Tests of proposed “Star Wars” arms could be extensively carried out under a broad interpretation of the 1972 ABM treaty contained in a report to Congress by the Defense Department. The Pentagon also said the United States would “reserve the right” to disregard provisions of the treaty in reprisal for purported Soviet violations, raising the possibility that such experiments would proceed even if they did not comply with the treaty. The statement, contained in a report to Congress this week, was the most explicit indication to date how the Administration might respond to what it has described as clear-cut Soviet violations of treaty limits on anti-missile defenses.
No protest resignations are expected from the 55-member United States Holocaust Memorial Council over President Reagan’s plans to visit a German military cemetery next month, according to Hyman Bookbinder, a member of the council’s executive committee. “It would be a dramatic and emotional reaction, but not the most sensible thing to do,” he said. “We now see the work of the council as even more important,” Mr. Bookbinder said in an interview. “We must help the President understand the full significance of the Holocaust, the real meaning – namely, that war and genocide are not identical.”
The Warsaw Pact will be extended for 20 years when officials of the Soviet bloc’s military alliance meet later this month, the East German Communist Party leader, Erich Honecker, was quoted as saying. “The decision is unanimous,” the East German leader was quoted by the Italian news agency Ansa as saying in an interview.
French President Francois Mitterrand condemned mounting racism in France and told a human rights convention that immigrants deserve better treatment. Speaking before the Human Rights League, Mitterrand said all immigrants who respect French laws “should be protected as if they were our own nationals.” Mitterrand, a Socialist, blamed the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment on France’s conservative parties, saying they are exploiting it for political purposes.
A group of Roman Catholic and Jewish religious leaders this week celebrated the 20th anniversary of a declaration by the Second Vatican Council that revolutionized the relationship between Catholics and Jews. Pope John Paul II told the group that the Holocaust, “which so cruelly decimated the Jewish people,” was the result of “an absence of faith in God,” and said Catholics and Jews should join together to help restore religious faith. The Vatican Council declaration, “Nostra Aetate,” or “In Our Time,” in 1965 rejected the once widely held Christian view that the Jewish people were responsible for the death of Christ. At the conference, the document was repeatedly hailed by both Catholic and Jewish leaders. But one prominent Italian Jewish leader strongly criticized the Pope for his recent meeting with leaders of Europe’s far right.
A powerful bomb damaged a building housing the North Atlantic Assembly and an adjacent historic mansion in Brussels, slightly injuring three people. A group called the Revolutionary Front for Proletarian Action claimed responsibility for the blast, which tore away a wall of the 19th-Century building housing the assembly, an independent affiliate of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Santiago Carrillo, a founder of Eurocommunism and a leader of the Spanish Communist Party for nearly 50 years, was expelled from the party’s Central Committee on Friday night in a bitter dispute. Eighteen of Mr. Carrillo’s followers, including the heads of some of the party’s regional organizations, were also expelled from the 100-member committee in what Communist spokesmen said was the largest purge in the Spanish party since at least the civil war, which lasted from 1936 to 1939. Mr. Carrillo and four suppporters were also expelled from the 27-member executive committee, largely removing them from political power in the party. The Central Commmittee is the main organ guiding the party between national conventions. It selects the executive committee, which handles details.
Twenty people were reported killed overnight in fighting in and around the port of Sidon in southern Lebanon. Fifty people were reported wounded in the artillery and machine-gun exchanges Friday night and today. Christian militiamen in the hills east of the mainly Muslim port fired on residential areas, Palestinian refugee camps and a Lebanese Army barracks in the center of the city. A Christian radio station, the Voice of Lebanon, said four Christian villages overlooking Sidon had been pounded with artillery. The police said five Christian militiamen died when their jeep received a direct hit from Muslim shelling.
