The leaders of the Greek and Turkish Cypriots met today for the first time in more than five years to try to work out an agreement for reunifying Cyprus. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, who sat in on the session here, called the talks “a landmark in the complex history of the search for a negotiated, just and lasting settlement of the Cyprus problem.” But the United Nations chief warned that “difficulties remain to be overcome, pitfalls to be avoided and mistrust to be dispelled.” The more than 20-year-old dispute over Cyprus has embittered Greece and Turkey, both members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Greece is worried that the price it might be asked to pay for a settlement of the Cyprus problem might be a heavier flow of American arms to Turkey, high-ranking officials here said today. Greece has protested earlier American moves in that direction, the officials said, and would object in the future. Meetings began at the United Nations today between President Spyros Kyprianou of Cyprus and Denktaş, leader of the Turkish Cypriots, the first such encounters since 1979. They came after separate negotiations late last year between Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar and each of the leaders. Those talks indicated that the Turkish Cypriots were prepared to give up the independent state that they proclaimed in 1983 and reunite the country.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain has accepted an invitation from President Reagan to meet on February 20 at the White House, Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, announced today. He said the official working visit would be part of the continuing discussions between Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher, and that the talks might “conceivably” center on arms control issues and on the Administration’s proposal for research on a spaced-based shield against nuclear weapons, a concept popularly known as “Star Wars.”
A friend of a pro-Solidarity priest described today how he had dived, handcuffed, to escape from a speeding unmarked police car and spread the alarm that the priest had been abducted. The man, Waldemar Chrostowski, a 42-year-old fireman, is the only known witness to the kidnapping of the priest, the Rev. Jerzy Popiełuszko, who was abducted last Oct. 19 and later found murdered. Three cashiered secret-police officers have pleaded guilty at a murder trial here, which is now in its 14th day. A fourth officer accused in the case still holds his rank of colonel because he has denied charges of aiding and abetting the crime.
More activism in currency markets on the part of the Reagan Administration may be in prospect, Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan hinted. Economists close to the currency markets said Mr. Reagan might be suggesting that Washington was somewhat more willing than previously to influence prices in the markets to slow sharp changes in a currency’s value, such as the selling wave that recently struck the British pound.
President Reagan participates in a meeting to discuss the Conference on Confidence and Security Building Measures and Disarmament in Europe.
The United States and Italy have agreed on a common strategy to fight organized crime and narcotics trafficking, the two governments announced in a joint statement in Rome at the end of a three-day visit by U.S. Attorney General William French Smith. Specifically, the two nations decided to strengthen cooperation to combat drug traffic in the Mediterranean basin and to stem the flow of drugs from South America. They also agreed on common measures to control chemicals used in the illicit production of narcotics.
Drug abuse and related crimes reached unprecedented levels worldwide last year, even posing a threat to the security of some e countries, a U.N. report released in Vienna said. The report, by the International Narcotics Control Board, did not elaborate on the national security issue, but it may have been alluding to the assassination of Colombia’s justice minister last May after he declared war on drug traffickers. “Very few countries remain unaffected” by drug problems, the report said.
A majority of residents in the European Economic Community support the concept of transforming the 10-nation alliance into a “United States of Europe,” according to a poll published by the Common Market’s executive commission. In the poll of 10,000 citizens, only the British and the Danes said they opposed moving beyond the economic alliance to form a political union. Overall, 52% approved of the concept, while 21% said it would be “a bad thing” to unite politically.
On the 40th anniversary of the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg, President Reagan praised the Swedish diplomat’s efforts in saving the lives of nearly 100,000 Jews in World War II and called on the Soviet Union to give “a full and complete accounting of his fate.” Wallenberg, serving in Budapest, helped to save Hungarian Jews from Nazi death camps. He disappeared January 17, 1945, after being taken away by Soviet soldiers. Moscow says he died in prison a few years later, but reports from former Soviet prisoners have indicated that he may still be alive.
