Soviet intelligence agencies secretly bugged communications equipment at the French Embassy in Moscow for more than five years, according to a report published in the French news magazine Le Point. Citing a secret report by the External Relations Ministry, the magazine said the Soviets placed the electronic bugs on six teleprinters in late 1976 and were detected in January, 1983. The report prompted the French expulsion of 47 Soviet diplomats in April, 1983, the magazine said.
East German leader Erich Honecker will make an official visit to Italy later this month, the East German news agency reported. Honecker’s visit will be his first to a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and was seen by diplomats in Bonn as an indication that Moscow, under new Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, has decided to renew efforts of closer ties between the Soviet Bloc and the West. Honecker will be returning a visit by Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi who went to East Berlin last summer.
The Greek Parliament approved in principle today constitutional amendments that would trim the powers of the President. The action brings the nation closer to early legislative elections that are expected to be held in June. Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, whose Socialist Government is facing a constitutional crisis, has asked President Christos Sartzetakis to call elections when Parliament approves the amendments in two rounds of voting. In the first vote today, 182 of the 300 deputies, two more than the required minimum, voted for the changes. The second vote is to be held in a month. The changes cannot get final ratification until after the elections. The proposed changes, which would limit the President’s powers to dissolve Parliament, appoint the Prime Minister and call referendums, prompted the resignation of President Constantine Karamanlis on March 10. Mr. Sartzetakis was elected by Parliament on March 29.
Iraq launched an air raid on Tehran and fired missiles at three other Iranian cities, killing at least 21 people, before Iranian jets hit two Iraqi targets, according to reports from both sides. Iran acknowledged the deaths in the attacks on its capital and the cities of Dezful, Nahavand and Ramhormoz. It said its jets raided Ranya in northeastern Iraq and its gunners continued shelling the port of Basra. Meanwhile, a U.N. spokesman said Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar will travel to Tehran today to discuss an end to the Persian Gulf War.
Mediation of the Iran-Iraqi war will be attempted by the Secretary of General of the United Nations, Javier Perez de Cuellar. He said last week that he would not visit Iran or Iraq during his current tour of the Persian Gulf region because Iran had refused to give him assurances that it was willing to discuss a comprehensive settlement. One of his aides said the Secretary General now feels that his conditions have been met.
Lebanese President Amin Gemayel met with political and military leaders in Beirut in an effort to halt Muslim-Christian fighting that has killed 48 people in Sidon. The fighting continued for the ninth straight day, pitting rightist Christian militiamen against army troops and Palestinian gunmen. The Christians are loyal to Samir Geagea, leader of a revolt within the Lebanese Forces, the major Christian militia coalition. Geagea accuses Gemayel of betraying Christian political ideals by aligning himself with Syria’s leftist government.
India’s Foreign Secretary Romesh Bhandari ended two days of talks in Islamabad with Pakistani officials, aimed at normalizing relations between the two countries, which have fought three wars since their independence in 1947. The two sides have been discussing a Pakistani proposal for a non-aggression pact and an Indian proposal for a treaty of peace, friendship and cooperation.
The leader of an insurgency in India’s remote northeast says he is willing to negotiate a settlement with the Indian Government because the issue cannot be resolved by military means. “We do not not seek a military victory over India — that is impossible — but we want to insure that we are not defeated politically,” said the leader of the Mizo National Front, who goes by the name of Laldenga. Mr. Laldenga said in an interview that he would seek constitutional safeguards for the territory of Mizoram to preserve its ethnic identity as the home of the Mizo tribe. Talks with the government are to resume Monday.
Italy will sell arms to China and will train Chinese troops and scientific personnel under an agreement reached here today, the Italian Defense Minister, Giovanni Spadolini, said. Under the agreement, which was reached with China’s Defense Minister, Zhang Aiping, Peking said it would buy radar systems, transport and fighter planes, helicopters, mines, torpedoes, electronics and hydrofoils, Mr. Spadolini told Italian reporters. Chinese troops will be trained in Italy in parachuting and in techniques for mountain fighting, he said.
Mexico City police questioned reputed drug baron Rafael Caro Quintero about the kidnap-murder of U.S. drug enforcement agent Enrique S. Camarena. Caro Quintero was returned to Mexican authorities Friday after his arrest in Costa Rica. Under Mexican law, police have three days to interrogate Caro Quintero before handing him over to judicial authorities, an official said. Authorities then have another three days to either file formal charges or free him.
