Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader, has responded positively to President Reagan’s proposal for a meeting, but the site and time of the meeting must still be worked out, White House officials said today. At the same time, Mr. Reagan said today that the next move on a meeting with Mr. Gorbachev was up to the Soviet leader. “It’s always encouraging to get a letter in response to your own,” Mr. Reagan told reporters. White House officials said that Mr. Reagan was hopeful of arranging a summit meeting in the United States, perhaps in connection with the United Nations General Assembly in September. But officials stressed that, despite Mr. Gorbachev’s positive response to Mr. Reagan’s proposal for a meeting, further diplomatic exchanges were necessary.
U.S. and Soviet negotiators dealing with space weapons held a two-hour session in Geneva, their second since the arms talks were divided into three working groups. Chief U.S. negotiator Max M. Kampelman met with Soviet Ambassador Yuli A. Kvitsinsky at the U.S. Mission. No substantive details were made public. Kampelman later met with John Tower, U.S. negotiator for strategic nuclear arms, and Maynard W. Glitman, the negotiator for medium-range weapons.
The Soviet military newspaper Red Star criticized Soviet troops in East Germany for poor discipline, nine days after a Soviet soldier killed U.S. Army Major Arthur D. Nicholson Jr. The newspaper said the Soviet troops displayed “elements of lack of order.” The article, a review of field operations, said training in one regiment “was carried out at a low methodological level.” Nicholson was killed March 24 while taking pictures near a Soviet military installation in East Germany. Washington has protested the shooting as unjustified.
Soviet weapons technology is rapidly progressing, especially in submarines, nuclear missiles and space weaponry, according to a Pentagon assessment of Soviet military power. The report focused on an expanding program in laser weapon research, which the Pentagon described as part of drive for space weapons superiority that proves the need for President Reagan’s “Star Wars” space defense program. The Russians were reported to have built prototype ground-based laser weapons capable of interfering with American satellites.
Moscow ordered computer courses to be given in Soviet high schools by next fall. The directive was issued by the Soviet leadership under Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Computer training had been a goal of the school reform adopted in April 1984. The speed with which the computer instruction program is being put into place seemed to reflect the new Soviet leader’s emphasis on stepping up modernization of the economy.
The Soviet Union plans to allow 280 Jewish families — about 1,000 people — to emigrate to Israel in April, a sharp increase from recent months, Israel radio reported. The broadcast quoted Yuri Stern, director of the Soviet Jewry Information Center, as saying that according to Moscow sources, the families have been told officially that they will receive emigration documents in a few days. Among them, he said, are several activists who have long been denied emigration.
Britain’s Defense Minister said here today that there was potential Western European interest in joining the United States research effort on a space-based missile defense system. He said the motivation was the potential technological gain. The Defense Minister, Michael Heseltine, said he was consulting with other Defense Ministers about a joint response to an American invitation to help develop the new technologies. But Mr. Heseltine, speaking at a news conference after talks with Defense Minister Charles Hernu, said the Europeans wanted to know more before replying to the offer. He said they did not want to be bound by a request by Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger to reply within 60 days.
President Reagan meets with the Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey Turgut Ozal. President Reagan promised visiting Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Ozal that he will seek Congress’ approval for the full $934 million in military-related aid for Turkey next year, restoring $78 million recently cut out by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Reagan said that “continuing dangers facing us in southwest Asia and the eastern Mediterranean” make U.S.-Turkish military cooperation “more important than ever.” Reagan also praised Turkey’s “positive role” in the U.N. effort to work out a solution for the Greek and Turkish sectors in Cyprus.
Two leaders of the radical Red Army Faction were convicted today in Stuttgart, West Germany of killing three prominent West Germans and their bodyguards and trying to kill a United States Army general. The judge sentenced them to life in prison. The two radicals, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, 35 years old, and Christian Klar, 32, were found guilty of shooting to death the chief Federal Prosecutor, Siegfried Buback, and his two bodyguards; a prominent banker named Jürgen Ponto, and an industrialist named Hans-Martin Schleyer and his four bodyguards. All the killings occurred in 1977. The court also convicted them of trying to assassinate General Frederick J. Kroesen, then commander of the United States Army Europe, in 1981. The sentences were the stiffest ever imposed by a West German court on members of the Red Army Faction terrorist group.
A car bomb apparently intended for an Italian magistrate exploded in the seaside Sicilian town of Pizzolungo today, killing a woman and her two children. The judge escaped with minor injuries. The police said the attack appeared to have been organized by the Mafia. It was one in a series of attacks on magistrates in Sicily. The assault was similar to a bombing in Palermo that killed a judge, his wife and an escort in 1982.
