The Soviet Union formally protested U.S. charges that it has violated existing arms control agreements and accused Washington of trying to “poison the atmosphere” of next month’s arms talks in Geneva. “The unsubstantiated and groundless charges… have been categorically rejected,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Vladimir Lomeiko, said. Lomeiko said that the Soviet Embassy in Washington has filed a formal protest over the charges, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard N. Perle and Assistant Secretary of State Richard R. Burt.
Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi says the success of arms negotiations in Geneva could depend on the willingness of the United States to show sensitivity to Soviet “preoccupations” over President Reagan’s proposed space defense system. “We must declare from the very beginning the negotiability of this matter,” Mr. Craxi said in an interview Monday. The Italian leader said that “guarantees must be given” on the system to overcome “the preoccupations of the Soviets.” He did not specify what guarantees he thought would satisfy the Soviet Union.
Pope John Paul II and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei A. Gromyko, met for nearly two hours today and discussed world peace and the situation of the Roman Catholic Church in the Soviet Union, a Vatican spokesman said. It is believed that Mr. Gromyko was also seeking to enlist the Pope’s opposition to the United States plan for a space-based defense system. The Pope has so far declined to take a stand on the issue, and Vatican officials seemed to go out of their way to emphasize that he placed greater priority on reports of religious persecution in the Soviet Union.
The British Government declared today that more than half of Britain’s coal miners were at their jobs and that the nation’s longest strike had crumbled after a year of violence and bitterness. Union leaders disputed the assertions and urged strikers to stand firm. A surge back to the mines began this week after the union rejected a settlement negotiated by the state-owned industry and the Trades Union Congress, Britain’s giant labor confederation. After the turndown, management said there would be no more talks. The Coal Board said 1,218 miners abandoned the strike today, bringing the number at work to nearly 94,000 — more than half the union’s 186,064 members.
A bid to drive the dollar down was pressed successfully by major European central banks for the second consecutive day. Dealers and bankers estimated that five European central banks sold $1 billion or more from their reserves to depress the dollar.
Heavy fog obscured highways in Belgium, the Netherlands and West Germany today, and the police said about 375 cars and trucks piled up in several separate accidents. At least four people were reported killed. One accident, in which at least three people were killed, involved about 150 cars on a highway between Cologne and Aachen in West Germany, West German authorities said. The police also said about 50 vehicles crashed on a highway near Neuss, a suburb of Düsseldorf in West Germany. In Belgium, the police said several pileups involved a total of about 25 trucks and 150 cars on a highway near Antwerp, and one person died.
Prime Minister Shimon Peres told Egyptian envoys here today that Israel supported President Hosni Mubarak’s call for direct talks between Israel and a delegation of Jordanians and Palestinians, government officials said. The Prime Minister’s spokesman, Uri Savir, told reporters that Mr. Peres was ready for direct talks with Jordan or with a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, provided it did not include known members of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In a speech delivered in English this evening in Natanya to the Women’s International Zionist Organization, Mr. Peres outlined what he felt all the parties in the Middle East had to do. “What we have to agree,” he said, “is to negotiations in Cairo under the hospitality of the Egyptian President, with American participation, and with a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation without the P.L.O. — without declared members of the P.L.O. — and an Israeli delegation — and let’s move ahead.”
Yasser Arafat was quoted today as having said he accepted a key United Nations resolution as a basis for Middle East peace talks. In an interview to be published Friday, Al Hawadess, a London-based, Arabic-language weekly magazine, quoted Mr. Arafat as endorsing Security Council Resolution 242, which calls for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories in exchange for peace.
Two Syrians being deported from West Germany hijacked a Lufthansa airliner on a flight from Frankfurt to Damascus and forced it to land in Vienna. They surrendered five hours later after freeing all 41 passengers and crew. Authorities said the hijackers, who were not identified, were armed with broken bottles and table knives when they commandeered the Boeing 727 in what they said was a bid to seek political asylum in Austria. A West German police spokesman did not specify the reasons for their deportation but said the two had been arrested in West Berlin and did not have “spotless records.”
Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid offered to end a decade of hostility between his country and Morocco by merging all Arab nations in North Africa, including Libya and Tunisia, into a single union, Morocco’s official news agency reported. His only condition for such a merger is that the disputed Western Sahara must form a separate component of the union. Morocco broke relations with Algeria ten years ago over its backing for the Polisario guerrillas fighting for the independence of Western Sahara. There was no immediate comment from the Moroccan government on Bendjedid’s offer.
