President Reagan meets with U.S. Negotiators returned from the first round of the Nuclear and Space Talks with the Soviet Union.
President Reagan headed for Bonn to attend a seven-nation economic summit meeting and to celebrate 40 years of peace and reconciliation in Western Europe in the aftermath of World War II. But as he prepared to leave, the House of Representatives, joining the Senate, voted a nonbinding resolution, 390 to 26, urging Mr. Reagan to reconsider his planned visit Sunday to a German war cemetery where 49 SS soldiers are buried.
Jewish groups urged demonstrations Sunday at the German war cemetery that President Reagan plans to visit. In Jerusalem, Kalman Sultanik, an American who is vice president of the World Jewish Congress, told the German news agency that demonstrators would also seek to prevent Mr. Reagan from entering the Bergen-Belsen camp site, which he is also scheduled to visit on Sunday.
U.S. missiles are vulnerable to terrorist attacks in West Germany and need to be fortified, according to the Pentagon. For the first time since delivery of the Pershing 2 nuclear missiles began 17 months ago, the Army has asked Congress for money to begin a four-stage project that will eventually secure the medium-range missiles in concrete sheds behind camouflage fences.
The Polish Government said today that those “who work against the interests of the state” could lose their jobs in the same manner as a Solidarity adviser who was dismissed last week from his position at the Polish Academy of Science. Jerzy Urban, the Government spokesman, said the Solidarity adviser, Bronislaw Geremek, who is a medieval historian, was dismissed from the academy after 30 years because his political activities “are not in accordance with the goals of the academy and strike at the interest of the state and of Polish science.”
Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, in a telegram to the Polish Parliament, accused police authorities of carrying out “mass detentions” to counter anti-government protests planned for today — May Day. Three of Walesa’s aides were reportedly being held by police. Underground groups with ties to the banned trade union have called for demonstrations to counter official May Day parades and protest increases in the cost of food and energy.
Irish Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald made a surprise trip to Londonderry, a predominantly Roman Catholic city in British-ruled Northern Ireland, sparking a storm of protest from Protestant politicians. FitzGerald flew on the inaugural flight of a new air link between Dublin and Londonderry. The militant pro-British Democratic Unionist Party of the Rev. Ian Paisley called the trip “an invasion by a hostile leader.” The Unionists said that it was “interference” in Northern Ireland’s elections, scheduled for later this week.
A car packed with explosives blew up shortly after midnight after being set afire near the central railroad station in Brussels, killing a fireman and injuring 13 people, the police said. Pamphlets found near the fire were signed by a leftist terrorist group that has taken responsibility for recent bombing attacks on targets linked to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A police spokesman said the pamphlets, written in both French and Dutch, were signed “Cellules Communistes Combattantes” – Communist Fighting Cells. It is a terrorist group that has taken responsibility for eight bomb attacks since October 1984.
Prime Minister Shimon Peres said today that his Government’s decision to withdraw its troops from Lebanon three years after the invasion meant a return to Israel’s “values as a nation.” “We re-established our national consensus on our defense policy,” the Prime Minister said in an interview in his office. “I can say it in a few words: Go to war when you don’t have a choice; make peace when you have a choice. “We have returned to our values as a nation, as a people, a nation that has principles. This is the most important consequence of our decision.”
$1.5 billion more U.S. aid for Israel is set for approval, according to Reagan Administration officials. They said the additional economic assistance would be authorized in response to an urgent request from Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
Muslim militias advanced again in Christian sectors in southern Lebanon. The militiamen attacked the town of Kfar Falous, a Christian stronghold in the hills east of Sidon, and reports about the town’s fate were conflicting. The Shiite Moslem militia Amal said its fighters had entered the town, while Sunni Muslims of the self-styled People’s Liberation Army were reported to have gained a foothold at the entrance of Kfar Falous.
