President Reagan, voicing optimism that nuclear arms cuts can be won, said the Soviet Union agreed to return to the bargaining table when it was forced to choose between arms reduction or an arms race. While the Kremlin has not responded to his proposal to meet in Geneva in early March, Reagan said he expects agreement soon on a time and place for talks on strategic arms, medium-range nuclear missiles and weapons in space. In an interview with United Press International, Reagan said Washington and Moscow are entering the new negotiations “with both sides having said their ultimate goal would be… to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely.”
A new consensus on global interests of the United States and whether they should be defended with military force should be forged by Americans, according to the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The chairman, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, said the nation had been uncertain about the use of force in the conduct of foreign policy since the Vietnam War. Before that involvement, he said, “some widely shared assumptions were held about the national interest and potential threats to it.” “Some consensus was apparent on appropriate remedies to our problems,” he said. “One of the costs of Vietnam was the breakup of this consensus.”
The seven judges presiding over the murder trial of four security policemen began deliberating today over whether to limit testimony or to call additional witnesses, whose statements in open court could implicate higher-ups in the slaying of a pro-Solidarity priest. Their pending decision, which touches on the political aspect of the trial, was brought into sharp focus toward the end of the day, in which two police officers testified that within a day of the kidnapping of the Rev. Jerzy Popiełuszko, they told their commanding officer that an unmarked government car had been seen at the church in Bydgoszcz where the priest spoke shortly before his abduction. General Zenon Platek, the officer in question and the suspended director of the Ministry of Internal Affairs department that monitored church activity, repeated in his testimony that he could not remember being informed about the car by the two men whom he dispatched to report on the early investigation of the crime in Torun.
Konstantin U. Chernenko, the Soviet leader, today promised a constructive approach to arms control talks with the United States and called for more international campaigns against nuclear weapons, the Soviet press agency Tass reported. Mr. Chernenko, in a message to a Moscow peace conference, said the Soviet Union intended to conduct the new negotiations in “a businesslike and constructive manner.”
One defendant in the conspiracy trial of six Yugoslav dissident intellectuals was freed today and charges against three others were reduced. The prosecutor, Danilo Nanovic, said the state was dropping all charges against Pavlusko Imsirovic, a 36-year-old translator, due to lack of evidence. He said the charges against Miodrag Milic, 55, a scriptwriter, Dragomir Olujic, 36, a technician, and Milan Nikolic, 37, a sociologist, were being reduced from conspiracy to carrying out hostile propaganda against the state, reducing the potential sentence from a minimum of five years to one.
The 19-year-old grandson of Axel Springer, the head of West Germany’s largest publishing empire, was found this evening at Klothen airport, near Zurich in Switzerland, after having been reported missing from a Swiss boarding school since late Sunday evening. A spokesman for the Springer company in Hamburg said the youth, Sven Axel Springer, was in police custody. The West German police said that tape-recorded messages, presumably of the boy’s voice, had been played by telephone saying the boy’s abductors were demanding about $5 million. The spokesman said no ransom was paid.
Britain’s House of Lords debate is first televised. The House of Lords — live, from Parliament — had its world television premiere today. It was five hours long. The broadcast, the first live coverage of a parliamentary debate here, marked the beginning of a six-month experiment that the unelected chamber agreed to try last November. No cameras have ever been allowed in the House of Commons.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry announced the reopening of its Hong Kong consulate after a 10-year closure amid persistent reports of growing arms sales by Israel to the Far East. A ministry spokesman said a diplomat will reopen the mission in the coming months to boost trade. He would not comment on the question of arms sales. There have been reports in recent months that Israel has sold China millions of dollars worth of military equipment. Since 1975, when the consulate was closed in an economy move, Israeli affairs in Hong Kong have been handled by an honorary consul.
Indian investigators were reported today to have implicated at least three French nationals in an extensive espionage ring that purportedly passed sensitive military information to the West. Disclosures about the spy ring have shaken the Government here and led to the resignation of one of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s top advisers, as well as the arrest of more than a dozen Indian officials and businessmen. Prime Minister Gandhi first disclosed the existence of the espionage operation last Friday, but since then he and his aides have refused to give out details on an official basis.