Three warplanes, identified as Iranian F-4 Phantoms, strafed a Greek supertanker in the Persian Gulf off Qatar, salvage executives reported. “It appears the Iranians hit the Greek ship by mistake,” said a shipping executive in Bahrain. “Why should the Iranians hit a ship that is heading for Kharg (Island), their own port in the gulf?” Meanwhile, Iraq reported that its planes attacked a large naval target near Kharg Island and scored “an accurate and effective hit.” It could not immediately be determined whether the two reports were about the same attack.
Three gang leaders were indicted today in Taipei on charges of killing a Chinese-American writer in California. A court indictment said Chen Chi-li, 41 years old; Wu Tun, 35, and Tung Kuei-sheng, 33, who has fled to the Philippines, had been charged with murder, illegal possession of arms and organizing criminal societies. The writer, Henry Liu, 52, wrote books and articles critical of Taiwan’s policies, including a biography of President Chiang Ching-kuo. Taiwan has rejected a United States request to extradite the murder suspects for trial in the United States. The indictment said Mr. Chen and Mr. Wu had admitted the killing under interrogation. Earlier, Justice Minister Shih Chi-yang told Parliament that Mr. Chen, head of the Bamboo Union gang, had said he had been ordered by Taiwan’s military intelligence bureau to kill Mr. Liu in Daly City, California, on October 15. Mr. Shih said the bureau admitted employing Mr. Chen to spy against China but denied it had ordered him to kill anyone.
The Philippine court trying General Fabian C. Ver and 25 others in the assassination of the opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. in 1983 suspended sessions today until Monday after key witnesses withdrew or failed to appear. General Ver is on leave from his post as armed forces chief of staff. A lawyer connected with the case said key witnesses had been in hiding for months. They were civilian employes at the Manila airport when Mr. Aquino, who was returning from exile, was assassinated. They told an independent fact-finding commission last year that they saw Mr. Aquino still descending the airplane stairway when he was killed. Their testimony and others led the commission to conclude that Mr. Aquino had been killed by one of the soldiers escorting him, and that the soldier had acted upon superior orders.
Three Mexican suspects in the kidnapping of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent remained under interrogation, Mexican government officials announced in Mexico City. The three may be released today, the officials said. Meanwhile, U.S. Ambassador John Gavin spent the day in Guadalajara and met privately with Geneva Camarena, the wife of DEA agent Enrique Camarena, who was abducted February 7 and has not been heard from since.
Nicaraguan rebels are incapable of overthrowing the Sandinista Government in “the foreseeable future” regardless of whether they receive United States aid, according to General Paul F. Gorman, the retiring commander of American forces in Central America. But the commander, Gen. Paul F. Gorman, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that support of the rebels should be resumed, along with diplomatic measures, to keep up economic and political pressure and “bring the Sandinistas to a reckoning.” Asked after the hearing how long such pressure would take to produce changes in the Nicaraguan Government, he replied, “Years.” General Gorman, who will turn over his command on Saturday, said that while most of Nicaragua’s neighbors had unofficially told him that they would favor a change in the Sandinista Government, the rebel forces were too small and ill trained to accomplish such an objective.
A halt in Nicaraguan arms imports was announced by President Daniel Ortega Saavedra. He also said that Nicaragua would send home 100 Cuban military advisers in an effort to help reduce tensions in Central America that would hopefully be a first step toward a complete withdrawal of all foreign military advisers from the region.
Brazilian police rounded up key figures in a major drug ring and said they have dismantled a “Colombian cocaine Mafia.” Dozens of people were arrested in raids in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian cities, as well as in Amazon River basin areas close to the Colombian border. More than six pounds of cocaine and 30 suspects were seized in Sao Paulo alone. Narcotics agency officials said the ring was led by traffickers who fled Colombia in the wake of a 1983 crackdown there after the murder of Colombian Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. The ring is believed to have had about 300 members in Brazil.
Mauritania’s new constitutional charter is published. The charter unequivocally eliminated any of the pretenses of democracy embodied in the 1961 constitution. The charter also proclaimed Islam the state religion and sharia the only source of law. The military officer who took power in a coup in December says Mauritanians must first be educated before the country can be turned over to democracy. The officer, Col. Maaouniya Ould Sidi Ahmed Taya, declined today to say how long that might take. But he appeared to be sealing the possibility of a quick return to democracy, as the military pledged to do in 1978 when it overthrew the civilian one-party system in this arid land of mostly desert nomads. In the meantime, he said, in his first interview as President, respect for human rights is one of three main goals he has set. The others, he said, are ending corruption and promoting national unity.
