Secretary of State George P. Shultz said today that there was growing national support for the Administration’s plan to develop a space-based defense system. At the opening of a Senate hearing on foreign policy, Mr. Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, who appeared later, said the plan, known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, was crucial to the stability of the strategic relationship with the Soviet Union and could reduce the threat of nuclear war. The plan, for which the Government wants to spend $26 billion in preliminary research, has attracted both increasing support and increasing opposition since it was formulated two years ago.
There was new criticism of the space defense plan today from Konstantin U. Chernenko, the Soviet leader. In written responses to a Cable News Network correspondent in Moscow, Mr. Chernenko took issue with the view that the plan held out the possibility of an effective defense. “Using the term ‘defense’ is juggling with words,” Mr. Chernenko said. “In its substance, this is an offensive or, to be more precise, an aggressive concept. The aim is to try to disarm the other side and deprive it of a capability to retaliate in the event of nuclear aggression against it.” Chernenko said today in written responses to questions that if the United States succeeded in developing a space-based defense system, it could upset Soviet-American accords and lead to “an uncontrolled arms race in all fields.” The answers were conveyed by the Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, Vladimir B. Lomeiko, to Stuart H. Loory, the Cable News Network correspondent in Moscow, in response to questions submitted earlier. When Mr. Loory asked why he could not see Mr. Chernenko in person, he was told that the Soviet leader was on a month’s vacation.
President Reagan recently authorized a merger of talks on reducing medium-range and intercontinental-range nuclear weapons if such an arrangement was proposed by the Soviet Union, according to Administration officials. The officials said Secretary of State George P. Shultz was given this option as a “fallback position” for his meeting with Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko in Geneva three weeks ago. Instead, and to the relief of the American team, the officials said, Mr. Gromyko proposed and the two sides agreed on three separate working groups – defensive systems, strategic or intercontinental-range weapons and medium-range weapons – as part of one overall negotiation. But there have been indications recently that Moscow may be reconsidering the merger idea in some form.
Fear that a world war will break out in the next decade is dramatically declining in Western Europe, according to a recent public-opinion poll conducted for the European Commission, the Common Market’s executive body. A similar trend has been found in the United States. Only 13 percent of the West Europeans polled, down from 34 percent in 1980, indicated they felt a world war was probable within 10 years, according to a consortium of European polling companies headed by Jacques-Rene Rabier, special counselor to the European Economic Community. Last fall, from October 2 to November 4, 9,911 people were interviewed in the 10 Common Market countries and were asked to estimate the chances of a war in the next decade on a scale that began at 0 and moved by tens to 100.
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick expressed conviction that her views had been “misunderstood” and distorted by key Reagan Administration officials. But Dr. Kirkpatrick, who will leave her United Nations post in March, said she was buoyed by her diplomatic and personal achievements over the last four years. “I was a woman in a man’s world,” she said. “I was a Democrat in a Republican Administration. I was an intellectual in a world of bureaucrats. I talked differently. This may have made me a bit like an ink blot. People projected around me.”
Ministers of the 14-nation European Space Agency agreed to begin negotiations to join the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s program to build the first permanent space station for deployment in 1992. G.M.V. Van Aardenne, the Dutch minister of economic affairs, said the ministers agreed unanimously to open negotiations with NASA by the April 1 deadline on Western European participation. But Van Aardenne said that whether the agency goes ahead with the project “will depend on the terms and conditions of the… agreement to be concluded with the United States.”
The lawyer for Polish secret police Captain Grzegorz Piotrowski said his client didn’t mean to kill Father Jerzy Popieluszko and demanded that a court drop murder charges against him. The captain is facing the death penalty in the killing of the priest, who strongly backed the outlawed Solidarity union. In final arguments, Piotrowski’s lawyer, Janusz Ilasz, said: “Piotrowski may have hit the priest with a club but did not intend to kill him. If he had wanted to do that he could have shot him with his revolver.” The proceedings were adjourned until Tuesday.
West Germany has increased to $300,000 the reward for information leading to the capture of Dr. Joseph Mengele, the infamous Nazi war criminal. Mengele has been sought by West Germany since 1959 in the deaths of thousands of prisoners at the Auschwitz death camp. The reward increase, from $15,000, follows the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Many Nazi hunters believe that Mengele is living in Paraguay under the protection of the government of Cen. Alfredo Stroessner. The Stroessner regime has repeatedly denied this.
