Konstantin U. Chernenko was shown on Soviet television casting a ballot in his first public appearance in almost two months. The Soviet leader appeared frail, unsteady, and grim-faced as he put his ballot in a box and posed for photographers. Tass reported that the Soviet leader had cast his ballot at a polling station in the Krasnopresnensky district of the capital, but the room shown on television had none of the bustle and only the basic trappings of a polling place. He was voting in elections for members of the Supreme Soviets, the nominal legislatures of the republics that make up the Soviet Union. Two days ago Mr. Chernenko failed to deliver a scheduled pre-election speech, and Viktor V. Grishin, the Moscow Communist Party leader and a member of the policy-making Communist Party Politburo, announced on Soviet television that the 73-year-old Soviet leader stayed away “on the recommendation of doctors.” That was the first official hint in the Soviet Union that Mr. Chernenko was not well. The televised appearance today, which came 59 days after Mr. Chernenko’s last public appearance, seemed intended to quiet speculation about the gravity of his condition.
Soviet elections are usually the only time when foreign reporters are permitted a close-up view of the Soviet leader. None were permitted to watch Mr. Chernenko, but they were invited to watch Mikhail S. Gorbachev, a fellow member of the Politburo and of the Secretariat, which runs the day-to-day affairs of the Soviet Union. The choice was noted with interest by diplomats since Mr. Gorbachev, 53, is widely held to be the strongest candidate to succeed Mr. Chernenko. Mr. Gorbachev voted at the polling station in the House of Architects, where Mr. Chernenko would normally have voted. The scene contrasted sharply with the stiff portrayal of Mr. Chernenko voting. Mr. Gorbachev arrived with his wife, Raisa Maximovna; his daughter, Irina, and his young granddaughter, Oksana. He chatted cheerily with polling officials and then helped his granddaughter push the ballot into the box. When photographers asked for a repeat, he smiled and said, “You can only vote once.” Soviet television and the evening newspapers did not show Mr. Gorbachev.
The outlawed Irish Republican Army said it has executed an unemployed laborer for being a police informer, but a Belfast police spokesman called the death a “brutal killing without justification.” The body of Kevin Coyle, 24, the father of three children, was found in a Londonderry street with a single gunshot wound to the head. The body was discovered 19 hours after a British army patrol ambushed and killed three armed IRA members. There was no apparent connection between the incidents.
Scuffles broke out near the residence of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and more than 50 people were arrested as thousands of British coal miners marched through central London in support of their 11-month-old strike over pit closings. Police blamed a “young hooligan element, not all miners,” for the trouble. Union leaders estimated that 80,000 took part in the march, but police put the figure at about 14,000.
Sweden massed 22,000 soldiers on its border with Norway today in its largest military exercise since World War II, aimed at showing it is ready to repel attacks from the west as well as the east. Sweden does not belong to any military alliance. In the maneuvers, code-named Western Border, army units and 100 aircraft will stage a mock offensive through the western provinces of Dalarna and Varmland. Previous major exercises were held in northern and eastern Sweden, presupposing an attack from Warsaw Pact forces.
Israel responded coldly to the peace principles announced by King Hussein of Jordan and the P.L.O.’s chairman, Yasser Arafat. Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir said today that the agreement between King Hussein and Arafat, in no way amounted to an “opening to peace.” “We do not see this agreement as being any opening to peace in the region,” Mr. Shamir said this morning before leaving on a trip to Europe. “It is our belief that there is no lack of peace programs, but rather a lack of readiness and desire for peace on the Arab nation’s part. “Israel continues to stand by its adherence to the Camp David agreements and its readiness to conduct negotiations with Jordan without preconditions,” Mr. Shamir said.
Israeli soldiers besieged at least nine Shiite Muslim villages in southern Lebanon today, continuing their crackdown on the underground resistance. Several attacks on Israeli positions or those of the Israeli-paid South Lebanon Army were reported overnight, including two assaults with rocket-propelled grenades on the Israeli intelligence headquarters in the market town of Nabatiye. Israel initiated what its Defense Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, called an “iron fist policy” last week to try to suppress the guerrillas after three Israelis, including a colonel advising the South Lebanon Army, were killed in the first three days after the Israelis pulled back to positions south of Sidon.
Egypt’s President urged the Reagan Administration to invite Israel and a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to the United States to lay the groundwork for direct peace talks. President Hosni Mubarak said he was willing to act as host for such a meeting in Cairo, or to attend one “anywhere” that was agreeable to all parties. He praised the joint peace framework outlined by King Hussein and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, “as a very good achievement,” and stressed that the cooperation agreement, made public on Saturday in Jordan, was “only a first step.”
