The chief spokesman for the Defense Department said today that there were no differences between Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger and Secretary of State George P. Shultz over a response to the Soviet Union for the death of an American Army officer. The spokesman, Michael I. Burch, said Mr. Weinberger “is not at odds with George Shultz over this issue.”
An unidentified man in Athens fired a bazooka at a Jordanian airliner today as it prepared to take off for Amman, causing minor damage, the Greek police said. An announcement said “a young man with a tanned complexion” was spotted as he fired his bazooka from behind a bush, in an opening in the fencing of Athens International Airport.
French Agriculture Minister Michel Rocard, one of the most popular members of President Francois Mitterrand’s struggling Socialist government, resigned. Rocard, 54, indicated that he quit because he opposed the government’s decision to change the nation’s election law from a majority system to proportional representation. But virtually all observers read the resignation as Rocard’s first move to challenge Mitterrand for the presidency in 1988.
In a solemn ritual symbolic of the first Easter, Pope John Paul II washed the feet of 12 priests — a re-enactment of the Last Supper — and led more than a thousand others in a renewal of their vows of celibacy. The pontiff began four days of Easter observances at St. Peter’s Basilica, joining 10 cardinals, 50 archbishops and bishops in celebrating Mass.
The latest Middle East peace initiatives of Jordan and Egypt will involve the United States in a more direct diplomatic role, Reagan Administration officials said. Secretary of State George P. Shultz is planning to visit the Middle East himself next month if an envoy reports progress. Mr. Shultz, who will accompany President Reagan on a trip to Western Europe in early May, has already announced that he will fly to Israel on May 10 to attend ceremonies at the Yad Vashem memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazi Germany. Previously, State Department officials said Mr. Shultz return directly to Europe, where he is due to be in Vienna on May 14 for talks with Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko of the Soviet Union and to take part on May 15 in ceremonies marking the 30th anniversary of the postwar independence of Austria.
King Hussein accepted the resignation of Jordan’s government, and a new Cabinet led by Zaid Rifai as prime minister was sworn in. Rifai, who will also be defense minister, replaces Prime Minister Ahmed Obeidat. A number of key officials kept their posts, including the foreign and finance ministers. Rifai, a childhood friend of Hussein’s, is generally believed to be in favor of improved relations with Syria, which has been opposed to Jordanian and Palestine Liberation Organization efforts to get new peace talks started in the Mideast.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan criticized the State Department for asserting that Israel had apparently violated an international agreement by transferring detainees from southern Lebanon to Israel. The State Department said it stood by its statement. In a Senate speech, the New York Democrat said that the State Department had wrongly interpreted the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which deals with the treatment of captured civilians and others who are not members of organized armed units. Specifically, the convention applies to everyone who is not a part of an organized military unit. Also included are people who have been convicted of actions “hostile to the security of the occupying power.”
Israeli soldiers searching for guerrillas swept through the Shiite Muslim village of Kawhariyat As-Siyad in southern Lebanon today and reported that they had killed eight people they described as armed terrorists in the raid. Several miles to the south, a roadside bomb exploded and wounded three French soldiers of the United Nations peacekeeping force. A United Nations spokesman, Timur Goksel, said it was the first time the organization’s troops had been victims of a roadside bomb since they took up peacekeeping duties in southern Lebanon in 1978.
Jerusalem police stormed El Ibrahimiya College on the Mount of Olives and arrested 130 Palestinian protesters who burned tires and hurled stones at officers from the roof of a school building, Israel radio reported. Seven protesters and one policeman were reported injured. The protest came as part of a commercial strike in East Jerusalem called to support Palestinian prisoners on a hunger strike at the Ashkelon prison in southern Israel. The prisoners have complained of cramped living conditions.
Iraq attacked Iranian cities with missiles and warplanes, and Iran said that at least 41 people were killed, with many more wounded. Iran said it retaliated with air strikes on three Iraqi border cities and urged people to flee Baghdad to escape “the fiery wrath of our combatants.” An Iraqi military communique said missiles were fired at the Iranian cities of Bakhtaran and Hamadan. Iran’s official news service confirmed the Bakhtaran strike and said that 28 people were killed and 70 injured. Tehran radio said 13 died at Hamadan and a nearby town. The attacks appeared to be the most severe since an Iraqi air raid Monday on Tehran, the Iranian capital. They came as Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar of the United Nations and others sought to mediate an end to raids on civilian targets and work out a settlement of the war. In recent weeks, Iran has said that it has struck Baghdad with surface-to- surface missiles, but this has not been confirmed.
