The Soviet-U.S. arms talks must be “honest and businesslike,” and Moscow will brook no attempts at deception, the Soviet leader, Konstantin U. Chernenko, said on the eve of the meeting in Geneva between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko. He stressed the Kremlin’s desire to block an arms race in outer space, saying the militarization of space would be irreversible. Mr. Chernenko’s remarks were in response to a letter from American and Hungarian churchmen. Alluding to the space research that the Americans call the Strategic Defense Initiative, Mr. Chernenko said: “Attempts in some American quarters to foist a ‘Star Wars’ era on mankind are creating a new, additional threat to peace. If United States militarist forces prevail on this issue, an irreversible situation will arise, fraught with baneful consequences.” The Soviet leader said his nation “attaches importance to reaching agreement with the United States on the entire range of issues involving the nonmilitarization of space and nuclear arms.”
The four rounds of talks Monday and Tuesday between Mr. Shultz and Mr. Gromyko will be the first significant Soviet-American arms talks in 13 months. He and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko are scheduled to hold at least four rounds of talks over the next two days. The purpose of the renewed Soviet- American talks is to find a formula for resuming formal negotiations covering both offensive and defensive weapons. But even in advance of the opening session on Monday morning at the Soviet Mission here, there are wide disagreements between the two sides on the scope of the talks that could make progress difficult, American officials warned.
Less than 20 years ago, American officials began the process of convincing skeptical Soviet leaders that defenses against missile attacks would undermine mutual deterrence. On Monday in Geneva, in what Reagan Administration officials and foreign diplomats see as a historic reversal of roles, Secretary of State George P. Shultz is set to preach the virtues of missile defenses, and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei A. Gromyko, is expected to condemn them. At stake will be the consensus reached in the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty sharply limiting missile defenses, a result of talks begun between Johnson Administration officials and Prime Minister Aleksei N. Kosygin in Glassboro, N.J., in 1967. At issue will be whether mutual survival should continue to rest on mutual vulnerability to attack, namely each side’s capacity to absorb a first strike and respond with a devastating retaliatory blow, or whether it should rest on the mutual capacity to blunt attacks with space-based and other defenses.
The Polish government has outlined plans to raise the prices of most basic food items 12% to 13% but with greater increases for meat products, including as much as 80% for lard. The price of coal, electricity and gas would go up 20% to 30%. The government said the increases, to take effect in March and April, are designed to eliminate most of the food rationing that is still in effect. The price rises would be offset in some cases by wage hikes. The government appealed for public comment on the increases to avoid the social unrest that had greeted price jumps in the past.
Only three of eight charges filed against accused Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie have been retained against the former Gestapo chief of Lyon, France, from 1942 to 1944, legal sources reported. Five of the charges against Barbie, known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” have been dropped because of a lack of surviving evidence and witnesses. The remaining charges against Barbie, who was jailed in Lyon following his extradition from Bolivia in 1983, cover three incidents that resulted in the death or deportation of 777 people, mostly Jews.
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan discussed the Palestinian problem today at an unexpected meeting in Jordan. The two leaders met for three hours during Mr. Mubarak’s four-hour visit to the Red Sea port of Aqaba. “We discussed the Palestinian issue at present and how we plan to move in the future,” Mr. Mubarak told reporters after his return to Cairo. “There must be movement on the Palestinian issue or else it will die.” On Thursday, King Hussein met with Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, with whom the King hopes to forge a common Middle East policy. Mr. Mubarak said that he and the King had also discussed Mr. Mubarak’s scheduled visit to the United States in March.
President Hafez al-Assad denounced King Hussein and Mr. Arafat today as agents of “imperialism and Zionism” and assailed them for dealing with “the Egypt of Camp David.” Mr. Assad made his comments as he opened an annual meeting of the ruling Baath Party here. Without mentioning either man by name, Mr. Assad said the Jordanian and Palestinian leaders “want to meet with the Egypt of Camp David because they are seeking surrender, and they expect us to bless it.” “Those who want to join Camp David, let them go to hell and get burned alone,” Mr. Assad declared. “We will not join them ever.” He also accused Mr. Arafat of conducting a “conspiracy” against the Palestinian people and said “Syria will lead the Palestinian struggle henceforth.”
