Elie Wiesel implored the President to cancel a visit to a military cemetery where Nazi Germans are buried. Mr. Reagan listened intently at White House ceremonies honoring Mr. Wiesel, the chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, as Mr. Wiesel told him “that place, Mr. President, isn’t your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.” Despite Mr. Wiesel’s plea, the White House said Mr. Reagan would continue with his plans to lay a wreath at the Bitburg cemetery, accompanied by Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany, who had requested the visit. The moment, in the silence of the packed Roosevelt Room, came on a day when the White House announced that Mr. Reagan would visit the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp site. His visit to the camp, where Anne Frank died, will be made on the same day that he attends ceremonies at the Bitburg military cemetery, which includes the graves of 47 SS soldiers, members of the Nazi elite guard.
President Reagan speaks with Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Helmut Kohl. Helmut Kohl said he was gratified that President Reagan had reaffirmed his plan to visit a German military cemetery next month, saying the decision showed he was “a friend of the Germans.” He told a West German television interviewer that he and Mr. Reagan had discussed the revised plan to visit both the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and Bitburg, and that Mr. Reagan’s decision on his itinerary was “final.” The Chancellor added that Germans “ought to be very reserved” in regard to the American debate over Mr. Reagan’s plan to visit the cemetery, which has sparked strong criticism from American veterans’ organizations as well as Jewish groups in West Germany and the United States. “I know that this was a hard decision for the President,” the West German leader said, adding that he understood the reaction of American Jews and victims of what he called “the Nazi barbarity.”
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was honored by a group of Jewish leaders in Manhattan yesterday and seemed to join in their criticism of President Reagan for likening German soldiers killed in World War II to the inmates of Nazi concentration camps. “The fact is that we are not all equally guilty, we are not all equally dangerous, we are not all equally victims,” Dr. Kirkpatrick said at a luncheon of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations at the Pierre Hotel. Dr. Kirkpatrick, who until recently was President Reagan’s chief delegate to the United Nations, did not mention the President by name.
Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speaking out for the second time in two days after a long self-imposed silence, criticized President Reagan today for planning to visit a German military cemetery next month. “President Reagan is a great friend of the Jewish people and of the state of Israel,” Mr. Begin said. “But in this case, he was ill-advised, and all of us are very sorry about it.”
President Reagan meets with US Ambassador to the Soviet Union Arthur Hartman to discuss Mikhail Gorbachev.
A measure to permit abortion in some cases moved closer to legislative approval today after Spain’s political parties agreed to vote for it. Leaders of all the parties represented in the lower house of Parliament agreed to amend an existing law, which never took effect, along lines recommended by the country’s top court, the Constitutional Tribunal. The court declared the law unconstitutional last week but suggested in the complete text of its ruling, issued Wednesday, that the law needed only to be tightened to meet constitutional guarantees of a right to life for both the mother and the child.
Israel would, in effect, be prepared to give up the security zone it plans to establish in southern Lebanon for an informal agreement with Lebanon’s Shiite Amal militia to keep the area quiet, senior Israeli military sources said today. “We would be prepared to trade the security zone for a deal with the Shiites,” said a senior military source directly involved in policy making on Lebanon. “We would like them to know that we mean business. Though we know that Amal could not, even if it wanted, fully guarantee security in the area, we believe they could do so to a large degree. We regard them as an address we can deal with, and we are not looking for any formal arrangements.”
Thousands of soldiers and policemen sealed off the western and central sections of Karachi today, allowing no one on the street after five days of rioting left 44 people dead and more than 250 hurt. The Government of President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq said it controlled the city today after bitter clashes between ethnic groups the day before. The rioting began Monday after two young girls were killed by a bus that had been racing with another bus in a city street. Fighting Thursday and early today was between rival ethnic groups. People grappled in the streets with knives and daggers and set fire to homes and businesses. Karachi, with 7 million people, is Pakistan’s biggest city.
Japan will ease some trade rules covering telecommunications, making them comparable to those in the United States, a team of American trade negotiators announced in Tokyo. The agreement appears to fulfill Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s recent commitment that Japan would change regulations that American companies regard as barriers to trade. The Japanese Government praised the agreement, which was reached well before a June deadline. The five-day talks were held amid mounting trade frictions between the two nations, political pressures that the negotiators said had helped to speed their progress. The trade negotiations will continue next week.