A 41-year-old American yachtsman was released today by Vietnam, where he had spent eight and a half months in solitary confinement on charges of espionage and violating territorial waters. The yachtsman, Bill Mathers, was in Bangkok today on his way home to Singapore. He denied he was spying when he was captured July 22, or that his schooner was in Vietnamese waters. Mr. Mathers, who worked for a marine construction company, grew up in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York, but has lived in Singapore since 1970. Four French citizens and one Australian in his crew were set free earlier, after fines were paid. Mr. Mathers’s father, William Mathers, a lawyer, said yesterday in Cove Neck, Long Island, that he had paid $10,000 to Vietnam for his son’s release.
South Korea announced today that it had accepted dates proposed by North Korea for resuming talks on economic issues and Red Cross cooperation. The resumption, originally scheduled for last January, was postponed by a North Korean boycott that began that month. The economic meeting is to be held May 15 in Panmunjom and the Red Cross talks May 28 to May 30 in Seoul, South Korean officials said.
A large Soviet naval task force, which left the port of Vladivostok last week, is now conducting maneuvers about 250 miles northwest of the island of Iwo Jima. The task force consists of the 43,000-ton Kiev class aircraft carrier Novorossiysk and seven other ships, including three Kara class cruisers and two Krivak class guided-missile frigates. The maneuvers are being monitored by the Japanese navy and by the flagship of the U.S. 7th Fleet, the Blue Ridge, an amphibious command ship. In Tokyo, Japanese defense officials said they believe this task force is one of the largest to stage maneuvers in this area in the last five years.
President Reagan meets with President of the Republic of Colombia Belisario Betancur to discuss the situation in Nicaragua.
President Reagan meets with leaders of the Nicaraguan Contras.
The President offered a peace plan for Central America. His proposal coupled a call for talks between the Nicaraguan Government and the U.S.-backed rebels with a request to Congress to approve $14 million in aid for the insurgents. Mr. Reagan called for a cease-fire in Nicaragua until June 1, promising that if Congress agreed to his request for aid for the rebels, the money would not be used for arms before June 1.
Nicaragua’s leftist Government today rejected President Reagan’s call for a cease-fire and peace negotiations with anti-Sandinista rebels, calling it “a public-relations maneuver.”
Representative Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., the Speaker of the House, today called President Reagan’s new proposal to aid the Nicaraguan rebels a “dirty trick” that would be rejected by Congress, but some Republicans expressed cautious optimism that the proposal would sway enough swing votes on Capitol Hill to win the day for the Reagan Administration. While the Democrats were denouncing Mr. Reagan’s plan in unusually harsh terms, and predicting its failure, they also expressed worry and admiration for the President’s proven ability to lobby lawmakers and push his program through Congress. “I don’t think the funds are going to be released,” said Representative Thomas S. Foley of Washington, the Democratic whip. “But it’s going to be a very close vote, and I don’t ever want to be accused of underestimating the President.” The Senate is scheduled to vote on the proposal April 23, and the House is likely to vote about a week later. Mr. Reagan is expected to mount a major campaign for his proposal over the next several weeks.
The Honduran Congress quashed a move by President Roberto Suazo Cordova to charge 50 of its members with treason in a dispute over elections due in November. The 82-seat Congress voted against allowing the courts to proceed with the charges, brought with the president’s backing after Congress replaced five Supreme Court judges. Congress accused the judges of corruption and of manipulating electoral law to have pro-Suazo candidates nominated.
A suspect in the killing of a United States drug agent was captured by the Costa Rican police. The suspect, Rafael Caro Quintero, is believed by authorities to be one of the major figures in Mexico’s cocaine and marijuana traffic.
Brazil’s President-elect, Tancredo Neves, was listed in critical condition today after undergoing his fifth abdominal operation in 21 days. A Government spokesman said the new, unexpected surgery was performed at noon, immediately after doctors discovered two new abscesses along Mr. Neves’s abdominal wall. The President-elect was first stricken with an intestinal ailment March 15, on the eve of his inauguration as the country’s first civilian leader since a 1964 military coup.
A general strike organized by opponents of President Gaafar al-Nimeiry crippled the Sudan today, forcing the shutdown of businesses, transportation and basic services. According to reports reaching here, strike leaders vowed to continue until Mr. Nimeiry is driven from office. The President was visiting the United States when the most recent strike began Wednesday. Mr. Nimeiry, in an interview published today in Saudi Arabia, said that the strike was a “transient matter” and that he would still be President when he returns home.