The Revolutionary Guards of Iran arrested about 500 people in Tehran in the past two days for violating the strict code of Islamic behavior, the semi-official Iranian newspaper Jamhuri Islami said today. The newspaper, published in Tehran, said the guards arrested the people for “violating the rules of public morality” – a phrase normally used to mean women not wearing veils and men wearing tight-fitting clothes such as jeans, T-shirts or short-sleeved shirts.
Soviet troops, in recent weeks, have been committing atrocities against civilians in Afghanistan, with evidence showing that people were tortured, bayoneted and burned to death in reprisal raids, Western diplomats said in Islamabad, Pakistan. Terror tactics, the diplomats said, are aimed at discouraging civilian support for anti-communist guerrillas.
A parade in Hồ Chí Minh City, the former Saigon, marked the tenth anniversary of its fall to North Vietnam. As military units marched by, a local band on the sidelines broke into Vietnamese rock-and-roll and down the street came a motorcycle club and roller skaters, prompting a visiting Government official to remark, “We don’t have this kind of parade in Hanoi.”
It had been more than a decade since Henry A. Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ sat together in Paris, negotiating an uneasy settlement to an unpopular war. But the bitterness over the end of the Vietnam War is still close to the surface for Mr. Kissinger, whose temper flared Monday night when the former antagonists appeared on the ABC News program “Nightline.” Because of the intensity of the long-distance debate, with Mr. Kissinger in New York and Mr. Tho in Hồ Chí Minh City, producers let the program run 11 minutes longer than scheduled to give the former Secretary of State a chance to respond to extensive remarks by the Vietnamese official. Mr. Kissinger leveled his strongest criticism at the American press, which he criticized for offering — then and now — a sympathetic forum for Vietnamese Communist leaders.
Militant Kanaks held at least 30 people hostage on an island in France’s troubled territory of New Caledonia, a territorial spokesman said. The Kanaks, indigenous Melanesians who are seeking independence, seized security guards who were waiting at the airport for the arrival of territorial assembly chief Dick Ukeiwe. Ukeiwe, hearing of the seizure, remained in Noumea, the capital. Leaders of the Kanaks denounced the security guards as “commandos.” Official sources reported that attempts were being made to negotiate with the militants.
The Canadian Immigration Ministry ordered the deportation of publisher Ernst Zundel, a West German citizen who asserts that the Holocaust never happened. The agency also ruled that Zundel, 46, could remain in the country until he has exhausted his immigration and criminal appeals, a process that could take years. Zundel, who is now free on $10,000 bail, was convicted on February 28 and sentenced to 15 months in jail for disrupting social or racial harmony by publishing a booklet titled “Did Six Million Really Die?”
An embargo on U.S.-Nicaragua trade will be ordered by President Reagan, Administration and Congressional sources said. They said he had told Congress the decision was motivated by what he called the Sandinista Government’s “aggressive activities.”
The Catholic Relief Agency said its programs in famine-stricken Ethiopia are being hampered by the U.S. government’s refusal to fully pay the private agency’s costs for transporting food within Ethiopia. The United States did pay $7.6 million but refused to approve another $2.9 million in March, forcing the agency to divert funds from other programs, agency official John Swenson said.
Sudanese rebels fighting for autonomy in the southern Sudan have renewed their denunciations of the new Government, calling the civilian Prime Minister “a figurehead” and vowing not to negotiate a truce with the country’s military government. The southern rebels, rejecting peace overtures from the government in Khartoum, the capital, said in a radio broadcast Monday, which was monitored in Nairobi, that Dr. al-Gazouly Dafallah, the physician named last week by the ruling Military Council to be Prime Minister, is “a figurehead with no power.” General Abdel Rahman Siwar el-Dahab set up a 15-man Military Council, which he heads, and promised a return to civilian rule within a year.
Riot policemen detained at least 30 South African black labor activists in central Johannesburg today during a peaceful demonstration called to protest layoffs. The police confronted singing demonstrators from the Metal and Allied Workers’ Union outside City Hall and took at least 30 of them away in police vans. The demonstrators had earlier accompanied union negotiators meeting with an employer federation for talks on the future of the metal industry. The demonstrators carried placards that read “Stop retrenchments” and “We demand a living wage.” There was no immediate word tonight on whether the demonstrators had been charged with criminal offenses.
