Konstantin U. Chernenko will soon mark his first year in power, and once again a Soviet leader is approaching the anniversary under a cloud of rumor and foreboding. From the evidence, Mr. Chernenko is ill, perhaps seriously. Soviet officials, lifting a bit the taboo on discussing the leader’s health, have said as much. They have not said what ails him. The 73-year-old leader has not been seen in public since Dec. 27. A conference of Warsaw Pact leaders set for mid-January has been postponed. A visit by Willy Brandt, the West German Social Democrat, planned for mid-February, has also been put off. The uncertainty has spawned rumors ranging from a report that his respiratory problems have been aggravated by the winter to one that he may resign at the next meeting of the Central Committee, reportedly set for March.
Much of the speculation has a familiar ring. Mr. Chernenko, suffering from emphysema, has been subject to scrutiny from the time he became the party’s General Secretary last February 13. What is new this time is that the issue seems to have roused little suspense or apprehension. Western diplomats have advanced several explanations.One is that, in the transitions from Leonid I. Brezhnev toYuri V. Andropov and from Mr. Andropov to Mr. Chernenko, the leadership has demonstrated that it can transfer power without disruption. Another is that the succession seems to have been decided in advance, and that Mikhail S. Gorbachev, 53 years old, the second-ranking party secretary, is the heir. A third explanation is that Mr. Chernenko has been perceived as a transitional leader, to hold the fort a little longer before the transfer of power to a new generation.
President Reagan said today that he had instructed United States arms control negotiators “to get up from the table and come on home” if they could not negotiate a good agreement with the Soviet Union. Mr. Reagan made the remark before members of the House Appropriations Committee as he opened up another avenue of lobbying for his military spending budget proposal. In this effort, he asserted that the Russians were “looking for evidence of continued United States resolve” before they would reach an agreement. “No one wants the nuclear genie put back in the bottle more than I do,” Mr. Reagan was reported to have said. “But wishing won’t make it so, nor will a rush to any kind of arms control agreement… The only thing more dangerous than no agreement is a bad agreement.”
President Reagan meets with U.S. Representative to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick to discuss her returning to academia. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick will soon leave her post as chief United States delegate to the United Nations to resume teaching, writing and speaking out on public issues. The statement by Dr. Kirkpatrick, who has been chief United States delegate to the world organization, came after months of speculation about her future in the Administration. Dr. Kirkpatrick is known to have been unhappy at the United Nations as well as with the basic divisions between conservatives and moderates within the Administration. She announced she wanted to leave the job last November.
A lawyer for the family of a slain pro-Solidarity priest seemed to imply today that Moscow had “an interest” in what he called the politically provocative murder. “Who could have had an interest?” the lawyer, Jan Olszewski, said after depicting the slaying as a “fuse” intended to rekindle social unrest in Poland. “I do not see in this any Polish interest since, if it suceeded, it would have made Poland a land of misery, despair and terror. “International relations tolerate no vacuums, and something that leads to weakness in one country is the strength of another. Every schoolchild with a thorough grounding in history knows who would profit from a weak Poland.”
A Soviet missile that crashed in Finland last month had been aimed by mistake at the West German city of Hamburg but was shot down by Soviet fighter planes, the London Daily Express reported. The paper said that war-plan flight data were erroneously fed into the missile and that, within seconds of the launch, Moscow so informed Washington by military hot line. U.S. and Soviet authorities cooperated in keeping the story secret to avoid endangering arms control negotiations, the paper added. A Pentagon spokesman expressed doubt that there was any truth to the report. The Daily Express report was emphatically denied by officials in West Germany, Finland, Britain and the United States. A spokesman for the West German Defense Ministry, Lieutenant Colonel Norbert Huebner, was quoted as saying that the missile “was not capable of covering such a distance.” A Finnish Army spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Antti Mustonen, told The Associated Press that the newspaper report had “no basis whatsoever.”