A crackdown on drug trafficking is being carried out by the United States and the Bahamas, American and Bahamian officials announced in Miami. In the past two weeks, the operation has resulted in the seizure of tons of cocaine and marijuana, a Coast Guard admiral reported.
A compromise being worked on by the White House and Congress on President Reagan’s request for $14 million in aid to Nicaraguan insurgents was hindered by procedural complications and wide differences over how the money is to be spent. Senate Democrats and Republicans agreed to meet with the President on Sunday afternoon to try to develop legislative language that would provide the symbolic show of support that the President wants for the anti-Sandinista cause in Nicaragua, while limiting the use of the money to purchase of nonlethal supplies rather than military assistance as first proposed. Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, the minority leader, said he was willing to work with the Republican leadership to find a way to substitute another proposal for the President’s before a scheduled vote on Tuesday, as long as the new plan was a widely acceptable compromise. Nonmilitary Aid Supported He said he was willing to support nonmilitary aid for the rebels, as long as that aid was not funneled through the Central Intelligence Agency.
A Senate subcommittee heard detailed evidence today showing purported links between the Nicaraguan Government and international narcotics trafficking. A former drug trafficker, James A. Herring Jr., who has acted as a Federal informant, testified that he worked with Cuban Government officials and with the American fugitive Robert Vesco to help the Nicaraguan Government build a cocaine-processing laboratory near Managua. Mr. Herring said that he had worked with members of the Nicaraguan military and that Nicaragua’s Interior Minister, Tomas Borge, had offered his personal thanks for helping with what Mr. Borge called “our project,” whose purpose was to earn foreign currency for Nicaragua’s troubled economy.
Nicaragua charged today that three Honduran combat jets attacked two coast guard vessels in Nicaraguan waters Thursday, killing one sailor, wounding four and sinking one of the ships.
Two Americans, one of them a freelance journalist, were reported missing Friday in the Guatemalan highlands. The two were hiking in a remote area, reportedly hoping to make contact with anti-Government guerrillas. According to the United States Embassy here, the two men are Nicholas Blake, 26 years old, a journalist from Pennsylvania, and Griffith Davis, 38, who lives in Guatemala. The two were last seen in the northern province of Huehuetenango on March 26. Friends said the men planned to hike from the town of San Juan Ixcoy to Nebaj in Quiche Province, about 25 miles through rugged terrain.
The fire in the Galapagos Islands has endangered nesting birds, giant tortoises and other forms of wildlife unique to the islands. But after burning for a month, the blaze has brought a modest economic boom to the people who live there, a boom created by firefighting experts, pilots, scientists, journalists and tourists who are flocking to the islands to help put out the fire or to watch it.
Sudanese rebels said today that they were renewing the two-year-old civil war and ending a brief truce that followed the ouster of President Gaafar al-Nimeiry in a military coup. The rebels said by radio that the cease-fire, which they declared just after the coup earlier this month, ended Thursday. The broadcast called the country’s new military rulers “another form of the regime of dictator Nimeiry” and denied reports that the rebel leader John Garang was flying to Khartoum today for peace talks. A military spokesman said Thursday that Mr. Garang would meet with Sudan’s new military ruler, General Abdel Rahman Siwar el-Dahab, but later said he knew nothing of the trip. General Siwar el-Dahab, who ousted President Nimeiry earlier this month, has in recent days offered to meet with Mr. Garang, the United States-educated leader of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army.
New violence broke out overnight in South Africa’s eastern Cape region, and President P. W. Botha told Parliament today that there had been “a drastic escalation of the revolutionary climate in the country.” In the latest violence, five men were killed in rioting in black townships near Uitenhage when, according to police reports, mobs of blacks surrounded police vehicles and tried to set fire to them. Three men were killed by shotgun fire in the township of Despatch, and two others were found burned to death in Kwazakele.
The USSR performs a nuclear test at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeast Kazakhstan.
Space shuttle Discovery landed safely at Cape Canaveral, Florida, despite a tire blowout and a gaping hole at the end of one wing. The landing at 8:55 A.M. was delayed an extra orbit because of rain clouds. At touchdown, the brakes on one landing gear locked, shredding two tires and causing a blowout. Two other tires were badly worn. The crew appeared in good spirits when they emerged from the craft after landing, but Senator Jake Garn of Utah, who was among the crew, was assisted by a space agency official. Technicians who examined the Discovery found a hole the size of a dinner plate at the tip of the left wing where the elevon, a maneuvering and control flap, hinges to the wing. A heat-shielding tile had come loose, and the fiery temperatures of re-entry melted some of the exposed aluminum and other components of the elevon.
