Soviet-American arms talks began in Geneva with Secretary of State George P. Shultz meeting with Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko. They talked for seven hours, first at a morning session at the Soviet mission here, then in the afternoon at the United States mission. Reagan Administration officials said the discussions, which are aimed at devising a format for future negotiations covering both nuclear arsenals and space weapons, began with the two sides outlining ideas for future arms control negotiations. The officials described Mr. Shultz’s presentation as a three-stage approach. The officials described Mr. Shultz’s presentation as a three-stage approach. They said he called for deep cuts in offensive nuclear forces, followed by the introduction of defensive systems to protect retaliatory forces, and finally discussed the possibilities for space-based defense of populations.
The officials would not say anything about Foreign Minister Gromyko’s reactions or ideas. But the seven hours of talks were more than had been scheduled and, as the day wore on, the two delegations appeared relaxed and smiling for photographers and reporters. The total absence of polemics, the decision by both sides not to conduct formal briefings for reporters and the general cordiality all served to underscore the impression of a return to traditional and businesslike forms of diplomacy.
A Soviet scientific report says that the space-based defense system proposed by President Reagan would disturb the strategic balance, set off a chain reaction of countermeasures and ultimately make nuclear war more possible. The 42-page report, obtained from Soviet sources, says much of the so- called “Star Wars” defense system appears technically feasible, though vulnerable and immensely costly. It says that the testing and deployment of even parts of the system could complicate the prospects for future arms accords. Mr. Reagan has said that the plan, known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, is aimed canceling out the threat of offensive missiles and thus making nuclear war obsolete. The program is a prime concern of the Soviet Union at the talks in Geneva between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko.
The United States is prepared to make a high-level overture to the Soviet Union for a simulated space rescue in which American and Russian astronauts would transfer between spacecraft. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration confirmed today that the proposal could be made as early as this week. A spokesman, Sarah Keegan, said she did not know if it would be brought up in the current arms talks in Geneva between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei A. Gromyko.
The key defendant in the trial of the former security policemen charged in the killing of a pro- Solidarity priest testified today that he had beaten the priest and helped throw his bound body into a reservoir. But he would not admit that he was guilty of the specific charges against him contained in a 60-page indictment. The defendant, Grzegorz Piotrowski, a former captain, was the commanding officer of the October operation in which the priest, the Rev. Jerzy Popiełuszko, was kidnapped and killed. The defendant startled many in the court when he testified in a firm voice that “I do admit to the guilt for some of the deeds.”
More than 1,100 British miners abandoned their 43-week-old coal strike, the most in one day since mid-November, the National Coal Board said. About 71,000 of the 188,000 members of the National Union of Mineworkers, or almost 38%, are now defying their strike leaders and reporting for work, the board said. Union chief Arthur Scargill disputed the board’s figures, saying that 140,000 union members are still on strike. The walkout was called to oppose mine closures and job cuts.
The environmentalist Greens party in West Germany said that neo-Nazis have infiltrated its West Berlin branch over the last six months and that ways are being examined to dissolve the 140-member branch because it refuses to oust them. Greens leaders in Bonn said some of the neo-Nazis now hold influential party posts.
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres said his government and Egypt will start talks by January 18 on stationing elements of the 10-nation Multinational Observer Force in the disputed Taba strip on the Red Sea coast. A 700-yard-long area with a hotel and beach club, Taba is now in Israeli hands, but Cairo considers it part of the Egyptian Sinai. Israel returned its last occupied Sinai territory three years ago as part of the 1979 peace treaty. A decision on Taba and some other disputed points was postponed.
Israel and Lebanon resumed their negotiations today, but it became quickly apparent that the two sides were still far apart and that the talks were probably doomed to fail, Israeli officials indicated. “I am not optimistic about the future of the talks, and regrettably so,” Brig. Gen. Amos Gilboa, the head of the Israeli delegation, said after today’s negotiations on the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon. It was the first meeting since a holiday recess was called Dec. 20 in the talks, which are being held in the Lebanese border town of Naqura. The Lebanese spokesman, Col. Bassam Saad, insisted that the Lebanese were showing greater flexibility on Israeli demands for expanded United Nations troop deployment and said his country did not want to see the negotiations halted.
Prime Minister Shimon Peres vowed today that the Israeli rescue of Ethiopian Jews would be completed. “We shall not rest until our brothers and sisters from Ethiopia will come safely home,” Mr. Peres told a seminar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. On Sunday, the Jewish Agency, Israel’s semiofficial Government relief organization, announced that an airlift of the Ethiopians had been halted because of the publicity given to it. A spokesman said he hoped the halt to the flights would be temporary. There has been no independent confirmation that the flights have actually been stopped.
