Optimism on developing a defense in space against nuclear missiles, a program being pressed by the Reagan Administration, is supported in part by years of industrial research and weapons building. Hidden in the rocky canyons of the Santa Susana Mountains outside Los Angeles is the nearest thing to a “Star Wars” laser base anywhere in the Western world. Its code-name is Sigma Tau. “This is as close to weaponization and as far from the laboratory as you’re going to see without full-scale development,” said Bill Robinson, director of laser programs for the Rockwell International Corporation, which began Sigma Tau secretly for the Air Force in 1976. Two years earlier on the same site, Rockwell used its own money to start building a high-energy laser called Rachel, which the corporation describes as the forerunner to “Star Wars,” or, as it is officially designated, the Strategic Defense Initiative, for which the Government is proposing to spend $30 billion in the next five years. The Strategic Defense Initiative research grew out of a speech by President Reagan in March 1983 in which he proposed that scientists and engineers design a defensive shield to render nuclear weapons obsolete. However, the industry possesses only the most rudimentary engineering knowledge in many crucial areas.
The House majority leader, Rep. Jim Wright (D-Texas), accusing the Reagan Administration of playing partisan politics with U.S. nuclear arms negotiations in Geneva resuming next week, said he is withdrawing a 16-member House observer delegation from the talks. Wright had said he was considering a boycott of the talks after published reports indicated that top Administration officials were unhappy about the size of the House delegation and the fact that some members planned to bring spouses.
President Reagan attends a National Security Council meeting to discuss the U.S. position in the Arms Talks with the Soviet Union.
Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of West Germany met in Moscow today with Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, in what Mr. Genscher described as an attempt to make Bonn “an influence for positive relations between East and West.” The Soviet Government press agency, Tass, said the visitor had set forth Bonn’s “same old viewpoint” on the deployment of medium-range missiles in Western Europe and had engaged in distortions when interpreting the American position on a proposed space-based missile defense system. When Mr. Genscher flew to Moscow Sunday, West German officials said his main purpose was to demonstrate Bonn’s concern for productive arms negotiations in Geneva starting this month between the United States and the Soviet Union. Mr. Genscher has also added a stop on Wednesday in Poland to his schedule, between planned visits to Finland and Bulgaria.
Miners in Kent and in Scotland voted today to defy their national union and remain on strike when their colleagues in other regions return to work Tuesday. The dissidents said they would remain off the job until about 650 men dismissed during the year-long walkout were rehired. But no prospect of such an amnesty appeared, although Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher spoke Sunday night of the need for reconciliation. And in Scotland, the state-owned National Coal Board appeared to take a particularly hard line.
Poland raised the price of food, increasing the cost of such staples as bread by more than 30 percent and the price of one type of tea by 75 percent. Prices of other staples such as milk, cheese and cereals also went up. A week ago, officials had moved to forestall a protest strike by announcing they had postponed plans to increase food prices. Warsaw shoppers standing on the lines that routinely form in front of many stores showed their resentment of the new prices and of the deceptive way in which they were imposed.
A longtime Prime Minister of Albania was “liquidated” as a “secret agent” in 1981, according to Albania’s principal Communist Party newspaper. The report contradicts the earlier Albanian explanation that the official, Mehmet Shehu, committed suicide during a Central Committee meeting in December 1981. He was 68 years old.
All tariffs between the United States and Israel would be eliminated within 10 years under an agreement the two countries have just concluded – the first free-trade pact that Washington has reached with any country, Administration trade officials said today. President Reagan will formally submit the accord to Congress on Tuesday, and most legislative analysts expect relatively easy and quick approval – before the summer. Israel sought the agreement as a means to spur economic development and to cement both economic and political ties with Washington. A Further Refinement For the United States it represents a further refinement of the use of trade to help countries that it considers strategically, and politically, important.