A French diplomat who was held by kidnappers for 10 days has been freed in Lebanon. The envoy, Gilles Sidney Peyrolles, director of the French cultural center in the northern port of Tripoli, was the fourth kidnapped foreigner to gain freedom in less than a week. Mr. Peyrolles said today that he he had been kept in Syrian-controlled territory by a group that treated him very well.
The Israeli Army transferred more than 1,000 prisoners to Israel today from its Ansar detention camp in southern Lebanon, and it is due to release 600 others on Wednesday, Israeli Army officers said. The Israeli Army indicated that the most violent of the prisoners had been temporarily transferred to Israel so that they would not obstruct the Israeli troop withdrawal process now under way. The pullout is expected to be completed by late May or early June. At the same time, the army said, others were released as a “good-will gesture” in hopes of improving relations with the communities of southern Lebanon.
Sikh religious leaders announced today that they had excommunicated of a prominent Sikh aide of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and a rebel sect leader for defying their authority. The five Sikh head priests said in Amritsar that the action against the Sikh aide, Buta Singh, India’s Agriculture Minister and the only Sikh member of the national Cabinet, and the sect leader, Narain Singh, head of a little-known group, followed their refusal to appear before them and explain their association with another rebellious Sikh leader who was ousted from the faith last summer. The edicts against the two men urged their boycott by all Sikhs and added that members of the religion should prevent them from speaking at Sikh forums.
Ethnic Vietnamese in Thailand feel threatened as anger increases among Thais over daily reports of incursions into Thai territory by Vietnamese troops pursuing Cambodian guerrillas. Large demonstrations denouncing Hanoi have been held in Thailand’s Northeast, where most of the tens of thousands of ethnic Vietnamese live. Many have been there for decades.
A tough trade reprisal bill aimed at Japan was approved by the Senate Finance Committee. The Administration opposes it, but may use it to demand further access to the Japanese market for American products. The bill would give the President 90 days to obtain more liberal Japanese trade rules or take action under this country’s “unfair trade” law to ban imports from Japan.
Lawyers defending two reputed gangsters charged with killing a Chinese-American writer in California, told the court today that they were not guilty because they had been carrying out orders, like soldiers. After the one-day trial of Chen Chi-li, 41 years old, the reputed leader of the Bamboo Gang, and his deputy Wu Tun, 35, the panel of three judges said it would announce a verdict next Tuesday. Mr. Chen and Mr. Wu have been charged with killing Henry Liu, 52, in his garage at his home in Daly City, California, near San Francisco, last October 15. At a pretrial hearing last month, Mr. Chen said Wong Shi-ling, 58, head of the Defense Ministry’s Intelligence Bureau, had ordered him to kill Mr. Liu because the writer was a “double agent” who worked for both Taiwan and the mainland Chinese Government.
The Toronto police continued to keep a close watch in and around the subway system today, a day after an Armenian terrorist group had said it would detonate a bomb there. Torontonians meanwhile nervously went about their business after the unusual decision of local officials to disclose the threat last Friday. In Europe and the United States, threats of general terrorism, rather than those to a specific site, are normally not made public.
A convoy of seven Soviet-made trucks containing 17 defecting Nicaraguan soldiers fled across the border near the Honduran checkpoint of La Fraternidad, 100 miles southeast of Tegucigalpa, a Honduran military spokesman said. He said the crossing was at a point about 30 miles north of maneuvers being conducted by 450 U.S. National Guard troops from Texas. A U.S. Army spokesman said no American troops were involved in the defection.
Salvadoran rightist leader Roberto D’Aubuisson charged that there were widespread irregularities in Sunday’s election and demanded that the results be thrown out. President Jose Napoleon Duarte’s party said it won a majority of National Assembly seats and mayoral posts; official results may be released today. D’Aubuisson, who lost to Duarte in the presidential election last year, said that results from entire precincts were missing in the voting, and irregularly numbered ballots were found.
Brazil’s President-elect, Tancredo Neves, underwent his fourth abdominal operation in 19 days today, once again dashing hopes that he was recovering well from intestinal problems that prevented him from assuming office last month. A government spokesman said Mr. Neves’s latest surgery was to remove a hernia that threatened to block his lower intestines. He said that doctors had described the operation as a “complete success” and that, unlike the previous three operations, a general anesthesia had not been necessary.