A prominent Afghan rebel leader who commanded guerrillas from a mountain base near Kabul has been killed by pro-government forces, his Pakistan-based party announced in Islamabad. Maulvi Shafiullah, a prominent member of Harakat-i-Inquilab-i-Islami Party, was killed about five days ago during a missile attack on his base in Koh-i-Safi Mountain, the party said. He was the second senior rebel military commander to be killed in the last four months as the result of a new strategy of the Soviet-backed regime apparently aimed at crippling the resistance leadership.
The Police raided the Golden Temple in the holy Sikh city of Amritsar before dawn today in an attempt to arrest Sikh militants who officials say may once again be using the complex as a hideout. Local officials said three Sikhs had been arrested, and the police confiscated a shotgun, a hand grenade, and a homemade pistol at the complex, considered the holiest shrine of the Sikh sect. Police sources said many of the militants the police sought had escaped. Sikh leaders said six people had been taken away. The police and Sikh leaders said the troops had searched the residential areas of the complex and had not entered the temple’s holy places. The Indian Army assaulted the temple last June in a three-day battle to flush out what it called terrorists. About 1,200 people died in the raid.
New violence struck Karachi, Pakistan, when mobs of youths, defying a 24-hour curfew, hurled rocks at police before they were driven off with tear gas and police charges. Two people were stabbed to death, bringing the toll in six days of clashes between ethnic groups to 51 killed and 250 seriously wounded.
Thailand’s armed forces chief, who has challenged the Prime Minister on several national issues over the last year, has had his term in office extended by the government. The armed forces chief, General Arthit Kamlang-Ek, 59 years old, who serves as both head of the army and as Supreme Commander, was due to retire in September, but he had been pressing for an extension with the help of other powerful military officers. His term in both posts has been extended for a year. Some Thai politicians and foreign diplomats suggested that the decision by Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda to extend General Arthit’s tenure was made to insure political stability. General Arthit made his boldest challenge to Prime Minister Prem in November, when he denounced on national television the government’s decision to devalue the currency. The Prime Minister survived that attack with a show of support from the Thai royal family.
Vietnam will allow a team of American experts to visit a B-52 crash site in June to examine the feasibility of recovering remains of missing Americans, Foreign Minister Nguyễn Cơ Thạch said today. At a press conference for foreign journalists, he described the move as a special case and said it would only involve a preliminary survey. He appeared to rule out similar visits in the future unless the United States moved toward normal relations. The agreement to allow the American experts to visit the crash site at Gia Lâm, 60 miles northeast of Hanoi, was reached after three days of talks here with United States officials.
Almost 100 policemen were reported injured in Seoul by students throwing rocks, torches and gasoline-filled bottles, South Korean officials reported after the 25th anniversary of a student uprising that brought down a previous government. In Friday’s demonstrations, an estimated 20,000 students from about 50 colleges and universities denounced President Chun Doo Hwan, labeling him a military dictator and calling for cancellation of his trip to the United States, which begins Thursday. The bloody student uprising of 1960 toppled South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee. A metropolitan police official said about 230 demonstrators were taken in for questioning after the protests in the capital on Friday. It was not known how many remained in custody or how many of the students were injured
A historic conference in Indonesia 30 years ago held by 29 Asian and African developing nations, which led to the movement known as nonalignment, will be commemorated this year. The theme then was political freedom for nations emerging from colonial rule. This time it will be economic emancipation.
Plans for military development of Guam and the nearby island of Tinian as possible alternative sites for the United States bases in the Philippines have run into legal and political snags, according to island officials and an attorney for the affected local landowners. Some of the displaced landowners on both islands, which are in the Mariana chain, are challenging the Federal Government’s right to condem their property for military use. Hundreds of others are disputing the proposed compensation for the loss of their property. The political complications include a small but persistent independence movement on Guam, led by indigenous Chamorros.
President Reagan makes a Radio Address to the Nation on the Nicaraguan Peace Proposal. Soviet troops are in Nicaragua, President Reagan said. In his weekly radio address, Mr. Reagan said the Soviet Union had “military personnel” in the battle zones near the Honduran border. A White House official said later that a small Soviet military contingent had been sighted near Cotal, where a Nicaraguan Government garrison is situated.
