Moscow accused Washington of violating the accord that set up the Geneva arms control talks, which linked discussion of medium-range and strategic missiles with space-based weapons. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader, said the opening talks, which ended yesterday, showed that the United States was not seeking an accord.
“Star Wars” computer research will be financed by the Pentagon and carried out by a nine-member consortium that will include four universities. The Pentagon said the consortium included the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology and Carnegie-Mellon University.
A meeting of seven Western European nations failed today to agree on a joint response to the Reagan Administration’s invitation to take part in research on space-based anti-nuclear weapons. The inconclusive outcome of the gathering, which no United States envoys attended, means President Reagan will not find a unified Western European position on his strategic defense initiative, or “Star Wars” program, at the meeting of major non-Communist industrial nations in Bonn early next Month. The foreign and defense ministers of the seven nations gathered under the framework of the Western European Union, a 30-year-old organization revived last year to strengthen what is being called “the European pillar of the Atlantic alliance.” They also gave lukewarm endorsement to a French proposal for a European “technological community.”
American experts have traced the fatal fire in a Pershing 2 missile three months ago to a freak electrical discharge, not human error, West German government sources said. The accident January 11 at a training site in West Germany killed three American soldiers and injured 16. The sources said static electricity was discharged into the solid-fuel propellant of the unarmed nuclear missile’s first stage.
The White House said today that continued Soviet refusal to accept responsibility for the slaying of an Army officer last month would have “adverse consequences on future relations.” Larry Speakes, the spokesman, reflected the Administration’s irritation with a Soviet statement on Monday that its sentry was blameless in the death of Major Arthur D. Nicholson Jr. in East Germany. The statement said the United States had distorted the results of a Soviet-American meeting on the issue held on April 12. Major Nicholson, a member of the American liaison team allowed to observe Soviet forces in East Germany, was shot during a patrol in East Germany on March 24 while preparing to take pictures in what the Russians said was a closed military installation.
Efforts to cancel a cemetery visit by President Reagan are underway despite his insistence that he will lay a wreath next month in a German military cemetery that contains graves of 47 Waffen SS soldiers, a White House official said.
President Reagan meets with President of the European Communities Commission Jacques Delors.
A Lebanese Army brigade was reported today to have moved between Syrian and Israeli forces in the Bekaa region in preparation to take over areas to be evacuated by the Israelis. Military analysts here said the reported deployment of Lebanese troops in eastern Lebanon meant that Syrian troops would not advance into territory previously held by the Israeli Army. These positions were established on June 11, 1982, when Syrian and Israeli forces agreed to a cease-fire. Israel has warned it will not stand by if the Syrian Army moves closer to the Israeli border after Israel withdraws from Lebanon. Thirty thousand Syrian soldiers have been facing about 8,000 Israeli troops in the Bekaa since Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 in a move against the Palestine Liberation Organization. Syrian forces first came to Lebanon 10 years ago as a deterrent force in the Lebanese civil war.
In another development today, Christian militiamen began to pull out of the hills east of the southern port of Sidon with the aim of easing the fighting there. The commander of the Christian, militia, the Lebanese Forces, announced a unilateral cease-fire on Monday, but fighting continued. In the Bekaa, the 1,000-member Lebanese contingent moved into the village of Amiq, 25 miles southeast of Beirut, on Monday, and a military source said it was ready to take over Israeli positions within hours of the Israelis’ departure. The source said the Israelis were expected to pull out of the central sector in eastern Lebanon before the end of the week. The Israeli Cabinet decided on Sunday to complete the withdrawal from occupied Lebanese territory by the beginning of June.
Iranian President Ali Khamenei ordered a halt to public harassment of citizens for un-Islamic behavior or dress. Khamenei said on Tehran radio that women have been accosted over their clothing and youths over their long hair. He blamed extremist members of Hezbollah (Party of God), a Muslim fundamentalist group. Enforcement of Islamic standards should be left to governmental organizations, he said.