The police in Santiago seized at least 81 people, including dozens of Chile’s leading actors and actresses, as they marched today to protest the murder of a leftist son of one of their colleagues, the actors’ union said. A lawyer for the union, Jose Florencio Guzman, said all but three of those detained were freed after being issued “summons for traffic violations.” The police refused to comment on the action. Organizers said the march was to express their solidarity with Roberto Parada, a veteran actor whose son, Jose Manuel Parada, was one of three men kidnapped and found killed over the weekend. Jose Manuel Parada was a Communist and human-rights activist.
Sudanese President Jaafar Numeiri said he thwarted a plot last month by Muslim fundamentalists, supplied with arms by Iran, to overthrow his pro-American government. Numeiri, interviewed in Washington after meeting with President Reagan, accused the Muslim Brotherhood of plotting against the Sudan government. He blamed the brotherhood for last week’s food price riots in Khartoum, the capital. On March 10, Numeiri ordered the arrest of more than 160 members of the group.
A year-old black infant in South Africa was reported burned to death in a gasoline-bomb attack after a crowd of youthful black militants attacked his parents’ home overnight, believing it to be that of a person collaborating with the white authorities. Since 19 black people were killed by policemen on March 21, black demonstrators have increasingly aimed their violence at other blacks they perceive as being such collaborators. The baby was the second infant to die in this manner in recent days. A police spokesman said the incident, in New Brighton township in Port Elizabeth, came as widespread violence erupted in townships around three white towns in the area after the police fired shotguns, tear gas and rubber bullets.
The phase-out of Federal jobless aid to people out of work more than six months was approved by the House, which bowed to White House pressure. The Senate is expected to approve the measure today, which would continue payments to people enlisted in the program but would permit no new applicants. The Senate is expected to adopt the same measure Wednesday. Earlier in the day, committees in both chambers passed identical bills that would ultimately kill the program, which has cost almost $10 billion since it began in September 1982.
President Reagan attends the 10th anniversary of the Republican Eagles Dinner.
Arthur J. Goldberg will investigate the ties of the chief justice of Rhode Island’s Supreme Court to reputed organized crime figures. Mr. Goldberg, a retired Supreme Court Justice and former chief United States representative to the United Nations, was appointed to head the investigation by the Rhode Island state judicial ethics commission.
Education Secretary William J. Bennett, citing multi-million-dollar mistakes in his agency’s administration of student aid programs, formed a task force to seek ways to cut the waste. Bennett said that the Education Department has cracked down on defaulted student loans and recouped more than $260 million. But he said that audits of the $2.4-billion Pell Grant program indicate that there are mistakes — including overpayments and underpayments — in nearly one-fourth of the grants. “Such a high error rate… is absolutely unacceptable,” Bennett said.
More than two dozen Democratic members of the Minnesota House are fasting in support of legislation that would put a moratorium of a year on farm mortgage foreclosures, a state representative said. The 72-hour fast started with 14 legislators Monday and grew quickly to 31 by Tuesday, said Rep. Pat Piper of Austin, sponsor of the moratorium proposal. They plan to fast until 2 PM on Thursday, when Democrats will try a second time to pull the moratorium bill out of a banking committee.
The dioxin-contaminated town of Times Beach, Missouri officially ceased to exist today when its aldermen voted unanimously to disincorporate and Gov. John Ashcroft approved the action. Mr. Ashcroft had appointed a trustee to oversee final claims under the Federal Government’s buy-out of the land, which was contaminated when waste oil tainted with dioxin was sprayed to control dust. All but one elderly couple, who are seeking more money for their home, have left the town, which had 2,242 residents three years ago. “Disincorporation of Times Beach is a sad but necessary step in allowing local citizens, the state and the federal government to complete the job in that area,” Governor Ashcroft said.
A woman slipped a gun to a male prisoner being escorted to court in Salt Lake City and the man killed an attorney and critically wounded a bailiff but was surrounded by police as he fled the building, authorities said. The inmate, Ronnie Lee Gardner, 23, was shot in the shoulder by a prison guard before he opened fire. Moments later,
A Detroit man held three children hostage for almost four hours today at an elementary school, demanding $8,000 and an automobile so that he could make a new start on life, the authorities said. The ordeal at the William C. Loving Jr. Elementary School ended shortly after 2 P.M. when a 19-year-old man surrendered the children to the police and threw down his weapon, a small-caliber rifle. Officials said no one was injured.he was surrounded and captured by police in front of the downtown Metropolitan Hall of Justice, Salt Lake County Sheriff Pete Hayward said.
