The Times of London said Soviet officials have denied that ailing President Konstantin U. Chernenko has been urged to retire, but it quoted unnamed sources as saying that the Politburo may give some of his duties to others, especially Mikhail S. Gorbachev, 53. The report followed a story in the Times’ sister paper, the Sunday Times, saying that the 73-year-old Chernenko may be in the intensive-care unit of a Moscow hospital. Chernenko has not appeared in public since a televised awards ceremony on December 27.
A senior civil servant in the Defense Ministry went on trial here today for disclosing politically embarrassing documents relating to the sinking during the Falklands War of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano. Clive Ponting admitted to the police that he copied and sent the documents to Tam Dalyell, a Labor Party M.P., last July, but today pleaded not guilty to charges that he violated the 1911 Official Secrets Act. In what is expected to be a major test of British secrecy laws, the 38-year-old civil servant’s attorney, Bruce Laughland, argued that Mr. Ponting had a duty to send Mr. Dalyell the documents “in the interest of the state.” The essence of Mr. Ponting’s defense is that the documents were sent to Mr. Dalyell in the public interest. Mr. Dalyell, a Scot, has harried the Government since 1982 in a campaign to prove that the British torpedoed the Belgrano to undermine efforts to reach a peaceful settlement of the Falklands conflict.
Leftist guerrillas from the Portuguese group FP-25 claimed responsibility for an unsuccessful mortar attack on North Atlantic Treaty Organization warships in the port of Lisbon. Police said three shells from what was believed to be a 60-millimeter mortar were fired at six warships but fell short. The ships, on a routine annual visit, included the U.S. frigate R.E. Byrd. A Portuguese navy spokesman said the attack appeared to be part of a series of recent strikes against NATO throughout Western Europe.
President Reagan will add visits to Spain and Portugal to his planned trip to West Germany in May, White House officials said today. Mr. Reagan’s swing through West Germany May 5-8 will follow the two-day economic conference of industrialized nations in Bonn. During his visit, White House officials said, Mr. Reagan will commemorate the 40th anniversary of V-E Day on May 8, the day of the German surrender, and confer with Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, said the visit to West Germany would be followed by a trip to Spain on May 8-10. White House officials said the European trip would then continue to Portugal on May 10-12. The scheduled visits to Spain and Portugal are Mr. Reagan’s first as President.
The second day of Egyptian-Israeli talks about a disputed border ended without agreement today. The parties, meeting in Beersheba, Israel, adjourned to draft new position papers defining areas of agreement and disagreement in preparation for the final round of talks on Tuesday. Discussions centered on proposals to deploy the so-called “multinational force and observers” in the disputed 750-yard strip at Taba on the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, where the Israelis remained when they withdrew from Sinai in l982.
An American captive in Lebanon was seen in a 56-second videotape in which he called on Washington to act quickly to gain the release of five Americans apparently kidnapped in Beirut over the last 10 months. But the American, William Buckley, who was a political officer in the United States Embassy, did not specify what Washington had to do to free the five captives. On the videotape, Mr. Buckley said that he and two other missing Americans were well. He mentioned Jeremy Levin, the Beirut bureau chief for the Cable News Network, and the Rev. Benjamin M. Weir, a Presbyterian minister.
Iraq said it had carried out its first ground attack against Iran in nearly three years. It said the drive involved 40,000 troops backed by air cover and artillery. Iraq said its forces had advanced to new positions. Iran, in a broadcast monitored in Nicosia, Cyprus, said “not an inch” had been gained by Iraqi troops in the attack, directed during the night against the Majnoon oilfield, 60 miles north of Basra and a mile inside Iraq. At the United Nations, Iraq’s Ambassador to Washington, Nizar Hamdoon, said the attack was “not a change in our military strategy,” but “a limited operation to retake Iranian positions on Iraqi territory.” Western reporters are rarely allowed at the front and conflicting claims cannot be immediately verified.
In other military activity, an Iraqi military spokesman said, jet fighters attacked a “large naval target and returned safely to base.” The term “large naval target” usually means an oil tanker. The spokesman, reading a communique on television, said the target sustained “a direct and effective hit.” Shipping sources said there had been no distress signal from any ship. The attack was the 25th reported by Iraq since January 1 on ships in the Persian Gulf as part of a blockade against Iranian ports. Only six of the attacks have been confirmed.
Javier Perez de Cuellar arrived here today on his first official visit as United Nations Secretary General and went directly to a series of meetings with Vietnam’s Foreign Minister. The Foreign Minister, Nguyen Co Thach, told reporters before Mr. Perez de Cuellar arrived that he expected their private talks tonight and on Tuesday to cover Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia and the wider issues of “peace and stability in Southeast Asia.” He said they would also discuss “bilateral relations between Vietnam and the United Nations.”