President Reagan said today that he was encouraged by initial reactions from abroad to his proposal for providing $14 million in aid to the Nicaraguan rebels. In his weekly radio address from his ranch near here, Mr. Reagan said more than a dozen countries, including Nicaragua’s neighbors, had already expressed their support. Mr. Reagan did not mention Nicaragua’s strong rejection of the proposal, which calls for talks between the rebels and Managua. The President said people around the world who support democracy were rallying behind the proposal. He added, “I ask only the members of our own Congress to do the same.”
Politicians and foreign diplomats here say President Jose Napoleon Duarte’s unexpected electoral triumph over his rightist opponents is almost certain to give him the power he needs to alter the economic and political structure of El Salvador. But if he is to govern effectively, the officials say, Mr. Duarte must use his office in a way that has not previously been open to him. “He has to define the rules of the game and what he really thinks of social reforms,” one of Mr. Duarte’s closest confidants said in an interview. “He has to reach out in a way that he has not done up to now.”
The body of the secretary of the Support Group for Families of the Detained and Disappeared in Guatemala was found Friday in her car in a ravine nine miles south of Guatemala City, according to a spokesman for the group. The bodies of her brother and young son were also in the car. The official, Maria Rosario Godyo de Cuevas, was the second rights activist to die within a week. The group’s press liaison officer, Hector Orlando Gomez, was abducted March 30, according to the rights group. His body was found the next day outside Guatemala City. Jane Horvath, a spokesman for the Guatemala News and Information Service, an California-based group that monitors the rights situation in Guatemala, said the incidents came after a statement issued to journalists March 15 by Guatemala’s leader, General Oscar Mejia Victores. “To take steps toward the reappearance alive of the disappeared is a subversive act,” the statement said, “and measures will be adopted to deal with it.”
Brazil’s President-elect, Tancredo Neves, continued in stable condition today, with new tests revealing a slight increase in a lung inflammation but apparently the elimination of an abdominal infection that prompted emergency surgery Thursday. Doctors at Hospital das Clinicas in Sao Paulo, where Mr. Neves is being treated, stressed that he was strong enough to be moved by ambulance from an intensive-care unit to a nearby building where computerized X-rays could be taken. On Thursday, the President-elect’s condition was described as “very critical.” Mr. Neves, 75 years old, was hospitalized for an acute intestinal inflammation just hours before he was to take office on March 15. Since then, with Vice President Jose Sarney serving as Acting President, Mr. Neves has undergone five abdominal operations.
A military coup in the Sudan overthrew the Government of President Gaafar al-Nimeiry. It was led by the recently appointed Defense Minister, General Abdel Rahman Swar al-Dahab, the new government announced. The takeover followed more than a week of demonstrations and strikes touched off by increased food prices and growing disaffection for President Nimeiry, an army officer who was regarded as pro-Western. He was in Cairo, arriving there yesterday after a visit to the United States. The coup was announced over the radio. The radio studios in Omdurman were heavily guarded by soldiers, who withdrew only after the announcement was made. Reportedly, there were two casualties during the coup, killed in a brief shootout as soldiers seized the state security headquarters in the capital Khartoum.
The coup in the Sudan took place less than 12 hours after Mr. Nimeiry had left Washington to fly home to try and put an end to unrest there. American officials were concerned over the future stability of the Sudan, but said that the new leader seemed to be “an establishment figure” and that there were no signs of Libyan or Ethiopian involvement in the coup.
The new Sudanese leader, General Abdel Rahman Swar al-Dahab, was described yesterday by a former Minister of Information of the Sudan and by a Sudanese Ambassador as an apolitical career military officer. They both indicated that they thought General Swareddahab would return power to a civilian Government after an interim period, as a communique of the new regime declared. The former Minister of Information, Bona Malwal, who was reached at his Manhattan home, said General Swareddahab, who is Commander in Chief of the Sudan’s armed forces, was in his early 50’s, of medium height and soft-spoken. He “speaks in a very simple and straightforward way,” Mr. Malwal said.
