Talks on the slaying of a U.S. officer by a Soviet sentry in East Germany last week will be held by military leaders from the United States and the Soviet Union, the State Department announced. The talks are aimed at ensuring “that there will be no repetitions of such episodes,” the department said after a meeting between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly F. Dobrynin. Meanwhile, the slain officer, Major Arthur D. Nicholson Jr., was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. After the hourlong session, Mr. Dobrynin told reporters that the meeting had touched on “the whole range of the Soviet-American relations, beginning from Geneva and ending with bilateral relations.”
The East-West conference on security in Europe is at its midpoint, with many of the Western allies believing they may achieve some important goals by the time the meetings conclude in 1986. The West considers that it has overcome its initial concern about the conference. When it began in January 1984, the allies feared that the Soviet Union would use it in its campaign against deployment of new American medium- range missiles – the Pershing 2 and cruise missiles – in Western Europe. It was a time when the Geneva arms talks were broken off, and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko was charging at the opening session here that “the present United States Administration is thinking of war and acting accordingly.”
A Common Market compromise on Greek demands paved the way for Spain and Portugal to join the organization at the start of next year. Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou had threatened to veto an agreement reached last week on admitting the Iberian countries. He insisted on $2 billion in aid to Greece to help its farmers compete with the two new members. After two days of negotiations in Brussels, Greece was persuaded to accept $1.4 billion in aid in exchange for dropping the veto threat. Announcing the agreement, Prime Minister Bettino Craxi of Italy, who was the chairman of the conference, said it marked a “historic moment in Europe’s development.”
Christos Sartzetakis was sworn in as the new president of Greece in a ceremony boycotted by conservative lawmakers who claimed his election was legally invalid. Sartzetakis, 56, a supreme court judge, was backed for the presidency by Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou’s ruling Socialist party and was the only candidate. He won 180 votes Friday, the minimum required for election on the final round of balloting for the 300-seat Parliament. The 112 seats of the conservative opposition New Democracy Party were conspicuously empty during the ceremony.
Cypriot President Spyros Kyprianou rejected as unconstitutional a second demand by Parliament that he resign for his handling of peace talks with Turkish Cypriots, who occupy 37% of the island shared with Greek Cypriots. The latest demand backed a February 22 call for Kyprianou’s resignation that was approved by the two main Greek Cypriot political parties. Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash had accepted a preliminary draft peace agreement prepared through efforts by U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar. Kyprianou has demanded clarification of details in the agreement.
Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Garret FitzGerald of Ireland held what was described as a “very good meeting” on Northern Ireland. The two leaders, in Brussels for a Common Market conference, agreed that talks on the Ulster question should continue at ministerial and official levels, a joint statement said. It added: “They agreed that there was real merit in continuing the process. It is, however, not possible at this stage to predict the eventual outcome.”
The Danish Parliament approved an imposed strike settlement and ordered 300,000 private sector employees back to work from a week-old walkout and lockout that paralyzed the country’s economy. The settlement calls for a 2% pay raise this year and 1.5% hike next year for private and public sector employees. It also calls for a cut in the 40-hour workweek to 39 hours for both sectors by January, 1987. The unions had demanded higher pay raises and a 35-hour workweek.
A four-day congress of the Hungarian Communist Party has ended here with the re-election of Janos Kadar and the selection, for the first time, of a designated deputy to the 72-year-old party leader. Mr. Kadar first took power as Soviet troops quashed the uprising of 1956. Though the choice of Karoly Nemeth, a 62-year-old national party secretary, to the new post of deputy chairman of the 13-member Politburo was a departure from previous practice, Hungarian commentators cautioned against any assumptions that Mr. Nemeth was being cast in a role of heir apparent.
Several neo-Nazi groups and the secretive Islamic Jihad (Holy War) claimed responsibility for the bombing of a Paris theater holding a Jewish film festival that injured 18 people, three seriously. Nearly 2,000 people protested the bombing at the Rivoli-Beaubourg Theater Friday as part of an anti-racist demonstration that had been previously called to protest the murder of a young Arab in southern France a week ago. Jewish groups planned to protest the bombing today.
Israeli forces shot and wounded three Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on the ninth anniversary of Land Day, a traditional day of anti-Israel protests. Israel radio said the incident occurred when youths hurled rocks at Israeli border police at the Dahaisha refugee camp near Bethlehem. Land Day commemorates the fatal shooting by Israeli troops of six Israeli Arabs in 1976 during protests against expropriation of Arab land in the Galilee region.