At least 15 people were killed and nearly 100 wounded today as clashes erupted between rival Hindu caste groups in the western Indian city of Ahmadabad, according to reports reaching New Delhi. The violence came as the Hindus defied a curfew and the presence of army troops, who were requested in recent days by the Gujarat state government. The worst violence occurred in neighborhoods of industrial and textile workers, where upper caste and lower caste people battled each other, the reports said. At least seven people were burned to death while others were stabbed or shot. At least 55 people have been killed and hundreds more wounded in a series of similar violent incidents in Ahmadabad since mid-February.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk has asked to resign as president of Cambodia’s precarious anti-Vietnamese guerrilla coalition, foreign diplomats in Peking said. They said Sihanouk wrote to Khieu Samphan, Khmer Rouge leader and premier of the coalition, tendering his resignation for health reasons. The coalition links the non-communist forces of Sihanouk and former Cambodian Premier Son Sann with those of the Communist Khmer Rouge, blamed for more than a million deaths when they ruled Cambodia from 1975 to early 1979.
Indonesia and China agreed to hold formal talks, an effort to normalize relations suspended 20 years ago after an unsuccessful, Communist-backed coup attempt in Jakarta. Indonesian Foreign Minister Mochtar Kusumaatmadja said Chinese Foreign Minister Wu Xueqian asked for a meeting. Wu is in Indonesia to attend 30th anniversary ceremonies marking the 1955 Bandung conference that gave birth to the movement of nonaligned nations.
A Japanese fishing boat with an American woman aboard was seized by a Soviet naval vessel in the Bering Sea near a disputed area claimed by both the U.S. and Soviet governments. The State Department said it is trying to secure the release of the observer from the National Marine Fisheries Service, which monitors foreign fishing inside the U.S. 200-mile limit. The site was reported as 180 nautical miles west of St. Matthew Island. Officials said the two sides disagree on how a dividing line was drawn under an 1867 convention.
The remains of a University of Colorado professor who disappeared almost three years ago have been found in a ravine near San Ignacio in northwestern Mexico, U.S. and Mexican officials said. Nicholas Schrock’s remains were identified to the satisfaction of his wife through comparison with dental records, among other things. Schrock was 42 when he disappeared May 31, 1982, while driving on Mexico’s Pacific Coast Highway 15 to a summer teaching job in Guadalajara. Seven policemen from San Ignacio, including the chief, were arrested, convicted of robbery and have since been released.
President Reagan participates in a series of meetings with Representatives to discuss the Nicaraguan Peace Plan.
Opposing votes on Nicaraguan rebel aid were recorded in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Senate voted, 53 to 46, to approve the release of $14 million in aid to the insurgents after President Reagan pledged to use the money only for nonmilitary items such as food and clothing. The House later rejected the aid measure by a vote of 248 to 180.
Sudan’s new military rulers and the Libyan government agreed to normalize relations, which were strained before the Sudanese military seized power earlier this month. Tripoli radio, monitored by the British Broadcasting Corp., said the agreement provides for an exchange of visits, increased cooperation in all fields and regular, direct air flights between the two countries. The Kuwaiti newspaper Al Watan, meanwhile, reported that Libya has offered Sudan billions of dollars if the new regime will sever ties with Washington.
A surge in consumer prices was reported by the Labor Department. It said that the Consumer Price Index, led by a spurt in the price of gasoline, rose last month by five-tenths of 1 percent, the largest amount in more than a year. The Government also reported a surprisingly large drop in factory orders for durable manufactured goods. Orders for American-made durable goods fell 2.3 percent in March, continuing a pattern that shows increasing reliance on foreign products, the Commerce Department reported today. It was the third drop in four months, and followed a 2.5 percent decline in February. Orders had been up 8.2 percent in November, to a monthly record of $104.4 billion. Since then, orders declined each month except in January. The March orders were down to $100.4 billion.
The flight of the space shuttle Challenger, set to begin Monday, will land May 6 at wide-open Edwards Air Force Base in California because of problems experienced on landing last week by the shuttle Discovery, NASA announced. During Discovery’s landing Friday, a landing gear brake locked up, one tire blew out and another was damaged. At a flight readiness review, shuttle managers decided that all other elements of Challenger’s mission were OK and gave the go-ahead to launch the ship at 9 AM PST Monday.