An American was reported today to have been sentenced to 10 years in jail in Liberia after he had been convicted of plotting to overthrow General Samuel K. Doe, the Liberian leader, last November. Meanwhile, the deputy chief of General Doe’s bodyguards, Colonel Moses Flanzamaton, confessed in a broadcast today that key politicians had offered him $1 million to kill General Doe on Monday. The report about the American, William Woodhouse, was carried on the private Liberian radio station Elwa in a broadcast monitored in Abidjan. It said that a court in Monrovia pronounced sentence Wednesday. Last November the Liberian Information Ministry announced that a plot to overthrow the government had been foiled and that two foreign nationals, one of them later identified as Mr. Woodhouse, had been captured.
South Africa is calling in the army to work with the police in riot-torn areas wherever necessary to maintain law and order, a Government minister said today. Adriaan Vlok, deputy minister of defense and of law and order, said the army would man roadblocks and cordons, escort police in trouble spots, and assist in “such other situations as circumstances may demand.” “It is emphasized that the authority of the state will be maintained,” Mr. Vlok said. Riots have erupted continually in the country’s black townships for the last year. More than 300 people have died, many in clashes with the police, but others, identified as stooges of the white authorities, at the hands of other blacks.
A budget to reduce projected spending in the next fiscal year by $52 billion and by almost $300 billion over three years was approved by Senate Republican leaders and the Administration. The package, which President Reagan approved this morning, would reduce the projected $227 billion deficit in the fiscal year 1986 to $175 billion. It includes significant compromises by both the Administration and the Senate Republican leaders. Basically, the President agreed to halve his requested increase for the Pentagon and to drop his opposition to any limit or freeze in Social Security increases. In exchange, the Senators agreed to eliminate many domestic programs and restructure others that the Senate Budget Committee had sought to save.
The Senate Armed Services Committee today approved a military budget $10 billion lower than President Reagan’s request, and the panel’s chairman, Barry Goldwater, warned the President he would be lucky if Congress did not cut more. “I’d advise them to accept these figures and be very happy,” Mr. Goldwater, an Arizona Republican, said at a news conference after more than two days of closed meetings. “We can live with this.”‘ The White House announced this afternoon that it would accept the committee’s level of spending, which amounts to a 3 percent increase over the current year on top of another increase to make up for inflation.
A Federal grand jury examining allegations of drug use by former associates of Marion S. Barry Jr., Mayor of Washington, and city employees ended its term “without further indictments.” The grand jury’s only indictment in the case was brought last year against Karen K. Johnson, a friend of the Mayor who had worked for the city. She was charged with possessing and conspiring to sell cocaine, pleaded guilty last June, and has since been jailed for contempt, stemming from her refusal to testify before the grand jury.
Demonstrations against apartheid highlighted the 17th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In Washington, 4,000 people gathered outside the South African Embasssy. In Manhattan, protesters barricaded a Columbia University building, and threatened to stay until the university pledged to divest its business holdings in South Africa.
A member of a neo-Nazi organization known as The Order surrendered peacefully after authorities surrounded the small farmhouse where he lived in Gentry, Arkansas, authorities said. Ardie McBrearty, 57, was arrested on an Idaho warrant charging him with receiving stolen money in the robbery of $3.5 million from a Brink’s armored truck in Ukiah, California, last year, said FBI special agent Jim Blasingame. Twelve members of The Order, a faction of the Aryan Nations, a white supremacist organization, robbed the Brink’s truck last June 19, the FBI said.
Federal authorities are investigating a report that subway shooter Bernhard H. Goetz may have tried to buy a gun in Florida while he was under indictment on gun possession charges, the U.S. attorney said in New York. Federal agents have obtained records indicating Goetz bought two guns in Orlando last fall and later made an unsuccessful attempt to buy another, said U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani. His comments followed a report in the Orlando Sentinel in which a gun shop owner was quoted as saying he turned down a man who tried to buy a gun about three weeks ago, and later recognized the man as Goetz.
A 28-year-old man who was sent to prison six years ago after being convicted of rape was freed on bail today after his accuser told a judge she had lied about being raped. After a hearing before Judge Richard L. Samuels of Cook County Circuit Court, the man, Gary Dotson, was returned to the Joliet Correctional Center, 45 miles away by car, to await the posting of a $10,000 cash bond. Nic Howell, a spokesman for the corrections department, said Mr. Dotson left prison at 5:09 PM, about two hours after his mother, Barbara Dotson, had presented a check to the court clerk.