Senator Lawton Chiles of Florida said today that he would offer an alternative 1986 Federal budget next week that includes tax increases and a limit, probably a freeze, in the cost-of-living increase for Social Security. Mr. Chiles is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee. The Senate minority leader, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, and other Democrats have said they strongly oppose any limit on the cost-of-living increase for Social Security. The Republican leadership and the White House are just as adamantly opposed to tax increases.
Scores of armed police officers wearing camouflage clothing encircled the compound of a white supremacist group in the Ozark Mountains today. The state police and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said the deployment of the 70 to 80 officers at the 224-acre encampment of the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord would continue until Jim Ellison, 44 years old, described as the spiritual leader of the organization, surrendered. A Federal warrant accuses Mr. Ellison of violaions of Federal firearms laws, according to United States Attorney Asa Hutchinson of Fort Smith, Arkansas. Kerry Noble, identified as an elder of the group, met with a state police investigator for two and a half hours today in what he described, without elaboration, as negotiations. The authorities in Arkansas and Missouri have been searching the Ozarks for David Tate, 22 years old, of Athol, Idaho, since Monday, when a Missouri state trooper was shot to death at a routine traffic stop. Mr. Tate, who the authorities say is a member of a neo-Nazi group, the Order, has been charged with the murder.
The trial of a Russian emigre couple who are accused of spying for the Soviet Union opened today with an assertion by the Government that the Russian woman and an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were after money “for what the K.G.B. most wanted,” access to an agent of the F.B.I. The opening statement by the prosecutor indicated the key role the former agent, Richard W. Miller, will play at the trial of the couple, Svetlana and Nikolay Ogorodnikov. Mr. Miller, the first bureau agent to be charged with spying, will be tried later. All three are accused of conspiracy to commit espionage by passing secret national defense information to the Soviet Union. They were arrested last October. Richard Kendall, the Assistant United States Attorney who presented the prosecution’s opening statement to the jury in Federal District Court, said that Mr. Miller had agreed to betray his country “in concert with” the Ogorodnikovs for the sake of “money, greed and sex.”
Attorneys for Gary Dotson, who has served six years in prison for a rape that the woman who accused him now says did not happen, today filed a petition for executive clemency with the state Prisoner Review Board. Governor James R. Thompson said he and the board would begin examining the clemency application immediately to avoid any delay in deciding the case. At an impromptu news conference in Chicago, the Governor also said Mr. Dotson’s guilt or innocence might not be a factor in deciding the case, “but mercy and the appropriateness of the sentence.” He added, “On that issue, I can hear any kind of evidence.” Circuit Judge Richard L. Samuels of Cook County refused last week to set aside Mr. Dotson’s 1979 rape conviction, saying he did not believe the recantation of Cathleen Crowell Webb, the woman who testified at Mr. Dotson’s trial that he had raped her.
Thousands of activists from church, labor and civil rights groups began arriving in the capital today for four days of demonstrations against Reagan Administration policies on South Africa, Central America, nuclear disarmament and aid to the jobless. In the first of three demonstrations scheduled under the banner of the “Four Days in April” protests of a coalition of 50 groups, eight marchers were arrested peacefully this afternoon after approaching the South African Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue N.W. Meanwhile, 400 others backing the April Actions Coalition protest marched legally about a block away. The charge against those arrested is crossing a police line, or violating the law that forbids demonstrations within 500 feet of an embassy. The demonstrations staged each weekday here against South Africa’s policy of racial separation, however, have become a police ritual because the United States Attorney has declined to prosecute any of the 1,896 people arrested at the embassy since last fall.
Rita M. Lavelle, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s program to clean up toxic waste dumps, surrendered today at a federal prison to begin serving a six-month sentence for lying to Congress. Mrs. Lavelle, 37 years old, arrived at 11:15 AM at the minimum security Federal Correctional Institution in Pleasanton, 40 miles from San Francisco. Mrs. Lavelle was dismissed from the environmental agency two years ago along with two dozen other officials, including the agency’s director, Anne McGill Burford. Mrs. Lavelle was sentenced to prison and fined $10,000 in December 1983 in connection with testimony about the timing of her discovery that her former employer, Aerojet General Corporation of Sacramento, was one of the companies dumping toxic waste at Stringfellow Acid Pits near Riverside. She said she began abstaining from decisions on Stringfellow when she learned of Aerojet’s inolvement, but other E.P.A. officials disputed this.
