Max M. Kampelman was appointed by President Reagan to head the United States delegation to the new three-part arms control talks with the Soviet Union. Mr. Kampelman is a Washington lawyer with political and diplomatic experience. The announcement by Secretary of State George P. Shultz also said that Mr. Kampelman would head the separate group discussing space weapons with Moscow. Under the agreement reached by Mr. Shultz with Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko last week in Geneva, the two sides agreed to hold talks on space weapons, strategic arms and medium- range missiles. In a move that caught arms-control officials by surprise, Mr. Reagan named John G. Tower, the former Republican Senator from Texas, to replace Edward L. Rowny as head of the group dealing with strategic arms.
President Reagan attends a National Security Planning Group meeting to discuss action against Iran.
Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders appeared tonight to have failed to reach an agreement on a draft plan for the reunification of Cyprus but are to meet again Saturday afternoon. “We cannot continue this sort of meeting forever; we shall decide tomorrow whether to continue,” the Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktaş, said after a second day of talks with the Cypriot President, Spyros Kyprianou. The meeting was called by Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar after he brought about an agreement in principle between the two last year.
A judicial appeal that would have turned the murder trial of four secret policemen into a wider tribunal judging purported excesses by the Roman Catholic Church was rejected here today. The lawyers of a slain pro-Solidarity priest’s family argued against admitting the evidence. At issue was the claim of a key defendent, Grzerorz Piotrowski, that Ministry of Interior documents bearing on investigations into church activities would demonstrate his psychological state at the time he admittedly kidnapped and beat the priest, the Rev. Jerzy Popiełuszko.
Mehmet Ali Ağca, who was convicted of shooting Pope John Paul II, wrote a letter to the American military attache in Rome in August 1983 suggesting that the United States had encouraged him to charge that Bulgarians were involved in the plot to kill the Pope.
Mr. Ağca, the main witness against three Bulgarians who will be tried this spring for conspiracy in the 1981 shooting, later retracted the contents of the letter. It was published in Italian newspapers today. The existence of the letter has been known since October, when Judge Ilario Martella filed a 1,243-page report that included indictments of three Bulgarians and four Turks, as well as a new indictment against Mr. Ağca. The appearance of the letter was widely regarded here as part of a battle for public opinion over Mr. Ağca’s credibility as a witness in the trial. The American Embassy here issued a statement denying any connection with Mr. Ağca.
The Indian Government has arrested at least seven officials for spying, including a secretary in Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s office, it was reported today. Press reports identified the aide in the Prime Minister’s office as T. N. Kher, a personal secretary to one of Mr. Gandhi’s closest assistants, P. C. Alexander.
Washington’s highest-ranking official on Asian affairs ruled out arms assistance to Cambodian rebels today, saying that American military involvement in the Cambodian civil war would only make negotiating with Vietnam more difficult. Speaking at a news conference at the end of a three-day visit to Thailand, the official, Paul D. Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said he continued to hope that Hanoi will agree to discuss a political solution in Cambodia. Vietnam has 160,000 to 180,000 troops in Cambodia battling three resistance groups. On Thursday, Thailand’s Foreign Minister, Siddhi Savetsila, said Thailand was pressing the United States to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and China in giving military assistance to Cambodian rebels. Guerrillas of the non-Communist Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, one of the three Cambodian resistance groups, have been under heavy Vietnamese attack since mid-November.
The Reagan Administration, concerned about a growing Communist insurgency in the Philippines, is planning to ask Congress to increase the military aid portion of American security assistance, an Administration official said tonight. The official said the aid request would be submitted to Congress as part of President Reagan’s budget for the fiscal year beginning October 1.
President Francois Mitterrand was met by thousands of jeering demonstrators today as he arrived here on a mission to promote independence for this South Pacific territory. The demonstration, which appeared to attract a substantial portion of the residents of this coastal capital of 60,000, signaled the difficult task faced by Mr. Mitterrand and his Government as France seeks to resolve a bitter conflict between parts of the indigenous Melanesian, or Kanak, population of New Caledonia, who are demanding independence from France, and the island’s settlers, mostly Europeans, who are determined to keep this island a part of France. Mr. Mitterrand arrived in the capital by helicopter from the airport and went directly to the French High Commission complex, which was sealed off by hundreds of riot-equipped French security policemen. As Mr. Mitterrand’s helicopter landed, demonstrators, many waving French tricolors, pressed into the streets leading to the Government complex. There, stopped by the police, they began jeering loudly.