Military divers located some wreckage of a U.S. Air Force jet that crashed off the Honduran coast but found no signs of the two missing crewmen, the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, said. In Washington, the Pentagon identified the crewmen as Capt. Ronald B. Schatz, 34, of New Hope, Pa., and Capt. Donald F. Benton Jr., 35, of Aberdeen, N.J. The plane, an OA-37 bomber, crashed Thursday on a training mission near Honduras’ northeast coast, apparently due to mechanical failure, the embassy said. The bomber was on a training mission.
The nine leaders of three former military Argentine Governments are to stand trial in a public hearing that opens Monday on charges of kidnapping, torturing and killing Argentine civilians. The trial is expected to unfold as one of the most dramatic reviews anywhere of culpability by the military in human rights abuses committed during a campaign against an internal guerrilla threat. The coming of the trial and a worsening economic situation have created an atmosphere of heightened tension in Argentina. President Raul Alfonsin, who is to address the nation on Sunday night, has called for Argentines to demonstrate in support of democracy next Friday.
A crowd of blacks set fire to a mixed-race woman and then torched her home in South Africa’s black township of Bontrug, near Kirkwood, killing her and her 3-year-old son and badly burning her two other young children, police said. Arsonists elsewhere in eastern Cape province poured gasoline on a garbage truck and tried to set it afire but were stopped by soldiers, police in Pretoria said. More than 300 blacks have died in the riot-torn black and mixed-race townships of the eastern Cape in the last nine months.
Tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington today in sweltering heat to shout and sing protests against the domestic and foreign policies of the Reagan Administration. As a humid breeze flapped through their hand-painted banners, the crowd marched past the White House, chanting slogans in Spanish and English. It was the second day of demonstrations organized by a coalition of more than 80 groups that included activists from labor unions, civil rights organizations and churches. The protests, dubbed “Four Days in April” is to culminate Monday with civil disobedience at the gate of the White House and lobbying in Congress against President Reagan’s request for aid to the Nicaraguan rebels.
Technicians assessed the damage to the space shuttle Discovery today as they pressed to meet an ambitious schedule of eight more shuttle flights this year. By October, according to current plans, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects for the first time to have all four of the re-usable winged spaceships in service for flights as often as every three weeks. The next shuttle mission, by the Challenger, is scheduled for April 29. Space agency officials said they would probably not know until Monday or Tuesday the full extent of the damage suffered by the Discovery at the end of its seven-day mission or what effect this was likely to have on future flights. Technicians were working through the weekend, examining the spaceship and studying instrument data to determine why the brakes failed on the landing and what caused a foot-wide hole in a wing flap.
A dearth of low-income housing and large rent increases in existing housing generally would result from the Treasury Department’s comprehensive tax revision plan, Federal housing officials say. A Housing and Urban Development study says the tax proposal would remove virtually all the builders’ tax incentives and deplete the supply of rental housing. Aides to Samuel R. Pierce Jr., the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said he planned to convey his concerns to Treasury Secretary James A. Baker 3d in a meeting next week. Mr. Pierce has a reputation in Washington as a loyal low-key member of the Reagan Administration. His forceful stand on the tax proposals, according to his staff, reflects the depth of his concern, which is shared by the housing industry.
President Reagan goes swimming at Camp David.
Reported crime decreased 3% last year, including a 4% drop in murders, but rapes and aggravated assaults rose at the fastest pace since 1980, the FBI reported. The bureau’s Uniform Crime Report said the overall decline last year continued a downward trend that began in 1982. But during the fourth quarter, the report said, reported crime rose 2% in contrast with the same period in 1983. The increase was the first since 1981. The figures are based on a compilation of crimes against people and property reported by nearly 13,000 state and local police agencies around the country. Governmental officials and criminologists have questioned the accuracy and usefulness of the reports. The bureau said there was also a 5 percent decline in the number of robberies reported last year, but rapes jumped by 6 percent and aggravated assaults by 4 percent.
