President Reagan makes a Radio Address to the Nation on the Bonn Economic Summit and the Federal Budget. President Reagan will urge growth when he meets the leaders of six other industrial democracies at the economic summit conference in Bonn this week. He will cite the policies that made the American economy the world’s fastest growing for the last two years. But some Europeans and Reagan Administration officials fear that the American economy, which pulled other countries from a prolonged global recession, is showing signs of pushing them into another.
The 10-day trip, with stops in Spain, Portugal, France and other parts of West Germany, has been overshadowed by outrage over the President’s plan to visit a cemetery that has graves of Waffen SS soldiers. Today officials said the White House chief of staff, Donald T. Regan, was seeking to shift attention from the cemetery visit on Friday to a previously announced trip to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp site earlier that day.
The massacre of 642 inhabitants of a French village by a Waffen SS Panzer Division of the German Army in World War II has been recalled by President Reagan’s plans to visit a German military cemetery in Bitburg, where members of the SS division are buried. The burial of the SS troops has been verified by a German group that assembled the dead there after the war and by other historical sources. Although those buried in the Bitburg cemetery probably did not take part in the massacre, which occurred in June 1944 in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, the involvement of the division appears to have escaped the attention of West German and American officials who have been doing research on the graveyard since protests broke out in the United States. The announcement on April 11 that Mr. Reagan would lay a wreath at the cemetery next weekend brought an outcry from Jewish organizations, veterans’ groups and others because of the presence of 49 Waffen SS soldiers among the dead.
A meeting in Paris of former government leaders from 24 countries today urged a total ban on nuclear testing for the duration of the current Geneva arms talks and new steps to strengthen the world’s monetary and trading arrangements. The declaration was signed by former leaders from the West, the developing nations and several Communist countries. Their goal is to influence the outcome of the Western economic meeting in Bonn next week as well as the Geneva talks between the Soviet Union and the United States. Western members who attended the session today included former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany and former Prime Ministers Takeo Fukuda of Japan, Pierre Elliott Trudeau of Canada, James Callaghan of Britain and Malcolm Fraser of Australia.
Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, who has been here for a meeting of the Warsaw Pact treaty, conferred today with Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish leader. After Mr. Gorbachev’s departure for Moscow, a communique said: “The Soviet side reiterated its unchanging solidarity with the struggle of the Polish United Workers Party and Poland’s working people in fully overcoming the effects of the crisis and achieving stability and strengthening the position of socialism. “The Polish side expressed thanks for the U.S.S.R.’s assistance and support, which have made a considerable contribution toward overcoming of Poland’s difficulties.”
A Scottish separatist group claimed responsibility for a fire that burned for six hours in the basement of the British Defense Ministry. Officials said 40 firemen battled the blaze, which broke out in the early morning hours in an empty area of the building in Whitehall, central London. No injuries were reported. A caller to the Press Association news agency claimed responsibility on behalf of the Scottish National Liberation Army.
Israel hopes a new economic plan will meet U.S. conditions for $1.5 billion in emergency aid, Israeli diplomats in Washington said. Prime Minister Shimon Peres outlined the plan in the latest in an unpublicized exchange of letters with Secretary of State George P. Shultz. American officials were preparing a response. One high-ranking official said there were some “positive elements” in it, but he was unsure that Mr. Shultz would view it as going far enough to warrant Administration support for the $1.5 billion, which is in addition to the $3 billion in military and economic aid already approved by the Administration for the 1986 fiscal year, which begins October 1.
“There are a lot of promises in the Peres letter,” an American official said, “and Shultz has made it clear that we are looking for actions instead of promises.” Israeli and American officials said there had been a number of letters between Mr. Shultz and Mr. Peres on the economic issue since late last year. State Department officials said they could not cite any other instance in which the Secretary had been so deeply involved in discussions with a foreign leader on the internal economic changes needed by that government to qualify for additional American aid.
Thousands of Christian refugees have been streaming into the Christian town of Jezzin in southern Lebanon after fleeing from villages around the nearby port of Sidon. The police said about 17,000 families fled their homes when the villages were overrun and sacked Friday by Palestinian gunmen and Muslim militiamen who moved in after Christian militiamen left the area.