A huge blast destroyed a mosque in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon, killing two local guerrilla leaders and at least 13 other people, the authorities reported. Officials said at least 55 people were injured in the explosion, in the Shiite village of Marakah, that was thought to have been caused by a bomb. The region has been a center of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation. Lebanese leaders immediately accused the Israeli forces of having placed a bomb in the mosque. The charge was denied by Israeli military officials in a statement issued in Tel Aviv. The blast came a day after Israeli troops ended a 24-hour siege of Marakah, during which they searched for suspected Shiite guerrillas. The spirtual head of the million Shiites in Lebanon, Sheik Mohammed Mahdi Chamseddin, called for a “relentless jihad,” or holy war, against the Israelis as long as they remained on any part of Lebanese soil. Diplomats of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council were summoned to the presidential palace in the Beirut suburb of Baabda, where the Lebanbese Cabinet was meeting.
The Foreign Minister of Iraq urged the Security Council today to arrange an exchange of prisoners between Iran and Iraq. The Iraqi official, Tariq Aziz, told the Security Council, “The exchange should be completed within a specific timetable, starting with the prisoners of war suffering the most — that is, the disabled and the sick — to be followed by the exchange of prisoners who remained longest in captivity, until the last prisoner of war is exchanged.”
Vietnam, saying it “could not cope” with all the foreigners asking to visit Vietnam before the 10th anniversary of the capture of Saigon next month, has called off a United Nations-sponsored press visit to refugee sites in Vietnam, according to United Nations officials. Leon Davico, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said today that the trip to Vietnam had been planned since last September, when the High Commissioner, Poul Hartling, was in Hanoi. It was to be a study seminar for about 20 television, radio and newspaper reporters from Europe and the United States. Several news organizations have been denied visas for journalists trying to report from Hồ Chí Minh City, as Saigon is now called, before the anniversary April 30.
The condition of ex-Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka is more serious than first believed after a stroke last week, his doctors said. They had predicted recovery in three to four weeks, but they now say it could be as long as three months before Tanaka, head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s largest faction, can return to normal activities. They said it is not known whether Tanaka, 66, will suffer any permanent paralysis.
Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos fired his foreign minister and rebuked his labor minister, apparently to squelch signs of dissension within the government. A presidential palace announcement said that Foreign Minister Arturo Tolentino is being dismissed as the result of a speech in which he criticized diplomatic appointments. Tolentino, 74, has often criticized Marcos’ power to legislate by decree and has also spoken out against the government’s handling of the economy. Labor Minister Blas Ople was asked to explain a speech he gave that appeared critical of official patronage.
The United States, in its latest move to press New Zealand to lift a ban on warships capable of carrying nuclear weapons, won agreement from Australia today to postpone indefinitely any further meetings of the three-nation ANZUS alliance. The 34-year-old alliance of Australia, New Zealand and the United States has been shaken for the last month by a dispute between New Zealand and the United States over nuclear policy. Last month, Prime Minister David Lange of New Zealand, whose Labor Party swept into power last July on an antinuclear policy, announced that he was barring a scheduled port call by an American destroyer because Washington would not say that the ship did not carry nuclear arms. The United States, as a matter of policy, does not issue such statements, and it has said that New Zealand’s policy may damage not only the ANZUS alliance but other American security pacts.
Nicaragua charged that the United States is testing a sophisticated spy plane in Honduras and has converted that country into a “great military base.” A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, acknowledged that the R4E-40, a drone surveillance aircraft, is in Honduras but said it is being used only for “training purposes.” Barricada, Nicaragua’s official Sandinista newspaper, said the small, pilotless plane, known as the SkyEye, can detect enemy troop movements from high altitudes.
The Government imposed a midnight-to-5 AM curfew today to prevent looting as aftershocks from an earthquake Sunday continued to rock towns along the coast and in the central valley. The death toll from the earthquake, which registered 7.4 on the Richter scale, rose to 135, with almost 2,000 injured, according to the Government. The quake struck at 7:45 PM Sunday, destroying or damaging thousands of homes, damaging eight bridges and cutting communication lines.
Argentina’s armed forces chief of staff, General Julio Fernandez Torres, resigned to protest cuts in the country’s military budget since President Raul Alfonsin took power in late 1983 after eight years of military rule. A Defense Ministry spokesman said Fernandez Torres will be replaced by the army chief of staff, Ricardo Pianta, and that the commander of the 3rd Army Corps, Hector Rios Erenu, will take the top army post.