South African police fired tear gas to disperse thousands of black mourners marching from a funeral for riot victims to a cemetery in strife-ridden eastern Cape Province. A black reporter who witnessed the march outside Port Elizabeth estimated that about half the 15,000 mourners could not proceed to the burial service. The authorities did not interrupt another funeral in the area for Xolile Kani, 26, youngest brother of internationally known actor John Kani. Xolile Kani, was killed in a recent clash with police.
Curtailment of vaccine production by manufacturers, especially of whooping cough vaccine, has raised fears in the Reagan Administration of possible shortages, and it will soon propose major changes in the compensation system for children harmed by the shots, according to Administration officials. They said the proposal was designed to assure continued availability of all the childhood vaccines. The Administration fears possible shortages of vaccines because manufacturers have curtailed production as a result of a growing number of multimillion-dollar damage suits. Production of whooping-cough vaccine has been especially hard hit.
William J. Schroeder left his hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, and moved into an apartment across the street, becoming the first person to live outside a hospital with a permanent artificial heart. The 53-year-old retired Federal worker, in his 133d day with an artificial heart, longer than anyone, was released from Humana Hospital Audubon at 2 P.M. after a roller-coaster recovery since his admission Nov. 11. Mr. Schroeder immediately moved across the street to a specially equipped 800-square-foot apartment. He and his wife, Margaret, will live there while Mr. Schroeder, who remains severely impaired because of a stroke suffered Dec. 13, continues his recuperation from the artificial heart experiment as an outpatient. Mrs. Schroeder said at a news conference before the move, “We’re going home in a sense – not our home, but we’ve lived in the Air Force for years, and home was wherever we were at.”
All branches of the nation’s armed forces met their recruitment goals during the first quarter of fiscal 1985, but re-enlistments showed a slight decline — 66%, compared to 71% the year before — the Pentagon reported. The military services, the report said, continue to enjoy success in attracting recruits with a high school diploma, with 92% of those who joined from October 1 to December 31, 1984, having graduated. The report showed 2.142 million persons on active duty as of December 31, slightly above last year’s total.
Rhode Island’s second effort to convict Claus von Bülow of trying to murder his multimillionaire wife, Martha, begins tomorrow with a new judge, new prosecutors, a new defense team and a new location, the County Superior Court in downtown Providence. However, pretrial maneuvers by both sides indicate that, at least in its early stages, the new trial will be a reprise of the highly publicized proceedings in Newport three years ago. The state argued then, in two months of often lurid testimony, that Mr. von Bülow, a 58-year-old Danish-born financial consultant, injected his wife with potentially fatal doses of insulin in Christmas visits to their Newport mansion in 1979 and 1980, hoping her death would give him half her fortune as well as freedom to marry another woman. Mrs. von Bülow, Sunny to her friends, is at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in what her doctors say is an irreversible coma. The Newport jurors found Mr. von Bülow guilty, rejecting his assertion that his wife’s condition resulted from alcohol and drug abuse or possibly a suicide attempt. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
The possibility that the Wilberg Mine fire in Utah that killed 27 mine personnel last December 19 was the result of arson is under investigation, Emery County Sheriff Lamar Guymon said. Working with investigators from Utah Power and Emery Mining, Guymon said the focus on arson resulted from reported jealousy among miners over an effort to set a production record. He said miners receive bonuses for such efforts. He added that if the “hearsay evidence” received proves to be factual, “there’s a good possibility that fire was set.”
Family problems will be reassessed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who 20 years ago wrote a highly controversial report on black families. He is to deliver a series of lectures at Harvard Monday and Tuesday renewing the call he made in 1965 for a “national family policy.” Now, however, he avoids identifying the problems of single-parent families, illigitimacy and poverty among children as largely black phenomena. Those problems, he says, pervade the entire society.
A subsidiary of the nation’s largest waste-disposal firm has agreed to pay a $2.5-million fine to settle civil complaints involving an Ohio landfill, the Environmental Protection Agency said. The penalty against Chemical Waste Management Inc., an arm of Waste Management Inc. of Oak Brook, Illinois, is the largest administrative fine in the history of the EPA. It is far less than the $6.8 million the agency sought in a complaint charging that Chemwaste illegally diluted liquid PCB wastes and sold the result as reclaimed oil, and that it illegally stored PCB wastes in lagoons at a Vickery, Ohio, landfill. The EPA said that it accepted a smaller fine because Chemwaste had agreed to take specific protective measures costing up to $25 million at the site.