Reporters for a Kuwaiti newspaper have visited an American Presbyterian minister and two other Americans who are being held in Lebanon, the paper, Al Watan, reported today. The daily said its correspondents visited a basement in a partially built Beirut building in which the minister, the Rev. Benjamin Weir, and two other Americans were held. It did not name the other two. It said a fourth American was being held outside Beirut.
Iraqi warplanes bombed “a very large naval target,” a term usually referring to an oil tanker, near Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal, and Iraqi troops destroyed seven boats carrying Iranian soldiers in marshlands along their border, the Iraqi military said. Iran had no official comment on the Iraqi reports. The attack near Kharg Island was the fourth reported by Iraq in as many days and the 66th such attack claimed this year. Independent marine salvage and shipping executives along the Persian Gulf have been able to confirm only 17 of the reported Iraqi ship raids.
In India, police opened fire on rampaging crowds in the western Indian state of Gujarat today in the 10th day of riots over the Government’s affirmative action policy for disadvantaged castes and classes. In one village, three people were killed in shooting between groups opposing and supporting the policy. Seven were wounded when the police opened fire on rioting crowds. Policemen in Surat used tear gas and fired in the air as rioters burned and looted stores today despite an indefinite curfew imposed Friday night, the Press Trust of India said. At least 50 people have already died in the riots in Gujarat over a policy reserving quotas of jobs and college places for groups defined as disadvantaged in the Constitution.
Chinese authorities forced foreign reporters away from a continuing demonstration in Peking by people seeking permission to move back to the capital from rural areas to which they were sent in the late 1960s during the Cultural Revolution. The officials also told the demonstrators to stop discussing their grievances with foreigners, “who can’t solve your problems.” The reporters were told they would need a special permit to enter the city hall zone where about 100 demonstrators gathered. “I warn you!” a police officer shouted at a foreign press photographer, whose identify card he demanded. “In China, you should abide by Chinese laws.” The sit-in has not been reported by Chinese news organizations.
A Philippine businesswoman said in a sworn statement that she saw a soldier shoot opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr., the most direct eyewitness account to date, her lawyers said. “I saw a gun pointed at the back of the head of Mr. Aquino…” said Rebecca Quijano, 32, a passenger on the plane that returned Aquino to Manila. “A soldier in khaki immediately behind Senator Aquino was the one who shot him.” She said she feared for her life and avoided the yearlong inquiry into the 1983 assassination that led to the current trial of 26, including the armed forces chief.
Tens of thousands of Canadians demonstrated against the testing of U.S. cruise missiles in Canada and any Canadian role in President Reagan’s program to research. space-based defenses against nuclear missiles. In Vancouver, the demonstrators numbered fewer than 100,000, well below the 150,000 predicted by organizers, who blamed the smaller turnout on rainy weather. Smaller protests were held in Toronto and in Ottawa, where about 150 demonstrated on the steps of Parliament.
Police in Santiago arrested 264 people who were celebrating the 52nd anniversary of the founding of Chile’s outlawed Socialist Party, the semi-official news agency Orbe reported. It quoted Interior Ministry sources as saying that 22 children among the reported 60 women and children taken into custody were released. The remainder will be held up to five days while charges against them are studied, the agency said. President Augusto Pinochet had banned political meetings in a crackdown on dissidence.
Seventy-nine patients died in a fire in a mental hospital in Buenos Aires Friday night, the Argentine the police said as they began an investigation. There were 410 registered patients at the privately owned Saint Emilienne Neuro-Psychiatric Institute when the fire broke out and engulfed the six-story building.
Nigeria is reopening its land borders, closed for the last year, to allow 700,000 illegal immigrants to comply with a government order to leave, a senior immigration official said today. The government has given the illegal aliens until May 10 to legalize their status or go home. Muhammadu Damulak, acting director of immigration, said border guards were instructed Friday that anybody affected by the order was free to leave. On Tuesday, Nigeria’s deputy leader, Major General Tunde Idiagbon, said the military government was ready to reopen the frontiers, closed to check smuggling since a currency changeover last year. About 300,000 of those affected are Ghanaians, while about 100,000 are from drought-stricken Niger in the north. Thousands have been driven south in search of food and land.