The U.S. State Department today criticized Switzerland’s handling of a Lebanese citizen convicted of transporting explosives. It said a Swiss court in Bulach sentenced Hussein Atat Hani to an 18-month jail term Wednesday for transporting explosives but suspended the sentence and ordered his expulsion from the country. The same day, the Swiss Minister of Justice announced that an Italian request for Mr. Atat Hani’s extradition had been rejected, the department said.
An Israeli who was wounded by a firebomb thrown at his car in the occupied West Bank last Saturday died from his wounds today.
Iraq and Iran gave conflicting reports today of a new Iraqi attack on the central war front, the second reported Iraqi drive in four days against Iranian positions. An Iraqi field commander told the Baghdad radio that his troops seized several Iranian positions in two hours of fierce fighting. But the official Iranian press agency IRNA said there was only a limited Iraqi attack today in the Chagha Hammam region of Bakhtaran Province that caused the Iraqis heavy casualties and failed to take any ground. Baghdad television showed interviews tonight with a dozen Iranians who said they were captured in today’s Iraqi attack.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk rejected an offer of talks with the Hanoi-backed government in Cambodia because it would split his rebel coalition. Sihanouk, former Cambodian head of state, spoke in Bangkok after he and coalition partner Son Sann met with U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, who had just returned from Vietnam. Sihanouk said Hanoi’s offer excluding one of his coalition partners, the Khmer Rouge, would split the coalition and rob it of the support of China, which backs the Khmer Rouge.
Impoverished northern Vietnam is a world away from southern Vietnam, where consumer goods appear to be in abundance. The contrast prompts people to say, “One country, two systems.” Nearly 10 years after the fall of South Vietnam’s Government, “the American war” has slipped into history, overshadowed by the latest threat from China.
The road from to Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone has a new asphalt surface, a hurry-up job completed recently. South Korea wanted to show off its best, expecting that Red Cross representatives from North Korea would be driving down that road last week for the first full-dress talks with their South Korean counterparts in 12 years. Instead, earlier in January, North Korea announced that it was not coming — not to Seoul for the Red Cross discussions, nor to Panmunjom for negotiations that had been scheduled for mid-January — to discuss possibilities for trade between the long-hostile countries. Now South Korean officials do not expect talks to resume before mid-spring, if then. After a brief period of friendlier relations in the second half of 1984, the two Koreas have returned to a pattern of mutual scorn and attacks on one another’s intentions.
In a packed courtroom, the Chief of Staff of the Philippine armed forces, General Fabian C. Ver, and his 25 co-defendants pleaded not guilty today to the killings of former Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr., the opposition leader, and Rolando Galman at the Manila airport in 1983. The close aide to President Ferdinand E. Marcos stood alongside nine other officers and the lone civilian accused in the case. Behind them in three more rows were sergeants and constables who had served as Mr. Aquino’s security escorts and had been with him or with Mr. Galman, the man the government initially accused of killing Mr. Aquino on his return from the United States. Mr. Galman was slain by guards shortly after Mr. Aquino was killed.
New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange formally replied to a Washington request for a visit to his country by a U.S. Navy ship believed capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Lange would not disclose his answer, but he had said. earlier that he likely would reject the request to allow such a ship to visit New Zealand in March after exercises involving the ANZUS alliance-Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
President Reagan’s “Star Wars” research on putting an anti-missile system in space is developing into a potentially volatile issue in Canadian politics. The political opposition has in recent days accused Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his ministers of ignoring or not being candid about possible Reagan Administration plans to make Canada part of the project. Today, John Turner, the former Prime Minister who now leads the opposition Liberal Party, asked Defense Minister Robert Coates to confirm or deny press reports that current United States-Canadian negotiations on modernizing the early warning radar system in northern Canada could lead to Canadian participation in the “Star Wars” project. “What we’re negotiating is a warning system and not a weapons system, and that’s a fact,” said Mr. Coates during an acrimonious exchange at the daily question period in the House of Commons.