San Antonio Mayor Henry G. Cisneros defeated five challengers to win a third term. With 99% of the precincts reporting, Cisneros, the first Latino mayor in San Antonio, had 73% of the vote. Cisneros, 37, gained national attention last year when he was being considered as a possible Democratic vice presidential candidate. San Antonio voters also approved a $100-million public works bond issue that would raise property taxes 14%. In Dallas, Mayor Starke A. Taylor narrowly won a second term, and in Austin, Mayor Ron Mullen was locked in a tight race.
Internal Revenue Service agents seeking information on tax protesters raided suspected “warehouse banks” in seven cities and seized records, documents and gold bullion, IRS spokesman Scott Waffle said. There were no arrests made at a Denver warehouse and offices and homes in Littleton, Colorado, Edina and Albany, Minnesota, Clackamas, Oregon, Alexandria, South Dakota, and Sioux City, Iowa, which are affiliated with the National Commodity Barter Association, a Denver group headed by federal tax opponent John Grandbouche. Waffle said that warehouse banks claim to provide financial privacy, since they avoid documentation and offer most services except making loans or handling U.S. savings bonds.
The Federal Government, having just about conceded that automobile thieves will be able to defeat almost any antitheft gadget devised by manufacturers, is completing regulations to make it easier to recover cars after they are stolen. Under rules being drawn up by the Department of Transportation, automobile parts most attractive to thieves would be stamped with identification numbers the authorities could use to trace them. The rules are aimed at shops that take apart stolen cars and sell them piecemeal, often realizing more than the cars were worth whole. “The numbers are a concession that thefts cannot be stopped,” said Richard O. Elder, a vice president of the Highway Loss Data Institute, an insurance industry group. He said the numbering system would address the problem “post-theft, at the point where the thief would be selling the car or cutting it up.”
Manufacturers of tampons have begun a voluntary recall of products containing a fiber linked to toxic shock syndrome. In newspapers across the country, Playtex International suggests that women with Playtex Slender, Super, or Super Plus tampons throw the tampons out and send for exchange coupons for a reformulated tampon. Tambrands Inc., manufacturer of Tampex, is announcing a similar policy for its Super Plus tampon. The Playtex products and the Super Plus Tampax contained an absorbent material, polyacrylate. Research at Harvard Medical School in Boston has shown that in laboratory testing this material may increase the risk of toxic shock syndrome, a potentially fatal disease, according to a statement released by Tambrands.
A brake on the Northeast’s migration to the South and West which brought population losses of the hundreds of thousands in the 1970’s is indicated by recent Government figures. Some experts are cautiously interpreting this development as evidence that the region has reach an equilibrium, though it is still losing population to the South and West.
Columbia University issued formal warnings yesterday to students barricading a campus building that they would be subject to disciplinary measures ranging from probation to expulsion. For a third day, more than 100 students continued to block the main entrance to Hamilton Hall, insisting that the university divest itself of its $33 million in holdings in companies that do business in South Africa.
Heavy rains helped douse wildfires that blackened 70,000 acres of brush and woodlands across eight Southeastern states, but gusty winds fanned the embers and weary firefighters stood by in case of new blazes. Volunteers, National Guardsmen and prison inmates joined the fight against the fires, which were blamed for one firefighter’s death, more than 30 injuries, mostly among firefighters, and millions of dollars of damage. Two North Carolina residents suffered mild heart attacks as they evacuated their homes, officials said. The showers fell on North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.
The U.S. performs a nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site.
Born:
Clarke MacArthur, Canadian NHL left wing (Buffalo Sabres, Atlanta Thrashers, Toronto Maple Leafs, Ottawa Senators), in Lloydminster, Alberta, Canada.
David Sloane, NHL right wing (Philadelphia Flyers), in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Ropati Pitoitua, Samoan NFL defensive end (New York Jets, Kansas City Chiefs, Tennessee Titans), in American Samoa.
Garrett Zablocki, American rock guitarist (Senses Fail, 2002-11), in New Jersey
Died:
Mark Lothar [Lothar Hundertmark], 82, German composer (The Story of the Lazy Bear).
History Diaries 