A West German Jewish group accused the Greens party of anti-Semitism and said it will no longer cooperate with the party in building a memorial to Jews killed by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The Bonn-based Jewish Association charged that recent comments by some Greens parliamentary delegates were “characteristic of those who took part in the mass murders” of Jews during World War II. A five-member Greens delegation visited the Mideast last month and later accused Israeli troops of using “terror tactics” in southern Lebanon.
The Reagan Administration has expressed its concern to Israel about reports that some Ethiopian Jewish refugees have been settled in the West Bank, State Department officials said today. According to the officials, the United States Embassy in Tel Aviv was instructed to complain to the Israelis about reports that hundreds of the Ethiopian Jews – part of an airlift of some 10,000 – had been sent to the Kiryat Arba settlement outside Hebron in the West Bank. The United States has given Israel some $12.5 million for the resettlement expenses of new immigrants this fiscal year and Washington wants to make sure that none of the money is spent on enlarging Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The West Bank of the Jordan River, populated mostly by Palestinian Arabs, has been under Israeli control since it was captured from Jordan in the June 1967 war. Jordan seized the West Bank in 1948, and the area’s sovereignty remains in dispute.
West Beirut is in greater chaos than ever before. Over the last decade, the sector became virtually synonymous with mindless death and destruction. It seemed inconceivable that it could get any worse — but it has. George Zeini is a well-known figure around Makhoul Street in West Beirut. Over the years, his restaurant was a refuge for those Lebanese – artists, writers, professors, especially Christians – who stubbornly refused, despite violence and chaos, to move away from this predominantly Muslim sector of the capital. Gaunt, gray and insistent, Mr. Zeini also ran an art gallery a few blocks away on Rue Bliss. Over lunch one day, he talked excitedly of an exhibition of watercolors of Rue Bliss, at one time an intellectual center of the Arab world, now best known as a place where cars are often stolen at gunpoint. Implicitly, the exhibit would call for a return to the old Beirut tradition of intellectual and political freedom, rather than what Mr. Zeini termed the current rule of “barbarians.”
Although Mr. Zeini’s restaurant, Smugglers Inn, was robbed six times in the last three months by gunmen who stripped customers of their money and jewelry, it still seemed a small haven for West Beirutis from the mean streets outside. The quickest seats to fill up were the red leather banquettes in the narrow space by the bar in back. That is where the bomb went off last Thursday, killing four people and wounding 12. “I have built this place with my life, all my life, and now it is destroyed — for what?” Mr. Zeini was heard to cry over his ruined restaurant. “West Beirut is in the grip of lawlessness,” a former Cabinet minister said. “Everything is bad and getting worse.”
President Zail Singh said today that the new Government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi is “committed to a clean public life” and that it plans to enact a law to ban political defections. In a statement of Government policies and intentions, Mr. Singh said at a traditional joint session of the two houses of Parliament that Mr. Gandhi would welcome cooperation from the opposition and would start talks on changes in the electoral process. Defections have long been a mark of Indian politics.
At least 60,000 Cambodians who fled recent Vietnamese attacks on border settlements are being moved to a refugee camp deeper in Thai territory, according to international aid workers and Thai officials. The move came amid signs that the Vietnamese may be preparing to seal the Cambodian-Thai border and stay in the camps abandoned by Cambodian rebels and their civilian supporters since Vietnamese attacks began in mid-November. Nearly 250,000 Cambodians supporting three anti-Vietnamese guerrilla armies trying to overthrow the Cambodian Government installed by Hanoi six years ago were living in the border camps when the attacks began. More than half of them have already sought refuge in Thailand. The Cambodians who began to move quietly on Wednesday to the Khao I Dang refugee camp, north of Aranyaprathet, are apparently from the makeshift settlement at Red Hill, according to refugee workers. The people in that settlement fled at Christmas from Rithisen, the largest civilian camp of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front
The former head of Taiwan’s Military Intelligence Bureau has been taken into custody for questioning in a scandal linking agency officers with the slaying of a journalist in California, a Government official said today. Vice Admiral Wong Shi-lin, 57 years old, director of the bureau since 1983, was dismissed without explanation by the Government on Tuesday, after it was announced that one of his deputies had been arrested for purported involvement in the death of an American political writer, Henry Liu, 52. Authorities said the deputy, Colonel Chen Hu-men, 47, was implicated in the slaying by two Taiwanese gangsters wanted by the police in Daly City, south of San Francisco, in connection with the death. The two are in custody in Taiwan. Mr. Liu, who had written articles critical of the Nationalist Chinese Government in Taiwan, was gunned down October 15 by two assailants in the garage of his home in Daly City. He had worked in Taiwan before emigrating to the United States in the 1970’s and was reported to have finished revising a critical biography of President Chiang Ching-kuo of Taiwan just before his death.