China said today that its forces had counterattacked against Vietnam in recent days after weeks of “provocations” along the border. The Foreign Ministry statement today gave no indication of the scope of the military actions undertaken by Peking in recent days, nor any other details. But officials said that the military actions were continuing, and were on a scale greater than has usually been the case in the sporadic fighting since 1979. For the moment, Western diplomats here said that a new war seemed unlikely. They noted that Chinese military leaders told a visiting American military delegation last week that Peking did not intend to prejudice its domestic economic growth with military “adventures.”
Moreover, the diplomats said, it was far from clear that Chinese prospects in a new war would be any better than in 1979, when Peking incurred heavy losses against stiff Vietnamese defenses. Nonetheless, there were signs that tensions in the region had increased to a dangerous degree as a result of recent Vietnamese attacks on Chinese- supported guerillas in Cambodia, which has been occupied by Vietnam since 1978. Among other things, the attacks have sharpened longstanding animosities between China and the Soviet Union, Vietnam’s ally. As the fighting between China and Vietnam has developed, Peking and moscow have sent high-ranking envoys to reaffirm their stands. The Chinese Foreign Minister, Wu Xueqian, was in Bangkok, Thailan, today, where he was reported to have told his Thai counterpart, Sidhi Savetsila, that China would “teach Vietnam a lesson” if Vietnamese troops carried their attacks on Cambodian guerillas into Thailand. The phrase was the same as that used by china’s pre-eminent leader, Deng Xiaoping, to justify the 1979 attack on Vietnam.
Two South Korean naval vessels fired on two North Korean fishing boats sailing off Japan and tried to capture them, North Korea’s official news agency reported. The agency said more than 100 shots were fired at the boats in an attempt to force them into the South Korean port of Pusan. A Japanese naval official said the crew of a Japanese anti-submarine patrol plane saw the North Korean boats being fired upon. The South Korean navy denied the reports, saying the fishing boats departed after being warned that they were approaching South Korean waters.
The State Department, responding to published reports that South Korean opposition leader Kim Dae Jung will be imprisoned when he returns to Seoul on February 8, expressed hope that his return will be “trouble-free.” Washington has made known its hope that Kim’s return will be untroubled, and “that remains our position,” spokesman Bernard Kalb said. Kalb said the United States has discussed Kim’s case with all concerned parties, and the U.S. position “is known and understood by those parties.”
Philippine prosecutors accused the armed forces Chief of Staff and 25 other people of complicity in the 1983 assassination of the opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. All but one of the accused are soldiers. Most of them were members of the Manila Airport detail on duty when Mr. Aquino was fatally shot as he stepped off a plane after three years in the United States. In charging the 26, government prosecutors agreed with a majority report issued by a citizens board in October that implicated them in a high-level plot to kill Mr. Aquino. The citizens board had no power of indictment. The case is expected to go before a special three-judge court appointed by President Ferdinand E. Marcos. The court has ruled on many minor corruption charges involving Government officials but has not handled a case on the scale of the Aquino assassination. There are no jury trials in the Philippine justice system.
A prominent Philippine opposition leader said today that the indictment of General Ver was a ploy to prevent his conviction. Aquilino Pimentel, leader of the Philippine Democratic Party, said at a news conference, “Back home this is considered a ploy by General Ver to get acquitted and prevent any further charges being brought against him. “Ver has been pressing for his inclusion in the formal charge because he knew, as the evidence stands now, it would not be enough for conviction in court,” Mr. Pimentel said. He said some opposition figures were concerned that a coup led by General Ramos, the Acting Chief of Staff, might be acceptable to Washington.
A United States Navy plane carrying three crewmen and six passengers was reported missing near here Wednesday, and military ships and planes searched the western Pacific Ocean for it early today. The plane, a modified trainer and logistics version of the Douglas A-3 Skywarrior, was on a flight from Atgi, Japan, to Agana, Guam. Those on board were assigned to Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron 1, based on Guam.
American and Canadian officials moved yesterday to investigate accounts that the Nazi fugitive Josef Mengele may have been captured and released in an American occupation zone after World War II and may have gained entry to Canada around 1962. In Ottawa, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney directed Justice Minister John Crosbie and Solicitor General Elmer MacKay to conduct an “urgent investigation” of intelligence records, including some that have not been made public. Responding to questions in Parliament, the Prime Minister called the matter of a possible Canadian refuge for Dr. Mengele “repugnant and repulsive in the extreme to our citizenship.” In Washington, Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, said there was agreement within the Reagan Administration that the case should be examined, at least initially, by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations. In 1983 the office, formed to prosecute war criminals who entered the United States illegally, investigated American intelligence contacts with the former head of the Gestapo in Lyons, Klaus Barbie, now awaiting trial in France.