The government has retreated from a decade-long effort to require Canadians to adopt the metric system. Michel Cote, consumer affairs minister, announced in Parliament that gallons, pounds and inches are legal again. “Canadians feel, and we agree, that compulsory metric is a heavy-handed and insensitive approach,” Cote said. The metric system, adopted in 1976, was presented as a tool to expand Canadian exports by conforming to world standards. However, opponents say more than two-thirds of Canada’s exports go to the United States, where the metric system is not enforced.
Many remains of a “lost city” that archeologists believe may rival the spectacular ruins of the Incas have been examined and photographed high in the Andes of Peru. The pre-Columbian ruins of massive walls and terraces, buildings, tombs and statuary were presumably a major center of an early, resourceful and mysterious people whose civilization flourished long before the golden age of the Incas.
Jose Donoso, one of Chile’s best-known authors, and 24 other people were arrested Wednesday night in the town of Castro for protesting the dismissal of three dissident writers from teaching jobs, the police said today. The protesters were arrested during a demonstration at the local office of the leftist Commission of the Rights of the People, the police said. The police in Castro, on the island of Chiloe 753 miles south of Santiago, said all 25 were charged with holding an anti-government demonstration, which is forbidden under the nationwide state of siege. Santiago radio stations quoted police sources in Castro as saying that Mr. Donoso, his wife and five other women were freed this afternoon, leaving 18 others in jail.
American aid programs in Africa have often been short-sighted and should be revamped to emphasize small farmers, a congressional report said. Prepared by the Office of Technology Assessment, the report also recommended that the United States develop a long-term commitment to African assistance.
Ships delivering arms to Ethiopia have apparently been given priority over ships bringing food to famine victims, according to aid officials and Western diplomats in the capital, Addis Ababa. The officials said two Soviet ships sailed into the Red Sea port of Assab in the third week of January. A January 24 sailing bulletin of Ethiopia’s marine transportation corporation classified the cargo on the first ship as “military” and on the second as “private.”
The American compound in Juba, in the southern Sudan, is almost deserted. So is the United Nations enclave. Norwegian Church Aid, a mainstay of the regional aid and relief effort, has evacuated about 150 of its staff and dependents to Nairobi, Kenya. Ninety percent of the foreign relief workers have left Juba and nearby towns in the last two weeks. Today, the Sudanese insurgents who have been fighting since 1983, warned foreigners to leave to avoid being killed, according to a rebel broadcast from Ethiopia.
South African President P. W. Botha offers to free Nelson Mandela if he denounces violence. President P. W. Botha held out the possibility for the first time today of a conditional release for Nelson Mandela, the country’s best-known black nationalist leader, who has been in jail for over two decades and who is regarded by many South African black people as their true leader. There was no immediate response from Mr. Mandela, 66 years old, who is in Pollsmoor maximum-security prison in Cape Town, or from members of his family. Some South African commentators, however, said the purpose of Mr. Botha’s offer seemed to be to shift responsibility for Mr. Mandela’s continued incarceration away from the white authorities and onto the shoulders of Mr. Mandela himself. Previously, Mr. Mandela, who was sentenced in 1964 to life imprisonment on charges of sabotage and plotting a violent revolution, has spurned offers of release in the nominally independent tribal homeland of the Transkei, which is reserved for people of Xhosa ethnic origin, like Mr. Mandela. He has not been offered release in those parts of South Africa deemed by the authorities to lie outside the tribal homelands.
The lowest rate of spending growth in two decades will be reflected in the budget that President Reagan sends Congress on Monday, according to Administration officials and budget documents. The total is $973.7 billion, or 1.5 percent more than the Government expects to spend this year. Mr. Reagan proposes cuts in spending at eight departments, including Agriculture, Education, Energy and Housing and Urban Development.
President Reagan attends the annual National Prayer Breakfast.
President Reagan phones singer Michael Jackson.
Staff lawyers from the Office of Government Ethics, testifying today at confirmation hearings on the nomination of Edwin Meese 3d to be Attorney General, said they had not been pressured into changing their opinion about whether he had committeed ethics violations. The lawyers, F. Gary Davis and Nancy Feathers, drafted a memorandum earlier this month in which they said that Mr. Meese appeared to have violated ethics standards in at least three instances. But under long questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee, they insisted that their memorandum had been only a “starting point” and that their concerns had been resolved by further analysis and discussion with their boss, David H. Martin. Mr. Martin, appointed as director of the ethics office by President Reagan, said he and his staff lawyers had arrived at the “mutual” conclusion that Mr. Meese had not violated any code of ethics in the transactions they examined.
