Britain’s National Coal Board met with government arbitrators, but the meeting ended with no new developments in the 47-week-old miners’ strike. The state board said that only 11 of its 174 mines are still completely strikebound, with 664 more miners returning to work for the first time. The board said that more than 80,000 miners are back at work, leaving about 100,000 still on strike. The strike began last March over the board’s plan to close 20 mines and cut 20,000 jobs.
The key defendant in the trial of four state security men made his final statement today, stressing his Communist ideals while accepting qualified guilt for the slaying of a pro-Solidarity priest. The defendant, Grzegorz Piotrowski, who is the only one of the four facing a possible death penalty, asked clemency for two others, Waldemar Chmielewski and Leszek Pekala, when sentence is pronounced Thursday. Earlier, the two wept as they made short statements of their own, declaring their guilt and asking leniency.
West Germany and France agreed today to set up an antiterrorist hot line to help combat an increase in urban guerrilla violence. Interior Minister Pierre Joxe, speaking at a news conference with France’s Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, and the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, said a high-speed telex link would be established between the Interior Ministries in Paris and Bonn. West Germany’s Interior Minister, Friedrich Zimmermann, said the hot line was one of several joint measures to combat an “internationalization of terrorism.” Mr. Joxe and Mr. Zimmermann met in response to the murder of an arms dealer, Ernst Zimmermann, in Munich last Friday and of Gen. Rene Audran, in charge of French arms sales, outside Paris 10 days ago.
President Reagan meets with the new Minister of External Affairs of the French Republic Roland Dumas. The French Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas, ended his talks in the United States today, getting an assurance that a policy of nuclear deterrence would not be abandoned until a “safer strategy,” such as a space-based defensive shield, can replace it, a senior American official said. The American official, briefing reporters on the discussions between Mr. Dumas and Secretary of State George P. Shultz, said the chief topic was President Reagan’s proposal to carry out research on the feasibility of a space-based shield designed to protect the United States from incoming nuclear missiles.
A Soviet airliner crashed last Friday near the Minsk airport after taking off for Leningrad, a newspaper published in the area reported. It did not report the number killed in the crash, but the plane, a twin-engine TU-134, can carry 80 passengers, and Soviet domestic flights usually are fully booked. The Soviet media rarely announce plane crashes, and the fact that this one was publicized suggests that foreigners or high Soviet officials were aboard.
A Moscow court has sentenced Jewish activist Alexander Kholmyansky to 18 months in a labor camp on charges of possessing live ammunition, dissidents said. Kholmyansky’s wife has charged that the ammunition was planted in their apartment by the KGB security police. Kholmyansky, who has been refused permission to emigrate, was active among a group of Jews who gave Hebrew lessons to young people in Moscow and other cities without official sanction. At least three other Hebrew teachers have been sentenced to labor camps in recent months.
Another dissident, Milan Mladenovic, was convicted Monday of antistate activity and sentenced to 18 months in prison, the newspaper Politika said today. Mr. Mladenovic, a philosophy instructor, was accused of having maintained contact with supporters of Savremenik, a Serbo-Croatian emigre periodical published in Paris. The court said Savremenik was anti-Yugoslav and had been founded in part by sympathizers of the Chetnik movement, a group of royalist officers who allegedly collaborated with German occupation forces in World War II against the Communist guerrillas. In a separate case on Monday, three dissidents were given sentences ranging from one to two years.
Hosni Mubarak criticized Israel, saying it had not been flexible enough in the search for peace. The Egyptian President also faulted the Israelis for not withdrawing their forces sooner from Lebanon. The Egyptian leader had not, since Prime Minister Shimon Peres took office in September, offered such a sweeping expression of dissatisfaction with Israel’s efforts to improve diplomatic ties. Mr. Mubarak was responding to statements by Mr. Peres, who criticized Egypt’s peace policies Monday in Jerusalem. Mr. Peres, speaking in an interview, expressed disappointment, also for the first time publicly, at what he described as Egypt’s failure to respond to his efforts to improve relations between the two countries.