Mother Teresa, founder of the Missionaries of Charity, praised the Ethiopian Government today for making “a very good beginning” in its effort to resettle victims of the famine that has stricken much of the African continent. At the same time, Mother Teresa, who won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for her work among the poor of India, called on donor nations to support the plan by “adopting” resettlement sites. She said this meant taking on full responsibility for establishing the new communities, including providing food, water, schools and health offices.
A Sudanese statement issued in London today accused Ethiopia of trading its Jews for Israeli arms and money. The statement, drafted by Sudan’s Foreign Ministry and issued by its embassy here, denied that the Sudan had helped in the airlift of an estimated 7,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel.
To cheers from more than 10,000 Coptic Christians, Pope Shenuda III formally ended more than three years of banishment today by officiating at a midnight mass in central Cairo. The Pope’s celebration of the Coptic Christmas mass at St. Mark’s Cathedral was his first official act as spiritual leader of Egypt’s six million Copts since the Government allowed him to leave a desert monastery January 1.
A long-anticipated attack by the Vietnamese on the headquarters camp of the largest Cambodian rebel group was begun by a force of 4,000 Vietnamese troops backed by tanks and artillery. Vietnamese forces heavily shelled a Cambodian guerrilla headquarters at Ampil, then broke through its defenses in a tank-led push to the center of the camp, witnesses and Thai officials said. About three-quarters of the camp near the Thai-Cambodian border was reported in Vietnamese hands after daylong fighting in which at least 20 guerrillas were killed. Most of the guerrillas reportedly retreated into Thailand. The assault on the base of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front came on the sixth anniversary of the Vietnamese capture of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.
More than 100 South Korean policemen surrounded the suburban Seoul home of dissident Kim Young Sam and then withdrew about 22 hours later, one of Kim’s aides said. He reported that an officer at the scene said the action was taken “just for an anti-crime measure.” However, a senior police officer had visited Kim’s home the night before to warn that force might be used to keep him from continuing his political activities. Kim, 57, leader of the now-outlawed New Democratic Party, is one of 15 people who are barred from participating in polities until June, 1988, under a law that was enacted in 1980.
Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos, trying to stifle rumors that he is seriously ill and is preparing to leave office, said local elections next year and presidential polling scheduled in 1987 will go ahead as planned. Marcos, 67, in his 21st year of rule, has already announced he will run for reelection. However, he has rarely appeared in public in the last few months, and opposition leaders and newspaper columnists have speculated that he might call an unscheduled vote this year and name his wife, Imelda, as his ruling party’s presidential candidate.
France offered New Caledonia a limited form of independence that would not break its links to the government in Paris. The proposal was announced in Noumea, the capital of New Caledonia, where white French settlers have been resisting the efforts of indigenous Melanesians, known as Kanakas, to establish a fully autonomous nation. The French Government proposed that New Caledonia, east of Australia in the South Pacific, become a sovereign nation, but that it be linked to France by a special “treaty of association.”
Salvadoran officials said today that they were uncertain about the exact circumstances surrounding the assassination of the El Salvador Government’s chief corruption investigator Sunday. The investigator, Pedro Rene Yanes, who was head of the Presidential Commission on Ethics, was shot dead early Sunday morning, reportedly by a member of the extreme-right National Republican Alliance. The shooting occurred during a festival in the village of Concepcion de Oriente, 180 miles east of San Salvador. The assailant and at least two other people were killed in a shootout involving Mr. Yanes’s bodyguards. Several Government officials say Mr. Yanes was shot without warning by a member of the National Republican Alliance, which is led by Roberto d’Aubuisson. But a spokesman for the party said today that Mr. Yanes and his bodyguards had opened fire first.
French Defense Minister Charles Hernu said there are still about 1,500 Libyan troops in northern Chad despite an agreement by the Libyan regime last year to pull out its forces simultaneously with a French withdrawal. Hernu said French planes are still flying reconnaissance missions over northern Chad, where Libyan forces had backed Chadian rebels while France supported the government of President Hissen Habre.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy met with Foreign Minister Roelof F. Botha of South Africa for an hour today to discuss apartheid, but they were unable to reach “common ground.” The Massachusetts Democrat also visited the town of Mathopestad, where some 2,000 blacks are threatened with eviction. Mr. Kennedy, on an eight-day tour of South Africa to study its racial problems, declined to speak with reporters immediately after meeting with Mr. Botha, but said later that he “did not find anything much encouraging” in the hourlong talk. Agreeing with Mr. Kennedy’s assessment, Mr. Botha said: “It would be naive to expect me and Senator Kennedy ever to reach common ground. He cannot even reach common ground with the Republicans in the United States, and the Republicans are to the left of us.”