Iraq said that its aircraft flew 51 combat missions today against Iranian troops east of the southern port of Basra, Iraq. In Tehran, an Iranian military communique reported artillery exchanges between the two sides and said eight people had been killed and 28 wounded in Iraqi air raids on four villages Friday. The Iraqi statement issued in Baghdad said the raids east of Basra across the Shatt al-Arab waterway were the first in several weeks of the four-year war. It said the planes inflicted heavy losses and damage and that further damage was caused by Iraqi artillery bombardments of the area.
A French politician has spent 10 days with Muslim guerrillas in Afghanistan despite a Soviet threat about such visits, an Afghan refugee press service reported today. The Afghan Information and Documentation Center, based in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar, said the politician, Jean Deniau, visited Afghanistan’s northeastern Kunar Province and returned safely to Pakistan. Mr. Deniau is vice chairman of the European Parliament’s Political and Human Rights Commission and a former Foreign Trade Minister. The center said he reported that the guerrillas were in high spirits but short of heavy weapons to face a new Soviet offensive. Last October the Soviet Ambassador to Pakistan, Vitaly Smirnov, said that journalists or others who made secret visits to report on the Afghan situation would be killed. Mr. Smirnov gave his warning in a talk to a French television network after one of its journalists, Jacques Abouchar, was captured by Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Mr. Abouchar was freed after being sentenced to an 18-year jail term.
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi said in a speech today that he had appointed a special Cabinet group to come up with ways to resolve the separatist political crisis in the northern state of Punjab. He said he had asked the Cabinet group to propose solutions “within a specified time frame.” The new Prime Minister, speaking in a nationally televised speech, said the top priority of his Government would be to find a solution to Sikh separatism in the Punjab. At the same time, he pledged not to bow to the forces of fanaticism and separatism that took the life of his mother, Indira, last October 31.
Officials of the Cambodian rebel group under attack by Vietnam say that Vietnamese troops appear to be digging in for a long stay along the border of Thailand and Cambodia. The rebel officials said the Vietnamese, along with Cambodian troops loyal to the Phnom Penh Government, appeared to be seeking to keep the forces of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front from returning to some abandoned border settlements as quickly as they had done after previous Vietnamese assaults. “This is a major change in tactics,” a spokesman for the front said in an interview today. “The Vietnamese seem to be coming to the border to stay.”
Maximum Vietnamese casualties are promised by General Dien Del, a well-regarded Cambodian rebel leader who is preparing for a major Vietnamese attack on the non-Communist Cambodian resistance bases around Ampil. On December 25, Vietnamese guns destroyed the refugee camp of Rithisen, which had been a stronghold of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front. Building bunkers is a life-or-death preoccupation in this embattled Cambodian guerrilla camp, where a major Vietnamese attack has been predicted for weeks. No one here is any more than an easy dash and dive from the underground shelters built for protection against Vietnamese artillery. To the east of Ampil are entrenched units of Vietnam’s Fifth Division, more than 2,000 men by guerrilla estimates, with their long-range howitzers trained on this most important of non-Communist Cambodian resistance bases. Vietnamese guns, some with a range of up to 19 miles, devastated the refugee camp of Rithisen.
A New Caledonian political leader who opposes independence for the South Pacific territory today termed a reported independence plan involving a contract of association with France “a monstrous idiocy.” The new plan reported in the French weekly Nouvel Observateur as being drawn up by Edgard Pisani, France’s special envoy to New Caledonia, would make the French territory an associated state with special ties to France for a transition period of 5 to 10 years.
Honduran police have arrested an Indian leader of U.S.-backed rebels opposed to the leftist government of neighboring Nicaragua and may deport him soon, Honduran officials said. Steadman Fagoth Muller, who commands an Indian rebel group known as the Misura, violated the law by “getting involved in politics,” the officials said. Foreign Minister Edgardo Paz Barnica said Nicaraguan rebels should be “booted out” of his country. Honduran officials were angered by Fagoth’s recent boast to reporters that his forces would execute 23 captured Nicaraguan soldiers if their government attempts to rescue them.