Social Security’s once impoverished old-age trust fund, which borrowed $17.5 billion in 1982 so it could issue checks on time, paid back a quarter of those loans. It returned $1.8 billion to its sister hospital insurance trust fund and $2.5 billion to the disability insurance fund, Social Security spokesman Jim Brown said. The old-age fund is now back in the black and showing surpluses each year instead of deficits. The 1983 Social Security rescue legislation, which shored up the system by cutting some benefits and raising taxes, required the old-age fund to repay the $17.5 billion in loans when the fund built up a 15% reserve.
The Environmental Protection Agency is pulling back, at least temporarily, from its attempt to ban use of asbestos, officials said. The agency will announce today that it is formally referring asbestos matters to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission under a procedure it has never used before, said spokesman David Ryan. Last summer, the EPA sought Office of Management and Budget approval to ban asbestos for some uses, but the budget office refused to approve publication of the proposal on grounds that it would cost too much to the economy in view of the number of lives saved.
Air and water in many cities is cleaner than it was a decade ago but other “environmental villains” remain uncontrolled, the National Wildlife Federation said in its annual report on environmental quality. The report, published in National Wildlife magazine, indicates that the nation has succeeded in lowering levels of many conventional air and water pollutants, but the country still has problems with toxic wastes and other chemicals that are increasingly poisoning the quality of the environment. The federation estimated that more than 260 million tons of hazardous waste are produced each year.
Paul G. Kirk Jr., a lawyer with close ties to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), won a test vote of his front-running candidacy to be the next Democratic Party chairman. Kirk forces in the Democratic National Committee defeated, by a vote of 178.05 to 146.45, a proposal by his rivals to force immediate election of the 25 at-large members of the panel. The issue was actually a test of whether Kirk could muster a majority of the votes on the committee. Kirk is expected to be elected party chairman by the 378-member committee today, succeeding Charles T. Manatt.
The high value of the dollar is exacting a heavy toll from the nation’s farmers, from merchants and bankers in many rural towns and from the industries that produce the farmers’ supplies. Nationally, the experts say, this cost now amounts to tens of billions of dollars a year. The Reagan Administration, under heavy pressure from farm-state lawmakers to do something about the credit crisis facing farmers, offered today to liberalize the rules governing $650 million in agricultural loan guarantees. The offer came in a two-hour meeting with more than a dozen Republican senators at which Mr. Reagan’s budget director, David A. Stockman, and Agriculture Secretary John R. Block tried to solicit the senators’ commitments to support the Administration’s proposed reductions in the farm program, according to several participants. The same offer was made later to farm-state House members, but no final agreement was reached immediately, several senators said. Another meeting was set for Friday.
A judge today dismissed murder and manslaughter charges against a doctor who performed a late-term abortion September 12. The prosecution contended the fetus was alive after the procedure and that the physician, Dr. Joseph Melnick, withheld proper medical care. Municipal Judge Michael Conroy did order Dr. Melnick to stand trial on two violations of the state’s abortion law: performing an abortion after viability and infanticide. Dr. Halbert Fillinger, a pathologist, testified that the fetus, about 32 weeks into term, weighed 3 pounds, 9 ounces. He said many such aborted fetuses “survive if they receive intensive medical care within 5 to 10 minutes of birth.”
Two Brink’s workers were arrested on Federal charges of plotting to rob Brink’s main vault in San Francisco to help finance the activities of an extremist, anti-Semitic group seeking to take over the Federal Government. One of the men, Charles E. Ostrout, was also charged with aiding in the $3.6 million armed robbery of a Brink’s armored truck last July near Ukiah, California.