The Japanese space probe Sakigake is launched to Halley’s comet. This was Japan’s first interplanetary spacecraft and the first deep space probe to be launched by any country other than the U.S. or the Soviet Union. It aimed to demonstrate the performance of the new launch vehicle, test its ability to escape from Earth gravity, and observe the interplanetary medium and magnetic field. Sakigake was also supposed to act as a frame of reference for data received from probes that flew closer to Halley’s Comet. Early measurements would be used to improve the mission of the Suisei probe launched several months later. It carried out a flyby of Halley’s Comet on March 11, 1986, at a distance of 6.99 million km.
President Reagan won re-election by a landslide today in an anticlimax required by the Constitution: the counting of the 538 Electoral College ballots at a joint session of Congress. Only a few dozen lawmakers were on hand for the 25-minute ritual, and after the last of the manila envelopes that contained each state’s official tally was opened, the results were the same as on Nov. 6: a record 525 electoral votes for Ronald Reagan and George Bush and 13 for Walter F. Mondale and Geraldine A. Ferraro. No President ever got more, and no major-party loser except Alf Landon, the Republican standard-bearer in 1936, ever got fewer.
President Reagan will endorse, with modifications, the Treasury’s plan to overhaul the tax system, Administration officials said. They said the proposal would be the cornerstone of Mr. Reagan’s State of the Union Message on February 6. Officials said he would adopt the basic philosophy of the Treasury’s plan: to cut tax rates for individuals and corporations and to abolish many tax preferences. Final decisions on modifications had not been made, the officials said, but consideration was being given to changing the plan in regard to the tax treatment of depreciation, dividends, interest, capital gains, personal exemptions and charitable contributions. “As more and people look at the Treasury proposal, it continues to hold up very well,” a key White House official said.
President Reagan meets with a group of bipartisan cabinet members from former Administrations.
President Reagan agrees to a request by Chief of Staff James Baker and Secretary of the Treasury Don Regan to switch jobs.
John A. Zaccaro pleaded guilty yesterday in Manhattan to an indictment charging him with scheming to fraudulently obtain financing for a multimillion-dollar real-estate deal. The District Attorney said the scheme had been designed to net large commissions for Mr. Zaccaro and a partner. After the indictment on a single misdemeanor charge was read to Mr. Zaccaro in State Supreme Court, he pleaded guilty in an agreement under which he would not be sent to jail but would receive only up to the maximum $1,000 fine. The crime is punishable by up to a year in jail, plus the fine. The actions marked an end to a sensitive investigation that colored the 1984 Presidential election and the unsuccessful Democratic Vice-Presidential campaign of Mr. Zaccaro’s wife, Geraldine A. Ferraro. But yesterday’s conclusion left murky some key questions of responsibility for dealings that the prosecutors called fraudulent.
New York Democratic politicians and political consultants said yesterday that Geraldine A. Ferraro’s political career had been damaged by the indictment and guilty plea of her husband, John A. Zaccaro. But they disagreed on how much. The assessments, which ranged from too-early-to-tell to “tremendous” and “deadly,” were significant because Mrs. Ferraro has strongly hinted that the next step in her political career would be to challenge Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato next year. There was wide agreement that Senator D’Amato, a Republican who won in three-way race in 1980 with 43 percent of the vote, was now perceived as such a strong candidate that a long list of prospective Democratic opponents had shrunk to two or three.
A U.S. magistrate in Pensacola, Florida, denied bail for two men accused of the Christmas Day bombing of three abortion clinics, saying he had no assurances there would not be further attacks. Magistrate Robert Crongeyer ordered that Matthew Goldsby and James Simmons, both 21, be held for federal grand jury action. Goldsby and Simmons, both Pentecostal Christians, have confessed to planting the bombs. The clinics were unoccupied at the time of the blasts and no one was hurt.