The nation’s black mayors, blaming the “severe crisis” in U.S. cities on federal cutbacks, adopted resolutions urging Congress to increase funding for jobs, housing and transportation. “We have grown in number and grown in unity,” said Marion S. Barry Jr., president of the National Conference of Black Mayors and mayor of the District of Columbia. The mayors, meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, called for a decrease in the $200billion federal budget deficit but not at the expense of domestic programs.
Joseph Paterno, 51, a reputed leader of the Gambino organized crime family, and four men described by police as mob “soldiers” have been arrested in Florida and New Jersey on charges they conspired to murder two persons in the New York area, authorities said. “This essentially was an attempt to set up a classic mob hit,” said FBI Agent Bill Perry. Police identified the other arrested men as Frank Anthony Basto, 48, of Belleville, New Jersey, one of Paterno’s “enforcers”; Carl Joseph Palo Jr., 62, of Fort Lee, New Jersey; Martin Louis Carbone, 59, of Bloomfield, New Jersey, and Thomas Vincent Ignizio, 47, of North Miami Beach.
The Animal Liberation Front said today that it had “rescued” 260 laboratory animals from a University of California research center, the latest in a series of raids by the antivivisection group in this country, Canada and Britain. Vicky Miller, of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said in a call to the Washington bureau of The Associated Press that 16 members of the group took 21 cats, 35 rabbits, 38 pigeons, more than 80 rats, more than 70 gerbils, 9 oppossums “and an infant primate who had been the victim of sight-deprivation experiments since birth,” from the university’s Riverside campus. Jack Chappell, a university spokesman, said: “The claims of animal mistreatment are absolutely false. There will be long-term damage to some of the research projects,” including those aimed at developing devices and treatments for blind people. “There is a great deal of shock among the research scientists,” he added. The theft followed a pattern set in similar incidents in recent years, with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals informing the news media of a raid by the Animal Liberation Front.
In the first week under a new smoking law in Los Angeles, a special telephone line in the City Attorney’s office received 432 calls, 16 of them complaints of violations of the law, a spokesman said Friday. Under the smoking law employers with five or more employees must provide no-smoking areas “to the maximum extent possible.” Employers were required to adopt a smoking policy by April 13. Exempted from the law are county, state and Federal buildings, as well as restaurants, bars and sections of hotels used for food and beverage service.
Seven people were killed when a twin-engine plane crashed in a wooded area on Beaver Island in northern Lake Michigan, the authorities said today. The Cessna 310 was traveling from Holland, Mich., to Beaver Island when it crashed late Friday, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman, Mort Edelestein, said. Helicopters from the United States Coast Guard Air Station in Traverse City spotted the wreckage a mile southeast of St. James Airport today, Commander Bob Gravino of the Coast Guard said. He said the plane was about four minutes flying time from the island when the Federal Aviation Administration radar in Minneapolis lost contact. Fog covered the island Friday night, he said.
A fire raced through Lubbock’s only blood bank early today, destroying hundreds of pints of blood and forcing doctors in a large area of West Texas to cancel elective surgery. Investigators sifted through the remains of United Blood Services, a nonprofit organization owned by Blood Systems of Scottsdale, Ariz., seeking a cause for the blaze. Firefighters said there was no evidence of arson. Blood center employees moved to Lubbock General Hospital and set up emergency plans to replace the lost supplies within a week. Emergency shipments of blood were brought in from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and El Paso. The blood center serves an area north toward Amarillo, west into New Mexico and as far south as Andrews and Snyder. That is an area of roughly 14,000 square miles, or the size of Connecticut, Rhode Islan and Maryland combined. Carolyn Paulas, a spokesman for United Blood Services, which serves 33 hospitals in 22 counties, estimated the loss of blood supplies and equipment at more than $1 million.
A baseball team from Cuba will play in the United States for the first time in 25 years when it competes in the fourth annual World Junior Baseball Championships this summer. Cuba, the reigning world amateur baseball champion, will join teams from the United States, Australia, Canada, Taiwan, Panama and Venezuela in the tournament, to be held Aug. 3-11 in Albany, New York. “This is good news for amateur baseball,” Major League Commissioner Peter V. Ueberroth said.