Mexico rejected I.B.M.’s plan to build a wholly foreign-owned microcomputer plant in Mexico. The National Commission on Foreign Investment said it turned down the plan to produce personal computers “on the terms proposed by the company” because “there are already companies in existence that manufacture them with a majority of national capital.” The I.B.M. plan would have built a $6.6 million addition to its plant in El Salto, near Guadalajara. The I.B.M. proposal has been looked upon in the foreign business community as a test of the government’s stated intention to allow more flexible terms for foreign investment. Whether the plan can be revived was unclear.
The protests this week over sharply increased fuel prices, the most intense public outbursts in Jamaica in more than four years, are widely seen as the harbinger of a politically turbulent year for Prime Minister Edward P. G. Seaga. Opponents of Mr. Seaga, confronting what they describe as the Prime Minister’s intransigence and arrogance, are expected to try to put pressure on him in the form of more public protests. Michael N. Manley, the opposition leader, whose bid for a third term as Prime Minister was defeated by Mr. Seaga in 1980, said this week that more demonstrations were “inevitable” if the Government continued “to impose intolerable burdens.” Despite the discomfort expressed by many Jamaicans, Mr. Seaga has doggedly refused to ease up on austerity measures designed over the long run to restore the country’s economic health. He insists he will not yield to demands from opponents that he resign and hold new elections.
Further World Court proceedings in Nicaragua’s suit against the United States will go ahead without United States participation, President Reagan has decided. The State Department announcement marked the first time the United States had walked out of a case in the World Court, in defiance of the Court’s rules, since joining it in 1946. A State Department spokesman said Nicaragua’s World Court case was “a misuse of the Court for political and propaganda purposes.”
U.S. negotiations with Nicaragua were suspended, Reagan Administration officials announced, saying that the Sandinistas had no interest in serious exchanges. The talks had begun last June. Nicaragua’s Deputy Foreign Minister said the American charge was “absurd.”
Senior Salvadoran and United States officials here say that although President Jose Napoleon Duarte is facing a growing political challenge from conservative opponents, he remains firmly in control of the office he won seven months ago. On Thursday, senior Reagan Administration officials, citing concern about Mr. Duarte’s political problems, said President Reagan would probably ask Congress for at least $172 million in additional military and economic aid for El Salvador this year. Salvadoran and American officials here said that on the eve of a campaign for national legislative and municipal elections, Mr. Duarte appeared to be weathering a strong attack from the rightist-dominated Legislative Assembly, as well as conservative opposition to continued peace talks with leftist guerrillas. The officials, who spoke in separate interviews this week, noted that despite deep differences and heated debate, the rightist political offensive against Mr. Duarte is being waged with words in the newspapers, the legislative chamber and courts of law rather than with bullets and the midnight assassinations that have traditionally settled political disputes here.
An opposition leader in the Sudan was publicly hanged. The executed man, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, 76 years old, was a leading opponent of President Gaafar al-Nimeiry, and was the founder and head of a Muslim political movement that opposed the establishment of traditional Islamic law in the Sudan. As the trapdoor of the red steel scaffold swung open, a thousand Sudanese men in the Kober Prison courtyard here, many of them members of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood group, leaped to their feet and shouted in Arabic, “Death to the enemy of God!”
The President faulted black leaders for being “committed politically” to the Democratic Party, for distorting his record “to keep their constituency aggrieved” and ignoring gains made by members of minority groups in the last four years. “I have to come to the conclusion that maybe some of those leaders are protecting some rather good positions that they have, and they can protect them better if they can keep their constituency aggrieved and believing that they have a legitimate complaint,” Mr. Reagan said. “If they ever become aware of the opportunities that are improving,” he said, “they might wonder whether they need some of those organizations.” Mr. Reagan, who made his comments in an interview on Thursday with USA Today, did not say which black leaders he was talking about. Mr. Reagan’s comments were denounced by leaders of black organizations, including the Urban League.
The value of proposed budget cuts was re-estimated by the Reagan Administration. They are now expected to total about $50 billion in fiscal year 1986, the target set by Senate Republicans and endorsed by Paul A. Volcker, the Federal Reserve chairman, Administration officials said. That is the target for cutbacks in projected Federal spending set by the Republican leaders in the Senate and endorsed by Paul A. Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. The figure is $6 billion higher than earlier estimates. The re-estimated cuts through 1938, however, would put the deficit that year at $135 billion, still short of the Administration’s goal of a $100 billion deficit.
