A missile defense system in space will be developed by Washington even if an agreement is reached to eliminate nuclear weapons, President Reagan vowed. President Reagan said today that even if an agreement was reached to eliminate nuclear weapons, the United States would want to develop a space-based defense system against offensive weapons. The President said he intended to proceed with research on the defense system that has come to be known as Star Wars, independent of whatever agreement might be reached with the Soviet Union on reducing offensive nuclear weapons. “The only weapon we have is MAD – Mutual Assured Destruction,” the President said. “Why don’t we have MAS instead – Mutual Assured Security?”
Jozef Cardinal Glemp, the Roman Catholic primate of Poland, accused the Communist authorities today of a “malicious” campaign against the church, and he rejected allegations that many Polish priests regularly engage in anti-state activities. Speaking at a rare news conference, he said the nature of attacks on the church indicated an “ideological struggle” within the Polish leadership. Cardinal Glemp denied Government assertions that a slain pro-Solidarity priest, the Rev. Jerzy Popiełuszko, had violated the law. He said the priest’s frequent sermons in support of the outlawed free trade union “did not go beyond theological correctness.” “There was an accusation that Father Popiełuszko created an obstacle to accord,” Cardinal Glemp said. “I don’t think it was like that.” Four security police officers were convicted last week of killing Father Popiełuszko in October.
A top British defense official who leaked secret documents about the Falklands War was acquitted by a London jury on charges of breaking secrecy laws. Clive Ponting, 38, an assistant secretary in the Defense Ministry, was accused of breaking a 1911 law forbidding civil servants to pass information to an unauthorized person. The documents, mailed to a Laborite member of Parliament, indicated that the Argentine warship General Belgrano was heading home when it was sunk by a British submarine in May, 1982. The British government said the ship was threatening its forces. Prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act of 1911, Mr. Ponting argued that he had had a duty to Parliament and to the country to expose a government cover-up.
Eighteen members of Britain’s Royal Air Force band and their German driver were killed when a double-decker bus carrying about 40 band members collided with a tanker truck loaded with aviation fuel north of Munich. Nineteen other passengers were injured, and five escaped unhurt in what Bavarian police called the worst bus accident in almost 20 years. The band had been due to play at the 30th anniversary Wednesday of the opening of an RAF survival training school in an Alpine village. At the time of the accident, the bus was en route from an RAF base at Rheindahlen. “It was a sea of flames,” a police spokesman said.
Western members of UNESCO assert that the agency’s director general is planning to make up the loss of the United States contribution this year from a budget contingency fund instead of returning that excess money to the organization’s members. The Reagan Administration left the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization at the end of last year. At the time, Western members generally hoped the loss of the 25 percent American budget share, $47 million, would force the organization to curtail activities criticized by the Westerners as politically controversial.
Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou of Greece arrived to a warm welcome in Moscow today, saying that improving relations with the Soviet Union were based on “corresponding views on many international problems.” Mr. Papandreou was greeted on arrival by both Prime Minister Nikolai A. Tikhonov and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, and Greek sources said they expected him to meet Tuesday with Konstantin U. Chernenko. Mr. Chernenko has been ailing and was last seen in public on December 27. The warm greeting for the Greek leader underlined the improvement in ties between Moscow and Athens since Mr. Papandreou’s Socialist Government came to power.
Israeli Air Force planes attacked what were described as Palestinian guerrilla positions in southeastern Lebanon for the second time in 24 hours today. An Israeli military spokesman said the jets scored direct hits, while a spokesman for the guerrillas termed the attack a failure.
Assassinations in Lebanon have increased sharply, according to Israeli military officials and independent security sources. They said that at least 30 Lebanese and Palestinians working for Israel in south Lebanon had been slain by unidentified gunmen in the last seven weeks.
President Reagan greets the King of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud and hosts a state dinner in honor of the King. King Fahd urged President Reagan to engage the United States “more vigorously” in the search for a Middle East peace and to support “the just cause of the Palestinian people.” But Mr. Reagan told the visiting Saudi leader that priority should be given to persuading Arab countries to hold direct talks with Israel. “It is time to put this tragedy to rest and turn the page to a new and happier chapter,” the President said of the conflict in the region.
Tens of thousands of Iranians — many of them shouting “Death to America and the U.S.S.R!” — filled the streets of Tehran and other cities to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi by supporters of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The leftist opposition Mujahideen group announced in Paris that its guerrillas marked the anniversary by firing rocket-propelled grenades into the Tehran prosecutor’s office, killing or wounding a number of people. There was no confirmation of the attack.