Libya freed four Britons held hostage since the two countries severed diplomatic relations 10 months ago over the slaying of a British policewoman outside the Libyan Embassy in London. Robin Plummer, 32, and Malcolm Anderson, 27, both engineers, and Alan Russell, 48, and Michael Berdinner, 52, both teachers, were released after months of mediation and four trips to Libya by Terry Waite, the personal envoy of Robert A.K. Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The men were held in connection with charges ranging from a minor traffic violation to smuggling state secrets. They had to sit through a lengthy preamble by a Government spokesman, Mohammed Alhijazi, before learning that their ordeal was at an end. With the prisoners’ families watching the news conference, which was televised live in Britain, Mr. Alhijazi maintained the suspense until the last moment. Speaking through an interpreter, he said that 80 percent of the People’s Congresses throughout the country had wanted to impose strict conditions on the men’s release, including the release of Libyans detained in Britain, a demand that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would probably have refused to meet.
President Reagan attends a National Security Council meeting to discuss the upcoming visit of King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia.
Iran said 2 civilians were killed and 20 were wounded in Iraqi air raids today, and Iraq reported stepped-up air attacks on Iranian positions on the southern war front. The Iranian press agency said Iraqi warplanes dropped cluster bombs on the village of Hoveyzeh, 12 miles from the Iraqi border in southwest Iran, killing 2 civilians and wounding 20. In a dispatch from Ahwaz, in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, the agency said eight civilians were wounded when Iraqi jets fired rockets into the nearby village of Malihe-Sadoon. In Baghdad, a military communique said Iraqi warplanes mounted 104 sorties against Iranian troop positions on the southern and central battlefronts today, inflicting “very heavy losses” in troops and equipment.
India has expelled a Soviet diplomat in connection with the country’s spy scandal, the newspaper Indian Express reported. The Express, which first linked France to the affair, said the Russian as well as one diplomat each from the Polish and East German embassies left India over the weekend. It did not name them, and there was no comment from the Soviet Embassy or Indian officials. Since the case broke, about 15 people have been arrested, and two French diplomats have been withdrawn. The government said Tuesday that it was taking “appropriate action” against two diplomats from Poland and East Germany who were named as recipients of government secrets by a key suspect in a widening espionage case here. On Monday, a court spokesman said that the suspect, a businessman named Coomar Narain, had told a magistrate that he spent 25 years passing various industrial, military and political secrets. He said that “every kind of document” involving government secrets had been given to Poland, East Germany and France.
Waves of bombings, killings and arrests have spread through the northern and eastern regions of the island nation of Sri Lanka in recent months, creating new fears in the Government that the insurgency of Tamil separatists will continue and perhaps grow. What was once a case of sporadic episodes has become a steady series of violent encounters between Government forces, almost all of them Sinhalese, and Tamil guerrillas pressing for an independent nation of their own. In recent weeks, the violence has spread from Jaffna, Mannar, Vavuniya, Mullaitivu and other tamil communities in the north to Batticaloa and other areas in the east. The Government has estimated that more than 500 Tamil insurgents, Government troops and Tamil and Sinhalese civilians have died in the last two and a half months in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, off India’s southeast coast. Many people say this is a conservative estimate.
Vietnamese troops overran a Cambodian mountaintop command post of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas after heavy fighting, Thai military officers reported. It was the third guerrilla outpost to fall since Vietnamese troops began their drive late last month. Vietnamese troops were reported trying to pin the guerrillas against the Thai border in the Phnom Malai area of western Cambodia, and thousands of civilian followers of the guerrillas fled into Thailand to escape.
North Korean naval craft shot at and seized two South Korean fishing boats in the Yellow Sea off the west coast of the Korean Peninsula, the South Korean Defense Ministry announced. It said the boats, each with 10 crew members aboard, were with 30 other fishing boats 33 miles west of a South Korean island near the demarcation line between north and south. North Korea confirmed the seizure and said the boats had intruded into North Korean waters.
Retaliation against New Zealand for its refusal to allow a United States Navy destroyer to make a port visit next month is being considered by the Reagan Administration. The warship’s visit was to have occurred at the conclusion of joint naval exercises by Australian, New Zealand and American forces. The State Department announced Monday that the maneuvers had been canceled. The Reagan Administration said a firm American response was needed, beyond calling off the maneuvers, to demonstrate that allies could not impose limits on the movements of American military forces and get off “cost- free.”