56 Canadians died in Vietnam. The thousands of Canadians who joined United States forces are reticent about their participation in an unpopular war. The Pentagon cannot say how many Canadians served in the United States armed forces. Though they share the problems of other Vietnam veterans, many do not receive rehabilitation and other benefits because they live across the border. Their country is remembered more for harboring Americans who fled service in Vietnam than for producing volunteers for the confict.
President Reagan receives word that a C-130 National Guard plane crashed off the Honduran coast while on a training mission with the loss of 21 men. Searchers scanning Caribbean waters where a U.S. Air Force plane carrying 21 Americans is believed to have gone down, said they made sonar contact with what may be the C-130’s wreckage. Search parties on a beach north of Puerto Castillo, Honduras, found a sleeping bag, helmets and an unused life raft with the serial number of the missing aircraft, the Defense Department announced. The plane, carrying eight Army and eight Air Force personnel and a crew of five, disappeared Tuesday in stormy weather off Honduras.
U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebels fighting to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government rejected an amnesty offered by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, saying it lacks “credibility and validity.” Ortega, who took office January 10, sent a bill to the Constituent Assembly granting amnesty to about 12,000 rebels (contras) opposed to the Sandinista Front, which has ruled since 1979. He said the offer was being made to end the guerrillas’ three-year-old insurgency. However, the largest rebel group, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, rejected the offer and called instead for the end of Sandinista rule.
A Colombian plane crashed today and another was reported missing in remote mountain areas, a civil aviation spokesman said. The spokesman said a Twin Otter of the airline A.C.E.S. with 23 people on board crashed in a remote mountain area about 60 miles west of the northwestern city of Medellin, and there were no signs of survivors. Another plane, of the Aires company, with 17 people aboard, was reported missing between Neiva and Cali.
An Ethiopian rebel group has accused the Government of killing 27 prisoners of war and wounding another 7 in the port city of Asmara. The charge was made in a communique issued this week in Paris by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front Central Bureau of Foreign Relations and confirmed today by spokesmen for the secessionist group here in Khartoum. The People’s Liberation Front, the Marxist guerrilla group which has been fighting for the independence of its territory from Ethiopia for some 18 years, controls substantial portions of the Eritrean countryside and its fighters have been given safe haven in the Sudan.
The Ethiopian authorities say they are testing for cholera at a camp for famine victims. Relief workers and diplomats have been saying privately recently that they were convinced that cholera, an extremely contagious viral disease, was spreading in several areas.
James A. Baker 3d won support from all members of the Senate Finance Committee, virtually assuring that the Senate will confirm his nomination to be Treasury Secretary. Mr. Baker, who is leaving the White House after four years as President Reagan’s chief of staff, encountered bipartisan misgivings about a simplification of the income-tax system proposed by the Treasury.
President Reagan said today that he intended to offer Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, chief United States delegate to the United Nations, an unspecified high-level job in the foreign policy field. Dr. Kirkpatrick, who has expressed a desire to leave the United Nations post and return to Washington, is scheduled to meet with Mr. Reagan next Wednesday at the White House to discuss her future in the Administration. A White House official said the leading candidate to replace Dr. Kirkpatrick at the United Nations was Vernon A. Walters, an ambassador at large and former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.
The threat of icy weather conditions caused a 24-hour postponement today of the launching of the space shuttle Discovery on the first secret military mission by a crew of American astronauts. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced the postponement just before midnight, saying that a new attempt to get the mission under way would be made Thursday afternoon between 1:15 PM and 4:15 PM. In its postponement statement, the space agency said, “Extreme weather conditions in the area are projected to cause icy conditions on the external tank.” Officials of the Kennedy Space Center here had expressed concern earlier Tuesday when it became apparent that freezing temperatures were expected for the third night in a row. They feared that ice might form on the huge tank that holds the propellants for the shuttle’s main engines. If the ice formed, it would then probably break away on lift-off and damage the $1-billion spaceship.
