Improved U.S.-Soviet ties will continue to be sought by Reagan Administration officials, they said, despite the slaying Sunday of an American Army major in East Germany by a Soviet soldier. Taking their lead from President Reagan, the officials said the shooting on Sunday of Maj. Arthur D. Nicholson Jr., who was on patrol in East Germany, should not be permitted to become a new obstacle to progress in the various negotiations now taking place between Moscow and Washington. On Monday, Mr. Reagan was asked if the shooting, which Washington said was “totally unjustified,” would lead him to drop his hopes for an early meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader. “No,” he replied. “It would make me more anxious to go to one.”
The Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation opened the first meeting of its 11th session with a minute of silence for the late President Konstantin U. Chernenko. The opening session of the Parliament was attended by the new Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who received a standing ovation but did not speak, the Soviet news agency Tass reported. Vitaly I. Vorotnikov, a member of the Politburo, was reappointed premier of the Russian Federation, one of 15 Soviet republics.
The Ukrainian Communist Party has ordered regional ministers and party officials to shape up after disclosures of bribery, embezzlement and inefficiency, the Soviet newspaper Pravda reported. The newspaper said poor management and organization and wrong attitudes among party workers are largely to blame for poor results in agriculture and industry. Dairy and meat officials were summoned to a special session of the Ukrainian party and told to “introduce appropriate order,” Pravda said.
Vernon A. Walters will accept the post of chief United States delegate to the United Nations even though it does not include a regular seat on the National Security Council. General Walters informed the White House of his decision. The announcement by the White House ended speculation that General Walters might not take the high-level position because of opposition by Secretary of State George P. Shultz to making him a regular member of the council. The nomination was sent to the Senate on Monday, the White House said.
Dr. Kirkpatrick today that “it has been very useful to me to be a member of the National Security Council.” “To be able to hear the discussions has given me a sense of confidence about the goals of the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense” and “the directions in which they thought our foreign policy should move,” Dr. Kirkpatrick said at a news conference at the United States mission. But she added: “Whether the permanent representative should have a voice in the top policy processes — that is obviously a question for the President to decide. Generally speaking, the permanent representatives have been members of the National Security Council.”
Britain’s coal miners today voted down a proposal by union leaders for a small weekly levy on their paychecks to help 500 miners who were dismissed during the 51-week strike. The levy, which would have been equivalent to 60 cents a week, was opposed by 54 percent of the 109,150 miners who voted. Some 77,000 miners did not vote, many in response to a boycott organized in regions where most miners worked throughout the strike. Peter Heathfield, the National Union of Mineworkers’ general secretary, announced the vote and described it as “disappointing but not unexpected.” He said many miners felt that to have established the levy for an indefinite period would have signaled to the state-owned National Coal Board that the union was willing to back down on its demand that the dismissed miners be reinstated.
Workers in Warsaw, Poland were reported to have staged a four-hour stoppage at a key factory today. Staff members said at least 200 workers at the Roza Luksemburg light-bulb factory, one of Warsaw’s most important enterprises, stopped work to protest food price rises. The price of bread, rice, tea and some dairy products were raised on March 4. Electricity, coal and gas prices are due to go up next Monday, and meat and other foods in June.
Pope John Paul II proclaims first ever World Youth Day. Pope John Paul II told young people today that the earth was in danger of becoming “a graveyard of nuclear death.” At the same time, he warned them against the deceptions of advertising and the lure of materialism. The apostolic letter, addressed to the youth of the world, was dated March 31, which is Palm Sunday, but made public today. On Palm Sunday, 150,000 young people are expected to converge on St. Peter’s Square for a meeting with the Pope, who has an elaborate schedule of events leading up to Easter Sunday, April 7. Msgr. Paul Josef Cordes, the vice president of the Pontifical Council of the Laity, said the 64-page message, bound in blue imitation leather, was intended for wide use among young people, and he contrasted “the blue book of the Pope” with “the Red Book of Mao.” The Pope’s book, he said, was not aimed “at serving economic or political ends.”
A speedy pullout from Lebanon is planned by Israel, according to Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Prime Minister Shimon Peres said the withdrawal might occur “a lot faster” than most people think. Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin told a Parliament committee that the Israeli army already is in the final stage of its withdrawal from southern Lebanon, a committee member said. Israel television said Rabin also told the committee that extremist acts now are a greater threat than in 1982 and that Lebanese guerrilla actions against Israelis should be met with a “scorched earth policy” of full-scale retaliation.