Two Salvadoran guerrillas were killed in light, scattered fighting east of the capital, military sources reported. One of the leftists died in fighting near San Vicente and the other was killed in a battle near Chapeltique, 86 miles east of San Salvador. A new anti-insurgency operation involving some U.S.trained troops continued in a zone of heavy rebel activity in Chalatenango province, about 50 miles north of the capital, the sources added. Word was not available on the progress of the anti-insurgency operation.
Leftist guerrillas in Colombia agreed to withdraw from one of their bases, ending a three-week confrontation with the army that threatened a nationwide truce, according to official sources and a Bogota radio report. The radio report said rebels of the April 19 Movement, or M-19, agreed to leave a mountainside camp 180 miles southwest of Bogota within four weeks and to move to an area on the opposite side of the mountain. It was not known if the rebels will keep their weapons or if authorities plan to arrest those guerrillas facing criminal charges.
A team of Bolivian climbers fighting high winds and snow reached the wreckage of an Eastern Airlines jet roughly 20,000 feet up Illimani mountain and reported finding no survivors of the crash, the airline said. The Boeing 727 carrying 29 people, eight of them Americans, crashed last Tuesday, minutes before it was to land at La Paz airport from Asuncion, Paraguay. Among the Americans aboard was Marian Davis, wife of the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, and William Kelly, director of the Peace Corps in Paraguay. Officials had held out no hope that those aboard could have survived.
Civil conflicts in Ethiopia are, with drought and famine, also ravaging the country. Like the famine a year or six months ago, these chronic wars are being fairly effectively shrouded from public scrutiny. The government says that it has no internal enemies other than “bandits” and terrorists,” but diplomats say there are about 25 active rebel organizations, representing virtually all of Ethiopia’s main ethnic groups.
Two thousand Brazilian workers are to build Angola’s largest hydroelectric dam under the terms of a $500 million contract that has been signed here. The dam contract highlights a little- noticed surge in commercial and cultural exchanges between Marxist Angola and capitalist Brazil, a relationship that has been overshadowed in the last decade by the larger presence of Cuban troops and technicians. In Angola, Brazilians are drilling for oil, repairing telephone lines, rewiring power systems, maintaining freight trains and selling food, films and trucks. This two-way trade jumped from $4 million in 1973 to $230 million in 1984. Brazil is now Angola’s third largest trading partner, after the United States and the Netherlands.
White police officers scuffled with protesters tonight as Senator Edward M. Kennedy arrived in South Africa and was met by black demonstrators chanting, “Kennedy go home!” The protesters said they belonged to the Azanian People’s Organization, a “black consciousness” movement that excludes whites from its activities. The group, underlining a division in black ranks over the visit of the Massachusetts Democrat, has attacked it as an effort to secure “a ticket to the Presidency” of the United States.
The NASA space shuttle Discovery moves to the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center for the STS 51-C mission. Discovery was moved to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center for its unprecedented secrecy-shrouded flight on January 23, during which the crew will deploy a classified military payload reported to be an advanced intelligence-gathering satellite designed to monitor Soviet compliance with arms-control agreements. On Monday, the five-man crew, commanded by Navy Captain Thomas Mattingly, will board the shuttle for a rehearsal of the final 2½ hours of the launch countdown.
President Reagan spends the day at Camp David.
Former Senator John Tower (R-Texas), who served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee before retiring, is expected to be named U.S. ambassador to West Germany, Administration officials said. Arthur Burns, 80, the current U.S. ambassador, plans to retire after the economic summit of industrialized nations in Bonn in May. The appointment of Tower, a conservative with expertise in defense matters, is expected to win favor in West Germany.