Pope John Paul II closed his South American tour tonight after a day of hopscotching from the slums of Lima, Peru, to an Amazon jungle town and finally to the prosperous and temperate Caribbean island of Trinidad. The Pope celebrated mass here tonight and was to give the 45th and final address of his trip this evening before flying back to Rome. The Pope continued today to shift back and forth between messages of consolation to the poor and calls for greater church discipline, respect for church authority and avoidance of doctrines John Paul sees as contrary to Roman Catholic teaching. Having spent much of his Peruvian journey calling on Catholics to avoid theologies alien to the faith — a series of addresses seen as critical of certain aspects of liberation theology — John Paul returned today to the themes of the Pope’s special commitment to the impoverished.
Dominican troops and police detained left-wing leaders and trade unionists today after protests against price increases in which two people were killed, officials said. Troops armed with assault rifles surrounded the homes of left-wing activists early today as senior officials from 11 of Latin America’s most heavily indebted countries prepared to meet in the capital of Santo Domingo.
A Nicaraguan exile, Arturo José Cruz, working to forge an umbrella organization of opposition groups said yesterday that the main civilian group did not want the organization to serve as a conduit for United States aid to anti-Sandinista guerrillas. Reagan Administration officials were reported last week to be considering whether to encourage the rebels to form an umbrella organization that could openly receive military aid from the United States. The United States gave almost $80 million in covert aid to the guerrillas from 1981 until last year, when Congress cut off further aid. Congress is to vote later this year on a $14 million appropriation to the guerrillas.
The U.S. withholds suppoprt of a loan to Chile in protest over human rights abuses. The United States intends to abstain when the Inter-American Development Bank votes this week on a $130 million loan to Chile, partly in protest of Chilean human rights violations, Reagan Administration and Congressional officials said today. The vote would be the first time the Reagan Administration has acted to protest the human rights situation in Chile, where a three-month old military state of siege was extended for another 90 days on Saturday. An Administation official said, “We felt it was time to send a signal,” adding that the extension of the state of siege was “the main catalyst.”
An upbeat State of the Union Message tomorrow night is planned by President Reagan, according to White House officials. They said he planned to set legislative priorities for his second term with an address that reaches out to minority groups, emphasizes deficit reduction and tax simplification and stresses his desire to ease the threat of nuclear war. One official described the speech, which was discussed at a Cabinet meeting this afternoon, as “very positive, nonconfrontational.” Another White House official said, “What he wants to leave behind after the next four years is a meaningful arms control agreement with the Soviets and continued strong economic growth.”
President Reagan’s use of Scripture to appeal for support of his proposed increased military budget was criticized by several theologians and biblical scholars. Among the criticisms were that Mr. Reagan had taken a passage from the Gospel of Luke out of context and had failed to grasp Jesus’s teaching.
President Reagan met with his Cabinet to discuss a package to strengthen relief for debt-burdened farmers, but a group of rural banks said the response still is insufficient. The farm debt crisis has been at the top of the agenda of several recent Cabinet-level meetings. Agriculture Department officials said the Administration will announce today details of new federal guarantees of existing bank and cooperative loans to financially troubled farmers if banks agree to lower the interest rates on them. But Thomas Olson of the Independent Bankers Association of America said banks should have to write down neither principal nor interest to qualify for federal guarantees, which he said should total $3 billion.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said lengthy repairs on the shuttle Challenger’s heat-shield tile system and unfinished paperwork will delay its scheduled launch this month by about a week. Charles Redmond of NASA said an official launch date will be announced late this week or early next. “The best guess was (February) 27-28, and I suspect that will probably hold,” he said. “It would certainly be no earlier than the 27th.” Challenger was scheduled to take off February 20 with a crew of seven, including Senator Jake Garn (R-Utah), on a four-day mission to launch two communications satellites and retrieve a space experiment.
