The Belgian Cabinet won a vote of confidence in Parliament on its decision to deploy new U.S.-made nuclear missiles. The vote was 116 to 93 in favor of stationing the first 16 of 48 medium-range cruise missiles on Belgian territory. The center-right coalition government of Premier Wilfried Martens had delayed a decision on the missiles, and some members of coalition parties feared that because of anti-nuclear sentiment, a vote to deploy the weapons would hurt them in the next general election.
France plans a major buildup and modernization of its nuclear deterrent forces, Defense Minister Charles Hernu told the authoritative London magazine Jane’s Defense Weekly. Hernu said that the number of warheads aboard France’s nuclear submarines will jump from 80 last year to 176 this year and to almost 500 in 1992. He said a new generation of submarines will become operational in the mid-1990s. He added that the buildup is “well-matched to the scenario which we are likely to encounter up till the end of the century.”
The year-long coal strike swelled Britain’s budget deficit in the current fiscal year by $3.13 billion, Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson said as he presented the annual budget. Giving the first official estimate of the cost of the miners’ strike, which ended March 5, Lawson said the deficit he originally projected at $8.3 billion will now total more than $11 billion. The new 1985-86 budget of $146 billion is expected to again reflect the tight-money policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s previous six years.
An imprisoned Solidarity leader, Bogdan Lis, is being force-fed by guards after he started a hunger strike 10 days ago to protest his arrest, his lawyer said in Warsaw. Lis was detained last month along with fellow militants Adam Michnik and Wladyslaw Frasyniuk in connection with the banned trade union’s plans to mount a general strike against food price increases. Lis had headed the underground union in Gdansk. His lawyer said the activist will end his hunger strike Sunday.
Two bomb explosions 15 minutes apart tore through a Swiss aluminum factory in this Rhone Valley town early today, causing damage estimated by the owners at $5.4 million. No one was hurt. The police said a previously unknown, “Valais Group Against Hydro-Rhone” took responsibility for the blasts at the Martigny Aluminum Works. Hydro-Rhone is a $310 million project by utility companies to harness the Rhone River for electricity production. The explosions destroyed five electric transformers and the factory’s electronic control system, according to the plant director, Henri Guignard.
Christian and Muslim militiamen clashed in southern Lebanon today, forcing Muslim families to flee Christian-controlled areas and paralyzing activity in the Mediterranean port of Sidon. Christian rebel leaders in the north warned that if the Christian minority in the south was suppressed, the violence would spread to other parts of the country. The clashes today, the second straight day of such fighting, were centered in the hills overlooking Sidon. Gunmen also took up positions along the coastal road linking the port city, which is mainly Sunni Muslim, with Beirut. Lebanese army units stopped all highway traffic in the areas of tension.
A crushing Iranian defeat has apparently resulted from Tehran’s week-long offensive against Iraq, according to senior Reagan Administration officials. They said the Iranians had put from 30,000 to 50,000 soldiers, many poorly trained, into the attack and most were killed, wounded or captured. “I don’t think the Iranians know how many people they have lost,” one senior official said, “but it is in the tens of thousands, we think.” Administration officials said they based their assessment on several factors: intelligence gathered by Western countries, presumably through various electronic means; reports from Western observers, including journalists, who visited the battle area in recent days; close analysis of statements made by Iraq and Iran, and information gleaned by American and other Western diplomats in Baghdad and by Western diplomats in Teheran, where there is no United States mission.
Iran said that it had struck Baghdad today with a surface-to-surface missile. It was the fourth such Iranian assertion of a long-range missile attack on the Iraqi capital since last Thursday. Iraqi officials refused to say anything about the explosion today. Iraq also made no statement about an explosion in the capital Monday, but said the first two, one of them at the central bank, had been caused by bombs placed by saboteurs. Witnesses in the Iraqi capital confirmed that there had been an explosion today, which they said demolished four houses, killing 14 people.
Meanwhile, hundreds of foreigners left Tehran, the Iranian capital, on special airline flights hours before an Iraqi deadline for safe passage through Iranian airspace. The Baghdad Government threatened to shoot down commercial airliners over Iran starting Tuesday evening (noon, New York Time). Prime Minister Mir Hussein Moussavi of Iran called the Iraqi threat “insane” and said Iranian missiles would destroy Baghdad’s airport if it was carried out.
Elsewhere in the war front, Iraq said its warplanes struck five Iranian cities. An Iraqi military spokesman said warplanes raided “selected targets” in Bushire, Hamadan, Ardebil, Karind, and Khurramabad in order to “force the rulers of Iran to accept peace and end the war.”