A Soviet television program depicting Soviet Jews who wish to emigrate as traitors and Zionist conspirators was shown in a crowded U.S. Senate chamber to dramatize the need for increased pressure on Moscow to allow more Jews to leave. The 27-minute Soviet “documentary” seen on Leningrad TV last November was taped and apparently smuggled out of the Soviet Union for viewing at a meeting of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. Speakers at the meeting included Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Rep. Dante B. Fascell (D-Fla.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Striking British miners today rejected management’s demand for a written guarantee to discuss the key issue of closing money-losing mines, thus stalling new negotiations to end the nation’s 10-month-old coal strike. The 26-member executive committee of the National Union of Mineworkers renewed a previous offer of talks without conditions, which has been rejected by the state-owned National Coal Board. The deadlock over conditions for resuming negotiations centered on the key issue in the strike — management’s insistence on closing unprofitable mines and the union’s demand that pits be shut down only when exhausted or unsafe.
Nazi war criminal Helmut Krizons was sentenced in West Germany to three years’ imprisonment for complicity in the murder of at least 15,000 Poles, most of them Jews. His trial in the city of Bochum, which began in May, 1979, was the longest war crimes trial involving one person in West Germany. Krizons, 68, worked as an SS (elite guard) corporal in the ghetto of Łódź, Poland. He was found guilty of helping to deport at least 15,000 people, mainly sick women and children, to the Chelmno death camp, where they were gassed.
The Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie will go on trial in Lyons, France sometime this year, probably in December, on charges of crimes against humanity, the chief prosecutor’s office announced today. Mr. Barbie, the head of the Gestapo in Lyons from 1942 to 1944, has been held in jail in this southeastern French city since being extradited to France from Bolivia in 1983. There had been serious doubts about whether France would put the former Nazi on trial. The announcement said the trial would take several months and that the former Nazi would be protected by a bullet-proof glass cage.
Twenty Palestinian youths, in signed affidavits made public by the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists, said they were tortured and humiliated by Israeli soldiers at the Faraa Prison near the West Bank city of Nablus. Describing the facility as an interrogation and torture center, they said they were beaten, forced to stand for hours in cold showers and subjected to sexual abuse. The report was prepared by a group of West Bank Palestinian lawyers who have been outspoken critics of the Israeli government. Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, visiting Washington, described the report as “total nonsense.”
President Reagan meets with Minister of Defense of the State of Israel Yitzhak Rabin to discuss the sale of American military equipment to Israel. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel met with President Reagan at the White House and it was announced later that the Administration would ask Congress to provide Israel with $1.8 billion in military aid for the 1986 fiscal year, beginning October 1. This is an increase of $400 million over the 1985 level. The $1.8 billion would help defray the cost of arms sales made in previous years and would cover new arms sales to Israel once the policy review is completed.
The Reagan Administration announced today that it was halting new arms sales to the Middle East for several months while it prepared a “comprehensive review” of the connection between the sales and peace and stability in the region. It was the first time in the memory of senior State Department officials that there had been a deliberate decision to suspend new arms sales to all Middle Eastern nations since the United States became a major supplier in the 1960’s. The officials said the decision had been made primarily to avoid an early clash with some members of Congress over a contemplated large-scale sale of F-15 aircraft and other equipment to Saudi Arabia. Supporters of Israel in Congress have expressed concern that arms sold to Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries not at peace with Israel could be used against the Israelis in a future Middle East war. The Reagan Administration has supported arms sales to Saudi Arabia to help protect it against Iran.
Ariel Sharon returned home today after his libel trial against Time Inc. and immediately jumped back into the domestic political fray – and into a controversy over who has been paying his legal expenses. He had been absent for almost four months pursuing his unsuccessful suit. Although some politicians here had expected a huge throng of Mr. Sharon’s supporters to greet him, the only crowd at the airport consisted of reporters, cameramen, a few “Peace Now” demonstrators carrying placards about the 600 Israelis dead in Lebanon and a protester who identified herself as a “bereaved mother.”
Many authorities and military experts in Beirut believe Israeli troops are likely to be faced with more guerrilla attacks, not fewer, after the first stage of their planned phased withdrawal from southern Lebanon. There has already been a noticeable increase in the past few days in attacks on the Israelis and the local militia forces they set up, most of them in territory they will still be holding after they pull out of the area around Sidon. The Israeli Government, tired of the disastrous occupation because of the incessant ambushes made largely by militant Shiite Moslems, decided on the withdrawal plan over sharp internal objections. But if the major goal is to cut down the attacks and the casualties, the withdrawal from Sidon will present several new problems, according to diplomats in Beirut, Western military sources, Lebanese factional leaders and others familiar with the area.