The advisory council to the government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse voted to recommend a ban on all cigarette advertising and promotion, citing smoking’s role in hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. The council voted to write Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret M. Heckler to urge that she support legislation to enact a ban. The U.S. surgeon general estimates that 340,000 Americans die each year from lung cancer and other diseases related to smoking, and says smoking is the single largest cause of cancer in the United States.
Senator Bob Packwood (R-Oregon) is being targeted for defeat in 1986 by an anti-abortion political action committee that has nicknamed him “Senator Death.” Rick Woodrow, executive director of the Life Amendment Political Action Committee Inc., said that Packwood will be the group’s only target in the midterm elections and that all its resources will be spent in an effort to deny him a fourth Senate term. Packwood, the new chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, has long been one of the Senate’s most outspoken advocates of a woman’s right to choose abortion.
The jury in former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s $50million libel suit against TIME Inc. recessed for the night in New York after spending the day examining more transcripts of the trial. The jury is now deliberating on whether a TIME story defaming Sharon was published with malice or reckless disregard for the truth.
Records at Union Carbide’s plant in Institute, West Virginia, show that there were 28 leaks during the last five years of the same insecticide that killed 2,500 persons in Bhopal, India, the Environmental Protection Agency said. The agency added that it has not yet determined whether the leaks of methyl isocyanate were contained within the plant or whether any of the chemical reached the outside environment. An investigation is continuing, the EPA said. “The spills that were detected, while of course a terrible concern, were not the same types of leaks (as the one at Bhopal),” EPA spokesman Dave Cohen said. “Yet, 28 leaks of that stuff, however minor, are unsettling.”
Thirteen sanctuary movement leaders pleaded not guilty in federal courts in Tucson and Phoenix to illegally smuggling Central Americans into this country. Meanwhile, about a hundred refugees they helped bring in gathered in a Tucson synagogue for a two-day symposium condemning United States policy. The Central Americans, mostly from El Salvador and Guatemala, sat in a roped-off section of the Temple Emanu-El, one of 14 houses of worship here that are part of the sanctuary movement. They listened over headphones to a Spanish translation of a keynote address at a two-day symposium, delivered by the Rev. William Sloane Coffin of Riverside Church in New York City, one of about 200 churches nationally that are part of the movement. “The real issue is human rights,” Mr. Coffin said. “We must continue the sanctuary movement in its present form until Congress makes it no longer necessary to do so.”
Florida citrus crops that survived last winter’s cold snap have not been so lucky this year, as arctic temperatures have destroyed some orange and grapefruit groves in the Indian River section on the state’s east coast. The only way growers can salvage frozen citrus is to get it quickly processed into juice concentrate before warmer weather returns to rot the fruit.
Administration policies on charities have prompted leaders of the nation’s nonprofit organizations to open a nationwide lobbying campaign. They say that Federal grants to their programs have been cut by $13.5 billion in the last four years. And now the Treasury has urged changes in tax laws that they fear will reduce annual giving by individuals from $59.5 billion to $47.7 billion.
Five men who disrupted a Lutheran church service to protest unemployment got six-month jail sentences today from a magistrate who said he would not fine them because they would have difficulty paying. The five included Ron Weisen, 42 years old, the president of United Steelworkers Local 1397 in nearby Homestead and a leader of the Network To Save the Mon-Ohio Valley. “This is Mellon Bank putting more union people in jail,” Mr. Weisen said. He has accused the Mellon Bank of withholding loans from the declining steel industry around Pittsburgh, an assertion bank officials deny. Magistrate Ralph Freedman found Mr. Weisen and four other men guilty of disorderly conduct and defiant trespass. They were arrested Oct. 28 in St. John’s Lutheran Church of Highlaoutside Pittsburgh, for disrupting the service with bullhorns.
The Mayor of San Diego, Roger Hedgecock, testifying on charges that he illegally funneled more than $350,000 into his 1983 campaign, said any financial gain he did not disclose occurred because of oversights or without his knowledge. Mr. Hedgecock has been charged with felonious perjury and violating campaign financing laws in conspiracy with a former campaign aide, Thomas C. Shepard, and two principals of a once powerful local investment concern, Nancy Hoover and J. David Dominelli of J. David & Company. The prosecution says the aim of the conspiracy was to provide secret financing for Mr. Hedgecock’s mayoral campaign. The Mayor has denied the charges.