Egypt, marking the sixth anniversary of its peace treaty with Israel, accused the Israelis of violating “the letter and spirit” of the U.S.-mediated accord through its actions in the West Bank and other occupied territories. Butros Butros Ghali, Egypt’s deputy foreign minister, who played a key role in negotiating the 1979 treaty, made the accusations in an interview with the state-owned Cairo daily newspaper Al Akhbar. He referred to Israel’s “oppressive measures” in southern Lebanon, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Tunisia abandoned secret diplomatic contacts aimed at convening a summit with Morocco and Algeria, marking the demise of another attempt to achieve unity among the three North African countries. Morocco and Algeria also broke off secret talks aimed at reaching a compromise on the nine-year-old guerrilla war over the Western Sahara. The region’s 45 million Arabs have tried to form a loose federation since the French colonialists left more than 20 years ago, but political differences and continuing wars have blocked progress.
Iraq warned today that it was prepared to expand the Persian Gulf war to “every corner of Iran” unless Teheran agreed to a comprehensive peace settlement. The warning came as Iraqi war planes were reported to have attacked three Iranian cities and merchant ships in the gulf. Al-Jumhuriya, a Government daily newspaper, stated in an unusually harshly worded editorial that Iraq would not permit the war to continue. Iran’s only alternative was total peace or “an overall destructive war,” the newspaper said.
The U.S. State Department accused Iraq today of using chemical weapons against Iranian troops. A spokesman, Bernard Kalb, said the United States had received confirmation of such use from Western European physicians who treated Iranian victims.
President Reagan attends a National Security Planning Group meeting to discuss continuing to aid the Afghans who are fighting with the Soviets.
At least 40 Vietnamese soldiers intruded into Thailand and killed a Thai soldier during a 30-minute clash, military sources in the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet said. Three other Thais were seriously wounded in the battle near Dongruk, a village 17 miles north of Aranyaprathet. The Vietnamese, who are battling guerrilla resistance to their occupation of Cambodia, later withdrew from Thai territory, the reports added.
The South Korean Government announced today that high seas had caused a 24-hour delay in return of a Chinese torpedo boat that drifted into South Korean waters after a mutiny. The South Koreans are to return the two crew members said to have mutinied on Friday and killed six crewmen and wounded two others. The dead and wounded and 11 other crew members will be returned with the vessel. On Tuesday, the South Korean Government said the return would be Wednesday after receipt and acceptance of an apology from China for an intrusion into South Korean territorial waters. Three Chinese navy ships entered South Korean waters in search of the torpedo boat on Friday. Announcement of the delay was made by the state-run Korea Broadcasting System and attributed to government authorities. The announcement said strong winds in the area of the west coast had stirred high seas.
Taiwan’s former military intelligence chief and two of his deputies were formally charged today with involvement in the killing of a Chinese-American writer in California last year. The Defense Ministry said Vice Admiral Wong Shi-ling, 58 years old, the former director of the Defense Ministry’s intelligence bureau, his deputy, Major General Hu Yi-min, 58, and Colonel Chen Hu-men, 41, a deputy section chief, would be tried by a military court of five judges.
When it began a month ago, the court case against the Chief of Staff of the Philippine Armed Forces and 25 other men in the assassination in 1983 of the opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. was hailed here as “the trial of the century.” But today the trial is the subject of widespread cynicism, even apathy, among Filipinos. Witnesses regarded as vital to the prosecution have inexplicably vanished. The soldiers charged in the purported military plot are being kept not in jail, but in more spacious and comfortable special barracks.
One of the two men that a citizens’ panel concluded last year was a possible gunman in the slaying, Sgt. Filomeno Miranda, was married this month in festivities replete with a roast calf on a spit, all while in custody. The armed forces’ chief, General Fabian C. Ver, a cousin and close friend of President Ferdinand E. Marcos, is out on bail. In recent weeks, he has been feted at dinners and other public ceremonies around Manila. Late last month President Marcos surprised many Filipinos and foreign diplomats when he declared that if General Ver was acquitted he would be allowed to reassume command of the military.