A French medical relief organization said that two of its doctors and two of its nurses believed to have been kidnaped by Ethiopian secessionist rebels are, in fact, “safe and sound.” The four had gone to the northern Ethiopian town of Lalibela for a vacation, a spokesman for Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said in Paris. Earlier, five French air force crew members who were briefly held captive by the rebels were freed unharmed. The five crewmen, flying a twin-engine cargo plane, were on a mercy mission Sunday with 8.5 tons of food for the town of Lalibela in the Wollo region north of Addis Ababa when guerrillas ambushed them, the French Embassy said.
U.S. Vice President George H.W. Bush arrived in Sudan today for a seven-day journey through some of the most drought-scorched parts of Africa. President Gaafar al-Nimeiry greeted the Vice President at a private welcoming ceremony at the People’s Palace but was absent from the airport event at which Mr. Bush said that he had come “on a journey of mercy and friendship.” “So I’m here,” the Vice President added, “on a kind of pilgrimage to see what more can be done to help those who suffer now, to see what can be done to insure that no calamity like this happens again, and, on behalf of President Reagan and the American people, to show America’s admiration and respect for the compassion and courage of the people of Sudan.”
New housing in most major Third World cities consists primarily of the illegal, largely self-built shacks used by the urban poor, an international environmental group said. A 140-page report by the Earthscan information service, which has offices in London and Washington, said this expansion is unplanned and uncontrolled and that the proportion of illegal squatters is rising. “The true builders and planners of Third World cities are the urban poor,” author Patrick McAuslan wrote. “They build their settlements where they can, largely illegally: on unused land, on hills and over swamps.”
The Senate Budget Committee today began what could be a last-ditch effort to fashion a deficit-reducing package that meets Senate Republicans’ goals. A key issue will be whether the Republicans decide to abandon efforts to cut spending by more than $60 billion in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, and by enough in 1987 and 1988 to reduce the projected Federal deficit in 1988 to $100 billion. The committee chairman, Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, proposed a package today that would include savings in Social Security and the military budget, but the session got off to a rocky start. Mr. Domenici said he did not know if he had the votes for much of his package, and when Republicans and Democrats began talking they haggled over economic assumptions, not budget cuts. Mr. Domenici’s package would eliminate the cost-of-living increases scheduled for Social Security and other retirement and benefit programs, except for low-income recipients. He would freeze most other domestic appropriations at 1985 levels, and accept most of President Reagan’s plan to cut some programs below the 1985 level and eliminate many others.
Funds to continue the MX missile were formally requested of Congress by President Reagan. Saying the missiles are critical to the success of arms-control talks beginning in Geneva next week, Mr. Reagan asked the legislators to release $1.5 billion appropriated last year for 21 additional missiles. “Without the Peacekeeper our chances of reaching an equitable agreement with the Soviet Union to reduce significantly the size of our nuclear arsenals are substantially lowered,” Mr. Reagan said in an 18-page report required by Congress as a prelude to the Congressional votes. Congressional leaders were to introduce resolutions Tuesday that would free the MX money. Under an arrangement approved last year, the resolutions must then be brought before the House and Senate for votes within 15 days, probably the week of March 18.
The MX missile fund request appears to be gaining support on Capitol Hill, according to Congressional leaders. But they said the lineup in both chambers seemed close and the outcome was not certain.
The President and the First Lady celebrate their 33rd wedding anniversary. President and Mrs. Reagan today marked their 33rd wedding anniversary with a quiet luncheon in the Oval Office. The Reagans, who met in 1951 when Nancy Davis was a studio contract player and Mr. Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild, were married March 4, 1952, in California. They appeared together in the 1957 motion picture, “Hellcats of the Navy,” Mr. Reagan’s last feature film. Their anniversary gift to each other was a pickup truck for their California ranch.
The STS 51-E vehicle rolls back to Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center (Florida); the mission has been cancelled.