Interstate trucks are involved in twice as many fatal accidents per mile traveled as automobiles and often operate with defective brakes or other equipment, the Knight-Ridder Newspapers reported. The report, based on a four-month investigation, quoted government officials as saying the U.S. Bureau of Motor Carrier Safety is unable to enforce federal safety regulations on an industry that has a million trucks and 210,000 companies.
Divers for the environmental group Greenpeace sealed part of a pipeline that discharges about 4 million gallons of chemical wastes daily into the Atlantic Ocean near Dover Township, New Jersey. The pipeline belongs to the chemical manufacturer Ciba-Geigy Co., which said it would sign a complaint against Greenpeace only if its property was damaged. A company spokesman said the firm is permitted by the state of New Jersey to discharge the waste water into the ocean.
Army officers severely criticized themselves, the Army and its senior leaders in a remarkably candid self-evaluation. Half the officers who responded to a confidential survey by the Army agreed that “the bold, original officer cannot survive in today’s Army.” A report compiled from the survey said an even larger portion of the officers, 68 percent, agreed that “the officer corps is focused on personal gain rather than selflessness” — a virtue that military leaders cite as essential to good leadership. In addition, nearly half the generals, who were questioned in a separate survey but whose answers were incorporated into the report, concluded that “senior Army leaders behave too much like corporate executives and not enough like warriors.”
Carlos Lopes runs a world record marathon (2:07:12).
Karyn Marshall of NYC lifted 303 lbs in a clean & jerk lift.
The Firestone World Bowling Tournament of Champions is won by Mark Williams.
Paul Coffey scored two goals and assisted on three others tonight as the Edmonton Oilers beat the Winnipeg Jets, 5-2, and gave the Stanley Cup champions a 2-0 lead in their four-of-seven game Stanley Cup playoff sereis.
Major League Baseball:
The Phillies and Pirates swap relief pitchers, Al Holland going to Pittsburgh, Kent Tekulve to Philadelphia.
Joe Niekro and Frank DiPino combine on a two-hitter for an 8-1 victory over Atlanta. Jose Cruz drives in four while Brave-killer Craig Reynolds has two hits, including a homer.
Playing without their shortstop Julio Franco, the Indians lose, 5–2, to the Yankees. Franco, hitting .516, failed to show up but was later located at a friend’s house near Yankee Stadium. Franco said he spent the night at the house and awakened feeling ill. Since there was no telephone he could not call anyone and instead went back to sleep.
At Comiskey, Marty Barrett hits a 9th inning grand slam for Boston as they outslug the White Sox, 12–8.
Houston Astros 8, Atlanta Braves 1
Seattle Mariners 3, California Angels 2
Boston Red Sox 12, Chicago White Sox 8
San Francisco Giants 1, Cincinnati Reds 2
Kansas City Royals 3, Detroit Tigers 4
Texas Rangers 5, Milwaukee Brewers 1
Chicago Cubs 0, Montreal Expos 4
Cleveland Indians 2, New York Yankees 5
Minnesota Twins 2, Oakland Athletics 6
New York Mets 6, Philadelphia Phillies 7
Los Angeles Dodgers 3, San Diego Padres 4
Pittsburgh Pirates 3, St. Louis Cardinals 4
Baltimore Orioles 2, Toronto Blue Jays 3
Born:
Brent Seabrook, Canadian National Team and NHL defenseman (Olympics-Canada, gold medal, 2010; NHL Champions, Stanley Cup-Blackhawks, 2010, 2013, 2015; NHL All-Star, 2015; Chiacgo Blackhawks), in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada.
Guillaume Desbiens, Canadian NHL defenseman (Vancouver Canucks, Calgary Flames), in Alma, Quebec, Canada.
Billy Magnussen, American actor (“Bridge of Spies”), in Queens, New York, New York.
History Diaries 