A Cuban officer with extensive experience in Africa, Lt. Col. Joaquin Mourino Perez, has defected in Spain and is now providing information to the CIA about Cuban activities on that continent, U.S. officials said in Washington. Mourino defected Jan. 24 after he arrived in Spain as part of a Cuban commercial delegation and has been granted asylum in the United States, the officials said. A CIA spokeswoman declined to provide details of the defection.
The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence urged President Reagan today not to ask Congress for renewed aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, calling the policy an “illogical and illegal absurdity.” Speaking to the National Press Club, the committee chairman, Senator Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota, said he felt uncomfortable giving a speech on American policy in Central America, since the intelligence committee chairman is not supposed to discuss such issues in public. But he said he felt compelled to come forward for what he called his first and last address on the subject because, he contended, United States policy in Central America is being held “hostage to an ill-timed, ill-planned program in support of a policy which no one understands.”
About 7,000 American G.I.’s will begin two large-scale military exercises in Honduras over the next two months, a United States military spokesman here says. The maneuvers are to include the use of pilotless aircraft for reconnaissance missions over suspected guerrilla positions in northern El Salvador, said a Western diplomatic official here. The new exercises are part of a two- year buildup of the American military presence in Honduras. The presence is part of the Reagan Administration’s policy of maintaining pressure on Nicaragua’s Sandinista Government across the border.
Brazil’s President-elect, Tancredo Neves, was rushed from Brasilia to Sao Paulo today to undergo new surgery for intestinal problems that prevented him from assuming office 11 days ago. News of the operation, his third since March 15, stunned many Brazilians, coming only hours after reports had said the 75-year-old President- elect was recuperating well and might be released from the hospital this weekend. This evening, a Government spokesman quoted Mr. Neves’s doctors as having said that the latest, four-hour operation to halt internal bleeding had gone “very well” and had been “successful.” A medical bulletin said the decision to move Mr. Neves to the country’s top hospital in Sao Paulo was made before dawn today. New surgery was required to remove half an inch of intestine after medication failed to stop the intestinal hemorrhage, it added.
The Chilean Government said today that two sergeants were killed when a bomb went off as they were searching for a leftist radio transmitter late Monday in a hotel room in Concepcion. Later today, a car bomb exploded directly across the plaza from the Presidential palace in front of La Nacion, a daily newspaper. There appeared to be no injuries, but one woman, who could not be located, ran from the explosion site screaming. The bomb damaged the facade of the newspaper’s offices, and shattered the windows of adjacent buildings. Armed security agents prohibited photographers from taking pictures.
The South African police arrested two leading anti-apartheid churchmen in Cape Town today as the clerics knelt on the pavement singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” More than 200 supporters were detained with them The arrests came at the start of an impromptu march on Parliament to protest the killing by the police of at least 19 black people last Thursday at Langa township, near the southern coastal city of Uitenhage. Those arrested and held for about six hours included the Rev. Allan Boesak, President of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, and the Rev. Beyers Naude, General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. A police spokesman said all had been released without bail and had been given the choice of paying an admission-of-guilt fine equivalent to about $25 or facing charges in court Wednesday under the Internal Security Act.
MX missile funds were approved narrowly by the House. The members voted 219 to 213 to release $1.5 billion for the purchase of 21 additional missiles. Sixty-one Democrats brushed aside the arguments of party leaders and joined 158 Republicans in forming the winning margin. Twenty-four Republicans defected from the President to vote with 189 Democrats against the intercontinental missile. President Reagan, in a statement issued shortly after the vote, said he was “very pleased” with the outcome and described it as “a vote for peace” and for success in the Geneva arms control talks with the Soviet Union. “America has sent a message, loud and clear, that we back our negotiators, and we will continue to do so,” Mr. Reagan said. The vote was the climax of an intensive lobbying effort on both sides. Representative Vic Fazio, a California Democrat, said he could not recall “a more divisive issue” in his political career.
The Administration’s cause received crucial support from Representative Les Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee. In closing the debate tonight, Mr. Aspin stressed the importance of the Geneva talks and said: “It would be crazy for Congress, at this point, to take something away from our negotiators.” However, Mr. Aspin was jeered by his fellow Democrats when he said that if Congress defeated the MX, it “would be giving some help to the Soviet Union.” Despite the President’s triumph, both sides agreed that his request for $4 billion to buy an additional 48 missiles next year is in “serious, serious trouble,” as Thomas S. Foley of Washington, the Democratic whip, put it.