House Republicans today accused Democrats of trying to steal the election in Indiana’s Eighth Congressional District after a three-member Congressional panel declared Frank McCloskey, a Democrat, the winner by a four-vote margin. Representative William Thomas, a California Republican who served on the panel with two Democrats, charged that its rulings were a “rape” of Indiana’s voters. The panel was headed by Representative Leon Panetta of California, a Democrat, and the other Democrat was Representative William L. Clay of Missouri.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has announced that it intends to close its Mississippi office July 1 because funds are dwindling and black lawyers are eager to take on cases the committee once handled. “I frankly am sorry to see the lawyers’ committee go,” said Victor McTeer, a black lawyer. “Part of our training was working with the lawyers’ committee.” The committee operates on donations from individuals and private foundations as well as court fees and legal settlements. The Lawyers’ Committee was formed in 1963 in Washington in response to President Kennedy’s call for lawyers to get involved in civil rights issues in the South. The Mississippi office opened two years later.
If Lyndon B. Johnson were alive and Charles Murray’s book “Losing Ground” had just been published, Bill Moyers said today, “he would have hauled Mr. Murray out to the ranch to get it straight from the horse’s mouth.” Mr. Moyers’s remark capped a two- day conference, which began as a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the high-water mark of Johnson’s Great Society program and ended with sharp exchanges between advocates and critics of government social programs. Notwithstanding Johnson’s powers of persuasion, which were recounted over and over here this week by dozens of his apostles, it is unlikely he could have shaken Mr. Murray, who believes that government programs designed to help the poor have worsened their plight and devastated the nation’s values and economy. Nor was there any chance that Mr. Murray would change the views of men and women who had devoted the most memorable years of their lives on the programs Mr. Murray would like to scrap.
Distribution of a hormone was halted by the government as a precaution following the deaths of three patients. The natural human growth hormone has been supplied by the National Hormone and Pituitary Program in Baltimore for treatment of serious growth deficiencies in children and adolescents. One of the deaths was caused by a rare and incurable virus infection that may have originated in a batch of the hormone processed before 1977.
The U.S. Army grounded its fleet of Blackhawk helicopters today, less than 24 hours after the second fatal crash in 40 days. The Army described the action in a statement as “a precautionary measure to help assure troop safety.” It gave no indication how long the grounding would last, saying it was developing “a complete safety inspection plan for the Blackhawk.”
Earth appears to be getting radiation from the constellation Cygnus, according to physicists who have conducted observations in two underground laboratories in the Middle West. They said the results of tests made in the highway tunnel under Mont Blanc in the French Alps, support their findings. They described the radiation as highly penetrating and said it may be associated with a new subatomic particle.
Major League Baseball:
Rookie Fritz Connally hits his first Major League homer, a grand slam off Toronto’s Doyle Alexander, to put the Orioles in the lead, 4–1. Connally fouls off 9 pitches before connecting and his next home run will also be a grand slam. Toronto eventually wins the game, 6–5.
The matchup of Steve Carlton and Dwight Gooden produces no runs as Lefty goes 7 innings and Doc goes 8 innings. The Mets push across a run in the 9th to beat the slumping Phils, 1–0.
Houston Astros 5, Atlanta Braves 9
Seattle Mariners 1, California Angels 9
Boston Red Sox 1, Chicago White Sox 8
San Francisco Giants 2, Cincinnati Reds 4
Kansas City Royals 9, Detroit Tigers 2
Texas Rangers 4, Milwaukee Brewers 1
Chicago Cubs 3, Montreal Expos 5
Cleveland Indians 2, New York Yankees 1
Minnesota Twins 2, Oakland Athletics 4
New York Mets 1, Philadelphia Phillies 0
Los Angeles Dodgers 2, San Diego Padres 11
Pittsburgh Pirates 4, St. Louis Cardinals 5
Baltimore Orioles 5, Toronto Blue Jays 6
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1266.56 (+1.43)
Born:
Aleksandr Tretyakov, Russian skeleton racer (Olympics, gold medal, 2014; bronze, 2010), in Krasnoyarsk, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union.
Died:
Bruce R. McConkie, 69, American LDS apostle and author.
History Diaries 