Louise Bremer Kemp, 39, was treated for frostbite in Katmandu, Nepal, after an attempt to climb the world’s third highest mountain with her husband, physician Chris Chandler, 36, of Sausalito, who died during the attempt. In clarification of an earlier report, she said she and her Nepalese guide were forced to cover and leave Chandler’s body on Mt. Kangchenjunga when he died after becoming ill at about 26,000 feet. Chandler was one of the first two Americans to make an autumn ascent of Mt. Everest during the U.S. bicentennial expedition in 1976.
Twelve people were injured today in Manila when striking schoolteachers and transport workers seeking better wages clashed with policemen. The police arrested 72 drivers and sympathizers. Many schools in metropolitan Manila were empty as teachers refused to teach, while pupils were kept at home by parents fearful of traffic problems arising from the transport strike. President Ferdinand E. Marcos met with representatives of the teachers and promised them an honorarium fund of about $275,000. Earlier, he also ordered a 10 percent increase in salaries of public school teachers, who currently average only $50 a month.
A year ago, after a series of rebel successes, the spirit of Salvadoran Government troops seemed close to breaking. Today they appear more confident, willing to pursue rebel forces and to stand and fight when they clash. But with the peace negotiations that opened last fall now at a standstill after only two sessions, there is no sign of an early end to the five-year-old war in the countryside. Senior Reagan Administration officials have predicted that if present political and military trends continue the army could win the conflict within two years. At the same time, they have called for significant increases in military aid to El Salvador.
President Reagan orders an El Salvadoran immigrant not to be deported and separated from her American family.
On the third day of his Latin American journey, Pope John Paul II issued a stern call for docility in accepting the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church’s leadership, some of which are disputed by liberal priests and theologians. Appearing in Merida, Venezuela, the Pope spoke against a spectacular Andes mountain backdrop to 300,000 people gathered on a milehigh hillside. “To be faithful to the church… is to accept with docility its magisterium,” he said. The pontiff leaves for Ecuador today.
The Pope called for social justice in a statement issued in Caracas. John Paul II’s appeal was made amid efforts in the Venezuelan capital to encourage him to play a role in the conflict in Central America.
The Pentagon announced that another large-scale military exercise in Honduras will begin February 11. U.S. tanks will be sent there for the first time, and as many as 4,500 U.S. troops will take part. The exercise, Big Pine III, is the fourth large joint maneuver by the two nations in two years. It will last about three months. U.S. officials say the Big Pine exercise is intended to bolster the Honduran military and intimidate Nicaragua. The Hondurans. agreed to Big Pine III despite reports that some Honduran officers want to reduce the American military presence in their country.
President Reagan will receive President Raul Alfonsin of Argentina on March 19. A White House spokesman, Robert Sims, said Mr. Reagan was eager to underscore his support for the democratically elected President of Argentina and to stress the importance of “the trend toward democracy” in South America.
Food pledges to 21 African nations hardest hit by the continent’s worst famine in recent history make up only two-thirds the amount needed to prevent mass death from starvation, a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization report said. The report also said that only half the promised food aid has been delivered. It said the United States has offered 2.1 million tons, the European Economic Community 1.3 million tons and the Soviet Union only 3,500 tons, a mere 100 tons more than Algeria, a North African country whose food shortages are less severe than its neighbors.
Four employees of a French construction company who were held for nearly a year by the Sudanese Peoples’ Liberation Army were released in Addis Ababa today after the company paid a ransom estimated as high as $1 million. Two other hostages remain held by the rebel organization.
Thirty-two tons of grain were dropped on famine-afflicted areas of Ethiopia over the weekend in what a senior United Nations official called “a demonstration of cooperation between countries of different persuasions and economic levels.” The airdrop, a United Nations initiative called Operation St. Bernard, involved pilots and crews from Ethiopia, Britain and West Germany. Ethiopia’s Deputy Commissioner for Relief and Rehabilitation, Behane Deressa, said he was “very happy with the results of the airdrop,” which took grain to 15,000 people living at altitudes of about 9,000 feet in the mountains and on the plateaus in the northern part of Shewa Province, about 100 miles from Addis Ababa.
South Africa’s state-owned power company said today that it had recruited United States personnel, including atomic reactor operators, to help run a nuclear power station near here. But at a news conference, a spokesman for South Africa’s Electricity Supply Commission denied published suggestions that American personnel were working in contravention of United States laws. “They are not doing anything illegal,” the spokesman, Andre van Heerden, said.
Two chess players remain locked in the most grueling championship in the modern history of the game. After 46 games over nearly five months the score stands at 5–1, and the champion, Anatoly Karpov, needs only one more victory to defeat his challenger, Gary Kasparov.