Vietnam will turn over to the United States the remains of five people it says are Americans listed as missing in action in the Vietnam War, sources said in Bangkok. “It’s a welcome gesture,” one U.S. source said. Vietnamese sources in the Thai capital said that it could take as long as a month to turn over the remains of the five. In a related development, a U.S. team arrived in southern Laos to search for the remains of 13 American servicemen missing in the crash of an Air Force C-130 transport plane shot down in 1972.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations issued a worldwide appeal today for military aid to the Cambodian rebel coalition that is trying to overthrow the Vietnamese-installed Government in Phnom Penh. The call, following a special regional foreign ministers’ meeting on Cambodia here this morning, was contained in a communique that diplomats say was the first unanimous expression of full political and military support for the rebels from all six ASEAN nations: Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines. Until now, diplomats and ASEAN officials said, Indonesia had been reluctant to make so sweeping a commitment to the Cambodian resistance, and the Philippines had remained generally distant from the problem. Among the ASEAN nations, only Thailand and Singapore have been giving military aid to the rebel coalition.
President Reagan said today that “bad judgment on both sides” had led to the melee at the Seoul airport between South Korean security agents and an American delegation accompanying the opposition leader Kim Dae Jung on his return from two years’ exile in the United States. The President said in an interview that the incident had “tended to hide the fact that Korea, South Korea, has made great strides in democracy” and “that they have a prosperity that is far above that of a great many of their neighbors in that part of the world.” “Their democracy is working,” the President declared. . Several members of the American delegation who returned to Washington tonight described the airport melee as a “deliberate assault” by South Korean Government agents and disputed Mr. Reagan’s explanation of what occurred. “That is just dead wrong,” said Robert E. White, a former United States Ambassador to El Salvador. “There was no bad judgment on the part of the Koreans, there was a deliberate plot – a deliberate breaking of an agreement they had with the Reagan Administration.”
A three-week campaign for the South Korean National Assembly ended today amid predictions that the ruling party might lose ground in the balloting on Tuesday. The campaign was marked by unusually strong denunciations of the Government by an emboldened opposition. Many political commentators, some of them allies of the Government, said they saw a possibility that the ruling Democratic Justice Party would lose Assembly seats in the elections as well as slip in its share of the popular vote since the last balloting, held in 1981. Should that happen, the analysts say, the results would inevitably be interpreted as a blow to President Chun Doo Hwan.
Any American economic reprisals for New Zealand’s antinuclear policy would only make New Zealand less likely to cooperate militarily with the United States, Prime Minister David Lange said in Wellington. “Anything that cuts us back in the United States market cuts back our possibility of taking our part in regional cooperation,” Mr. Lange said in an interview with two American reporters. Last week, New Zealand said it would not permit an American warship to make a port call unless the Government was assured that the vessel carried no nuclear weapons. The United States, as a matter of policy, refuses to give such assurances.
The United States Embassy announced today that an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration had been kidnapped in the western Mexico city of Guadalajara. The kidnappers were believed to be involved in drug trafficking in Mexico. The kidnapping was the first of a United States narcotics agent in Mexico since the two countries began the current phase of a joint anti-drug effort in 1975.
False data on aid for El Salvador is being given to Congress by the Reagan Administration, according to a bipartisan Congressional caucus. The group said Congress had been supplied with “insufficient, misleading and in some cases false information” on the purposes and results of the aid program. The caucus said the aid was worsening El Salvador’s problems and prolonging the civil war.
Even as the guerrilla war on Nicaragua’s borders intensifies, the Nicaraguan Government is aiming its sights at what it views as an equally dangerous enemy: the peddlers and small shopkeepers it has classified as “speculators, profiteers and hoarders.” In the National Assembly, Carlos Nunez Tellez, the body’s president, called on Nicaraguans this week to wage a “war on speculation” as part of “the integral defense of the nation.” On the streets of Managua, slogans from elections lazst November have been painted over with such exhortations as “Down With Profiteering!”
President-elect Tancredo Neves of Brazil said he will convene a national assembly next year to rewrite the nation’s constitution, which was drafted in 1969 under a military government. Military rule is to end March 15, when Neves is to be installed in office. The 1969 constitution gave the military wide-ranging powers, and one amendment allowed the government to override Congress. Neves, who was chosen January 15 by the 686-member Electoral College, did not detail his plans for the assembly, but during his campaign, he pledged to reinstate direct presidential elections.