Deputies in an armored truck crashed an electrified fence and a booby-trapped front door to get into a Wilton, California farmhouse Wednesday and found a drug laboratory, a cache of automatic weapons and a decomposed corpse, the authorities said. Nine people, including two juveniles, were arrested in the house, which was guarded by pit bull terriers and bulletproof windows that deflected tear gas canisters, said a Sacramento County sheriff’s spokesman, Roger Dickson. The raid capped a two-month investigation stemming from reports by suspicious neighbors who told the police about the log-and-wire electric fence, the five pit bulls that wandered through the acre of land around the house and armed residents mowing the yard.
A woman abandoned as a waif in Vietnam and adopted by an American soldier has won the teaching profession’s highest honor: the 1985 National Teacher of the Year award. Therese Knecht Dozier, a 32-year-old history teacher at Irmo High School in Columbia, South Carolina, will be honored in Washington on April 17. Mrs. Dozier was born in Saigon to a Vietnamese woman and a former colonel in the German Army who joined the French Foreign Legion and was sent to Indochina after World War II. Her mother died after bearing her and a younger brother. They were brought to America in 1954 after being adopted by an American Army adviser and his wife.
The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops, flooded with comments from church members, are putting off final consideration of their hotly debated major statement on the U.S. economy until next year, spokesmen for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops said in Washington. Opposition to the first draft of the pastoral letter has been fierce from some conservative Catholics, a spokesman said.
Preliminary tests show that a new drug can begin dissolving blood clots that cause heart attacks immediately after injection and is nearly twice as effective as medication now used, according to a study. The genetically engineered drug, called tissue-type plasminogen activator, dissolved most of the offending clots in 66% of the 120 patients tested, when injected into bloodstreams within a few hours of their heart attacks, the New England Journal of Medicine reported.
A major natural gas supplier to the Northeast agreed to cut prices by as much as $1 billion to settle private lawsuits charging that the pipeline had paid producers imprudently high prices for natural gas since 1981. More than 4 million customers in eight Eastern states and the District of Columbia will be affected.
The University of Pennsylvania has suspended a lecturer at its Wharton School for one term because he made classroom remarks that some black students found offensive, the school announced today. Murray B. Dolfman, a lawyer who has lectured at the business school for 22 years, will not teach in the 1985 fall term, according to a memorandum from Dean Russell Palmer to Sheldon Hackney, president of the university. The memorandum said Mr. Dolfman must attend racial awareness sessions and could not resume teaching until the university’s legal studies department gave its approval. He was accused of singling out black students last November 12 for being unable to recite the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery.
Wildfires destroyed 37 buildings, injured nine firefighters and forced thousands to flee their homes in North Carolina’s mountains. Fires also charred thousands of acres in four other tinder-dry Southern states — South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. Nine firefighters were overcome by smoke battling the worst fire in North Carolina — a blaze on the outskirts of Valdese that burned at least 16 homes and forced the evacuation of 1,500 residents. A regional federal forestry official in Atlanta said that “all our firefighter resources are committed,” and added that he feared conditions would worsen.
Though the thousands of men and women at the Bath Iron Works in Maine greeted news of a big new Navy contract Tuesday with cheers, there are difficult issues they and the company must face. The ironworks says it needs concessions to fulfill its contractual bid.
A blizzard barreled through the Colorado mountains, shutting down an interstate highway and prompting a winter storm warning as winds gusted to 70 mph. Forecasters predicted up to eight inches of new snow in the north and central mountains. “We’re having an extreme whiteout, extreme icing conditions, and we’ve got jackknifed trucks and spun-out vehicles” on Interstate 70, Colorado State Patrol dispatcher Linda Boss said. The blizzard also closed down Colorado’s Loveland Pass, and an avalanche warning was posted for north of a line from Montrose to Pueblo.
Tulane University’s basketball program will be dropped in the wake of a point-shaving scandal. The decision occurred just before a grand jury returned indictments against three players and five others.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1259.05 (+0.99)
Born:
Rudy Fernández, Spanish National Team, EuroLeague, and NBA shooting guard and small forward (Olympics, silver medal, 2008, 2012; bronze medal, 2016; FIBA World Cup gold 2006, 2019; Real Madrid; NBA: Portland Trailblazers, Denver Nuggets), in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
Eric Brock, NFL defensive back (Atlanta Falcons), in Alexander City, Alabama.
Greg Fassitt, NFL defensive back (New Orleans Saints), in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Alison Bales, WNBA center (Indiana Fever, Atlanta Dream), in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Died:
Kate Roberts, 94, Welsh nationalist and Welsh language writer.
History Diaries 