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Hussein Kazempour-Ardebili, said today that about 20 Iranian soldiers who he said were injured by chemical weapons in recent combat with Iraq would be sent to Vienna, Bonn, Munich and London “in the next day or two” as evidence that Iraq was using chemical weapons. Mr. Ardebili said in an interview that Iraq had used mustard gas, and smaller amounts of cyanide and phosphorus, seven times in fighting back against Iranian troops in the southern Iraqi marshes north of Basra. One of the attacks was before March 14 and the other six were between March 14 and 16, he said, adding that the gas was dispersed in “shells fired from cannons.” Mr. Ardebili said that 200 Iranian soldiers had been hospitalized in Iran because of injuries from chemical weapons that included “blisters on their bodies, skin and eye irritations and lung irritations.”
India called out troops to quell rioting in the western city of Ahmadabad that was triggered by the Gujarat state government’s announcement of a proposed increase in job and university quotas for impoverished classes and castes. That move was apparently intended to gather popular support for elections to the state legislature, which the ruling Congress Party won handily in early March. Upper-caste groups oppose the quota system, saying it would deprive deserving students of their places, and they widened the protest to demand the scrapping of job quotas in government departments. At least seven people were reported to have been killed and 40 injured. Student protests in Gujarat turned violent during a general strike against the proposed reforms.
Vietnam is proposing to normalize relations with the United States as a way of eventually settling the Cambodia conflict, Indonesia’s Foreign Minister, Mochtar Kusumaatmadja, said today. Mr. Mochtar described the initiative as one of the “new elements” in a five- point proposal he brought back with him Sunday from a trip to Hanoi. The normalization process would begin, he said, with a Vietnamese response to repeated United States requests for information on American soldiers listed as missing in action in the Vietnam War. A second “new element” in Vietnam’s five-point proposal is apparently Hanoi’s willingness to drop the issue of foreign military bases in the region from future peace talks on Cambodia.
For decades, tourists have come to the western Mexican city of Guadalajara for its rich colonial heritage and Orozco murals, a glimpse of Mexico’s history and culture. Starting in the 1960’s, older Americans began to settle here, many drawn by the city’s pleasantly slow pace and low prices. In the 1970’s, investigators say, drug dealers came for the freedom. Until recently, when a United States narcotics agent was kidnapped and killed here, no one seemed to complain much. But perhaps as much as Mexico’s economic boom of the late 1970’s, investigators say, drugs changed the face of Guadalajara.
The leader of the largest Nicaraguan rebel group urged the Managua Government today to accept a peace initiative proposed by a group of Nicaraguan opposition leaders this month. “This is our last offer,” the rebel leader, Adolfo Calero, said. On March 2, a broad coalition of political and military opposition leaders published what they called a joint declaration of principles urging the Sandinistas to begin negotiations to resolve the Nicaraguan conflict. The group set a deadline of April 20, saying the Sandinistas would be “‘ending the possibility of a peaceful solution to the national crisis” if they did not respond by then.
Efforts by the Bolivian Government to negotiate an end to a 12-day general strike here collapsed Monday night, and today thousands of workers marched through the streets of this Andean capital, some calling for a popular workers state. The workers promised to “radicalize” the strike by holding marches and hunger strikes and by bringing in more miners from the countryside. Already more than 10,000 miners have been trucked into La Paz to bring pressure on the government.
If the United States can track down Dr. Josef Mengele in a foreign country, it can probably detain him and turn him over to one of the nations that wants to try him for Nazi war crimes, the Justice Department told Congress today. Although Dr. Mengele is not wanted by the United States for any specific crimes, the “rule of law is very broad” and will permit him to be detained by United States officials, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Trott told the Senate Judiciary juvenile justice subcommittee. “What the rule of law is will depend on the situation,” Mr. Trott said, noting that the Supreme Court has upheld the validity of cases in which a fugitive was grabbed outside the United States and returned to this country. Dr. Mengele selected new arrivals at Auschwitz to be sent to the gas chamber and carried out pseudo-medical experiments.
President Reagan meets with the President of the Argentine Republic Raul Alfonsin to discuss the situations in Central and South America. President Reagan welcomed the President of Argentina to the White House today, an occasion that Mr. Reagan used to renew his denunciations of the Government of Nicaragua. “The free people of this hemisphere must not stand by and watch the Communist tyranny imposed on Nicaragua spread to the free lands of the Americas,” Mr. Reagan said. His comments on Nicaragua were in contrast to President Raul Alfonsin’s opening statement about the Sandinista Government, in which he stressed the need for “dialogue” and what he called a “longstanding principle” of international law in Latin America opposing intervention. “I am convinced that it is through dialogue that we will be able to reach peace,” the Argentine leader said in a speech on the White House South Lawn.
A little rain in Addis Ababa for the third consecutive day raised hope in parched Ethiopia that seasonal short rains, which did not come last year, might have arrived. “It’s too early to say for certain,” said Simon Chater of the International Livestock Center for Africa, an institution that keeps a keen eye on the weather. “But we’re cautiously optimistic.”