U.S. Ambassador John Gavin said pressure for better security on dangerous Mexican highways appears to be having favorable results. Gavin, who warned last fall that a traveler’s advisory might have to be issued by the embassy in Mexico City after reports of attacks and kidnappings, cited “a diminution in the rate of assaults.”
More assistance for El Salvador is expected to be requested of Congress this year, according to senior Reagan Administration officials. They said recent intelligence assessments had reported that President Jose Napoleon Duarte was now confronted by the most serious threat to his government since he took office seven months ago. Congress approved $326 million in economic aid and $128 million in military aid to El Salvador for the current fiscal year. The officials said the Administration would like to bring military aid up to about $200 million and add at least $100 million in economic assistance.
Children of U.S. Embassy personnel in Colombia are being sent back to the United States because of reported plots by Colombian drug traffickers to kill or kidnap them, State Department officials said. In the latest development in what one official called an “undeclared war” between the United States and the drug traffickers in Colombia, the United States Embassy in Bogota received intelligence reports in recent days that Colombian criminals were plotting to kill or kidnap children of American diplomats, department officials said. Last November, the United States evacuated about 10 diplomats and their families after the embassy received threats of retaliation by drug traffickers for stepped-up efforts to try to block the export of marijuana and cocaine to the United States. On November 26, a bomb exploded under a car near the embassy, killing a Colombian woman but not harming any Americans.
Managers of more than 600 factories in La Paz, Bolivia, said they shut down their operations to guarantee safety of executives after workers seized more than 30 firms and took 190 executives hostage. The Confederation of Factory Workers said it took over the factories to demand payment of November and December wages and a Christmas bonus equivalent to a month’s wage. A spokesman for the managers’ Board of Industries warned that more factories might close throughout the country if the hostages are not freed.
Reagan Administration officials told Congress today that the famine in Africa was of “historic proportions” and that it was likely to continue throughout this year and probably well into next. The officials, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the situation south of the Sahara would not improve much over the long run unless African nations drastically changed their agricultural methods and their urban-oriented policies. For the short run, they added, the best that could be hoped for was an end to the long African drought and a continuation of the heavy flow of food aid.
Scientists said that they have discovered the complete genetic structure of two viruses believed to cause AIDS, a finding that is expected to help in the detection, prevention and treatment of the deadly disease. A team of scientists from the National Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School and two commercial laboratories mapped the genetic structure of HTLV 3, which they believe to be the cause of AIDS. In France, another group working separately discovered the blueprint of another variation of the virus, which it called LAV. Testing revealed the two viruses to be nearly identical.
Three internal audits of the military medical care system have reported serious deficiencies in appointing and evaluating doctors in the military. The audits also found that emergency rooms of military hospitals were often staffed by unqualified personnel, that lax drug-dispensing systems allowed some doctors to precribe drugs for themselves or for friends, and that poorly supervised physicians’ assistants sometimes gave improper care without bothering to refer patients to doctors. Audits Raise Challenges The problems with military medical care have come to light as the Defense Department’s top military and health officials focused renewed attention on the need to assure the quality of care dispensed in the military hospitals. The most serious challenges to the Defense Department’s medical system were raised by the three internal audits. These audits, by the Defense Department’s Inspector General, the Naval Audit Service and the Army Audit Agency, were completed last year and were made available this week by the office of Senator Jim Sasser, Democrat of Tennessee, who became interested in military medical care because of complaints from constituents.