A key part of TIME’s defense in Ariel Sharon’s $50 million libel suit against the magazine was contradicted by evidence obtained from Israel by a Federal judge. A Federal judge obtained a report yesterday that contradicts a key section of a TIME magazine article on Ariel Sharon. The article said a secret Israeli document reported that Mr. Sharon had discussed revenge with Lebanese Phalangists before a massacre in 1982. The report the judge received from Israel yesterday said that the secret document contained no suggestion or evidence that Mr. Sharon had discussed revenge. The disputed TIME report is the basis for Mr. Sharon’s libel case against the magazine in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
Americans harvested a record $16.6 billion worth of marijuana last year, with increasing amounts grown in personal “victory gardens” in basements and closets, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws said. NORML, which advocates legalization of the substance, estimated in its annual report that the number of people growing their own marijuana indoors for personal use rose by one-third, reaching 4 million. This represents about 13% of the at-least 30 million Americans that NORML says are regular users of marijuana.
A judge in Dayton, Ohio, imposed 20-year prison terms on Alton Coleman and his girlfriend for kidnapping a professor, the first sentence for the pair in connection with a six-state crime spree that authorities said left eight persons slain. U.S. District Judge Walter Rice ordered the sentences to begin immediately, and denied defense requests to keep Coleman, 28, and Debra Brown, 22, from being sent to Cincinnati, where they face potential death-penalty charges of aggravated murder in two separate killings. Mr. Coleman and Miss Brown are wanted for questioning or have been charged in eight killings and attacks on about a dozen other people last summer in six Middle West states. The crimes, in Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana, included abductions, robberies and murders. Mr. Coleman and Miss Brown were arrested July 20 in Evanston, Illinois.
Cleveland police filed attempted murder charges against a 42-year-old Cleveland woman wounded in last week’s attempted hijacking of a Pan Am jetliner at Hopkins International Airport. Assistant U.S. Attorney William Edwards said federal charges also were planned against Oranetta Mays, who was shot in the chest Friday night when a SWAT team stormed the Boeing 727 in which four persons were held hostage for 6½ hours. Mays was listed in satisfactory condition. None of the hostages were harmed.
A native of Colombia pleaded innocent in Washington to charges of drug trafficking in a case that government prosecutors said could be of international significance in its efforts to slow the flood of narcotics from South America. Marcos Cadavid, 43, was one of four men returned over the weekend to the United States by Colombia under a 1982 extradition treaty, the first time Colombian nationals have been extradited under the pact. In Miami, the other three men extradited to this country were ordered held without bond pending a full-scale hearing.
Three persons with bad hearts, but currently in stable condition, are being considered by doctors at Humana Heart Institute International in Louisville, Kentucky, as possible recipients of artificial hearts, a spokeswoman said. “It’s a very, very initial contact… They (Humana representatives) are reviewing records and consulting with (the patients’) doctors,” said Linda Broaddus, a spokeswoman for Humana Inc. Meanwhile, William J. Schroeder, 52, who received the world’s second artificial heart on November 25, continued to improve.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt the execution of Roosevelt Green, who is scheduled to die in Georgia’s electric chair early Wednesday for the 1976 abduction and killing of Teresa Carol Allen, an 18-year-old convenience store clerk. As prison employees tested the electric chair, lawyers for Green, 28, met behind closed doors in Atlanta with the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which is considering their plea for clemency or a 90-day stay of execution pending a decision on the clemency appeal.
Four supporters of a dissident minister, saying they would not give up their freedom of religion, refused today to promise not to disrupt church services and were sentenced to 30 days in jail. The four, who were arrested Friday at the Trinity Lutheran Church in Clairton, Pennsylvania and spent the weekend in jail, were found in civil contempt of court for having barricaded themselves in the church. Allegheny County Judge Emil Narick had told them they would be freed if they would make a statement promising not to interfere with the ownership of the church or its services. The church, in a depressed steel town 15 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, has become the focal point of a dispute in which two activist labor groups, supported by the church’s former minister, have accused major companies of taking jobs from the depressed Monongahela Valley by investing overseas. The former pastor, the Rev. D. Douglas Roth, is serving a 110-day jail sentence for defying a court order forbidding him to preach at Trinity.
Norman H. Bangerter took the oath of office as Utah’s 13th Governor here today and pledged to limit the role of his administration to helping Utahans help themselves. It was a characteristic message of self-reliance and governmental restraint from the former Speaker of the Utah House. Mr. Bangerter, three days past his 57th birthday, is Utah’s first Republican chief executive after 20 years of strong and activist Democratic governors, and he is taking over a state facing a mixed economic future and lingering problems. As Governor Bangerter put it, Utah’s challenges and opportunies alike are “tremendous.” Its economy is recovering steadily from the recession, but it lags behind other states of the region. Its wealth in natural resources is immense, but markets for it are distant and demand is weak. Its people are among the best educated in America, yet per capita income is next to lowest.