The new chairman of the House Budget Committee said that he opposes a tax increase but favors an across-the-board freeze of spending in all government agencies to cut federal deficits. Rep. William H. Gray III (D-Pennsylvania) said that. “America made a decision” against tax increases when it voted to reelect President Reagan last November. As a result, a deficit reduction “has to be done by spending cuts,” he said.
United Mine Workers President Richard L. Trumka blamed Emery Mining Co. for the deaths of 27 persons in a Utah coal mine fire last month. Trumka said in Castle Dale, Utah, that the firm allowed unsafe conditions to prevail in the Wilberg Mine. The union chief, who until now had not specifically charged negligence on the part of the company, said: “If everything had been done properly, 27 people would not be dead today.” But company spokesman Robert Henrie denied the charge and said: “I believe these self-appointed critics… simply do more to compound the hurt,” especially when an official inquiry is “just beginning.”
A Massachusetts treasure hunter has retrieved more than $1 million worth of gold and silver from the ocean floor off Cape Cod, where a pirate galleon loaded with loot from 22 ships sank in 1717. The treasure being recovered by Barry Clifford of Vineyard Haven is believed to be that of the Whidah, a ship captained by Samuel (Black) Bellamy that was carrying the loot from the Caribbean when it sank in an April storm off Wellfleet. When the ship sank, the booty aboard it was estimated to be worth $4 million, and it is probably worth $400 million today.
Supporters of the jailed Rev. D. Douglas Roth threatened to break into his padlocked Trinity Lutheran Church today for services conducted by actor David Soul. An organizer of the move said the group might hold services on the lawn, declaring: “If they kick us off the lawn, I think that will be a major point in America.” The church, in Clairton, Pennsylvania, was raided Friday by 50 sheriff’s deputies and is the focal point of a dispute between two activist labor groups and local religious leaders. Soul I will deliver his own sermon and read one prepared by Roth.
Two Chicago firefighters were charged in connection with a $10,000 arson-for-profit scheme following an undercover investigation by police and federal agents, authorities said. Bond was set at $25,000 each for Donald Podolsky, 27, and Charles Hawkins, 33, who were arrested while entering a building in the city’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. Authorities said they found two five-gallon cans of gasoline in the suspects’ car.
Claus von Bülow faces a new trial in Rhode Island on charges of twice attempting to murder his wife, Martha. Rhode Island’s new Attorney General, Arlene Violet, announced that the state will try to prove once again charges that led to his conviction in March 1982. The conviction was overturned by the Rhode Island Supreme Court in April 1984. The announcement by the Attorney General, who took office five days ago, resolved the major policy question confronting her office. A jury in Newport found Mr. von Bülow guilty of twice injecting his wife, Martha, with insulin in attempts to kill her. She has lain in a coma since December 1980. The jury reached its decision in March 1982 after a trial that lasted more than two months.
To his admirers, Bernhard Hugo Goetz is a personable, scholarly, self- reliant man who cares about his neighbors and his community, despises hoodlums and has long been frustrated by what he sees as a drift toward criminal anarchy. To his detractors, he is a captive of naive idealism, a profoundly introverted and secretive man whose friendliness falls short of real friendships and whose outspoken views on crime mask a darker personality obsessed by irrational fears. The emerging picture of Mr. Goetz is a kaleidoscope of clashing opinions reflecting the harshness, if not the scope, of the debate over vigilantism and public safety that has arisen since he shot four youths who harassed him on a Manhattan subway train December 22.
An armed woman who had tried to commandeer a jetliner kept her gun trained on her hostages and said little before she was shot by police officers who stormed the plane, passengers said today. “The gun was always at our faces,” said Bonnie Esterquest, 75 years old, who was one of four hostages who spent six and a half hours Friday aboard the Pan American World Airways Boeing 727.
A few days before today’s inauguration of James G. Martin as Governor of North Carolina, a nationally known moving company reported a small but telling fact that helps illustrate this state’s happy economic bustle. The Mayflower Corporation said it had handled nearly twice as many moves into North Carolina, more than 2,500, as moves out of the state in the first nine months of 1984. As the retiring Governor, James B. Hunt Jr., prepared to make way for his successor, he issued figures underscoring the point. In the past eight years industries invested $15.5 billion in new and expanded plants in North Carolina, he said, producing 250,000 additional jobs. Over the last decade the work force has grown by 15 percent, according to Michael Rakouskas, research chief of the State Department of Commerce, and today the state is well on its way to recovering fully from the 1981 national recession.