The media’s failure to keep secret a test call-up of a combat press pool has not changed the Pentagon’s commitment to permitting media coverage of secret military operations, Pentagon spokesman Michael I. Burch said. He said military officials planned to meet with news executives. Burch praised the 10 correspondents who participated in the test, flying to Honduras to cover a military exercise. Burch said that the Pentagon acknowledged the test call-up because Washington was “on the brink of hysteria” about a possible combat action by U.S. forces. Meanwhile, the Mutual Radio Network, identified in some reports as the source of the leak, denied any wrongdoing.
Jackie Presser refused to answer a Federal panel’s questions about labor racketeering. Mr. Presser, the president of the teamsters’ union, repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.
Religious groups must pay minimum wages required by Federal law to workers engaged in commercial activity, under a unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court.
The Georgia Supreme Court ruled that Atlanta illegally transferred land to the state for construction of a contested 22-mile roadway from downtown to Jimmy Carter’s planned presidential library near Emory University. The high court said a construction contract for the parkway-previously awarded by the state but blocked by a lower court-was valid, but that right-of-way for the project was illegally delivered.
A 28-year-old Colorado woman, unable to give birth until she took fertility drugs, has delivered quintuplets, Denver doctors said. The four boys and a girl were stable and in an intensive care unit at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Four were on respirators. The infants were delivered 7½ weeks prematurely by Caesarean section. The parents are Kathleen and Greg Miller, 29, of Watkins, Colorado.
A new formula for Coca-Cola, the world’s best-selling soft drink, has been developed, and the 99-year-old former formula has been scrapped, the company said.
Defense attorneys, in closing arguments today, portrayed four defendants charged with bombing abortion clinics as all-American heroes who broke the law to save lives. But United States Attorney Tom Dillard said the defendants, Matthew Goldsby, 21 years old, his fiancée Kaye Wiggins, 18, James Simmons, 21, and his 19-year-old wife, Kathy, were no different from terrorists in the Middle East who invoke God’s name and take the law into their own hands. A jury began its deliberation at 7:15 PM in the federal conspiracy trial of the four youths accused of the December 25 bombings of three Pensacola clinics. Jurors recessed for the night a short time later.
Governor James R. Thompson Jr. said today that he would hold a special hearing with a state board to consider a clemency request from Gary Dotson, convicted of a rape that the alleged victim now says never happened. Governor Thompson announced the May 9 hearing in Chicago with the Prisoner Review Board after spending the weekend reviewing trial transcripts and Mr. Dotson’s petition for executive clemency and trial transcripts. Mr. Thompson, a former United States Attorney, also reviewed transcripts of a hearing earlier this month at which Mr. Dotson’s accuser, Cathleen Crowell Webb, testified that she had lied about being raped.
Henry Lee Lucas, who once said he had slain hundreds of people throughout the country, told reporters today that the only person he killed was his mother. Mr. Lucas, who served a prison term after being convicted of his mother’s killing in 1960, called a news conference at the McLennan County Courthouse here, where a grand jury is investigating the authenticity of his claims. “I have killed Mother, and that is the only one,” he said. Mr. Lucas, convicted of 10 slayings in Texas and charged with killings in five other states, contended that law-enforcement officers led him into confessing to crimes he did not commit. But Mr. Lucas’s allegations were termed “absurd” by Sgt. Bob Prince of the Texas Rangers, who heads a state task force set up to coordinate interviews with Mr. Lucas by law-enforcement officials from across the country.
Search teams combing the remote retreat of an anti-Semitic survivalist sect today found an area that had been land-mined and a large quantity of weapons, including machine guns, grenades, explosives and an antitank rocket. Jack Killorin of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said that the mines were rigged to explode upon remote command but that many had exploded well before the searchers entered the compound, apparently detonated by an electrical storm. The search of the 224-acre encampment of the sect, called the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, began Monday after the group’s leader, Jim Ellison, surrendered peacefully to the state and Federal authorities who had surrounded the area since Friday. He was charged with directing members of the group to manufacture and sell machine guns and silencers, including two silencers found in the possession of a man who killed a law-enforcement officer a year ago.