The Rand Daily Mail, South Africa’s best-known opposition newspaper, published its final edition, urging the nation to “go in peace” and thumbing its nose at the censors. On its second page, the newspaper displayed a photograph of two women in topless dress-in direct defiance of the country’s puritanical censorship laws. The Mail’s owners announced the closure last month, saying the newspaper group faced a loss over two years of $22 million. The Mail has been a critic of South Africa’s apartheid policies for 25 years, but in the final edition, the editorial page was blank.
France performs a nuclear test at Mururoa Atoll.
The Senate approved the budget plan proposed by the White House, 50 to 49, giving President Reagan a symbolic victory as he left Washington for the economic summit meeting. However, the package is still open to amendment, and it became clear today that to win final Senate approval, it would have to be changed significantly. Today’s Senate vote culminated a week of lobbying by the majority leader, Bob Dole of Kansas, who wanted to give the compromise budget momentum by beginning the debate with a yes vote on the package as a whole.
Astronauts saw the northern lights at close hand. The space shuttle Challenger’s crew flew through what one them described as “spectacular” rainbows of charged electrons thousands of miles long today in what may have been man’s closest look at the northern lights. Dr. Don L. Lind, a physicist, one of the five mission specialists among the crew of seven, told Mission Control here in a voice filled with wonder, “We’ve seen marvelous auroras,” as the Challenger sped 210 miles above the earth late this afternoon. The shuttle began its mission Monday from Cape Canaveral, Fla., and is scheduled to land at Edwards Air Force Base in California next Monday. Later the Challenger’s crew showed television pictures of gigantic arcs of light several miles thick and thousands of miles long undulating in the skies over the Pacific.
A disputed House race in Indiana continued to divert representatives’ attention from other issues. After an angry and partisan debate, the House voted 229 to 200 to reject a Republican proposal for a special election to decide the contested race in Indiana’s Eighth Congressional District. A House-supervised recount showed Frank McCloskey, a Democrat, leading by a four-vote margin, the closest House race in this century.
A key index suggested a cooling in the nation’s economic growth. The government’s main bellwether for predicting changes in economic trends registered a small but unexpected decline in March of two-tenths of 1 percent, the Commerce Department reported. Analysts described the fall in the index of leading indicators as somewhat disconcerting after other recent reports of meager economic growth in the first quarter and an upturn in inflation. The department also said the United States trade deficit in March was $11.1 billion, or 3.5 percent less than in February. The improvement was less than many economists expected. Another report said that factory orders fell nine-tenths of 1 percent and that the durable goods component plummeted 3 percent, not 2.3 percent, as first reported last week.
In his first speech as labor secretary, William E. Brock III said that the country should experiment with a sub-minimum summer wage for teen-agers, a program strongly opposed by organized labor. The Reagan Administration’s proposal to try to spur employment by paying teenagers $2.50 an hour instead of the $3.35-an-hour minimum wage is an idea that “I know we should try,” Brock said. Noting that unemployment among black teen-agers chronically runs at more than 40%, Brock told the National Press Club in Washington that “everybody digs in their heels while the kids cool their heels on the street corners, unemployed.”
Nearly 200 students rallied yesterday at Yale University to call for the university to withdraw investments in companies doing business in South Africa because of that country’s policies of racial segregation. Sit-ins by students opposed to university investments in companies with South African operations continued yesterday at the University of California at Los Angeles and at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. A similar protest against state investments was in its seventh day at the Wisconsin state capitol. [In San Francisco the City Retirement Board, which pays pensions to city workers, voted to gradually withdraw $335 million in investments in companies doing business in South Africa, Reuters reported.] After the rally at Yale, about 40 students began what they said would be a 24-hour vigil outside the offices of the university administration.