Military pensions were assailed as a “scandal” by David A. Stockman, the Federal budget director. Mr. Stockman, in sometimes blunt testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, said, “Institutional forces in the military are more concerned about protecting their retirement benefits than they are about protecting the security of the American people. When push comes to shove, they’ll give up on security before they’ll give up on retirement.” Stockman told the Senate Budget Committee that rather than slowing the rise in the President’s proposed military budget to reduce the deficit, Congress should move to curtail the military pension program, which is projected to cost $17.8 billion in 1986, up from $7.3 billion in 1976.
The nomination of Edwin Meese 3d to be Attorney General was approved, 12 to 6, by the Senate Judiciary Committee. All 10 Republican members voted for Mr. Meese and two of the committee’s eight Democrats also joined in referring the controversial nomination to the Senate floor. Several of the committee members called the vote one of the hardest of their careers.
Less than a day before he was to be executed in Florida’s electric chair for killing a state trooper in 1973, Carl Ray Songer was granted an indefinite stay from a federal appeals court, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene. The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta voted 11 to 0 to have the entire court hear the condemned man’s case. Songer, 34, was convicted of killing Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Ronald G. Smith on Dec. 23, 1973.
The National Transportation Safety Board, concerned about the increasing number of fatal accidents involving powered ultralight aircraft, recommended that the federal government take new steps to regulate the popular recreational vehicles and the pilots who fly them. The board concluded that additional operating rules are needed after it reviewed 177 ultralight plane accidents, which resulted in 93 deaths, during an 18-month investigation. Current rules are concerned primarily with the crafts’ weight and speed and sites where they can operate.
A plan to merge the two agencies responsible for building dams and other water projects has been rejected by the Secretaries of Defense and Interior. However, the Office of Management and Budget is still pressing its proposal to consolidate the Defense Department’s Army Corps of Engineers and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation.
Lawyers for so-called “Death Wish” gunman Bernhard H. Goetz said he will plead not guilty and ask for reduction of his $50,000 bail at an arraignment in Manhattan on charges of illegal weapons possession. A grand jury Jan. 25 indicted Goetz, 37, on charges of possession of an unlicensed loaded pistol at the time of the Dec. 22 shootings of four young black men who demanded $5 from him on a subway train. He faces up to seven years in prison if convicted on the felony charges. The grand jury declined to indict Goetz on attempted murder charges.
Less than a day before he was to die for killing a state trooper in 1973, Carl Ray Songer won an indefinite stay of execution from a Federal appeals court today, and the United States Supreme Court refused a request by attorneys for the state to intervene. The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, voted 11 to 0 to have the entire court hear Mr. Songer’s case along with that of another Florida death row inmate, James Ernest Hitchcock. A three-judge panel of the appeals court that heard arguments in the case Monday had given Mr. Songer a temporary reprieve to block his execution, scheduled for today. His death warrant was to expire at noon Wednesday. DeVal Patrick, an attorney for the Legal Defense Fund in New York, has argued that Mr. Songer, who has no previous convictions for violent crime, did not have a chance at his sentencing hearing in 1974 to offer evidence of his good character, background and education.
The cost of an aircraft toilet seat was lowered to $200 from $640 by a major Pentagon contractor after the charge was protested by Senator William V. Roth Jr., Republican of Delaware. Later, the Navy obtained a final price of $100.
General William C. Westmoreland imposed a ceiling on enemy strength estimates in Vietnam in 1967 that led to a “corrupt” report for President Johnson, according to Colonel Donald W. Blascak, an Army intelligence officer who is still on active duty. Colonel Blascak testified at General Westmoreland’s libel trial against CBS in Manhattan that the 25-page report should have put enemy strength at 500,000 to 600,000, double what the report cited.
Nine anti-abortion bombings have occurred in and around Washington. The destruction has confronted the authorities with radical violence reminiscent of war protests, damaged people with no connection to the abortion dispute and won sympathy from some religious groups.
At the end of a tumultuous 12-hour meeting, the Albuquerque City Council voted early today to extend an expansion of the city’s sales tax that was scheduled to expire June 30 and use the income for an $86 million downtown project. A fund created with the tax would finance an addition to the city’s convention center, a parking garage, a hotel and a “festival marketplace” similar to Manhattan’s South Street Seaport and Baltimore’s Harborfront. The Council voted to give landmark status to the facade and lobby of the Sunshine Building, built in the 1920’s, which potential developers say must be razed to make way for the marketplace. The portions given landmark status could be reconstructed as part of another building. At the end of the meeting, opponents of the marketplace announced that they planned to force a referendum on the sales tax extension.