President Reagan hosts a reception for members of the “Victory ’84 Committee”.
White House security might require the closing of the two-block stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the building, according to Treasury Secretary James A. Baker 3d. He told a Congressional panel that the proposal was “still very much in the planning stage.”
Tighter curbs on toxic air pollutants were urged by officers of major chemical companies and legislators at a House hearing. Warren M. Anderson, the chief operating officer of Union Carbide, urged Congress to provide uniform and coordinated standards to assure the right of all communities to know what chemicals used in their vicinity might endanger residents’ safety and health.
Bernhard H. Goetz refused to testify before a grand jury investigating his shooting of four young men in a Manhattan subway car last December. The 37-year-old engineer insisted that the prosecutor’s questioning be too narrow to include Mr. Goetz’s purchase of guns in Florida, a condition the District Attorney’s office refused to accept.
The giant Medicare hospital trust fund, which the Reagan Administration last year predicted would go bankrupt by 1991, now looks financially sound until near the end of the century, government sources told the Washington Post. Lower inflation rates and tighter controls over hospital reimbursements from Medicare have caused the change, hospital industry officials said. The Social Security trustees are expected to declare shortly in their annual report to the President and Congress that the trust fund will remain solvent for at least another decade and probably until 1997-98.
Ground workers for Pan American World Airways began voting on a proposed contract that, if passed, could end the nearly month-long strike that has severely cut the airline’s daily operations. The 5,800 Transport Workers Union members — mechanics, baggage handlers and flight dispatchers who walked off the job February 28 — began casting their ballots on a tentative settlement reached Saturday. Terms of the agreement were not released by either side. Results were not expected until tonight or Thursday morning.
The General Electric Company, the nation’s fourth-largest military contractor, was indicted by a Federal grand jury today on charges that it falsified claims and lied to the government about work on a nuclear warhead system. The 108-count indictment, announced by United States Attorney Edward S.G. Dennis Jr. at a late afternoon news conference, charged that General Electric defrauded the government of at least $800,000 between January 1980 and April 1983. One current and one former supervisory employee were indicted on two counts each of lying to a Federal grand jury. A General Electric spokesman, reading from a prepared statement after the indictment was announced, denied that the company or any employees had committed any criminal wrongdoing.
Some forms of insurgency, guerrilla warfare and terrorism are difficult to detect early and could lead to war, a study by security experts said. The study, compiled by a senior group of military and civilian security specialists, said the swift and decisive use of the U.S. Special Forces might be the only way to cope with terrorism. The United States, the study said, should not vacillate in striking at threats identified by intelligence sources or retaliating with “surgical” strikes by Special Forces after the fact.
An organization of state attorneys general urged the Justice Department to investigate abortion clinic violence, saying such incidents “interfere with the exercise of constitutional rights.” At a policy-making meeting in Washington, the National Association of Attorneys General passed a resolution saying: “There has been illegal harassment and intimidation of people who work in or visit abortion clinics.” It called for “a swift and forceful response by all levels of law enforcement.”
A federal district judge in Brownsville, Texas today revoked the probation of a worker in the movement to provide sanctuary to Salvadorans. The judge, Filemon Vela, decided that the sanctuary worker, Stacey Lynn Merkt, 30 years old, had violated terms of a probation imposed after she was convicted last May. Miss Merkt, a volunteer at Casa Oscar Romero, a shelter for Central Americans at San Benito sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church, was also convicted with Jack Elder, 41, last month in Houston on a charge of conspiring to help two Salvadorans enter the country illegally. Mr. Elder faces a maximum of 30 years in prison and a $28,000 fine. Miss Merkt faces a maximum of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine and also 90 days in jail for her probation revocation. Meanwhile, in Phoenix, Arizona, a Federal magistrate, Morton Sitver, today sentenced Cecilia de Carmen, a Salvadorian married to an American citizen, to two years’ probation after she pleaded guilty to helping Central American refugees enter the United States.
Farm lenders are dumping their troubled borrowers on the federal government’s doorstep at an alarming rate, prompting the transfer of $300 million to help meet the heightened credit demand, according to Frank Naylor, Agriculture Department undersecretary in charge of credit programs. Naylor said a survey of Farm Credit Administration offices last month showed that 40% of farmers coming to the agency for new operating loans were first-time borrowers — an unusually high level.