Reagan Administration officials said today that they were encouraged by the revived interest in negotiations being expressed by Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But they said there had not yet been sufficient movement for the United States to begin a new Middle East initiative. Commenting on the agreement between Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization on principles for negotiation, and on the remarks President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt made today urging a more active American negotiating role, a senior State Department official said: “At this time, we think this is still a process going on in the Arab world of defining the terms for negotiations, and it is not time yet for the United States to be injecting itself into it.” King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, when he was in Washington earlier this month, also called on the United States to play a more active role.
Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi urged black U.S. servicemen to leave the military and create a separate army because the United States “must be destroyed.” Qaddafi, in a 40-minute speech sent via satellite from Libya to a Chicago convention of the Nation of Islam, which is led by the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, urged U.S. blacks to fight for an independent state because they have been excluded by whites from political and social life in the United States. Farrakhan called Qaddafi “a fellow struggler in the cause of liberation” of blacks.
Crowds enraged by the police killing of a popular politician rioted in two towns south of New Delhi, clashing with officers and torching police checkpoints and vehicles. Police in Rajasthan state said four people were killed and 16 wounded. However, the Press Trust of India said seven people died and 175 were wounded. The disorders in Deeg and Bharatpur were sparked by the slaying last Thursday of Rajah Man Singh, a state legislator and younger brother of the former ruler of a local principality. Police said they shot Singh in self-defense, but Singh’s supporters say he was shot without cause.
A ranking Sri Lankan government official has been found slain after he was seized by separatist guerrillas in the island’s troubled north. Another official abducted with him was freed, government sources said. Security forces of the Sinhalese-majority regime suspect that ethnic Tamil separatists are behind the killing of K. Gnachandran, chief provincial administrator for the Mulativu district, whose body was found with gunshot wounds in the head. Thilingan Kirubaitilakan, a deputy planning director, was reported unharmed.
A Pakistani agent in the United States operated for nine months ending in mid-1984 in an attempt to illegally obtain nuclear-bomb triggers. The agent was arrested last June while trying to smuggle 50 of the devices, known as krytrons, out of Houston. Customs agents had been monitoring his activities since the previous October, according to court documents, the Pakistani’s lawyers and United States officials.
A 29-year-old Australian woman has given birth to the world’s first twins produced from frozen embryos, the Queen Victoria Medical Center in Melbourne said. The healthy baby girls were born last Friday at the center, where the first frozen-embryo test-tube baby was born in 1983.
The governing Human Rights Protection Party won a landslide victory in Western Samoa’s general elections Saturday and will have about two-thirds of the seats in the next Parliament, election officials said today. Early results indicated that Prime Minister Tofilau Eti Alesana’s party had won 31 seats in the 47-seat assembly, the officials said. The Government was opposed by the Samoa Christian Democratic Alliance, formed only last week by former Prime Minister Tupuola Efi, and by independents. Only about 16,000 of the country’s 160,000 people were eligible to vote under the Matai system, in which families are represented by their chosen heads. Both parties pledged during the campaign to hold a referendum on universal suffrage if they won. The election could be the last under the system that has operated since the Pacific nation gained independence from New Zealand in 1962.
A test launch of an unarmed United States cruise missile over the Canadian Arctic was postponed today for the third straight day, prompting frustrated protesters to pack up and go home. Major Richard Adam of the Canadian forces said heavy fog and snow blanketing the target area in northeastern Alberta would have made it difficult to monitor the launch. Weather permitting, the test will take place Monday afternoon, he said. The launch of the 22-foot-long missile was originally scheduled for last Friday but was postponed a day when mechanics discovered a fuel leak. The test was again postponed Saturday when icy fog grounded a key support aircraft at Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington. Officials announced late Saturday that the test today had been called off. The environmental group Greenpeace had planned to hoist a giant “cruise catcher” fish net in the path of the missile but called off their protest after learning about the latest postponement.
A Mexican suspected in the kidnapping of a United States drug agent left Mexico over the weekend with the help of Mexican police officers, an American official said today. The official, Francis M. Mullen Jr., head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, identified the man as Rafael Caro-Quintero. He said the man was “one of those whom we suspect, one of those traffickers involved in the kidnapping” of Enrique Camarena Salazar, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, on February 7 in Guadalajara. Mr. Mullen, appearing on the ABC News program “This Week,” said his agency had been told that Mr. Caro- Quintero left Guadalajara by plane Saturday night despite attempts by the Mexican judicial police to detain him with a warrant. “We have now learned he had as protection members of the Department of Federal Security,” the top Mexican law enforcement agency, Mr. Mullen said. He said there was an “element of the police letting this individual go.”
A group of U.S. Roman Catholic church leaders, led by Archbishop John J. O’Connor of New York and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, arrived in Nicaragua at the start of a Central American tour aimed at examining conflicts involving the church. In Managua, where the ruling Sandinistas and the Catholic Church have clashed openly, the Americans will meet with President Daniel Ortega and other officials. Later in the week, they will go on to El Salvador.