Nine of 13 oil ministers of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries today approved a modest cut in oil prices in a major step toward linking its official prices to free-market levels. But three major producers — Algeria, Libya and Iran — dissented from the accord, arguing that the price cuts unfairly penalized them as producers of high-quality oil. They plan to keep their current pricing. A fourth member, Gabon, abstained.
Iraq said its warplanes hit a “very large naval target” in the Persian Gulf today and returned safely to base. Iraq has in the past used the term “very large naval target” to refer to oil tankers or other large merchant ships. Shipping officials in the Gulf said they had no confirmation of any vessels hit today. No distress calls were reported. A military spokesman said the target was hit “accurately” in Iraq’s self-proclaimed prohibited zone at the head of the Persian Gulf but he did not say exactly where. It was the 26th success claimed by Iraq so far this year but only six have been independently confirmed.
The toxic gas leak at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, on December 3 has caused factory workers, technical experts and former Union Carbide officials to describe a steady deterioration of safety procedures. Investigators also cite a failure by Indian agencies to monitor the plant properly. The leak of lethal methyl isocyanate gas killed more than 2,000 people and injured 20,000.
Perez de Cuellar ended a two-day U.N. Secretary General Javier peace mission to Vietnam, saying his trip made “significant progress” toward resolving questions about the more than 2,500 Americans missing in action in the Vietnam War. Perez de Cuellar told reporters in Hanoi that he found the Vietnamese surprisingly receptive to Washington’s concern over the issue. The U.N. leader, accompanied at the press conference by Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyễn Cơ Thạch, added that “modest progress” was made in the search for peace in Cambodia but that much remains to be done. The Foreign Minister said today that Hanoi would welcome a more active American role in solving the problems of Southeast Asia. Thạch said of the Americans: “If they can can make a war here, they can easily make a peace.”
Americas Watch, a U.S. human rights group, said that the torture and killing of Salvadoran civilians by death squads and government security forces have been sharply reduced but that indiscriminate army attacks on villages — in which civilians are the primary victims — appear to have increased. Saying that the situation in El Salvador remains a “mixed picture,” Aryeh Neier, vice chairman of the group, declared, “No headway has been made whatsoever in stopping indiscriminate attacks by the armed forces, which victimize millions of civilians.”
Pope John Paul II received tumultuous greetings in Quito, Ecuador today as he spoke out on behalf of the poor of the third world. The Pope said mass before about a million people in a park in the center of this city, a marriage of modern high-rise structures and a historic center of rambling white buildings, a reminder of the city’s Spanish colonial past.
Archbishop John J. O’Connor of New York said today that regardless of political differences, the Governments of the United States and drought- stricken Ethiopia could “accomplish miracles together.” Archbishop O’Connor said while visiting the tent camps of famine victims that ideology need not hinder efforts to make Ethiopia’s 42 million people self-sufficient in food. He arrived in this African country Tuesday to oversee the operations of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, of which he is president. He brought $360,000 in contributions, including $250,000 donated by American servicemen through their chaplains. “I know there is a politics of hunger, but hunger knows no politics,” the Roman Catholic prelate said in an apparent reference to policy differences, including Marxist Ethiopia’s refusal to allow “safe passage” of relief goods into rebel areas as requested by the United States. “Hunger knows only pain, anguish, sickness and death,” he said in Mekelle, capital of the northern region of Tigre, the scene of a long secessionist struggle.
President Reagan intends to propose eliminating the revenue sharing program for local governments a year earlier than expected as part of the budget he will send to Congress next week, sources, who spoke only on condition they not be identified, disclosed. They said the move to close the program at the end of the 1986 fiscal year would save $3 billion in that year, and $4.6 billion a year thereafter. The proposed savings will be part of a long list of spending freezes, program cuts and reforms designed to reduce the deficit by $51 billion in the fiscal year that begins on October 1, 1985. Even with those changes, the President’s budget is expected to forecast a deficit of about $178 billion.
A slight gain in foreign trade last month was reported by the Commerce Department, but the deficit for all of 1984 grew to a record $123.3 billion. That dwarfed 1983’s record in which imports exceeded exports by $69.4 billion. The excess of American imports over exports shrank a little in December. Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige predicted still another record trade deficit for this year. Speaking of December’s results, he said, “Some of the improvement may have been temporary.”