Thousands of Indians were disabled by the Bhopal gas leak, according to Government health officials. They estimate that 5,000 to 10,000 people who survived exposure to the gas last December will probably never be able to earn a living because of incurable injuries to respiratory and digestive systems.
The United States, expressing concern over the reported use of forced abortions as a means of population control in China, today withheld $10 million earmarked for a United Nations agency that operates in China. M. Peter McPherson, administrator of the Agency for International Development, said that the United States would continue to support the work of the agency, the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, in other countries, but that “we will not associate U.S. funding, even indirectly, with what the U.S. views as a violation of human rights.”
Two key trade officials went to Japan to try to win concessions before a deadline Monday for restructuring Japan’s telecommunications industry, the White House said. The Cabinet will meet early this week to discuss the talks. If they are fruitless, top officials are expected to consider supporting trade reprisal legislation. Lionel H. Olmer, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Administration, and Dr. Gaston Sigur, a Japan specialist on the National Security Council, were sent to Tokyo by President Reagan.
President Reagan makes a Radio Address to the Nation on Central America. Warning that American officials must not be “ostriches with our heads in the sand,” President Reagan charged today that the Soviet Union wanted to turn Central America “into a beachhead for subversion.” Mr. Reagan’s charge came in his weekly radio address, which he delivered on the fourth anniversary of the assassination attempt in which he was wounded. He mentioned the shooting in passing, but devoted most of the address to his effort to gain Congressional approval to send aid to rebels seeking to overthrow the Sandinista regime.
Doctors in Khartoum staged a one-day strike and urged other professional unions to join them in an attempt to bring down Sudan’s President Jaafar Numeiri. Informed sources said the doctors’ union ordered the strike to protest police and army handling of rioters last week. Numeiri is in the United States for a medical checkup and a meeting Monday with President Reagan.
The manufacture of weapons is taking far longer than military defense contractors calculate would be necessary if they operated efficiently, according to industry data supplied by the Pentagon. The figures are likely to have considerable importance in forthcoming Congressional debates on the military budget.
President Reagan spends the day doing homework at Camp David.
Federal agency information services would be sharply reduced under a proposal by the Reagan Administration. The Administration proposes to put the information-gathering efforts by Federal agencies under the control of the Office of Management and Budget. The agencies would have to show that their efforts were “essential” to their mission, that they were not likely to be performed by the private sector, and that their benefits outweighed their costs.
Despite a last-minute push by House Democrats to win extension of a program for people who have been out of work for a long time, the program will expire Sunday, ending coverage for more than 325,000 people. The Federal Supplemental Compensation Program, enacted in the depths of the 1982 recession, provides 8 to 14 additional weeks of Federal benefits for unemployed people who use up their basic 26 weeks of state benefits. The Administration supported three previous extensions. Now it argues that with the economy looking strong, at least for the near future, and with the unemployment rate steady, the program is no longer needed. An 18-month extension, the Labor Department has estimated, would cost $2.77 billion.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who for many years has symbolized Democratic Party liberalism, has summoned his party to search for “new approaches” to the needs of the country if it is to win back the faith of the people. In a speech at Hofstra University on Long Island Friday and in remarks to a group of other Democratic Senators yesterday in West Virginia, Mr. Kennedy apparently sought to shift both his party and his own political image toward the center. “One thing is certain,” he said in the Hofstra speech. “We cannot and should not depend on higher tax revenues to roll in and redeem every costly program. Those of us who care about domestic progress must do more with less.
The case of Bernhard H. Goetz grew much more complicated last week with a decision by a Manhattan grand jury to indict him for attempted murder. The new charges accuse Mr. Goetz of having used more violence than necessary to defend himself when he shot four men, two of them in the back, on a subway train in December. At a hearing, Mr. Goetz pleaded not guilty and was allowed to remain free on $5,000 bail. Prosecutors had asked for $20,000.
Doctors in Louisville, Kentucky, decided to seek a donor human heart to transplant into Michael C. Jones, 16, who is being kept alive by two external pumps helping his diseased heart. Jones, of Madison, Indiana, remained in critical condition at Louisville Jewish Hospital. His natural heart was destroyed by a viral infection, which has now subsided. His kidneys have also failed, and he will be placed on a dialysis machine while awaiting a heart transplant.