The push for covert aid to the Nicaraguan rebels was renewed by the Reagan Administration after it concluded that open aid could cost the United States the support of its most important allies in Central America, senior Administration officials said.
Forty thousand metric tons of American wheat, the largest single consignment of grain ever sent to this drought- afflicted nation, arrived at the Red Sea port of Assab this weekend, the United Nations World Food Program’s office here announced. The shipment represents the first consignment of food aid by the United States Government directly to the Ethiopian Government.
Nigeria sent two naval vessels and five military transport planes to the remote West African nation of Equatorial Guinea to evacuate about 500 of its nationals reportedly laboring as slaves, the News Agency of Nigeria said. The action followed reports that some of the Nigerians have sought refuge in the Nigerian Embassy in Malabo, capital of the ministate off the Nigerian coast. A Spanish newspaper, ABC, said the Nigerians who took refuge were revolting against harsh working conditions on cocoa plantations in Equatorial Guinea. In the past, Nigerian workers have been evacuated because of oppressive treatment, particularly during the brutal regime of executed dictator Macias Nguema Biyogo.
A year’s freeze on federal spending except for programs for the poor was called for by Democratic and Republican governors. The call came from the executive committee of the National Governor’s Association. Governors belonging to both parties attacked the Administration for proposing deep cuts in Federal aid to the states and local governments while refusing to cut military spending and entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
The best federal help for farmers would be a reduction in the budget deficit, said the Senate majority leader, Bob Dole, to legislators from 30 states. Mr. Dole said that agriculture would have to absorb its share of spending cuts. He spoke at a meeting in Washington of more than 200 state officials who gathered to discuss the growing farm recession in their areas. They also were preparing to hold a large lobbying campaign in Washington next week as Congress debates farm credit bills.
President Reagan returns to the White House from the weekend at Camp David.
The President and the First Lady host a dinner in honor of the Governors of the States and Territories.
The Reagan Administration’s spending for research into AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, has not matched the deadly disease’s designation as the country’s top health priority, according to a new Congressional report. Spending requested by the Department of Health and Human Services in the last three years was less than what the department’s research agencies had sought, the report said.
Murray P. Haydon drank liquids a week after his diseased heart was replaced with a plastic-and-metal implant, while fellow heart patient William J. Schroeder relaxed after an informal party for his son, Terry. “Mr. Haydon is progressing as expected,” Humana Hospital Audubon spokesman Robert Irvine said in Louisville, Kentucky. “All his vital signs are normal and the Jarvik-7 artificial heart is working perfectly.”
Police stepped up patrols at abortion clinics throughout the Dallas area after arson destroyed a clinic in this suburban community. “When there’s been one, there’s always a possibility of another,” said Deputy Police Chief George Reed of Dallas. The police in Mesquite said they had no suspects in the fire, which destroyed the Women’s Clinic of Mesquite Friday night. Officials said the clinic had received several threatening phone calls in recent months, and that anti-abortion groups regularly picketed outside. The fire was condemned by people on both sides of the abortion debate.
Four people who damaged a Minuteman 2 nuclear missile silo with a jackhammer say they were not surprised by their convictions on charges of conspiring to impede national defense. A Federal court jury deliberated two hours Friday before delivering guilty verdicts on all four counts of conspiracy to damage Federal property and impede national defense. The defendants showed no reaction to the verdict, but their supporters sang, “Rejoice, rejoice,” as they left the courtroom. The four face possible prison terms of 25½ years and fines of $30,000. “The true verdict in this case will be rendered by God, not by man,” said Helen Woodson, who with the others attacked above-ground equipment at a Minuteman 2 silo with a jackhammer and household hammers in November.
The Federal Aviation Administration has revoked Capitol Air Service’s operating license, grounding the commuter airline for the second time in 11 months. The agency took the action Saturday, saying the airline, which is based here, had maintained “inadequate pilot records regarding crew training and flight and duty time, questionable pilot records involving crew training and an apparent falsification of records relating to a flight check, and the use of inadequate weight information regarding baggage and passengers.” Gary Cromer Jr., general manager of the airline, said it would apply for a new operating certificate. He said the record-keeping violations did not affect passenger safety. Capitol serves Topeka, Lawrence, Salina, and Manhattan in Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri. Mr. Cromer said the grounding would leave Lawrence, where the University of Kansas is, without air service. But it was not expected to have a major impact on Lawrence because most of the city’s residents travel to nearby Kansas City International Airport for air service.