A New Jersey businesswoman, imprisoned for more than a year on charges of illegal oil dealing, was acquitted and released yesterday by a Nigerian military tribunal, according to accounts of the trial reaching the United States. The businesswoman, Marie Lee McBroom, a 59-year-old commodities trader from Jersey City, boarded a Pan Am flight to New York just hours after she was released from Kiri-Kiri Prison in Lagos, according to a State Department spokesman. Representative Frank J. Guarini, Democrat of New Jersey, said the State Department had advised Mrs. McBroom to “leave Nigeria as quickly as she could, regardless of her personal belongings.”
President Reagan meets with Secretary of State George Shultz and Assistant for National Security Affairs Robert McFarlane to discuss the situation in Southern Africa.
Emergency loans for farmers to finance spring planting were approved by both the House and the Senate in the face of a veto threat by President Reagan.
Worried farmers gathered in Ames, Iowa, to stress that rural America is in trouble, with farms laden with debts farmers cannot pay and crops bringing in less than costs of production. The meeting drew more than 15,000 farmers from across the Middle West.
President Reagan hosts a breakfast meeting with the Senate Republican “Class of 1980” to discuss the MX missile program.
The synthetic fuels program is a “waste” but the Reagan Administration is not proposing to eliminate it because of a compromise reached in the Senate last year, according to David A. Stockman, the Federal budget director.
The launch of the space shuttle Challenger has been delayed for at least three additional days, and continued problems could jeopardize the space agency’s ambitious launch schedule for the rest of the year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. The latest setback means the Challenger, with Senator Jake Garn (R-Utah) in the crew, will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, no earlier than March 7. That is more than two weeks past the original launch date of February 20, and the delay will crowd the shuttle program down the line.
The National Institutes of Health must make a better assessment of the possible impact on the environment before approving outdoor experiments involving deliberate release of genetically engineered organisms, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled. The three-member panel stopped short of ordering the NIH to prepare a formal Environmental Impact Statement, which would require a detailed judgment.
Most of the money for retired General William C. Westmoreland’s libel suit against CBS came from Richard Mellon Scaife, one of the country’s richest men and a leading financier of New Right causes. Westmoreland’s chief defense lawyer, Dan M. Burt, said in an interview this week that Scaife, a great-grandson of the founder of the Mellon oil and banking empire, was the “real funder” of the Westmoreland case. Burt said Scaife put up more than $2 million of the approximately $3 million that it cost Burt’s Capital Legal Foundation to pursue the lawsuit.
A proposed blueprint for distributing a $190-million settlement to Vietnam veterans affected by Agent Orange would pay only those who were most heavily exposed to the herbicide and exhibit the most severe medical problems — an estimated 5% of the 200,000 who have filed claims. The families of about 3,000 veterans who have died since the war and about 7,000 veterans with long-term total disabilities would be eligible immediately for a share of a $130-million cash payment fund, according to preliminary estimates in the plan submitted to a federal court in Brooklyn.
Bernhard H. Goetz, who wounded four teenagers he says were trying to mug him on a subway December 22, told police that he tried to shoot one of them a second time because he could not see any blood and believed that he had missed, according to a transcript released in a Manhattan court. The fifth shot, which apparently went astray, was described in a statement by officer C. T. Domian that detailed Goetz’s alleged admissions after he surrendered to officers in New Hampshire. His statement said that, after admitting shooting the four youths, Goetz “further stated that he shot the fourth individual twice, that prior to doing so he told the individual: “You seem to be all right — here’s another.”
An 80-year-old San Francisco woman died of AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion, and one of her sons charged that the family learned the cause of death only after morticians refused to embalm her body. Anne Asaro, matriarch of a large Bay Area family, died last week. She had received the tainted blood last spring, when she received a transfusion from the city’s Irwin Blood Bank, her family said. Authorities said she was the 17th San Franciscan to die of the disease and the ninth to contract acquired immune deficiency syndrome after getting blood from the same blood bank. Officials there said tests last September were not definitive enough to warrant telling the woman that she might have the disease. John Asaro, one of the victim’s sons, said embalmers refused to prepare her body for a traditional Catholic open casket funeral, and it was only then that he was told that AIDS brought on the pneumonia that took her life.
A crucial statement by a defense attorney that was used to convict Claus von B”ulow of trying to kill his wife cannot be used in his retrial, a judge ruled today. The judge, Corinne Grande of the State Superior Court, denied two state motions concerning a statement by Mr. von Bülow’s former attorney, Herald Price Fahringer, who admitted in Mr. von Bülow’s first trial in 1982 that a needle the state said belonged to the defendant contained traces of insulin. But Thomas Puccio, who has replaced Mr. Fahringer, said the defense had developed evidence that insulin might never have existed on the needle because of “defects” in the testing process. The ruling opens the way for the defense to introduce new evidence it says will clear Mr. von Bülow of charges that he twice tried to kill his wife, Martha, with insulin shots in 1979 and 1980 in their mansion in Newport. Mrs. von Bülow is in an irreversible coma. Mr. von Bülow’s first trial ended with a conviction in 1982, but the Rhode Island Supreme Court overturned the verdict last year.