A Jet America DC-9 made two emergency landings after a ground maintenance crew apparently failed to correct a problem in which the nose wheel would not retract, O’Hare International Airport police said. Flight 121, bound for Long Beach, California, and carrying 136 passengers and crew members, made its landings at the Chicago airport after circling over Lake Michigan. Passengers continued their flight on another plane.
The Justice Department began deportation proceedings in Miami against Konrads Kalejs, 71, of St. Petersburg, Florida, for his alleged collaboration with Nazi Germany in the persecution of civilians during World War II. Kalejs was ordered to show cause why he should not be expelled. It was charged that he served in the Latvian Security Auxiliary Police, “an execution squad which traveled through Latvia.”
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court suspended a semi-retired judge who dismissed rape charges against a man because the alleged victim was late for the Pittsburgh trial, then reinstated the charges five days later. Prosecutors criticized Allegheny County Judge J. Quint Salmon, 77, and demonstrators protested his decision by picketing the courthouse and his home. Salmon later reinstated the charges against Geoffrey Adams, 28. The 14-year-old girl who says Adams raped and beat her was 15 to 30 minutes late for his trial.
A judge in La Crosse, Wisconsin, ruled Bryan Stanley, charged with murder in the shooting deaths of a priest and two others in a Roman Catholic church, incompetent to stand trial. The ruling halts for at least 18 months criminal proceedings against Stanley, 29, who will be re-evaluated after treatment in a mental hospital. Stanley, who reportedly objected to schoolgirls” reading of Scripture during Mass at St. Patrick’s Church in Onalaska, told Circuit Judge Peter Pappas at the hearing that he was ordered by the Lord to “assassinate the three devil-worshipers.”
The latest legal action to arise from a fatal confrontation in 1979 between supporters and opponents of the Ku Klux Klan is producing some startling testimony and a sharp contrast with two previous trials. In the earlier lawsuits, both criminal actions, the authorities were trying to show that Klansmen and members of the American Nazi Party were guilty of attacking anti-Klan demonstrators in Greensboro, North Carolina, killing five and injuring 10. Both trials, one state and one Federal, ended in acquittals.
The reverses of a farm family in Missouri illustrate how tens of thousands of people like them are struggling under economic pressures and the threat of foreclosure. The difficulties of farming today seem to fall most severely upon the youngest farmers, like Lawrence Gladbach, 31 years old, of Mendon, Missouri.
A California widow filed a $12 million suit Friday against a Vietnamese student convicted of killing her husband, charging he had caused a wrongful death. She and others also asserted that prosecutors in the case had failed to pursue information pointing to a political assassination.
The offer by International Playtex Inc. to provide free exchanges for tampons linked to the often fatal toxic shock syndrome was unrelated to a multimillion-dollar judgment against the company, its president says.
Symptoms of brain damage and unusual changes in spinal fluid have been detected in more than two dozen Swedish radar-maintenance workers, ages 35 to 62, who were exposed for 10 years or more to microwave radiation, according to a study at Sweden’s University of Goteborg. The study provides some of the first evidence of physical changes directly linked to microwaves, to which most persons are exposed at levels 10,000 to 100,000 times below what the radar operators experienced. It is reported also to have major implications for persons exposed to microwaves and other forms of non-ionizing radiation, ranging from radio and television to garage-door openers.
Spring snow borne by a storm cascading from the Rockies lashed Kansas and the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, while melting snow and rain flooded streets in Michigan and washed out West Virginia bridges. “Last weekend, people were running around in shorts (and) now, they’ve pulled on their parkas again,” complained Sgt. Kevin McLain at the Oklahoma Highway Patrol office in Guymon. Up to five inches of snow blanketed parts of western Kansas. Grand Island, Nebraska, and Denver got two inches of snow. In Mississippi, a band of severe thunderstorms pounded across the state, moving east from Louisiana and Arkansas.
139th Grand National: Welsh jockey Hywel Davies aboard 11-year old 50/1 outsider Last Suspect wins by 1½ lengths from Mr. Snugfit.
Ireland beats England, 13-10 at Lansdowne Road, Dublin to clinch its 10th outright Five Nations Rugby Championship and 6th Triple Crown.
Born:
Dan Runzler, MLB pitcher (World Series champions-Giants, 2010; San Francisco Giants, Pittsburgh Pirates), in Santa Monica, California.
Died:
Harold Peary, 76, American actor (Herb-“Blondie”, “Willy”), dies of a heart attack
History Diaries 