A series of eight airline accidents within two months, five of them fatal, has prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to begin an in-depth analysis of its air safety inspection system. Yesterday the Federal Aviation Adminstration said it was conducting an extensive analysis of its inspection system, acknowledged some problems and indicated that it might seek more resources in coming months. The anxieties of safety specialists were reinforced most recently by the crash January 21 of a Galaxy Airlines turboprop Electra in Reno, Nevada, where 68 people died, and the crash Tuesday of another Galaxy plane that the Federal Aviation Administration had specially inspected. Officials of the aviation agency have repeatedly noted that the overall airline safety record has been much better over the last five years than in the previous five.
Fires enveloped more than 50,000 acres of South Florida as Governor Robert Graham declared a state of emergency and forestry experts predicted weather would make one of three major blazes — the fire northeast of Naples — uncontrollable. The largest fire was burning over about 46,000 acres of uninhabited Florida Everglades grasslands in northwest Broward County on the state’s southeast coast, said Paul Wills, Division of Forestry spokesman. He said the fire could easily double in size. As of late Wednesday, 1,429 fires had destroyed 51,124 acres of forest since January 1, Wills said. The figures do not include grassland, such as that burning in the Everglades fire. The police were holding Eddie Richardson, 34 years old, of Naples, on arson charges in connection with another fire near Naples, said Deputy Chief Ray Barnett of the Collier County Sheriff’s Department. He said deputies were also investigating Mr. Richardson in the main Naples fire.
The Environmental Protection Agency filed suit today against the State of Massachusetts and three agencies, asking a Federal district judge to order them to meet deadlines for cleaning up pollution in Boston Harbor. The suit asks Judge David Nazzone to order the agencies to comply with Federal clean-water regulations within an E.P.A. timetable calling for a 10-year project costing $2 billion. The complaint seeks fines up to $10,000 a day for violations. Federal officials said the suit sought to add a level of accountability above the state and local authorities and E.P.A. administrators. State officials, including James Hoyte, Environmental Affairs Secretary, said the Federal objectives could be accomplished without litigation.
A 19-year-old teacher’s aide was sentenced today to life in prison after being convicted of rape and indecent assault of children at the day care center where he worked. The defendant, Bernard F. Baran Jr., showed no emotion when sentenced by Judge William Simons. He will be eligible for parole in 15 years. Mr. Baran was convicted Wednesday of five counts of indecent assault and battery and three counts of rape of children 3 to 5 years old at the Early Childhood Development Center in Pittsfield. He had worked there two and a half years and was arrested in October.
Nearly three years after the conviction of Wayne B. Williams led the police to close 23 cases involving the deaths of young blacks, what was called “the tragedy of the missing and murdered children” has come back to haunt Atlanta. “The Atlanta Child Murders,” a heavily promoted, five-hour television dramatization, will be broadcast nationally on CBS February 10 and 12. Although the program does not disclose any new information, its partly fictionalized reconstruction of events casts serious doubt on the guilt of Mr. Williams, who was convicted of two of the murders. And it implicitly suggests that he might have been a scapegoat offered to calm public hysteria over the murders. Late today more than 75 business, community, political and religous leaders organized by Mayor Andrew Young announced a public information campaign to blunt the effect of the program. After viewing videotapes of the movie, these critics said it distorted the events surrounding the trial and unfairly depicted Atlanta as a city torn by crime and racial dissension.
The National Cancer Institute announced a program that it said could save thousands of lives a year by enabling doctors to use their home or office computers to obtain information instantly on the latest cancer treatments and where to find them. The system, known as PDQ, for physician data query, also will tell physicians where clinical studies are under way for patients who have cancers with no known treatments. Information in it will be updated monthly by 72 cancer experts from around the nation.
The Des Moines Register and Tribune Company’s board approved the sale of its flagship newspaper and other newspaper properties to the Gannett Company for $200 million. The action ended a heated competition among some of the nation’s largest newspapers to acquire what is considered one of the best papers.
Max Showalter and Peter Walker’s musical “Harrigan ‘n Hart”, starring Harry Groening and Mark Hamill, opens at Longacre Theater, NYC; runs for 4 performances.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1286.77.
Born:
Mario Williams, NFL defensive end (Pro Bowl, 2008, 2009, 2013, 2014; Houston Texans, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins), in Richlands, North Carolina.
Died:
Barbara Cowsill, 56, American singer and rock band mother (The Cowsills – “Hair”; “We Can Fly”), of emphysema.
History Diaries 