Increased cuts in military spending should be offered by President Reagan, according to several Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee. The senators made the appeal as Mr. Reagan prepared to submit to Congress next week a 1986 fiscal-year budget that is expected to project a $178 billion deficit if proposed spending can be reduced by about $51 billion. But Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said Pentagon programs had been cut enough. Even among those who support the President’s plan for a military buildup, said Senator Bob Packwood, chairman of the Finance Committee, “I think the advice they are giving to him is this: ‘Mr. President, we have one of two choices. Either we can have the military cuts you want, but in that case we cannot get a spending cut program, or the military has to take what is perceived to be a fair share of cuts. If so, we can get a whale of a spending cut program.’ “
President Reagan attends a series of budget and tax meetings with Members of Congress.
The U.S. attorney in Manhattan is scheduled to meet with local black leaders who are demanding that a federal grand jury investigate whether Bernhard H. Goetz violated civil rights laws when he shot four black youths who harassed him on a subway on December 22. But a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani cautioned that “we’re making no commitment; no investigation is under way.” The Rev. Al Sharpton, head of the Brooklyn-based National Youth Movement, asked for the meeting after a Manhattan grand jury indicted Goetz, who is white, for three weapons violations last Friday but refused to indict him for attempted murder or assault. “It smacks of racism,” Sharpton said.
[Ed: It always does, Al. Just not in the way you think, you race exploiter POS.]
The Environmental Protection Agency proposed new procedures designed to hasten the cleanup of toxic waste spills and chemical dumps, but an environmentalist and a congressman said the plan was too little, too late. If adopted, the changes would be made in the federal “superfund,” a four-year-old, $1.6-billion cleanup program that expires October 1. About 530 chemical dumps have qualified for cleanup under the program. But Linda Greer, a scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, said that as she interpreted the proposals, they would apply to only 14 substances. Rep. James J. Florio (D-New Jersey), an author of the 1980 superfund legislation, said many of the proposals were procedures that the agency should have been following all along.
Edwin Meese 3d violated standards of ethical conduct for government employees, according to an internal government memorandum. The Reagan Administration kept silent about the memorandum before a news report brought it to light on the eve of a hearing today on Mr. Meese’s nomination to be Attorney General. Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, the committee chairman, who is a Meese supporter, said through a spokesman today that he had called the head of the ethics office and two subordinates who prepared the memorandum to testify at the Meese hearing. The spokesman, Mark Goodin, said the hearing was expected to take more than the one day originally scheduled.
A.F.L.-C.I.O. officials were accused of using sexist attacks to weaken the candidacy of Nancy Pelosi for chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. Mrs. Pelosi, a former Democratic chairman of California, said that federation officials were contending that a female chairman would harm the party and were questioning her intelligence. Mrs. Pelosi, a former Democratic state chairman in California, said the union officials were trying to aid one of her opponents, Paul G. Kirk Jr., by questioning her intelligence and telling members of the Democratic National Committee that a woman as chairman would harm the party politically. “They use some of the language of the day: ‘She’s an airhead,’ ” said Mrs. Pelosi.
A major budget cut for the T.V.A. has been proposed by the Reagan Administration. It wants to reduce by $96.4 million the $135 million sought by the authority to finance its regional economic, agricultural and natural resource assistance programs. Talk of reductions of that size has generated fear and concern throughout the Tennessee Valley.
A federal judge in Kansas City rejected a desegregation plan that would have consolidated the predominantly black Kansas City School District with 11 predominantly white suburban districts. U.S. District Judge Russell G. Clark ordered the district to draw up a new proposal that would involve only schools within the district’s boundaries. However, he said the school district plan was “thorough and thoughtful” and said it could be included in an appeal in the eight-year-old desegregation lawsuit.
A former United States Representative and two former Central Intelligence Agency analysts testified yesterday that Gen. William C. Westmoreland should not have removed the Vietcong’s self-defense forces in 1967 from the official listing of enemy strength known as the order of battle. The decision to delete those forces — which also resulted in their not being counted at current levels in a special intelligence estimate for President Lyndon B. Johnson in November 1967 — is a key issue in the 16-week-old trial of General Westmoreland’s $120 million libel suit against CBS. The suit stems from a 1982 documentary, “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,” that accused the general’s command in Saigon of engaging in a “conspiracy” to show progress in the Vietnam War by understating the size and nature of the enemy. That thesis was based largely on 15 years of research by a former C.I.A. analyst, Samuel A. Adams, who was a paid consultant for the broadcast and is now a defendant in the lawsuit. General Westmoreland, who commanded American forces in Vietnam from January 1964 to June 1968, contends that the broadcast defamed him by saying he had lied about enemy troop strength to President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Farmers will face economic hardship for at least six more years if current Government policies are continued, according to a study by a Congressionally-funded policy research institute. The study also predicted that changes in farm policy sought by the Reagan Administration would make matters worse.