President Reagan has agreed to address an anti-abortion rally Tuesday commemorating the 12th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing abortion, a rally official said today. The official, Nellie Gray, president of the March for Life, said Mr. Reagan would make a five-minute address from the Oval Office that will be carried over a loudspeaker system to the rally.
Four days of festivities began in Washington to celebrate the second inauguration of President Reagan and Vice President Bush. The Reagans kicked off the festivities by attending a “Prelude Pageant” on the Ellipse, a public event featuring military bands and a reading of excerpts from past inaugural addresses by Fess Parker, an actor. Although not so grand or expensive as Mr. Reagan’s first, in 1981, this inauguration will light the night sky with fireworks and salute the President and the Vice President with Hollywood entertainment, concerts, balls, youth forums, parties, exhibits and dozens of other glittering affairs.
A Cuban was charged with air piracy after the crew on an Eastern Airlines New York-Miami flight landed the plane safely in Orlando, Florida, after fooling him into believing they were following his orders to fly to Havana. “It’s kind of embarrassing to get hijacked to Disney World,” remarked Carol Bellamy, the New York City Council president, who was one of 123 passengers aboard the flight from New York to Miami. The Eastern Airlines plane was on the ground, and the Cuban was charged with air piracy, before he was told that the plane had not actually landed in his native land, airline officials reported. Authorities identified him as Lazaro Hernandez, 30 years old, of Union City, and described him as being “disoriented.”
A TIME magazine article about Ariel Sharon and the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Lebanon contained a false key paragraph, the jury in Mr. Sharon’s $50 million suit for libel against the magazine decided. The jury decided Wednesday that the article was also defamatory. It continued its deliberations to decide whether TIME published the article with reckless regard for the truth.
Congressional hearings on harassment of United States citizens in Taiwan are likely to follow Taiwan’s arrest of several military intelligence officials for suspected involvement in the murder of a Chinese-American writer in a San Francisco suburb last fall. Representative Stephen J. Solarz, the Brooklyn Democrat who is chairman of the House Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, announced yesterday that he planned to hold hearings on whether the killing violated a law against foreign harassment of American citizens. The law imposes a ban on arms sales to countries found “to be engaged in a consistent pattern of acts of intimidation or harassment directed against invididuals in the United States.” The 1982 law, an amendment to the Arms Export Control Act, was written by Mr. Solarz after the still-unsolved death of a Chinese-American professor from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The professor, Chen Wen-chen, who was visiting Taiwan, was found dead after long interrogation by the Nationalist police. Mr. Chen’s friends contended he had been tortured to death; the police said he had committed suicide.
A Houston vote on rights for homosexuals today might overturn a ban on discrimination against homosexuals in city hiring passed by the City Council last June. A heavy turnout is expected Saturday for a referendum on civil rights for homosexuals that has created high emotion and deep divisions in the east Texas city. Opponents of measures banning discrimination against homosexuals in city hiring, which were passed by the City Council last June but drew enough public opposition to force a referendum, say that failure to repeal the measures will turn Houston into “another San Francisco,” which would be a magnet for homosexuals and expose the city to acquired immune deficiency syndrome, the deadly disease that predominantly affects homosexual men. Supporters of the measures, which would ban discrimination in hiring based on “sexual orientation,” and would add sexual orientation to race and sex in affirmative action programs, say that they simply want to eliminate job discrimination. Opponents have conducted a vehement campaign against the measures.
Two couples facing Federal charges in the bombings of three clinics where abortions were performed pleaded not guilty today in Federal District Court. The pleas were entered by Matthew J. Goldsby and James T. Simmons, both 21 years old, of Cantonment, Florida; Mr. Goldsby’s fiancee, Kaye Wiggins, 18, of Pensacola, and Mr. Simmons’s wife, Kathren, 18. The charges are in connection with a bombing of the Ladies Center clinic last June and the bombings on December 25 of the Ladies Center’s new site and the offices of two doctors.
A Federal appeals court refused today to overturn the perjury conviction of Rita Lavelle, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s program to clean up toxic waste dumps. Miss Lavelle, the only high-level Reagan Administration official sentenced to prison for a felony committed while in office, must serve a six-month jail term and pay a $10,000 fine, unless she wins reversal of her conviction. He lawyer, James Bierbower, said he would ask the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to rehear her appeal. Miss Lavelle, 37 years old, was convicted Dec. 1, 1983, for lying to Congress about her actions as head of the E.P.A. program.