President Reagan meets with Dr. Bruce Merrifield, U.S. winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
After meeting with Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, the House minority leader, Robert H. Michel, said today that Republicans in the House would support cuts in President Reagan’s military budget but would seek to protect funds for the MX missile. The savings Mr. Michel suggested fell far short of the outright freeze on the military appropriation that Senate Republicans are considering as part of their deficit-reducing package. Mr. Michel’s remarks were one of several signals from Congressmen in recent days that it would be difficult to achieve the Senators’ target of reducing the deficit by $50 billion in 1986 without raising taxes. Mr. Reagan has strongly opposed a tax increase.
Jurors in Ariel Sharon’s $50 million libel suit in New York against Time magazine recessed for the night after reviewing testimony about meetings that the former Israeli defense minister had with Christian Falangists on the eve of a massacre of Palestinian refugees. The six-member jury has ruled on the first of a three-part verdict, finding that Sharon was defamed by a paragraph in a Time cover story on a massacre of Palestinian civilians in Beirut by the Falangists in 1982.
To ease the “cabin fever” of his lengthy hospital stay, artificial heart recipient William J. Schroeder is getting a customized van that will enable him and his wife to drive around — and possibly visit their Jasper, Indiana, home. No date has been announced for Schroeder’s release from Humana Hospital Audubon in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was listed in satisfactory condition, although he did complain of a “mild, non-specific abdominal pain Wednesday,” said hospital spokesman Bob Irvine.
The bombing of three abortion clinics in Pensacola, Florida, on December 25 represented the carrying out of God’s work, according to two former Bible school chums, Matthew J. Goldsby and James T. Simmons. The two 21- year-old men have acknowledged destroying the clinics.
Alfonse M. D’Amato expressed sympathy for Bernhard H. Goetz, the 37- year-old electronics expert accused of trying to murder four youths who approached him in a subway car and asked him for money. Senator D’Amato, speaking at a Congressional crime hearing, said he was willing to testify at Mr. Goetz’s trial that New York City subway riders needed armed guards.
The leader of the nation’s mayors, while voicing “grave concern” about federal deficits, said that cuts in aid to cities, under discussion by the Reagan Administration, appear to be unacceptable. New Orleans Mayor Ernest N. (Dutch) Morial, president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said in Washington that although he was awaiting details of the Administration’s fiscal 1986 budget, “reductions as have been proposed certainly appear to fall into the category of unacceptability.” Morial said he was particularly concerned about the future of multibillion-dollar federal revenue sharing and community development block grant programs.
The Defense Department is reviewing its decision and may decide not to base a Navy battleship and support ships on Staten Island, New York, in part because Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger is irritated that opposition has arisen over nuclear weapons that the vessels might carry, a spokesman said. “The military has always prided itself in being good neighbors,” Assistant Secretary Michael Burch said. “We feel that we contribute significantly to the economic and social well-being of any community where we’re present.”
The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled today that all life-sustaining medical treatment, including feeding tubes, can be withheld or withdrawn from incompetent as well as competent terminally ill patients, provided that is what the patient wants or would want. The 6-to-1 decision, which involved an 84- year-old nursing-home patient, was issued nine years after the court’s landmark decision that allowed Karen Ann Quinlan to be removed from a respirator.
A Federal district judge said today that freedom of religion was a legitimate defense in the case of a leading figure in a movement to afford sanctuary in the United States to refugees from Latin America. Judge Hayden Head Jr. was speaking of Jack Elder, director of Casa Oscar Romero, a refugee project of the Brownsville Roman Catholic Diocese, who is charged in Federal court with transporting three Salvadorans from Casa Romero to a bus station.