An initial failure by the police to advise a suspect of his rights against self-incrimination does not render inadmissible a later confession made after the warnings have been properly given, under a Supreme Court ruling. The Court settled the case in favor of the prosecution in a bitterly disputed 6-to-3 decision. The Miranda rule, based on the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination, prohibits the police from interrogating suspects in custody without first advising them of their right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present. Statements obtained in direct violation of the rule are not admissible in court.
States may not exclude nonresidents from admission to law practice, under a Supreme Court ruling. The 8-to-1 decision, striking down a New Hampshire regulation that made residency a condition for admission to the state’s bar, could change the bar admission regulations in about half the states.
The home of Harry A. Blackmun was the target of a bullet, but no one was injured. The FBI said it had recovered a bullet that had shattered a window of Associate Justice Blackmun’s third-floor apartment in suburban Arlington, Virginia. The Bureau said the bullet recovered was from a 9-millimeter weapon and could have been fired from either a rifle or a pistol. Justice Blackmun started receiving threats after he wrote the Supreme Court’s 1973 opinion approving abortions in the first six months of pregnancy.
The Environmental Protection Agency said today that it was considering a total ban on leaded gasoline by 1988. It issued final rules for removing 90 percent of the lead currently in automobile fuel by the end of this year. The agency said last year that it was contemplating a flat prohibition on lead in gasoline by 1992. Lee M. Thomas, Administrator of the environmental agency, said that an accelerated schedule for barring all lead in gasoline was being considered in large part because of new information about the adverse effects on human health of lead in the air. In particular, he noted that new studies suggest that lead from gasoline is a significant cause of high blood pressure among adults.
A new study by the General Accounting Office says that women working for the federal government make less than 63% as much as their male colleagues, primarily because the women are concentrated in low-paying clerical jobs and lack seniority. The GAO study, based on 1980 census data, says that women in the private sector earn 56% of what men get, and in state and local governments the salaries of women are about 71% of those for men. GAO’s report is background material prepared for Congress to use when it takes up the politically explosive issue of pay equity.
Doctors found no signs of bleeding in artificial heart patient Murray P. Haydon’s chest, while William J. Schroeder spent his 100th day with the device by concentrating on physical therapy. X-rays taken throughout the day showed that bleeding had stopped in Haydon’s chest cavity for the first time in a week, said Humana Inc. spokesman Bob Irvine in a tape-recorded statement in Louisville, Kentucky.
W. Paul Thayer pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Washington to obstructing justice by giving false testimony to the Securities and Exchange Commission when it was investigating whether he had engaged in illegal insider stock trading. Mr. Thayer resigned as Deputy Secretary of Defense last year. United States Attorney Joseph diGenova said today’s action resolved all potential criminal liability for both men, except for any action that the Internal Revenue Service might bring.
Regular tests for drug use would be given to air traffic controllers and other employees in safety-related jobs in the Federal Aviation Administration, under a proposal by the agency. Agency officials said that urine samples collected in employees’ annual physical examinations would be analyzed for drugs. In addition to controllers, physical examinations are taken by F.A.A. pilots and by agency employees in police, fire, security and other areas involving safety. The tests could also be ordered, with minimum advance notice, whenever an F.A.A. manager had reason to believe the employee had been using drugs, on or off the job. In January, a Federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of an off-duty controller for possessing cocaine, violating a condition of employment.
Military pensions, criticized by budget director David A. Stockman, generously benefit only a small, affluent group and actually work against defense readiness by encouraging skilled personnel to retire early, a private study group said. The observation was contained in “The Military Payoff,” a report issued by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, privately financed organization.
A judge extended a largely ignored strike ban as walkouts in Mississippi by the nation’s lowest-paid teachers spread to three more counties, leaving 93,000 of the state’s 465,000 students without teachers. Chancellor Paul G. Alexander’s restraining order was a middle ground between state demands that he issue a preliminary injunction to open schools state-wide and teacher claims that his court has no jurisdiction outside Hinds County, where he is the equivalent of a district judge. Alexander said that he intends to rule today that the teachers are public employees and have no right to strike under state law.
Alaska Airlines was struck by 650 mechanics and baggage workers, grounding half of its West Coast flights. The others were kept flying by management personnel. The employees walked off the job at the airline headquarters in Seattle, and at airports in Alaska, Washington and California, minutes after all-night negotiations broke off. No further talks were scheduled. The labor dispute centers on the airline’s desire to implement a secondary pay scale that would start new employees at a lower salary than that for current workers.