Four teenagers who used home computers to tap into a space agency computer at the Marshall Space Flight Center will not be prosecuted, United States Attorney Frank Donaldson announced today. The Federal Bureau of Investigation seized the youths’ computer equipment at their homes in Huntsville, Alabama, last July 16 after tracing the phone calls used to enter the computer. Unauthorized access to a computer is a felony. One of the youths, Robert Grumbles, 17 years old, said he was relieved not to be prosecuted, but he wished the FBI would return his $5,000 computer because “I don’t see any reason for them to keep it.”
A vice president of the Bank of Boston was told by Federal bank regulators as early as 1982 that the bank was not complying with international currency reporting regulations and promised to correct the situation, according to Treasury Department officials.
Republicans plan to target 25 to 30 Democratic members of Congress and spend $4 million to $5 million attacking their records for 18 months before the 1986 elections.
The National Institutes of Health did not fully assess impact on the environment when it approved a University of California plan to take genetically neered microbes out of laboratories for field tests, a Federal appeals court ruled today. The court barred the release of crobes until “an appropriate mental assessment is completed.” The ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of upheld a Federal District Court finding, preliminary injunction prevented Steven E. Lindow of the University of California at Berkeley from spraying a 200-foot row of potato plants with a common bacterium that had been altered in a laboratory so it would protect plants from frost. It would have been the first release of a man-made organism into the environment. The three-member appeals panel said the institutes could consider and approve other requests for outdoor release of such organisms but stressed that “appropriate environmental consideration” was needed.
Owning a freestanding house on its own land is still a goal of most Americans as it was of earlier generations, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll and interviews with owners and renters.
Virginia laws banning unmarried men and women from living together and having sex were ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge in Richmond. “In the view of this court, the constitutional right of privacy extends to a single adult’s decision whether to engage in sexual intercourse,” U.S. District Judge Robert R. Merhige Jr. wrote in the decision.
Seat belts must be worn by people in the front seats of cars in New Jersey, beginning tomorrow. State officials said they would rely more on good citizenship than on tough enforcement to increase use of the belts.
In New York, the first state to impose a mandatory seat-belt law, motorists and their passengers generally appear to be complying with the new law.
The Air Force has been breaking apart brand-new airplane engines bought for emergency use to get the parts it needs to keep its F-15 and F-16 fighters flying, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post. This cannibalization is occurring even though Congress has appropriated billions of dollars in recent years to buy spare parts for engines already in those planes, officials said. A major reason for the cannibalization, they said, is that contractors are not delivering the spare parts on time.
Nerve gas research was suspended today at the laboratories of Arthur D. Little Inc., a day after a judge upheld a ban on testing chemical warfare agents in the densely populated city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, attorneys for the city and the Little concern sought to clarify the decision made Tuesday by Judge Robert Hallisey of Middlesex Superior Court, which appeared to permit the experiments to continue while the case is appealed. Judge Hallisey ruled that a Cambridge health regulation outlawing use, storage, disposal or transportation of five poisonous chemicals was “valid and enforceable.” At the same time he refused to lift an injunction that had allowed the company to test the nerve gas while the issue was in court.
Confusion over the two Bookbinder’s seafood restaurants in Philadelphia occurs routinely among dining groups.
Henry Cabot Lodge died at his home in Beverly, Massachusetts, after a long illness. The articulate 82-year-old Republican was United States delegate to the United Nations, Ambassador to South Vietnam and a three-term Senator from Massachusetts.
The New York Yankees trade veteran infielder Toby Harrah to the Texas Rangers for outfielder Billy Sample and a player to be named later. The palindromic infielder was a member of the original Rangers in 1972.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1281.03 (-5.08)
Born:
Braydon Coburn, Canadian NHL defenseman (NHL Champions, Stanley Cup-Lightning, 2020; Atlanta Thrashers, Philadelphia Flyers, Tampa Bay Lightning, Ottawa Senators, New York Islanders), in Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, Canada.
Juliana Imai, Brazilian model, in Paraná, Brazil.
Died:
Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., 82, American politician (Senator-R-Massachusetts) and ambassador (West Germany, Vietnam, & United Nations).
J Pat O’Malley, 80, Irish-British actor (“101 Dalmatians”, “The Jungle Book”).
David Huffman, 39, American actor (“FIST”, “Jane Doe”, “Firefox”, “Onion Field”), murdered.
[Ed: Fuck this guy. I Said What I Said.]
History Diaries 