About 13,000 South African black miners were fired after a week of work stoppages in a dispute over higher wages at the world’s largest gold mine, a spokesman for the Anglo American Corp. announced. The company’s Vaal Reefs mining complex, 150 miles west of Johannesburg, employs more than 40,000 miners and produces about 82 tons of gold a year. The miners staged slowdowns and stoppages after the company offered black supervisors a 10% pay increase and the union asked to have it extended to all black miners.
With a fervor only slightly dulled by repetition of a sad event, the blacks of South Africa’s torn eastern Cape buried the dead of recent unrest today, 23 of them in all. It was a day of sunlight in places by the sea, but its message seemed more somber, since the horrors and tragedies and deepening racial divisions of this nation now appear commonplace, rituals enacted to familiar refrains. Here, in the township of Zwide near Port Elizabeth, 15 coffins were laid side by side on trestles in a rugby stadium, the burial of their youthful occupants conducted to a fanfare of worn slogans and zealous talk of liberation and the sonorous incantation of hymns and anthems. In Kwanobuhle township, near Uitenhage, the coffins numbered eight, but the hopes and angers at the system called apartheid were the same.
Congress is looking forward to a familiar agenda in the days ahead after the most turbulent week of the current session, marked by a series of unaccustomed legislative rebuffs to President Reagan. Despite a flurry of all-night sessions, White House meetings and Presidential exhortations, Congress failed to make any decisions on the major issues it grappled with in the week: the Federal budget and aid to the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua. The Senate, in fact, failed even to take a vote on the budget after Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the majority leader, admitted that he lacked a majority for the plan that had been worked out between the White House and Republican senators. But he warned his colleagues that a rocky road was ahead of them on the budget issue.
The President and the First Lady attend the 71st Annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
Preparations for the liftoff of the space shuttle Challenger, set for noon Monday, advanced smoothly today, but a problem with a $2 battery forced the space agency to cancel the deployment of two small satellites from the shuttle. The mission, scheduled to last a week, will center on scientific experiments. Two squirrel monkeys and 24 rats will be brought along for observation, and the seven-member crew is to conduct extensive research in the 12-ton Spacelab, which has been mounted in the shuttle’s cargo bay. But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said today that a problem with 9-volt batteries, which are off-the-shelf items like those used in transistor radios, were responsible for scrubbing the deployment of two small satellites that NASA officials have described as low-priority. Tests have shown that the batteries cannot withstand low temperatures in space.
Hundreds of U.S. Marines, forest rangers and volunteers held a 20-mile fire line and contained wildfires that have destroyed 7,700 acres of parched North Carolina coastal woodlands. A U.S. Forest Service information officer said that an expected increase in humidity and a chance of rain in the area would help firefighters control the blaze. Before containment, the fires had spread over 6,500 acres of national forest and 1,200 acres of private land. Damage was estimated at $1 million.
Federal prosecutors refused to seek an indictment against former Labor Department Chief of Staff Daniel Benjamin, who had been accused of a conflict of interest after borrowing a lobbyist’s 30-foot sailboat for four days. The department said that no wrongdoing occurred because Benjamin compensated James McKevitt, lobbyist for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, with unpaid labor and did not discuss government business with him.
Hilton Hotels Corp. agreed to sell its unopened 614-room hotel-casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to New York developer Donald Trump, Hilton Chairman Barron Hilton said in Beverly Hills. He said the price would cover Hilton’s $300-million-plus investment and yield a small profit. The hotel chain had been denied a New Jersey casino license but a rehearing had been scheduled. In addition, it is faced with a possible takeover attempt by Las Vegas-based Golden Nugget Inc. A Golden Nugget spokesman had said that, if the Atlantic City hotel were sold, his company would have to re-evaluate its position.