Millicent Fenwick, the U.S. representative to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, charged that the government of famine-stricken Ethiopia uses donated food as “a bait, a lure” to relocate thousands of people against their will. “It’s heartbreaking,” the former Republican congresswoman from New Jersey said in a Rome interview, citing reports from witnesses. The Ethiopian government says people from the north are being moved to southern regions less affected by drought.
The American Chamber of Commerce in South Africa took a strong stand against apartheid and recommended abolishing laws that discriminate against the black majority. The group also urged an end to restrictions on the movement of blacks and the extension of full property rights to blacks in their own residential areas. And it called for the phasing out of the labor system that requires black men to leave their families in distant tribal homelands. The chamber represents 300 U.S. companies that employ about 130,000 blacks.
MX missile funds were approved by the U.S. Senate. By a vote of 55 to 45, the members approved a release of $1.5 billion for the construction of 21 additional missiles. Ten Democrats joined 45 Republicans in supporting the Administration only hours after President Reagan went to Capitol Hill and made a fervent personal appeal for the intercontinental missile. Eight Republicans and 37 Democrats voted against the President, but in the final hours of debate almost every wavering vote swung to the Administration side. Today’s vote was the first of two needed in the Senate to release the funds under a complex procedure set up last year. The Senate is to vote a second time later this week and the House is to cast two votes next week.
Opponents of the missile, who say it is too costly and too vulnerable, insist that they still have a chance to win in the House. But they concede it will be a very tough fight after today’s vote. To senators on both sides of the issue, the key to the outcome was the beginning of the arms control talks with the Soviet Union in Geneva last week and the intensive lobbying effort mounted by the Administration. “Members said they didn’t want the failure of the Geneva talks on their consciences,” said Senator Charles McC. Mathias Jr., a Maryland Republican who cast a key vote in favor of the missile. “The Administration drove that point pretty hard, and it clearly was on people’s minds.” After the vote, Mr. Reagan said in a statement: “I am pleased that the Senate today voted to support the MX Peacekeeper missile and to send a message of American resolve to the world. It is critically important that the second vote in the Senate and next week’s votes in the House reaffirm this demonstration of America’s determination to achieve effective deterrence and significant nuclear arms reduction.”
The Ohio Legislature this morning approved emergency legislation that would permit some of the 70 state-insured savings and loans that were closed Friday to reopen. Governor Richard F. Celeste was expected to sign the legislation immediately, and a spokesman for the Governor said some institutions may be allowed to reopen as early as today. The measure would allow an institution to reopen as soon as it applied for Federal deposit insurance and state banking officials determined that the thrift unit was in strong enough financial shape to qualify for the insurance. U.S. bank woes caused concern in the world financial markets. The price of gold rose about $36 an ounce and the dollar declined sharply.
Disclosing security secrets without authorization would be a crime for which government employees would be prosecuted under legislation proposed by the C.I.A., Administration officials said. The proposed legislation would authorize prosecution of Government employees or former employees who “willfully” disclosed “any classified information,” with certain narrow exceptions, to reporters or others outside the Government. The maximum penalty would be five years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Although the Justice Department takes the position that such disclosures already violate criminal laws barring espionage and theft of Government property, that interpretation is in dispute in a pending court case.
The government did not violate the Constitution when it enforced the draft registration law by selecting only avowed resisters for prosecution, the Supreme Court ruled in a 7-to-2 decision.
The White House is acting illegally in planning to reduce spending for biomedical research below the level approved by Congress, the General Accounting Office charged.
Former Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr. (R-Tenn.), complaining that presidential campaigns are too long and costly, called for elimination of contributions to candidates by political action committees. “All the flurry about PACS misses the fundamental point — that only people vote for President,” said Baker, speaking in Washington. “And I think really that only people should contribute,” he added. “That would mean the elimination of political action committees. It would mean the elimination of contributions by the AFL-CIO or whatever group it is. But I think it would put everyone on the same footing.”
Two emigres from the Soviet Union went on trial on espionage charges today as a judge began the search for jurors for the case, which involves a former agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Federal District Judge David Kenyon called the first 36 potential panelists to the courtroom. The judge said he would question them extensively about their views of immigrants in general and particularly those who speak out publicly against the United States. The emigre couple, Svetlana and Nikolay Ogorodnikov, were indicted by a Federal grand jury in October. They were arrested October 2. The co-defendant in the case, Richard W. Miller, the first FBI agent charged with spying for a foreign government, is to be the star witness against the Ogorodnikovs. His trial is scheduled to follow theirs.