Thousands of black schoolchildren rioted in Seeisoville, about 125 miles southwest of Johannesburg in South Africa’s Orange Free State, setting fire to shops, offices and automobiles in an anti-government demonstration. Police used rubber bullets and tear gas to break up the rioting, and no serious injuries were reported. It was unclear what provoked the outburst, but students in many black areas. have become restive at the government’s delay in letting students elect their own leaders. The latter usually are chosen by school administrators.
South Africa’s official white opposition party is planning to seek a judicial inquiry into police activity in this region after reports of unprovoked police violence in black townships, legislators here say. The accusations of violence were made in a series of sworn affidavits collected in recent weeks by two white political activists, Molly Blackburn and Di Bishop, both members of the opposition Progressive Federal Party. John Malcolmess, a Port Elizabeth parliamentary deputy from the same party, said he would present some of the affidavits to Parliament in Cape Town on Tuesday and seek the establishment of a judicial inquiry.
Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio) said that Edwin Meese III has shown “extremely poor judgment at best and an ethical blind spot at worst” as a top White House adviser and should be rejected when his nomination for attorney general comes before the Senate. Glenn told a Washington news conference that he will vote against the Meese nomination and urged other lawmakers to do the same when the matter comes to the floor, perhaps on February 20. The Judiciary Committee on February 5 voted 12 to 6 to recommend confirmation of Meese.
The death rate in the United States has dropped to a record low and Americans can expect to live longer than ever before, new Government statistics show. Life expectancy at birth “continued its upward trend and reached a new high of 74.6 years” in 1982, the National Center for Health Statistics reported. The final mortality statistics for 1982, made public last week, show this was an increase in life expectancy from 74.2 years in 1981 and 73.7 years in 1980.
A special Navy tribunal formed to investigate allegations of illegal gift-giving by contractors to retired Admiral Hyman G. Rickover began interviewing officials of the General Dynamics Corp., naval sources said. General Dynamics builds the Navy’s nuclear-powered Trident submarines, and company officials have acknowledged privately giving Rickover some gifts of jewelry. Rickover, who retired on January 31, 1982, has acknowledged receiving some gifts but adamantly denied ever providing favors in return.
The Air Force confirmed that President Reagan’s fiscal 1986 budget includes a spending increase for research that might one day make it easier for U.S. missiles to foil Soviet defenses. But the service denied one part of a published report that it was actually developing a new type of “maneuvering” nuclear warhead for the MX or Midgetman missiles. There are no plans for constructing or deploying such a warhead on either the MX or Midgetman, the Air Force said, contradicting a report in the New York Times.
There is no evidence so far that the death rate for Air Force personnel who handled the defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War is higher than that for the general population, the Air Force said. A second Air Force analysis of the mortality rate among 1,256 individuals studied said that they “are living significantly longer than expected” when compared to the American white male population.
Leaders of eight states and a Canadian province pledged in Milwaukee to protect the Great Lakes region’s huge supplies of fresh water from diversion to parched parts of the continent. Governor James J. Blanchard of Michigan, one of six governors attending a ceremony to sign the Great Lakes Charter, called it both a milestone and a message for the Sun Belt states that consider the Great Lakes, which hold 20% of the world’s fresh water, a possible remedy to their water-supply problems.
Reporters have a First Amendment right to attend federal hearings in Price, Utah, into the Wilberg Mine disaster as long as other interested parties are being admitted, a federal judge ruled in Salt Lake City. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration convened the hearings to hear testimony from Emery employees about the deaths of 27 miners at the Wilberg Mine on December 19, when a fire broke out in a tunnel. The Society of Professional Journalists, The Associated Press, United Press International and 11 other news organizations filed suit to force access to the hearings. Officials of the mine agency and the Emery Mining Corporation, operator of the Wilberg Mine, declined comment today, saying they would have to study the court order. A fire in the mine killed 27 miners December 19.
Chained and confined to a wheelchair because authorities feared that he would refuse to walk, a man charged with killing three persons at a country church was arraigned as 2,000 mourners gathered to honor the victims: a priest, a lay minister and the church janitor. Bryan Stanley, 29, charged with the slayings at St. Patrick’s Church in Onalaska, Wisconsin, entered no plea. Circuit Judge Peter Pappas set $150,000 cash bail and scheduled a hearing for February 21. Police said that Stanley, who called himself “Elijah” and reportedly has a history of mental problems, shot the three men because the priest permitted girls to read Scripture during Mass.