Secret Service agents seized $8 million in bogus $100 bills and arrested two “known international counterfeiters” who hoped to export the money to South America, Agent Ronald Szego said in Miami. Also seized were about 80 printing plates and negatives used in the money’s production, negatives for Colombian pesos and three counterfeit British £20 notes, Szego said. Arrested were Christobal Saradetch, 42, a Guatemalan, and Uri Paz, 44, an Israeli.
More than 100 Washington-area elementary schoolchildren and their parents demonstrated at the South African Embassy today against that country’s policies of racial separation. There were no arrests. Renata Razza, 12 years old, who has won oratorical awards, called South African racism “a powerful hallucinogen” that “induces fantasies of supremacy in whites and nightmares of inferiority in blacks, colored and minorities.”
A commission appointed by President Reagan last month to study the nation’s chemical warfare policy has recommended that the Pentagon acquire new “binary” nerve gas weapons and destroy existing stockpiles of “unitary” weapons, a Congressional source said today. Binary shells carry two relatively harmless substances that mix after the shell is fired to form lethal nerve gas. Unitary weapons that have made up the chemical stockpile since World War II contain prepared lethal agents. Nerve gases kill by paralyzing the respiratory and central nervous systems.
Farley Mowat, Canadian author, protesting that he has been treated “as if I were a criminal,” said he would refuse to come into the United States despite State Department clearance. “I will not go under a shadow,” said Mowat, 63, who was barred earlier in the week from entering the country after the U.S. Immigration Service accused him of past associations with “communists, anarchists or subversives.” Mowat denied that he had connections with any of those groups. Mowat was stopped in Toronto when he tried to board a plane for Los Angeles and a promotion tour for his book, “Sea of Slaughter.”
The operating certificate of upstate New York-based Susquehanna Airlines was revoked by the Federal Aviation Administration, forcing the airline out of business unless the order is reversed on appeal. Last year, two of its planes hit the same hill near its home airport at Sidney, killing five persons, and in each case the pilots were reported to have been flying below minimum altitudes. The revocation order cited five violations of FAA regulations, including falsification of records.
A Houston judge has reversed a murder conviction, saying that new evidence proved the convicted man could not have committed the crime. The judge, Michael McSpadden of State District Court, on Friday ordered the release of the man, Pedro Torres, 37 years old, who was convicted by a jury in March and sentenced to 75 years in prison. Judge McSpadden said records produced in court Friday showed that Mr. Torres, an alien in this country illegally, was working in Dallas when the victim, Manuel Ortega, 18, who stabbed to death in Houston last April. Mr. Torres had spent six months in jail after being charged with the murder.
United Way and other charities that give money to youth groups are guilty of “dollar discrimination” against the nation’s 21 million girls, Margaret Gates, the executive director of the Girls Clubs of America, charged in New York. In 1984, she said, United Way gave $2.38 to boys’ programs for every $1 for girls. Gates said that the same held true for private funding, adding that, in 1982, foundations gave 91 grants to girls’ groups, totaling $2 million, and 377 grants to boys’ groups, totaling $13 million.
The men of the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, mostly bearded, talk quietly, smile often and are friendly even to strangers. They are affectionate, hugging each other and dandling babies on their laps. There are lots of babies. Where an earlier generation might have exclaimed, “Oh, wow,” the Covenant people say “Praise the Lord!” and they say it often. But when asked if they believe that Jews are the offspring of Satan, Kerry Noble, the leader of the Covenant, which is the political and paramilitary arm of the church of Zarepath-Horeb, says simply, “Yes, we believe that.” And should all “racial Jews,” in Mr. Noble’s terminology, be eliminated? “Not at this point,” Mr. Noble replies. “In the future, I think all of you who are Aryans are going to wake up to the truth and whatever actions you take is your choice.”
The Covenant is only one of the extreme right-wing groups under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The links among the groups, which investigators say continue to emerge, are not so much organizational as religious, based on the violently anti-Semitic teachings of sects referred to collectively as the Christian Identity Movement. They hold that Jews are the offspring of Satan, and, according to the most extreme doctrine, should be exterminated. Inside the rough-hewn Covenant camp, searchers found an arsenal that included submachine guns, grenades, an antitank rocket, plastic explosives and a quantity of other explosives. There were remnants of a minefield, an armored vehicle with gunports was under construction and the searchers found a cache of neo-Nazi hate literature. In a paramilitary training area called Silhouette City, the cutout figure the used for target practice was a state trooper. On his chest was drawn a Star of David.