Teachers in several communities across Mississippi voted to go on strike today in a pay dispute, despite a judge’s order forbidding it. However, the Mississippi Association of Educators, which issued the statewide strike call to its 13,000 members, “plans to comply with the restraining order and notify all of our locals of the order,” acting Executive Director Herman Coleman said. But he noted that there were questions about whether Judge Paul G. Alexander, who issued the restraining order, had jurisdiction statewide. Before news of the statewide order, about 50 teachers groups had vowed to walk off the job. Mississippi teachers earn an average yearly salary of $15,971, the lowest in the nation.
Americans believe it now takes at least $302 a week for a husband, wife and two children to make ends meet, the highest figure recorded in Gallup surveys since 1937, but statistically unchanged from the amounts recorded in each of the last three years, according to the latest Gallup Poll. The sharply lower inflation rate during this period is reflected in this trend. According to the federal consumer price index, living costs for 1984 were only 4% higher than the comparable 1983 period.
A liberal minister who says that conservative Presbyterians offered him money to abandon his pulpit said the appointment of a disciplinary committee showed that the entire church was behind his congregation. Leaders from 116 St. Louis area Presbyterian churches voted last week to appoint a disciplinary committee to investigate the charges brought by the Rev. Robert Tabscott, pastor of the liberal Des Peres Presbyterian Church in Frontenac. The committee will investigate allegations that three members of the governing board of the conservative Central Presbyterian Church in Clayton offered to buy out Tabscott.
The newly elected president of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly said that after being ignored by the Democratic Party for years, a growing number of Latinos are backing the GOP. “The Democratic Party for years has taken the Hispanic population for granted,” Fernando de Baca said, shortly after being elected president at the group’s national convention in Denver. De Baca served as a liaison for Latino affairs during the Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford administrations.
David Port, whose case drew national attention when his parents refused to testify against him before a grand jury, goes on trial today in New Braunfels, Texas, on charges that he killed a letter carrier. If convicted, Port, 18, faces up to life in prison. Debora Sue Schatz, 23, disappeared June 7, 1984, while delivering mail in the affluent Houston neighborhood where Port lived with his parents.
The large mortgage losses of the Bank of America reflect a pattern of defaults that have stung other California lending institutions and cheated mortgage investors across the country, bankers, lawyers and law-enforcement officials are concluding in their examination of documents. They say that it is unlikely that a single criminal mastermind has created the problem that led to the Bank of America’s startling losses and that it is more plausible that various operators have exploited the same weaknesses in the mortgage markets.
Bernhard H. Goetz appeared yesterday at an arraignment to show support for a Brooklyn man accused of killing one of two men who were reportedly stealing candy from a subway newsstand. Mr. Goetz, who shot four teen-agers December 22 after one of them asked him for money on an IRT No. 2 train, told reporters that he had come to the hearing because he sympathized with the suspect, Andrew Franklin. He said he believed that Mr. Franklin had acted in self-defense.
Republican gains in Texas could become permanent following President Reagan’s capture of 61 percent of the vote last November, political experts say. This could have important implications for the Democratic Party because no Democrat has been elected President without carrying traditionally Democratic Texas.
A Mason, Michigan man charged with shooting his wife to death told the police he was provoked by her poor cooking and sloppy housekeeping, officers said. Stanley Diehl, 52 years old, said he had been upset about it for some time, Detective Richard Fitzgerald said at a preliminary hearing Thursday. Mr. Diehl was held for trial on a charge of second-degree murder in the death of his wife, Ellen, on December 4. The detective said he believed the couple’s home had “not been properly cleaned in a year.” It was filled with dust and cobwebs, and littered with dog manure and food, he said. The cleanest area was a bedroom where Mr. Diehl kept his rifles and shotguns, he said.
Floods closed roads and forced hundreds of people from their homes yesterday as a winter marked by record cold and highway-blocking snow took an abrupt weekend break. In the eastern quarter of the nation, summerlike temperatures set records. Streams were out of their banks from Oklahoma to parts of Michigan and New York State, and high water took at least three lives. Dense fog was blamed for five deaths in traffic and airplane accidents in Michigan. Temperature records melted Sunday all along the East Coast; it was 80 degrees in Roanoke, Virginia, for example, and 71 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Some rivers in Indiana were reported heading for their highest levels in nearly 30 years, and the Huron River in north-central Ohio was six feet above flood stage and rising. Some people were reported to have left their homes near Milan, Ohio, and Marion, Indiana.
NFL quarterback Joe Montana (28) weds actress and model Jennifer Wallace.
Jim Kelly of the Houston Gamblers (USFL) passes for pro football record 574 yards. Kelly threw for three touchdowns in the last ten minutes to rally Houston to a 34–33 victory over the L.A. Express.
Born:
Jessica-Jane Clement, English actress (“The Real Hustle”), television presenter and former glamour model, in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom.
Justin Harper, NFL wide receiver (Baltimore Ravens), in Catawba, North Carolina.
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