The 55-mile-an-hour speed limit has often been called the most widely broken national law since Prohibition. Yet the 11-year-old law has attracted broad public support, and attempts in some states to repeal it within their borders have failed. Still, opponents are expected to renew their efforts this year to get a 65-mile- an-hour speed limit on rural parts of the Interstate system.
A Mexican couple facing deportation and the loss of a Kansas City house that they had won in a drawing would be allowed to stay in the United States with “permanent residence status” under legislation introduced by Senator Thomas F. Eagleton (D-Missouri). Jose and Silvia Carmona, who have four children, must leave the country by February 23 unless Congress acts. The children, born in America, are U.S. citizens. Immigration officials discovered the Carmonas, who have lived illegally in this country since 1977, after a story and photograph appeared in the Kansas City Times last year explaining how they won a house in a church charity drawing.
The National Guard was called out today to help environmental officials remove the carcasses of about three million chickens killed when coops in Alabama and Mississippi collapsed under the weight of ice from a weekend storm. Damage to the poultry industry in both states was put at $12 million. Dave Carter, director of the Alabama Poultry and Egg Association, said warming weather could compound the problem. Officials said 75 chicken houses in Alabama collapsed, destroying 2.25 million birds, and 105 collapsed in Mississippi, killing about 750,000 chickens.
A complaint of sexual harassment has led to the resignation of a tenured professor at Harvard, the university disclosed. Harvard officials said they believed that the resignation of Douglas A. Hibbs Jr., a professor of government, marked the first time in the university’s 348-year history that a professor had left after charges of sexual misconduct.
A man who pleaded guilty to charges of smuggling goshawks and goshawk eggs into the country was sentenced Monday to four months in jail and fined $30,000 by a Federal district judge. The man, Gerald C. DeCarnelle of Manhattan Beach, Calif., was also ordered by Judge Robert M. Takasugi to give up his falconry permit for smuggling the federally protected birds. Goshawks are members of the hawk family and are prized by falconers for their beauty and speed. A pair of goshawks can sell for about $4,500, according to officials of the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service. Mr. DeCarnelle, 44 years old, was indicted by a grand jury last July in connection with a three-year undercover investigation conducted by the Fish and Wildlife Service. “This investigation has connected people in Germany, Canada, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia,” said Alan Rubin, Assistant United States Attorney. Thirty-six warrants were issued in the investigation, and 29 people have been arrested.
The security guards looked like offensive linemen. They were broad- shouldered and formidable, packing walkie-talkies and casually brushing aside photographers and reporters who blocked their path to the podium. Hidden behind their massive bodies, partially obscured from view but nicely protected in the pocket, strolled Doug Flutie, the hottest property to hit New York since Trump Tower. The formal signing of Flutie’s contract with the Generals had come Monday night in New Jersey, so this was simply his gala presentation to the news media. A head of state couldn’t have attracted a larger crowd. The garden level of Trump Tower was filled to capacity – included were members of Flutie’s family; the Generals’ owner, Donald Trump; the coach, Walt Michaels, and the new United States Football League commissioner, Harry Usher – and above, leaning over the railings that overlooked the proceedings, stood several dozen passers-by.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1285.23 (-4.85)
Born:
Crystal Hunt, American actress (“Guiding Light”, “One Life to Life”), in Clearwater, Florida.
Paige Howard, American actress (“The Employer”), in Los Angeles, California.
Eric O’Flaherty, MLB pitcher (Seattle Mariners, Atlanta Braves, Oakland A’s, New York Mets), in Walla Walla, Washington.
Laurence Maroney, NFL running back (New England Patriots, Denver Broncos), in St. Louis, Missouri.
Maciej Lampe, Polish NBA center (Phoenix Suns, New Orleans-Oklahoma City Hornets, Houston Rockets), in Łódź, Poland.
Lindsey Cardinale, American country music singer (“American Idol”, 2012), in Hammond, Louisiana.
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