member Federal Communications Commission. The commission also authorized an increase in the so-called access charge to $2 a month on June 1, 1986.
Fire at the Wilberg Mine in central Utah killed 27 people. It was the most deadly coal-mine fire in Utah history and the worst U. S. mine disaster in a dozen years. Investigation of the fire revealed serious failures by the agencies charged with assuring coal mine safety. Rescuers, believing that the trapped miners might still be alive, worked frantically to reach them. Following three days of heroic effort, rescue crews entered Fifth Right and located 25 bodies. Before the bodies could be removed, however, the fire rekindled, forcing rescuers to evacuate and seal the mine. Recovery of the bodies was finally completed in December 1985, nearly a full year after the disaster. The sealed area where the fire began was not opened until July 1986. Only then could the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) begin its investigation into the cause of the fire. In the Spring of 1987, MSHA ruled that the Wilberg fire was caused by a faulty air compressor, allowed to run unattended in a non-fireproofed area. MSHA issued thirty-four citations against Utah Power and Light and Emery Mining Company (the mine’s operator).
A man fired a semiautomatic rifle at an apartment building on the University of Pittsburgh’s urban campus today, wounding two students, then shot at emergency vehicles before being arrested as he fled, the police said. One of the students was in serious condition with a bullet wound in the head. The suspect “tried to hide the gun and take off and police grabbed him,” said police Lieutenant Richard Roup. “They had seen him and the other witnesses identified him,” The police identified the man as Richard Marchese Jr., 19 years old.
Delaware’s air pollution regulations face their first court test after a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the state against the Formosa Plastics Corporation for releasing a toxic and flammable gas into the atmosphere. The suit, filed in Superior Court, charges Formosa with releasing vinyl chloride into the atmosphere 30 times from 1981 to 1984 at the company’s plant near Delaware City. Vinyl chloride, a carcinogen, is used to make polyvinyl chloride, an ingredient in many plastic products, including pipes for plumbing and food packaging. State Solicitor Fred Silverman said each discharge was counted as one violation and fines could range from $1,000 to $10,000 on each count for a maximum of $300,000.
A man described by the police as a drifter “tired of being rejected by women” opened fire with a revolver in a public library today, killing one woman and wounding two others, the authorities said. The man was identified by the police as Kent Malcolm, 44 years old, of Davenport, Iowa. He was taken to the Cuyahoga County Jail. The police said they did not expect to file charges until Thursday. One of the wounded women was in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head, the authorities said. The other victim was in fair condition. A police spokesman, Robert Bolton, said Mr. Malcolm was “aggravated because he was tired of being rejected by women and started shooting.” “He’d been rejected by women all his life and picked the library as a way to get even,” Mr. Bolton said.
A record number of espionage cases are now pending, but Federal investigators say an even larger number of Americans committed espionage in the last year but were not prosecuted. The reasons, they said, range from legal technicalities to the Government’s unwillingness to disclose what security secrets were offered to foreign agents.
The percentage of churchgoing Americans remained unchanged in 1984, with four of every 10 adults attending a church or a synagogue, the same percentage as in 1983, according to a Gallup Poll released yesterday. The poll was based on personal interviews with 7,747 adults conducted in five separate weeks in the year. The poll showed attendance since 1969, when 42 percent reported attending church, has varied within a range of only two percentage points. In 1984, 44 percent of the women who were polled said they attended church in a typical week, against 35 percent of the men. From 1958, a high year for church attendance nationally, until 1982, the proportion of Catholics attending mass fell 23 pecentage points while Protestant church attendance remained constant, according to the poll. However, in 1984 Catholics still led Protestants in attendance by 51 percent to 39. Among Jews, 22 percent reported attending synagogue.
Drug manufacturers offered to release enough children’s DPT (diphtheria, pertussis or whooping cough and tetanus) vaccine to avert a predicted nationwide shortage, if Congress will provide them at least temporary protection against costly liability lawsuits filed by parents of children who suffer adverse reactions. David Williams, vice president of Connaught Laboratories Inc., told a House subcommittee on health and the environment that his company stopped distributing DPT vaccine last summer after it lost its private insurance against the lawsuits.
The heavy use of antibiotics has produced resistant bacteria that increasingly cause infections such as gonorrhea, meningitis and blood poisoning, a House panel was told. “Bacteria resistant to antibiotics thwart our present-day ability to treat even common diseases,” Dr. Stuart B. Levy, professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, told the Science and Technology subcommittee on investigations.
Anorexia nervosa, an obsessive fear of being fat that drives young women to starve themselves, has been found to cause severe calcium loss, or osteoporosis, that can lead to painful spine fractures and other skeletal problems, doctors reported. The findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine are the first evidence that the effects of the illness may cause permanent damage.
A device that crumbles kidney stones with shock waves and permits them to be passed without surgery was approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It is estimated that 100,000 Americans now have to undergo surgery each year for kidney stones and that 80 to 90 percent of them would be able to receive the new treatment, once 100 devices are placed in hospitals, Federal officials said. The machine, a lithotripter, costs $1.7 million, but its use is estimated to save $2,000 per patient. The $170 million cost for 100 machines, therefore, would be almost paid off by the $160 million saved in a year by treating 80,000 patients.
33 unknown Bach keyboard works found in Yale library.
Scotty Bowman wins his 691st regular season game, the most wins by any coach in NHL history.
Wayne Gretzky, 23, is 18th & youngest-ever NHL player to score 1,000 points.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1208.04 (-3.53)
Born:
Ian Kennedy, MLB pitcher (New York Yankees, Arizona Dimaondbacks, San Diego Padres, Kansas City Royals, Texas Rangers, Philadelphia Phillies), in Huntington Beach, California.
Kevin Robinson, NFL wide receiver (Kansas City Chiefs), in Fresno, California.
Died:
Michel Magne, 54, French experimental music and film score composer (Gigot; Barbarella), and recording studio owner (Château d’Hérouville), by suicide.
History Diaries 