The nude, beaten body of a woman who put up “an awful fight” was found less than 100 yards from the Lowell, Massachusetts police station, officers said today. The police were searching for a motive and suspects in the slaying of Patricia S. Richard, 23 years old, of Lowell, whose body was found in a stairwell Sunday morning, Police Superintendent John Sheehan said. Because Mrs. Richard, who had given birth to her first child nine days earlier, was beaten so badly, inspectors were having difficulty determining what kind of instrument, if any, was used in the slaying, officials said.
Three former Philadelphia police vice officers convicted of racketeering were sentenced today to prison terms ranging from three to seven years by a federal judge who said he had “no choice” but to incarcerate them. The sentences were imposed by Federal District Judge Daniel Huyett 3d, who has presided over the police corruption trials that stemmed from a 3½- year federal probe. The officers, convicted of conspiracy, racketeering and extortion, were among 17 convicted in a conspiracy prosecutors say resulted in the extortion of $350,000 since January 1980 to protect illegal gambling in the city. “If we cannot trust the police, who can we trust,” Judge Huyett said. “I have no choice other than to impose a substantial term of incarceration.”
A lawyer for Cathy Evelyn Smith, who is charged with murdering John Belushi, the comedian, said in court today that he wants to take the case to trial. As a result, the Los Angeles District Attorney withdrew an offer to have Miss Smith plead guilty to a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter. Miss Smith’s lawyer, Howard L. Weitzman, told a judge in Los Angeles Superior Court that after reading grand jury transcripts and reports from the Los Angeles Medical Examiner, “I believe this case should be tried on the homicide count.”
Many students are being “ripped off” by colleges, according to William J. Bennett, the new Secretary of Education. In an interview, Mr. Bennett said that “most colleges promise to make you better culturally and morally, but it is not evident that they do.” The Secretary asserted that poor management and ill-conceived curriculums made it “reasonable to ask” whether so many young people should go to college.
The Federal Election Commission today ordered George McGovern’s 1984 Presidential campaign committee to repay the Government some $25,000 in Federal matching funds, part of which were used to help pay him a salary when he was seeking the Democratic nomination. The former South Dakota Senator was paid a $50,000 salary by the campaign committee to make up for lost earnings on the lecture circuit.
After weeks of keeping New York’s Grand Central Terminal open all night to shelter the homeless seeking refuge there, the president of the Metro-North Commuter Railroad said yesterday that he would resume closing the station at the request of Mayor Koch. Railroad officials said that the crime rate in the terminal had risen sharply after the railroad began allowing the homeless to sleep there last month and that several passengers had been hurt in encounters with vagrants. Mayor Koch said he made the request after reading news reports of the problems the new policy was causing. “I thought it was an outrageous situation that people should be placed in a dangerous situation,” he said at a City Hall news conference.
Costly malpractice claims and rising patient expectations are prompting a significant number of the nation’s doctors to abandon obstetrics. According to several experts, the care of women during pregnancy and birth and immediately afterward has become too financially risky for hundreds of specialists.
Five wrongful arrests over 14 months were cited by a 27-year-old Michigan man. In a federal suit, the man, Terry Dean Rogan, charged he had been wrongfully detained after an arrest warrant for a man using his name was placed in the FBI’s national computer system.
Viruses related to those that cause common warts are coming under increasing suspicion as factors in causing human cancer of the cervix and other types of malignancy. Scientists have found strong evidence linking some of the viruses with genital cancers.
Lincoln’s stature is sustained by a major cache of family documents being examined by historians. The letters totaling about 20,000 pages provide fascinating insights into the 16th President.
Minnesota Twins first baseman Kent Hrbek signs a new 5-year, $6 million contract that makes him the club’s first $1 million player.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1276.06 (-13.91)
Born:
Mike Richards, Canadian National Team and NHL centre (Olympic gold medal, 2010; NHL Champions, Stanley Cup, 2012, 2014-Kings; NHL All-Star, 2008; Philadelphia Flyers, Los Angeles Kings, Washington Capitals), in Kenora, Canada.
Ryan Mundy, NFL safety (Pittsburgh Steelers, New York Giants, Chicago Bears), in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Lionel Dotson, NFL defensive tackle (Miami Dolphins, Buffalo Bills), in Houston, Texas.
Chris Ellis, NFL defensive end (Buffalo Bills), in Hampton, Virginia.
William Beckett, American singer-songwriter (The Academy Is…), in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.
Died:
Heinz Roemheld, 83, American film composer (Yankee Doodle Dandy; Ruby Gentry), dies of pneumonia.
Henry Hathaway, 86, American actor and director of westerns (Nob Hill), dies of a heart attack.
History Diaries 