Much land has lost protected status in the last few years as the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management has changed the classifications of about 200 million acres. The changes, the bureau estimates, have opened about 30 million acres to mining and mineral exploration. Conservationists said the bureau acted without public review.
Three sons of the late Mafia boss Joseph Colombo have been indicted with 22 other persons on charges stemming from crimes including murder, rape and torture, prosecutors said in New York. Joseph Colombo Jr., 38, of New Windsor, his brother, Vincent, 34, of Washingtonville, and all but three of the others were charged with racketeering conspiracy, said U.S. Attorney Raymond J. Dearie of Brooklyn. Anthony Colombo, 40, of Blooming Grove, was charged with drug trafficking, extortion and running a “crew” that committed many crimes.
A nine-month test of video lottery machines that allowed Chicago bar patrons to play an instant version of the Illinois State Lottery is ending in apparent failure. The machines, which attracted nationwide attention because of charges that they were really video slot machines, are being withdrawn from Illinois by their manufacturer, Bally Corp., because they generated less revenue than expected.
An immigration judge in Miami denied bond for an alleged Nazi war criminal accused of killing thousands of Latvian Jews during World War II, saying he feared that Konrads Kalejs would “go underground again.” Kalejs, 72, will remain at a detention center pending a May 15 hearing on possible deportation. Defense attorney Ivars Verzins planned to appeal the ruling, saying Kalejs is not likely to flee because he has been in the country about 25 years. Justice Department investigator Jeffrey Mausner said Kalejs should be denied bond because he did not show up at an earlier hearing.
Sam J. Ervin Jr. died of respiratory failure in a hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at the age of 88. The former Democratic Senator directed the Watergate investigation.
Major League Baseball:
Dusty Baker has a homer and drives in 5 runs as Oakland outslugs the Angels, 14–9. Nine different players hit homers for both teams, which ties the American League record. California hits 5, two by Reggie Jackson, and all are solos.
Rick Sutcliffe (3–1) scattered eight hits and belted a long home run and Ryne Sandberg also hit a homer for his first run batted in of the year as Chicago blanked Pittsburgh, 5–0.
Mike Krukow gave up seven hits as the San Francisco Giants ended a seven-game losing streak and snapped Fernando Valenzuela’s scoreless-inning streak, beating the Dodgers, 2–1. Valenzuela (2-2) allowed only four hits and struck out eight, but his streak ended at 25 ⅔ innings when he was the victim of two unearned runs in the fifth and lost for the ninth time in the last 10 decisions at Candlestick Park.
Oakland Athletics 14, California Angels 9
Milwaukee Brewers 5, Chicago White Sox 6
Detroit Tigers 4, Cleveland Indians 3
Cincinnati Reds 4, Houston Astros 6
Seattle Mariners 2, Minnesota Twins 4
Philadelphia Phillies 4, Montreal Expos 5
Boston Red Sox 5, New York Yankees 4
Chicago Cubs 5, Pittsburgh Pirates 0
Atlanta Braves 4, San Diego Padres 2
Los Angeles Dodgers 1, San Francisco Giants 2
New York Mets 3, St. Louis Cardinals 8
Baltimore Orioles 11, Texas Rangers 1
Kansas City Royals 7, Toronto Blue Jays 6
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1278.71 (+12.15)
Born:
Emilio Bonifácio, Dominican MLB outfielder, second baseman, and third baseman (Arizona Diamondbacks, Washington Nationals, Florida-Miami Marlins, Toronto Blue Jays, Kansas City Royals, Chicago Cubs, Atlanta Braves, Chicago White Sox), in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Patrick Coulombe, Canadian NHL defenseman (Vancouver Canucks), in St-Fabien, Quebec, Canada.
Rachel Skarsten, Canadian actress (“Birds of Prey”, “Reign”), in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Angel Locsin, Filipina TV and movie actress (“Mulawin”), in Santa Maria, Bulacan, Philippines.
Lil Eazy-E [Eric Darnell Wright], American rapper, son of Eazy-E, in Compton, California.
Died:
Sam Ervin, 88, American politician (U.S. Senator from North Carolina) and Watergate committee chairman.
Kent Smith, 78, American actor (“Peyton Place”, “Invaders”), dies from heart disease.
History Diaries 