A Federal appeals court today barred the release of 34 Cuban refugees from an Atlanta prison, clearing the way for the deportation of 2,700 undesirable refugees to their homeland. It was the second consecutive day that the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit had sided with Justice Department attorneys and overturned Federal District Judge Marvin Shoob. On Wednesday, the appeals court stayed Judge Shoob’s order of Oct. 15 blocking the United States from deporting nearly 1,500 Cuban refugees in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Earlier Wednesday, he ordered the “immediate” release of 34 Cubans who had been approved for parole by a Federal review panel. The Government successfully argued today that the 34 Cubans “would abscond” if they were released. The United States reached an agreement December 14 with the Cuban Government that it should take back the 2,746 refugees.
Pentagon action on drug smuggling was urged by the governors of the five Gulf Coast states. The governors of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, meeting in New Orleans, called current Federal efforts against drug trafficking “completely inadequate.”
The campaign by labor and church activists seeking to restore the vigor of the steel and other manufacturing industries in this area, once the center of the American steel industry, appears headed for new, expanded levels of confrontation. The fight involves unusual church ferment, with Protestants generally favoring a militant course and Roman Catholics refusing to support them. The Protestants, ministers who have formed a group called Denominational Ministry Strategy, have singled out the Mellon Bank and the United States Steel Corporation, both headquartered in Pittsburgh, saying they have refused to invest in the area. They have also attacked churches, which, they say, harbor corporate executives on Sundays and make them feel like good Christians.
Simultaneous poll closings in national elections will be explored at hearings before the House Task Force on Elections, leaders of the panel announced. They said the stage was set for the hearings when news executives of the three major commercial broadcasting networks gave written commitments not to predict election results in any state until the polls had closed. Previously, only ABC News had announced such a policy.
The Federal Aviation Administration ordered that Susquehanna Airlines, a small New York commuter carrier, be grounded after investigators reported a broad. range of alleged safety violations. The airline, based in Sidney, New York, has seven planes and operated daily flights between Binghamton, New York, and Boston, Chicago and the three New York City-area airports. Last December 17, a Susquehanna plane crashed into a fog-shrouded mountain northeast of Binghamton, killing four persons.
Tests of dioxin-contaminated soil from a Virginia campground where 30,000 Boy Scouts held a jamboree in 1981 showed no danger to health, and the youngsters will return to the Ft. A.P. Hill site for their 1985 jamboree in July, officials said in Irving, Texas. None of the scouts or leaders who attended the 1981 jamboree need to be tested for exposure, said Dr. Walter Menninger, chairman of the Boy Scouts’ national health committee.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced late today rules designed to protect the public from radioactive air pollution. The announcement came after the Supreme Court denied the agency’s request to stay a court order requiring the agency to issue the regulations.
Senator Jake Garn today received his flight assignment from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He will be a “payload specialist” on a space shuttle flight scheduled for February 20. In that capacity, said Terry White, a NASA spokesman, Senator Garn will probably be participating in the life science experiments. Senator Garn, who has been undergoing training at the Johnson Space Center this week, said his activities aboard the space shuttle Challenger would include research on space sickness, a motion ailment that afflicts about half of all space travelers. He said if he does not become sick in orbit, he might be made ill as part of the experiment.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1228.69.
Born:
Emmanuel Burriss, MLB second baseman and shortstop (San Francisco Giants, Washington Nationals, Philadelphia Phillies), in Washington, District of Columbia.
Jai Miller, MLB outfielder (Florida Marlins, Kansas City Royals, Oakland A’s), in Auburn, Alabama.
Chad Beck, MLB pitcher (Toronto Blue Jays), in Jasper, Texas.
Kangin [Kim Young-woon], South Korean singer, dancer, actor and DJ (Super Junior), in Seoul, South Korea.
Riyu Kosaka, Japanese singer (BeForU), in Yokohama, Japan.
Simone Simons, Dutch singer (Epica), in Hoensbroek, Netherlands.
Died:
Jimmy DeBerry, 73, American blues guitarist, banjo player, and singer.
History Diaries 