The Ford Foundation has initiated a three-year study aimed at easing the staggering costs of social welfare programs in the United States. The goal is to seek alternative ways of coping with the costs of Social Security, medical care and other social welfare programs. The foundation said the aim of the undertaking was to develop a series of recommendations for new social policies “to protect future generations of Americans.”
Edwin Meese 3d, in a second of day of hearings on his nomination to be Attorney General, today continued to insist not only that his past conduct had been ethical but also that all inquiries into his behavior had reached that conclusion.n. “In every case, all of them have found I acted properly and ethically,” Mr. Meese told the Senate Judiciary Committee. He specifically cited the report of the court-appointed independent counsel, Jacob A. Stein, as exonerating him. Mr. Stein investigated a variety of allegations against Mr. Meese, including those that he helped arrange Federal jobs for people who had assisted him financially. But, in a report issued last September, Mr. Stein said specifically he had not addressed Mr. Meese’s ethical conduct because his mandate under the Ethics in Government Act limited his examination to issues of criminality. Mr. Stein found no basis for criminal prosecution of Mr. Meese.
Michael K. Deaver, the deputy White House chief of staff, has been released from Georgetown Hospital, where he was treated for a kidney ailment because of an allergic reaction to medicine, a White House spokesman said today. Larry Speakes, President Reagan’s chief spokesman, said Mr. Deaver, who is 46 years old, went home from the hospital Tuesday after 10 days of medical tests because of a kidney inflammation and was feeling better. Mr. Speakes did not indicate when Mr. Deaver would return to work.
A youth who remains in a coma after being shot along with three other teen-agers last month in a New York subway train filed a $50-million lawsuit against Bernhard H. Goetz, who has admitted the shooting. Lawyers for Darrell Cabey, 19, who is in critical condition from his wounds, said they filed the state court suit “to temper the wave of adulation” for Goetz. They say Cabey was shot in the back even though he never went near Goetz. Lawyer William Kunstler said Cabey “was across the subway car, seated 20 feet away” and only one youth approached Goetz and asked for $5. Police, citing witnesses’ accounts of the December 22 incident, have said the youths stood surrounding Goetz while one demanded money.
[Ed: And if he was “seated” how did he get shot in the back? I trust radical Bill Kuntsler a little less than gas station sushi.]
Richard D. Kovar, a former Vietnam specialist for the Central Intelligence Agency, testified yesterday that the only trouble with Samuel A. Adams was that he did not “salute and shut up” in 1967 when he concluded that the military had lied about the size of the enemy in South Vietnam. Mr. Kovar — appearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan as the seventh witness for CBS in the trial of General William C. Westmoreland’s $120 million libel suit — said that Mr. Adams, a defendant in the case, had been a “rigorous, diligent, inspired analyst” for the CIA in the mid-1960’s. And Mr. Adams had been right about the need to include the Việt Cộng’s self-defense forces in a special intelligence estimate for President Johnson in November 1967, Mr. Kovar said. But when Mr. Adams “pushed his outrage” at both the military’s refusal to include those forces and the CIA’s “acquiescence,” Mr. Kovar said, it “frightened a lot of people and made people mad.”
The Justice Department sided with white teachers who lost their jobs in an Indiana school district with a collective bargaining contract stating blacks would be protected from layoffs. The department filed the “friend of the court” brief in the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago on behalf of a group of white teachers from South Bend, Indiana. The South Bend Community School Corp.’s “no-minority layoff provision… unnecessarily trammels the interests of innocent employees,” the brief said.
James David Raulerson, 33, was put to death Wednesday morning in Florida’s electric chair for killing police officer Michael Stewart, 23, in a 1975 gun battle at a Jacksonville restaurant. As about two dozen death penalty opponents held lighted candles and sang softly nearby, the father of Raulerson’s victim, Jack Stewart, watched the execution to fulfill a graveside vow.
Odette Port, who spent four and a half months in jail for refusing to testify in an investigation of a murder charge against her stepson, was released from the Harris County jail in Houston, Texas today. Mrs. Port and her husband, Bernard, were jailed September 12 after refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the slaying of a postal carrier. Mr. Port was released last year after answering the grand jury’s questions. Mr. Port’s son by a previous marriage, David, 17 years old, was indicted in September for the murder of the carrier, Debora Sue Schatz, 23, but the investigation continued.