An appeals court today upheld the Cleveland Fire Department’s plan to redress racial imbalance in its leadership, overruling assertions by white firefighters that the promotion plan discriminated against them. By a 2-to-1 vote, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said the plan, approved through a consent decree in Federal District Court two years ago, redressed the racial imbalance without unfairly penalizing white firefighters. The plan was agreed to by the city and an association of black and Hispanic firefighters that complained that the city had maintained discriminatory promotion practices. Local 93 of the International Association of Firefighters brought the appeal.
A federal judge ruled that a widely used spermicide caused birth defects in a girl and ordered the manufacturer to pay $5.1 million in damages to the child and her mother. U.S. District Judge Marvin Shoob ruled in Atlanta that Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp. of Raritan, New Jersey, which makes Ortho-Gynol Contraceptive Jelly, should have warned its users that birth defects can result from conceptions that the gel fails to prevent. Expert witnesses for the plaintiffs, Mary Maihafer and her daughter, Mary Wells, 3, testified that the gel can damage sperm while failing to kill it.
The National Guard began plowing the streets in Buffalo, New York today after one of the worst winter storms in recent history. Camouflage-green trucks and tractors bearing 75 guardsmen were called in by Governor Cuomo. They joined the crews of 80 city plows in trying to clear 35 inches of snow that had fallen since Saturday.
Deadly nerve gas samples from deteriorating warheads will be flown to military bases, where their potency will be tested, in late April or May, Army officials said. The shipments throughout the nation will be carried on special military flights and should not pose a threat to public safety, said Dennis Smith, a spokesman for the Blue Grass Army munitions storage depot near Richmond, Kentucky.
Aspirin manufacturers have agreed to provide warning labels, store posters and broadcast announcements urging consumers to consult a physician before giving aspirin to children with flu or chicken pox, the Government said today. The campaign was prompted by a new study by the Federal Centers for Disease Control, which said that children and teen-agers given aspirin for flu or chicken pox may run a sharply increased risk of contracting Reye’s syndrome, which kills one in four of its victims. Margaret M. Heckler, Secretary of Health and Human Services, whose office announced the agreement, asked for the voluntary labeling January 9. Her office said warning stickers would appear on some store shelves this week.
A form of ether dramatically dissolves gallstones inside the body and may give doctors a way to avoid operating on persons with this common affliction, the New England Journal of Medicine reported. Researchers found that the ether broke down stones when squirted through a tube directly into the gallbladders of persons who otherwise would have required surgery. They cautioned that they have tested the technique on only six persons.
A physician in a Chicago hospital emergency room may have saved several lives Tuesday by notifying the Fire Department after she diagnosed two carbon monoxide poisonings from the same apartment building, hospital officials say. Dr. Mary Dunne was on duty at the Bernard Mitchell Hospital when a man and a woman came to the emergency room. She determined that the two, who lived in the same apartment building, had carbon monoxide poisioning, and alerted firemen so they could wake the building’s 15 other occupants. A hospital spokesman said carbon monoxide victims generally complain of headaches and that Dr. Dunne made the correct diagnosis although neither of the two patients mentioned headaches. City officials said a furnace in the building was leaking carbon monoxide. The building was evacuated.
Negotiations for a new labor agreement between baseball’s players and club owners suffered another setback yesterday, this time over the effort by the Los Angeles Dodgers to induce some of their players to agree to mandatory drug testing. The Players Association, branding the Dodgers’ action clearly illegal under the basic agreement and the agreement on drug matters between the two sides, canceled a negotiating session that had been scheduled for tomorrow. Instead, some members of the union’s bargaining team, but not its leader, Donald Fehr, plan to meet with the owners’ representatives to receive an explanation of the Dodgers’ action and the Player Relations Committee’s view of it.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1274.73.
Born:
Jeff Samardzija, MLB pitcher (All-Star, 2014; Chicago Cubs, Oakland A’s, Chicago White Sox, San Francisco Giants), in Merrillville, Indiana.
Antwaun Molden, NFL defensive back (Houston Texans, New England Patriots, Jacksonville Jaguars), in Cleveland, Ohio.
Jamie Tardif, Canadian NHL right wing (Boston Bruins), in Welland, Ontario, Canada.
Doutzen Kroes, Dutch supermodel, in Eastermar, Netherlands.
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