The Food and Drug Administration has issued an alert telling parents not to use the infant formula Nutra-Milk because it was severely deficient in essential nutrients. The agency said Friday that a distributor was voluntarily recalling it, but that the formula’s producer was not cooperating in the recall. Federal officials said Nutra-Milk was produced by a California concern that markets a formula, Kama-Mil, that was the subject of a recent alert by the agency. Business names listed on the products are Kama Nutritional and Golden Epoch, but no telephone listings for those concerns were found.
Texas is emphasizing school work under a program adopted last year that is changing the lives of the state’s four million school children. The program bars students who fall below a grade of 70 in any course from extracurricular activities such as sports and music for the next six-week grading period. Some say the program is working well, but others call it unfair and harsh.
Texas, California and Florida led the nation in population growth in the last five years, accounting for half the 11 million increase since the 1980 Census, according to mid-decade estimates. of the remaining growth was in the South Atlantic states, the Southwest and the Rocky Mountain states. Population losses were most severe in the farm states of the Middle West and in some old industrial cities. The Middle Atlantic region – New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, showed a marked improvement over the 1970’s.
Major League Baseball:
Toronto’s Willie Aikens cracks a game-tying 2-run pinch homer in the 9th inning against Texas, and the Blue Jays win 9–8. For Aikens, it is his last Major League at bat, as Toronto will send him to Syracuse in 3 days.
The Tigers posted a 3–2 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers today to regain first place from Baltimore in the American League East. Dan Petry (4–1) scattered six hits and struck out five. Willie Hernandez picked up his fourth save.
The Twins beat the A’s, 8–6. Mickey Hatcher went 5 for 5, driving in two runs, while Gary Gaetti hit a two-run double and the rookie Mark Salas hit a home run. It was the seventh straight victory for the Twins after they had lost nine in a row.
Jim Sundberg had three hits and scored the winning run in the ninth inning, as the Royals edged the Red Sox. Dan Quisenberry, the Royals’ ace reliever, survived a line shot to the leg in the bottom of the ninth, and the Royals held on for a 5–4 victory.
The Phillies’ Shane Rawley checked Chicago on four hits in 7 ⅓ innings and Glenn Wilson drove in three runs with a triple and a sacrifice fly as the Phillies beat the Cubs, 6–1, tonight, snapping Philadelphia’s three-game losing streak.
Tim Wallach’s bases-loaded two-run single highlighted a four-run seventh inning, and Andre Dawson drove in five runs, lifting the Montreal Expos to their fifth straight triumph, as they thumped the Cardinals, 8–3.
Kurt Bevacqua smashed a two-run pinch double and Andy Hawkins won his fourth consecutive game as the Padres edged the Dodgers, 4–3. Bevacqua’s double broke a 2–2 tie in the seventh, and came after Graig Nettles had walked and Garry Templeton had been intentionally walked with two out.
Alan Wiggins, the San Diego Padre second baseman who did not show up for the game against the Dodgers in Los Angeles Thursday night and missed the second game Friday night, has made arrangements to enter a drug-treatment center, according to the club.
Cleveland Indians 10, Baltimore Orioles 4
Kansas City Royals 5, Boston Red Sox 4
New York Yankees 4, Chicago White Sox 5
Atlanta Braves 8, Houston Astros 2
San Diego Padres 4, Los Angeles Dodgers 3
Detroit Tigers 3, Milwaukee Brewers 2
Oakland Athletics 6, Minnesota Twins 8
St. Louis Cardinals 3, Montreal Expos 8
Pittsburgh Pirates 3, New York Mets 2
Chicago Cubs 1, Philadelphia Phillies 6
California Angels 6, Seattle Mariners 1
Cincinnati Reds 2, San Francisco Giants 1
Toronto Blue Jays 9, Texas Rangers 8
History Diaries 