Meanwhile, Pan American World Airways, its domestic flights grounded on the fifth day of a mechanics’ strike, has laid off 10,000 flight attendants and office workers, officials said. Both Pan Am and the Transport Workers Union appeared to be digging in for a long strike yesterday as managers staffed terminals and planes while other unions continued to remain outside picket lines. A Pan Am spokesman, Jeffrey Kriendler, said the airline hoped to have a meeting with the union’s negotiators sometime this week. The airline said again that it was operating 40 percent of its international flights but none of its domestic service.
Carl C. Icahn, the multimillionaire New Yorker, called off an $8.1 billion takeover bid for the Phillips Petroleum Company yesterday. The move came one day after Phillips, the nation’s 11th-largest oil company, sharply improved the terms of a defensive plan to buy back a substantial number of its own shares. The improved offer will provide Mr. Icahn, who owns 5 percent of Phillips’s stock, with a profit of $50 million on the investment. Phillips, for its part, has managed to secure its independence after a bruising struggle. Mr. Icahn has promised not to attempt a takeover of the Bartlesville, Okla., oil company for the next eight years. And financial analysts maintained that the large debt that Phillips would take on to finance the costly purchase of shares would deter other bidders.
Lee A. Iacocca, the chairman of the Chrysler Corporation, sent a conciliatory letter to Representative Robert T. Matsui of California Sunday about a speech over the weekend that the Congressman had criticized as “racist.” Mr. Matsui, a third-generation Japanese-American, said today that he still considered the comments offensive to Japanese-Americans. But he said he was satisfied that Mr. Iacocca would not use the same tone in future speeches. Mr. Matsui said the letter from the Chrysler executive was hand-delivered Sunday by a company official in Washington.
A Federal magistrate today ordered Andrija Artukovic extradited to Yugoslavia, but specified that Mr. Artukovic, who is accused of helping the Nazis carry out war crimes, could be tried for only one murder. Magistrate Volney Brown gave the Government a 60-day stay of his order, allowing prosecutors to seek evidence of further killings that might warrant a change in the order. The magistrate, however, said he anticipated that Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who has the final say, would consider several issues, including “whether it is fair to surrender him some 42 to 45 years after the events.” Magistrate Brown ordered extradition for Mr. Artukovic, who is 85 years old, in the 1941 murder of Jesa Vidic, a former official in a Nazi puppet government in Croatia.
The Boeing Company billed the American taxpayers for at least $126,847 in 1982 political contributions, adding the cost to the price of weapons systems it built for the Pentagon. But the company abruptly withdrew the request for reimbursement within hours after the billing was publicly disclosed.
A Lutheran pastor who spent 110 days in jail for defying his bishop and a judge was released and vowed to continue to fight for the unemployed in the steel industry and to return to his padlocked steel-town church in Clairton, a Pittsburgh suburb, by Easter. “We are back. We are clearer and stronger than ever in our resolve to fight for the justice the valley is needing,” the Rev. D. Douglas Roth said after his release at dawn.
A fire whipped by high winds destroyed part of an adult foster care home early today, killing seven people and injuring seven, officials said. The blaze at the home, Lakeview Inn, eight miles east of Muskegon, Michigan, was reported at 11:22 PM Sunday and controlled about two hours later. The dead were six residents and a 4-year-old child visiting a parent who worked there, the authorities said.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1289.53 (-9.83)
Born:
Michael McKenry, MLB catcher (Colorado Rockies, Pittsburgh Pirates, St. Louis Cardinals), in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Cory Luebke, MLB pitcher (San Diego Padres, Pittsburgh Pirates), in Coldwater, Ohio.
Jake Dowell, NHL centre (Chicago Blackhawks, Dallas Stars, Minnesota Wild), in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Nedu Ndukwe, NFL safety (Cincinnati Bengals, Oakland Raiders), in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Guillermo Díaz, Puerto Rican NBA shooting guard (Los Angeles Clippers), in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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