Bernhard H. Goetz’s lawyers lost an attempt to halt a new grand jury from considering charges of attempted murder against him. An acting New York State Supreme Court justice ruled that a second grand jury called to investigate so-called subway vigilante, Bernard Goetz, who shot four youths last December, could continue its deliberations. In a court hearing. Goetz’s lawyers sought to have the grand jury dismissed. Justice Stephen G. Crane did not require District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau to produce new evidence in open court, ruling that “the defense’s claim lacks merit.”
Armed guards loaded 28 shackled Cuban refugees on a chartered jet in Marietta, Georgia, and deported them to their island homeland because the United States declared them excludable as insane or as criminals. It was the second deportation flight of Cuban detainees in less than a month under an agreement between the United States and the Fidel Castro government. The plane took off about 45 minutes after the refugees, escorted by about a dozen law enforcement cars, arrived on buses from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where some had been imprisoned up to 4½ years.
John C. Young, who has been on Death Row for nine years for fatally beating three elderly persons, was executed in Georgia’s electric chair. Young, who lost four last-minute appeals, including one to the U.S. Supreme Court, did not request a last meal and was “calm and resolved to the situation,” said prison spokesman Fred Steeple. Young, 28, was the sixth man executed in Georgia since 1983.
Saying that deputy U.S. marshals are “on the brink of burnout,” the director of the U.S. Marshals Service told Congress that last year’s sweeping anti-crime bill and the creation of 85 new federal judgeships are tying up the criminal justice system. The testimony by Director Stanley E. Morris marked the Administration’s first public assessment of the new demands that last year’s Comprehensive Crime Control Act has placed on federal law enforcement officials.
Cartier Inc., the prestigious 5th Avenue jewelry store, and two of its managers have been indicted on charges of evading at least $260,000 in New York sales tax, officials said. Tax evasion was especially prevalent on the fanciest gems, with 90% of all transactions involving $10,000 or more going untaxed, said New York state Atty. Gen. Robert Abrams. He said only one-third of all transactions at Cartier were taxed over a three-year period ending in 1983.
The trend toward larger farms will be accelerated by new technology and genetic engineering techniques in the next 15 years unless the Government provides more special benefits for medium-size farms, a Congressional research service said.
The license of a registered nurse who disconnected the life-support equipment of an elderly stroke victim as an act of mercy was revoked by the Wisconsin State Board of Nursing. The board said that although the nurse, Thomas P. Engel, had acted with altruism, the action was outside the scope of his profession.
A fight over California’s Chief Justice may well dominate next year’s elections. The dispute over whether the Chief Justice, Rose Elizabeth Bird, should remain in office has generated a bitter dispute even though the office is nonpartisan and she will not have an opponent.
Record cold stretched as far south as Florida on the last full day of winter, and Southern peach growers checked their crops for damage. It was zero at Massena, New York, and frost and freeze warnings were posted for Florida, where Jacksonville had a record 32 and Orlando had 41. Rain and snow fell over parts of Arizona, southern Utah, northwestern New Mexico and southwestern Colorado. More than a foot of snow has fallen since Monday near Cedar City, Utah. But the last day of winter was mild in the Midwest, where Chicago reported a sunny 53 degrees. Spring officially begins today at 8:15 AM.
A man convicted of violating federal laws by killing and selling protected wildlife species was sentenced today to 15 years in prison. United States Attorney Pete Dunbar said he believed the sentence was the stiffest given in a wildlife case and said he hoped it would deter others from trafficking in protected animals. The convicted man, Loren Jay Ellison of Livingston, was sentenced to three consecutive five-year terms by Federal District Judge James Battin. Mr. Ellison was one of 16 Montana residents arrested in October by federal wildlife agents.
A man who needs a bone marrow transplant if he is to survive a battle with leukemia found his long-lost brother and sister today, and doctors are to determine if either one can be a compatible donor. The leukemia victim, Steve Akin, 24 years old, telephoned his brother and sister from a hospital in Houston, where he is being treated. Mr. Akin’s siblings, John Davis, of the Chicago suburb of Schiller Park, and Barbara Davis, of Green Bay, Wisconsin, had known for more than two decades that they had a brother somewhere. Truth Seekers, an organization of adopted people, found Barbara and John Davis today. A representative called the two and told them about Mr. Akin and explained his circumstances. Later, Mr. Akin called each of them. “It was a very, very moving experience,” said Mr. Davis, 23, of his brother’s call. “We never talked to each other before, but it seemed like we knew each other for years.” Barbara Davis, a 28-year-old nursing assistant, said: “I’m just flying. I’m on cloud nine.”
“Spin Magazine” begins publishing
A $764,283 jackpot was won at Sportsman’s Park in Illinois with the aid of a last-minute decision, according to two men representing a syndicate of investors. The jackpot is the largest payoff in North American thoroughbred racing history.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1271.09 (+21.42)
Born:
Thomas DeCoud, NFL safety (Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers), in Oakland, California.
Ernesto Viso, Venezuelan racing driver, in Caracas, Venezuela.
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