Two condemned killers won 24-hour stays of execution so their attorneys could take their appeals to higher courts, but Florida could still execute them before their death warrants expire. James David Raulerson, 33, convicted in 1975 of killing a policeman, was granted a 24-hour stay so his attorneys could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Larry Joe Johnson, convicted of killing a Madison County gas station attendant in 1979, also had a 24-hour stay for review of his case by a federal court. Both stays run out at 7 AM Wednesday, five hours before the death warrants on the condemned killers expire.
The lawyer for Cathy Evelyn Smith, the former rock singer accused of unintentionally killing John Belushi with injections of cocaine and heroin, today put off accepting a prearranged plea bargain and said he might take the case to trial. The lawyer, Howard L. Weitzman, said his move was prompted by “new information” in secret grand jury testimony taken in 1983. The testimony was released to the lawyer Friday. Mr. Weitzman’s comments came at Miss Smith’s arraignment on one count of murder and 13 counts of administering illegal drugs in connection with the comedian’s death March 5, 1982. Miss Smith’s plea to the charges was delayed until February 11.
Frederick Holliday, superintendent of schools in Cleveland, shot himself to death in a school over the weekend, and left a note saying his suicide was a result of the school system’s “petty politics,” the authorities said today. Mr. Holliday’s body was found by a student in a stairwell at Cleveland Aviation High School this morning. His death was ruled a suicide by the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office. Mr. Holliday, 58 years old, was the 76,000-student district’s first black superintendent. He was hired in 1982. A school board member, Joseph Tegreene, said the superintendent feared his contract would not be renewed. Mr. Holliday had previously been school superintendent in Plainfield, New Jersey, and in York, Pennsylvania.
Vietnam veterans are more likely to die from cancerous tumors than veterans who did not serve in Southeast Asia, suggesting a link between cancer and Agent Orange, health officials said. The study, conducted by the Massachusetts Department of Health, found that Vietnam veterans were also more likely to die from kidney cancer, stroke, suicide and automobile accidents. “The findings in this study support the hypothesis that white male Vietnam veterans are at greater risk of death due to self-inflicted or stress-related conditions” than other men in Massachusetts, the researchers said.
Hundreds of young lives would be saved and thousands of serious injuries averted nationwide with the proper use of safety seats in automobiles, but few families use them and even fewer use them correctly, a Federal official said today. Patricia Goldman, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a symposium conducted by the board that it was seeking to ascertain why parents were not using the children’s seats and to develop strategies to increase the seats’ use.
King Boots, a champion sheepdog accused of fatally mauling an 87-year-old woman, was “doing just fine” in Birmingham, Michigan, after he was defanged and neutered to comply with a court order. The surgery was an alternative to death by injection. The dog’s owners, Kathryn and Charles Schwarb, were ordered to arrange the surgery instead of having the animal destroyed for the December 19 death of Gertrude Monroe, who was Kathryn Schwarb’s mother. City officials sought King Boots’ death, charging that the attack killed Monroe, but the Schwarbs contended she died of natural causes and fell on the sleeping dog.
Last-minute ways to trim taxes on income are being frantically sought by millions of Americans. There is still time to gain extra deductions by contributing money to a retirement account. Also, there are opportunities for additional savings for people willing to dig through last year’s records and receipts for expenses incurred routinely that are often overlooked as deductions.
12th American Music Awards: Cyndi Lauper and Lionel Richie win.
The charity single “We Are the World” is recorded by supergroup USA for Africa (Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, and other pop stars).
Houston’s Bill Fitch becomes the 6th coach in NBA history to post 600 wins as the Rockets beat the New Jersey Nets, 97–93.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1277.83.
Born:
Athina Onassis, daughter of Christina Onassis, French-Greek heiress and equestrian, the only surviving descendant of Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.
Libby Trickett [née Lenton], Australian swimmer (Olympics, 2004, 2008, 2012; 4 gold medals, 1 silver, 2 bronze), in Townsville, Queensland, Australia.
Daniel Carcillo, Canadian NHL left wing (NHL Champions, Stanley Cup-Chicago, 2013; Phoenix Coyotes, Philadelphia Flyers, Chicago Blackhawks, Los Angeles Kings, New York Rangers), in King City, Ontario, Canada.
Colin Fraser, Canadian NHL centre (NHL Champions, Stanley Cup-Chicago, 2010, Kings, 2012; Chicago Blackhawks, Edmonton Oilers, Los Angeles Kings, St. Louis Blues), in Sicamous, British Columbia, Canada.
Wesley Wright, MLB pitcher (Houston Astros, Tampa Bay Rays, Chicago Cubs, Baltimore Orioles, Los Angeles Angels), in Montgomery, Alabama.
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