More than 30 Baltic and Ukrainian emigre groups have stepped up a campaign to thwart the Justice Department’s investigation of Nazi collaborators, World Jewish Congress officials charged in New York. The organization’s investigation disclosed “a widespread campaign, fraught with anti-Semitism, to derail the government’s pursuit of war criminals,” said Kalman Sultanik, vice president of the Jewish group. The charges were denied by members of the Lithuanian and Ukrainian communities, who said opposition to the Justice Department effort focused on its use of evidence provided by the Soviet Union.
The police in Fort Worth, Texas have linked at least 10 crimes, including fire bombings, to the Legion of Doom, a high school vigilante group that included athletes and honor students, the authorities say. Detectives were studying possible links between 30 other violent acts and the group, which tried to rid a high school of drugs, crime and undesirable elements, the police said. They say the Legion of Doom consists of about nine Paschal High School students. Two students and a recent Paschal graduate were arrested last week in the investigation of a pipe bomb that exploded in a student’s car March 24.
Food poisoning apparently caused by contaminated milk has stricken more than 500 persons in Illinois and Iowa, and the number of victims is likely to climb “into the thousands,” officials said. The outbreak originated in five Chicago-area counties and has spread at least as far as central Illinois, with three cases confirmed in Iowa. Chet June, an Illinois Public Health Department spokesman, said that 543 cases of salmonella food poisoning had been reported.
Eight years of scientific research have failed to show significant new dangers from the artificial sweetener saccharin, the Food and Drug Administration said. Dr. Frank Young, the FDA commissioner, told a Senate committee that, based on the research, the agency will not oppose legislation to extend for another three years the special exemption that legalizes saccharin’s use.
A new computer service will enable physicians in Chicago to supplement a patient’s medical history with his history of filing malpractice suits. Physician’s Alert is scheduled to begin checking court records, for a fee, next week, company president Michael Eckstein said. The American Medical Association reported in January that malpractice suits have increased threefold over the last decade. The report said that there were 16 such claims for every 100 doctors in 1983; fewer than five were filed for every 100 doctors in 1975.
Claims for Dalkon Shield injuries will be paid from a $615 million fund set aside for the purpose by the A.H. Robins Company, manufacturer of the female birth control device, the company announced. The reserve fund is by far the biggest provision of its kind in a product liability case, lawyers said.
The theory that life began in clay rather than the sea is supported by a major discovery announced at a meeting in California, scientists said. An analysis of common ceramic clay, found that it contains two basic properties essential to life: the ability to store and transfer energy.
The U.S. performs a nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site. The Government conducted a major nuclear weapon test 2,100 feet beneath the Nevada desert today, causing “extremely noticeable” ground motion in a control building 12 miles away and registering 5.7 on the Richter scale. The scale is an index of earthquake severity, with each unit of increase representing a thirtyfold increase in energy released. A quake registering 5 can cause considerable damage. “It was extremely noticeable, the classic rolling, rocking motion for four or five seconds,” a Department of Energy spokesman said. The department said the blast had an explosive yield of 20,000 to 150,000 tons of TNT.
A new line of destroyers will be built at the Bath Iron Works in Maine. The Navy chose the shipyard after years of intense competition among shipbuilders for one of the Navy’s biggest shipbuilding programs. Bath was awarded a $321.9 million contract for the first Arleigh Burke class destroyer, designated DDG-51, which will be armed with the latest weaponry against planes, missiles, submarines and surface ships.
100,000 Villanova fans rallied near City Hall in Philadelphia to greet and idolize the team that scored one of the biggest upsets in collegiate basketball history in its defeat Monday of overwhelmingly favored Georgetown for the national championship. Philadelphia fans paid slightly greater homage only to the Phillies when they won the World Series in 1980, according to police estimates.
The NCAA Rules Committee adopts a 45-second shot clock for men’s basketball to begin in the 1986 season in an effort to eliminate stalling.
Quebec’s Czech center Peter Šťastný scores his 100th NHL point of the season for the 5th straight year, with an assist for the Nordiques in a 6-4 win over the Boston Bruins in Quebec City.
Edmonton center Wayne Gretzky sets an NHL record with his 34th career hat trick as the Oilers beat the Kings 6-4 in Los Angeles.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1265.68 (-7.07)
Born:
Stéphane Lambiel, Swiss figure skater (World Championship gold medal, men’s singles 2005, 2006; Olympics, silver medal, 2006), in Martigny, Switzerland.
C.J. Wilson, NFL safety (Carolina Panthers), in Dallas, Texas.
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