A $3.3 billion merger was called off by the Diamond Shamrock Corporation of Texas and the Occidental Petroleum Corporation. The announcement stunned Wall Street and left shareholders facing millions of dollars in losses. It was the biggest takeover canceled since the Gulf Oil Corporation backed out of a $5 billion deal to buy the Cities Service Company more than two years ago. Bruce E. Lazier, who follows Shamrock for the Wall Street house of Prescott, Ball & Turben, said: “This is incredible, Diamond Shamrock walking away from this. Their shareholders are going to have a tough time matching what they would have gotten out of this.”
A fire over the weekend destroyed a clubhouse at the Tanglwood resort in the community of Tafton, Pennsylvania in the Pocono Mountains, fire officials said. Chief Don Carrick of the Tafton Fire Department said today that the building, which housed a golf pro shop, a fitness center, a swimming pool, a dining room and offices, was a total loss. The Tanglwood clubhouse had only recently reopened after a fire there December 27, 1983, the authorities said. Fire investigators said they had not determined the cause of this weekend’s fire. The authorities said the fire began early Sunday and had broken through the roof of the second floor by the time firefighters arrived. The fire was brought under control about 4 AM.
A 3-year-old boy with herpes spent his first day of school yesterday with a substitute teacher and a public health nurse in a classroom in Pasadena, Maryland. And a 3-year-old girl with herpes stayed home in Council Bluffs, Iowa, because of a boycott. The Anne Arundel County superintendent, Robert Rice, said he had decided to allow the boy to attend class after health officials said his presence would pose no unusual health risks. In Council Bluffs, parents kept many children home from Longfellow School to protest a court order allowing a 3-year-old girl suffering from herpes to enroll in a preschool class. At hearings held by Federal District Judge Donald O’Brien last week, four doctors testified that the disease posed no threat to other students. In both cases, school officials refused to say which of three forms of herpes, one of which is sexually transmitted, the children have. Their identities were also withheld.
Nonunion actors are wanted by the committee planning President Reagan’s inaugural to perform without pay at the ceremony and festivities, but they are to be paid for their expenses in eight days of work. Unions say the request that the actors perform without pay would violate minimum wage statutes. The committee also called for “attractive, clean-cut, all-American types.”
Thousands of gold and silver coins dug up in July off Wellfleet in Cape Cod are awaiting the verdict of Massachusetts marine archeology officials, who so far disagree over whether there is enough evidence to prove that the coins are pirate treasure. State marine archeology officials are divided over whether thousands of gold and silver coins recovered by a treasure hunter are from the pirate ship Whidah, which wrecked off Cape Cod in 1717. The Whidah’s skipper, Samuel (Black) Bellamy, and his crew of 101 drowned when their ship went down in a northeaster, allegedly depositing a fortune in the sand and leading to some of Cape Cod’s most cherished legends. If the find is verified as the wreck of the Whidah, it would be the first time pirate treasure has been recovered from American waters, according to Joseph Sinnot, the director of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archeological Resources. He said a visit by the board to Cape Cod three weeks ago to view the recovered objects convinced him that the treasure was from the Whidah.
Robert H.W. Welch Jr. died in Winchester, Massachusetts. He was the founder of the ultra-conservative, anti-Communist John Birch Society, which he founded in 1957 after spending most of his life in the candy business. He was 85 years old.
Revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “The King & I”, still starring Yul Brynner opens at Broadway Theater, NYC; runs for 191 performances.
Lou Brock, the major leagues’ all-time stolen base king, and Hoyt Wilhelm, who rewrote the record book on relief pitching, are elected to the Hall of Fame by the BBWAA. Nellie Fox is named on 295 of the 395 ballots (74.7%), but the BBWAA and the Hall of Fame committee decline to round Fox’s total to the required 75%.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1190.59.
Born:
Lewis Hamilton, English auto racer (World Formula 1 Drivers Champion 2008, 2014-2015, 2017-2020), in Stevenage, England, United Kingdom.
José García, Dominican MLB pitcher (Florida Marlins), in Dajabon, Dominican Republic.
Died:
Johnny Guarnieri, 67, American stride and jazz stride pianist, and harpsichordist (The Gramercy Five; “The Morey Amsterdam Show”), of a heart attack.
History Diaries 