Union Carbide Corp., which reported last month that there were 28 leaks of the deadly chemical methyl isocyanate at its Institute, West Virginia, plant in a five-year period, said in a statement there actually were 61 “in-plant losses” of the chemical in that period. None of the releases were extensive enough to come under federal reporting requirements, the company said. Production of methyl isocyanate was suspended at Institute after the December 3 leak of the chemical at a Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, killed more than 2,000 persons.
Robert Latta, a Denver man arrested last week after strolling uninvited into the White House, “hears voices” and spent time in a mental hospital last June, according to documents filed in District of Columbia Superior Court. Mr. Latta, a water meter reader, was arrested one floor below President Reagan’s living quarters on January 20, just hours before Mr. Reagan was sworn in for a second term.
The Federal Trade Commission announced today that it had ordered cigarette manufacturers to submit plans to begin rotating the health warnings on their packages and advertising. Cigarettes are to carry four different warnings about the health hazards of smoking, including lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and dangers to pregnant women and their babies. The warnings will be rotated one after another, and manufacturers must submit their plans for beginning this process by May 6. The new warnings will begin appearing by October.
Democratic Party officials opened three days of meetings in Washington and quickly moved toward a test of strength in the four-way race for the party chairmanship. Paul G. Kirk Jr., the party treasurer and a former aide to Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, was regarded as the front-runner in the race to succeed. Charles T. Manatt as chairman. The other contenders were Nancy Pelosi, former chairman of the California Democratic Party; former Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina, and Robert J. Keefe, a political consultant. The test of strength in the chairmanship race will occur today on the question of whether 25 at-large members of the national committee-composed primarily of Kirk supporters-must stand for reelection before the new chairman is elected Friday.
Five National Guard helicopters today dropped food, fuel and medical supplies to hundreds of Indians stranded on snowbound reservations and flew two sick babies and an elderly man to a hospital. The helicopters flew first to Keams Canyon on the Hopi reservation in Northern Arizona, where 50 workers from the Hopi and Navajo tribes packed food boxes and livestock feed to be dropped to isolated families.
Women are using collective action increasingly to protect themselves and increase their power. Women who worked in a coal mine in Beckley, West Virginia, accused male associates of sexually harassing them with insults and pinches and watching them dress and undress through peepholes in a bathhouse. Seven of the women filed a successful federal lawsuit against their employer, arguing the company had been negligent in not protecting them from harassment.
The federal government pledged today to help make tests for AIDS available to those unable to pay for it. Margaret M. Heckler, Secretary of Health and Human Services, said the effort was designed to prevent contamination of blood supplies.
Arrest warrants were issued today for more than 600 people across Michigan on charges of welfare fraud as state officials announced a crackdown that they said could eventually involve about 3,000 people now receiving assistance. Gov. James J. Blanchard and Attorney General Frank Kelley said 549 warrants had been issued for welfare and Medicaid fraud in Detroit and surrounding Wayne County alone, representing $6.3 million in claims said to be fraudulent.
Directors of the Geo. A. Hormel & Company meat-packing concern moved a stockholders’ meeting to Atlanta from Minnesota to escape a confrontation with 1,700 disgruntled workers, but were met Tuesday by 34 union members who criticized a 22.8 percent cut in their pay.
A federal magistrate ruled today that Andrija Artukovic, who is accused of helping the Nazis commit war crimes, was competent to participate in extradition proceedings. Yugoslavia has asked the United States to return Mr. Artukovic, who is 85 years old, for trial on charges of complicity in the deaths of 770,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in concentration camps in World War II when the country was under Nazi control.
Ways to cope with travelers’ diarrhea were recommended by a government panel of experts. They urged travelers to wait for the first signs of diarrhea before taking any antibiotics or popular medicines.
Libel has been the stated issue in the trials brought by Ariel Sharon against TIME magazine and by General William C. Westmoreland against CBS, while the unstated issue has been the way two major news organizations gather and report the news. The trials have underscored the striking differences in the way major newspapers, news magazines and television networks report the news.
NFL Quarterback Dan Marino (23) weds Claire Veazey at St. Regis Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1287.88.
Born:
Torrey Mitchell, Canadian NHL centre (San Jose Sharks, Minnesota Wild, Buffalo Sabres, Montreal Canadiens, Los Angeles Kings), in Greenfield Park, Quebec, Canada.
Died:
Ken Mayers, 66, American actor (“Little Big Man”, “Dick Tracy”, “Space Patrol”).
History Diaries 