An attempt has failed to repeal the nation’s first insurance law that prohibits setting rates on the basis of sex. The Montana Senate decided Monday not to revive two bills killed in committee that would have effectively repealed the law. The law, which was passed in the 1983 session and takes effect in October, requires insurance companies to figure their rates based on criteria other than sex and marital status. Supporters of the law say that the different rates violate the state’s equal rights amendment. Insurance companies say the law will penalize women by increasing their rates and argue that women live longer than men and that women are statistically better drivers. Women generally pay less for automobile and life insurance policies than men. But women pay more, as a rule, for health insurance, and many receive lower monthly benefits from pensions and annuities.
Officials in the nearly all-white suburb of Quincy, Massachusetts, ending years of resistance, agreed today to place members of minorities in 25 percent of the city’s public housing and to protect them from harassment. The agreement to fill a fourth of Quincy’s 619 public housing units by 1992 is part of a consent decree negotiated by Greater Boston Legal Services. In Quincy, where about 200 of the 80,000 residents are black, members of minorities make up about 5 percent of the tenants, said Susan C. Cohen, an attorney for the legal services. The decree, to be signed by Federal District Judge David S. Nelson, calls for the plan to be advertised in areas surrounding Quincy, which is south of Boston.
Mayor Donald Frush of Hagerstown, Maryland, who vanished from City Hall for a week and turned up in a Baltimore hospital psychiatric unit for stress and fatigue, was defeated in a bid for reelection. With all 17 precincts reporting, unofficial totals showed that Democrat Steve Sager received 3,840 votes, while Republican Frush, 55, received 2,387 votes. Frush, who was seeking a second four-year term, conceded defeat.
Doctors and hospitals performing faulty sterilization procedures cannot be sued for the costs of rearing children who result from “wrongful births,” New York’s highest court ruled. “To hold that the birth of a healthy child represents a legal harm would be to engage this court in the jurisprudentially improper task of recasting the immutable, intrinsic value of human life according to the financial burden thus imposed upon the parents,” Judge Matthew Jasen of the Court of Appeals wrote in the 6–0 decision.
Homosexual rights were upheld by a deadlocked Supreme Court. By a vote of 4 to 4 and without a written opinion, the Court sustained a lower court’s decision that Oklahoma cannot constitutionally dismiss public school teachers for speaking out in favor of homosexual rights. Associate Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. did not participate in the decision.
Jesuit colleges lack Jesuit teachers because the order is attracting fewer candidates for the priesthood. As a result, an increasing portion of faculty members at the nation’s 28 Jesuit colleges and universities are laymen, and some of them are not even Roman Catholic.
Bell of Pennsylvania announced today that it would build a $25 million corporate computer center near the Temple University campus in the North Philadelphia area. “This is the first major company that’s moved back into North Philadelphia since probably the 1940’s,” said Peter J. Liacouras, Temple’s president. The four-story Bell structure, which is expected to employ 200 to 250 workers after completion at the end of 1986, is the first tenant of an 11-acre area to the east of the urban campus that Temple is attempting to develop as an industrial park for high-technology concerns.
A new secure telephone that the government said will end most international and corporate telephone eavesdropping is to be commercially available within a few years. The National Security Agency chose A.T.& T., RCA, and Motorola to build and service the new generation of computerized telephones after a six-month design competition.
A freight industry-teamster pact has been tentatively agreed on, a union official said. He said officials of truckers’ union locals around the country were to discuss the proposed contract in Chicago next Wednesday. A union spokesman called the disclosure premature.
An explosion Sunday in Los Angeles from an underground pool of methane gas has prompted the sealing of a bustling, four-block shopping area. The blast injured 21 people, two of them critically, when it ignited under a clothing store. The source of the explosion was apparently an oil well that was capped years ago.
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Born:
Keira Knightley, English actress (“Bend It Like Beckham”, “Pirates of the Caribbean”), in London, England, United Kingdom.
Jonathan Groff, American actor (“Hamilton”, voice of Sven in “Frozen”), in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Rashad Jennings, NFL runing back (Jacksonville Jaguars, Oakland Raiders, New York Giants), in Forest, Virginia.
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