The United Auto Workers struck International Harvester at midnight tonight, company and union officials said. The strike will affect up to 12,000 workers in plants in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, Texas, Minnesota, Kansas and Tennessee, said Bill Greenhill, a spokesman for the Chicago-based manufacturer of heavy-duty trucks and diesel engines. The walkout also will affect up to 17,000 laid-off workers, he said. Talks broke down over the company’s refusal to restore benefits the union said it had promised to restore in 1982, one union official said. The company had no comment on the strike. Mr. Greenhill said no new negotiations were scheduled.
James Rud, the central figure in the investigation into charges of sexually abused children in Jordan, Minnesota, was sentenced by Judge Martin Mansur today to 40 years in prison for molesting children, the maximum term under Minnesota law. Mr. Rud, 27 years old, had agreed to plead guilty to 10 counts of child abuse and tell prosecutors what he knew about a purported child-sex ring. He was the first of 25 people to be arrested on charges of abusing an estimated 40 children. The Scott County prosecutor, Kathleen Morris, later dropped charges against the others after one couple was acquitted. Mr. Rud had told stories of orgies he attended with a number of people, but he retracted them in November.
The state of Missouri today criticized a proposal by the Kansas City School District to consolidate 11 suburban districts, and it filed its own plan for desegregating the city’s predominantly black schools. Federal District Judge Russell Clark ruled September 17 that the Kansas City School District was illegally segregated and ordered the state and the school district to devise solutions. The city district’s proposal calls for consolidation of 11 suburban districts with the city district, forming a single 118,000-student district. The state plan would change city schools, concentrating on those where black enrollment exceeds 90 percent.
The Girl Scouts are to begin their annual cookie drive Saturday with new cookie boxes designed to thwart the tampering that marred the 1984 campaign. Glue holding the ends of the boxes is stronger and a tear strip has been added to discourage tampering. The new package is for cookies sold throughout the United States. Girl Scout officials in St. Louis halted cookie distribution last year after numerous incidents of tampering were reported around the nation. Although no arrests were made, investigators determined that the incidents were the isolated work of copycats.
In a 4-team trade, the Milwaukee Brewers send catcher Jim Sundberg to Kansas City and receive pitchers Danny Darwin from Texas and Tim Leary from the New York Mets. The Mets receive pitcher Frank Wills from the Kansas City Royals, who also send catcher Don Slaught to Texas. catcher Bill Hance goes from the Texas Rangers to Milwaukee.
Mary Decker, competing tonight for the first time since her controversial collision with Zola Budd in the Olympics last August, ran a world-indoor best in the 2,000-meter run with a time of 5 minutes 34.52 seconds in the Sunkist Invitational indoor track and field meet at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. Miss Decker, who broke immediately to the lead and never trailed, finished more than than 11 seconds ahead of Ruth Wysocki, who defeated her at 1,500 meters in last July’s Olympic trials. “I was a little bit surprised how easy it was tonight,” said Miss Decker, who shattered the world mark of 5:43.30 set by the Soviet Union’s Yekaterina Podkopayeva in 1983. “I never felt fatigued at all.”
The National Weather Service is forecasting dry and cool weather for Super Bowl Sunday in Palo Alto, California. A weather service spokesman said today that skies would be partly cloudy and the temperature at kickoff about 55 degrees, falling to 49 by game’s end.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1227.36.
Born:
Dale Begg-Smith, Canadian-born Australian freestyle skier (men’s moguls event; gold medal, 2006; silver medal, 2010), in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Matthew Mulligan, NFL tight end (New York Jets, St. Louis Rams, New England Patriots, Chicago Bears, Tennessee Titans, Buffalo Sabres, Detroit Lions), in West Enfield, Maine.
Nate Garner, NFL tackle (Miami Dolphins), in El Sobrante, California.
Nate Hughes, NFL wide receiver (Jacksonville Jaguars), in Macon, Mississippi.
Camille Smith, WNBA forward (WNBA Champions-Storm, 2010; San Antonio Silver Stars, Atlanta Dream, Seattle Storm, Connecticut Sun, Phoenix Mercury), in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Minnisha Lamba, Indian actress and model, in New Delhi, India.
Died:
Mahmoud Taha, 76, Sudanese Muslim leader, hanged.
Wilfrid Brambell, 72, Irish actor (“Hard Day’s Night”, “Steptoe and Son”), from cancer.
History Diaries 