Jerry Falwell, the leader of Moral Majority, says the bombings of abortion clinics are being carried out by “deranged” people who are diverting attention from the “real atrocity.” The worst thing anyone who genuinely supports the dignity of life can do “is be involved in a violent act,” he told reporters at a news conference Friday.
A Minnesota couple acquitted of sexual abuse charges involving one of their sons have been awarded custody of their oldest boy, who a judge said “was almost pleading” to go home. Judge Charles Gegen of Family Court returned the 14-year-old to Robert and Lois Bentz of Jordan after a hearing Friday. The boy has been in foster care. The two younger sons remained in foster homes. The Bentzes were among 25 Scott County residents accused last year of involvement in sex rings in which many children were said to have been abused. The Bentzes were acquitted in September, and charges against the others were dropped, though a state investigation continues.
A man brandishing a .45-caliber gun walked into a crowded St. Louis tavern early today and opened fire, killing three men and wounding two others before fleeing, the police said. The police said the shooting at the Turning Point Tavern apparently stemmed from an argument that had occurred earlier between the man and at least one of the victims. Several suspects were being questioned but no arrests had been made, a police spokesman said. Lawrence Williams, 37 years old, Ronald Brown, 33, and William Phillips, 27, were killed. Donnie Brown, 39, Ronald’s brother, and Anthony Bigham, 40, were wounded, the police said.
A 5-year-old California boy, mauled by a tiger that escaped from its cage at Lion Country Safari in 1982, will receive up to $20 million in an out-of-court settlement, his attorney said Friday. The boy, Anthony Stopani, was attacked by a 500-pound Siberian tiger that dragged the screaming child into bushes in the park south of Irvine. The settlement will cover medical expenses, and compensate the child and his family for emotional distress, the attorneys said. The child’s head and one leg are severely scarred and he suffers partial paralysis on the left side of his body.
The sale of the Alaska Railroad to the State of Alaska by the Federal Government, which owned and operated it for 60 years, was to be declared official in Nenana, a hamlet about 60 miles from Fairbanks. The 525-mile railroad linking Alaska’s south coast with its interior was completed in Nenana in 1923. Alaska is paying $22.7 million for it.
Almost gone but hardly forgotten, the traditional Roman Catholic mass conducted in Latin would be welcomed by many Catholics in the United States, a new survey suggests. Forty percent of responding Catholics said such a mass, all but banned by the church in the mid-1960’s, ought to be available as an alternative to the newer English version, according to a Gallup Poll released Wednesday by a traditionalist church group that strongly favors such a return.
A rare Eurasian bean goose is resting at a wildlife refuge near here, far from its natural migration routes. The Bobolinks, a national network of bird watchers, has issued a North American rare bird alert, and United States Fish and Wildlife Service officials have opened the DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge 25 miles north of Omaha for public viewing of the bird through Sunday. The bean goose, so named because it eats beans growing in fields, nests in Siberia, Greenland and Iceland, and winters in the Aleutian Islands, China and Japan. The bird has a brown, swanlike head and a brownish-gray back.
Born:
Anthony Stewart, Canadian NHL centre and right wing (Florida Panthers, Atlanta Thrashers, Carolina Hurricanes), in LaSalle, Quebec, Canada.
Tra Battle, NFL defensive back (San Diego Chargers, Dallas Cowboys), in Forsyth, Georgia.
Michael Cuccione, Canadian actor, in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada (d. 2001, from respiratory failure, complication of earlier cancer treatment).
Died:
John Paxton, 73, American screenwriter and producer (“On The Beach”, “Kotch”, “Farewell My Lovely”).
Robert L. Surtees, 78, American Oscar-winning cinematographer (“Ben-Hur”).
History Diaries 