Two members of the white-supremacist gang The Order pleaded guilty in Seattle to racketeering charges linked to a neo-Nazi plot to finance a right-wing revolution with robberies and counterfeiting schemes. Robert and Sharon Merki, who were arrested December 7 on nearby Whidbey Island where a leader of The Order was hiding out, entered the negotiated pleas in federal court. The Boise, Idaho, couple’s pleas bring to five the number of gang members to admit their roles in the conspiracy.
Union Carbide by the end of this week will resume U.S. production of methyl isocyanate, the chemical that killed more than 2,000 persons in India last December 3, a company official said. A review of the company’s MIC unit, which has been restructured for greater safety since the India disaster, “shows that we’re almost ready,” and it will be in operation in Institute, West Virginia, by Thursday or Friday, company spokesman Thad Epps said. “We’ve put in about $5-million worth of safety revisions in Institute,” Epps said.
Four more New York police officials, including the city’s third-ranking officer, are retiring in a shake-up prompted by police brutality charges, Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward announced. The reorganization, described as one of the most sweeping in the department’s history, included the departure of Chief of Patrol Hamilton Robinson, commander of the city’s 17,000-member patrol force, and three police commanders. The torture scandal surfaced last week when a teen-age suspect in a drug case charged that officers using an electronic stun gun burned him repeatedly.
Proposals to legalize bar sales of liquor by the drink were approved by voters in much of Oklahoma, including its four largest cities. The local-option measures, which would end a 26-year-old ban on across-the-bar liquor sales, won in Oklahoma City, the state’s largest city; Tulsa, the second largest, and Norman and Lawton, according to complete but unofficial results.
Two men suspected of kidnapping a woman, beating her boyfriend and shooting passers-by who went to the couple’s rescue will be charged with capital murder and kidnapping, the Texas authorities said today. The two men, Robin S. Partine, 28 years old, of Arlington, Texas, and Delbert Boyd Teague Jr., 22, of Houston, were arrested Monday night near Grosse Tete, Louisiana, one day after Donna Erwin, 18, was abducted as she sat with her boyfriend, Thomas Cox, 22, near Lake Worth, Texas. The attackers beat and robbed Mr. Cox, the police said. One man who apparently tried to stop the kidnapping was shot to death and two others were wounded. The authorities said Miss Erwin was freed after she left a note in a bathroom at a rest area.
The Illinois Supreme Court set $100,000 bond today for Gary Dotson while the justices consider an appeal of his 1979 conviction for a rape his accuser now says never occurred, and Mr. Dotson is to be released Wednesday, his attorney, Warren Lupel, said. Mr. Dotson, 28 years old, of suburban Country Club Hills, has served six years of a 25- to 50-year prison term for his conviction of raping and kidnapping a 16-year-old woman. The woman, Cathleen Crowell Webb, now 23, married and living in New Hampshire, earlier this month recanted the testimony she gave at Mr. Doston’s trial, saying she had lied because she feared she was pregnant after having sex with her boyfriend.
Tailor-made antibodies may be able to stop the crippling progression of multiple sclerosis by temporarily wiping out one variety of white blood cells that seems to play a major role in the disease, researchers said. “We’re encouraged by the results, but we are extremely cautious in not wanting to overemphasize these findings,” said Dr. Howard L. Weiner, who directed the research. Initial results of the therapy were formally presented at the annual meeting in Dallas of the American Academy of Neurology.
Cattle ranchers have the troubles that beset grain farmers, experiencing five years of surplus supplies, declining demand and high interest rates. Throughout the Rockies and in the Southwest Plains, ranchers are reducing herd sizes to try to stay in business while others, their credit exhausted, are getting out.
Monsanto won a Dioxin suit filed by seven of its retired employees. A Federal jury in Charleston, W.Va., ruled that the chemical company could not be held responsible for the possible effects of the toxic chemical on the seven, whose medical problems include skin and bladder cancer and nervous disorders. They had sought $4 million in damages. But the jury awarded $200,000 to one claimant, John Hein, whose bladder cancer was linked to another chemical.
“Shoah”, French documentary about the Holocaust, directed by Claude Lanzmann, starring Richard Glazar and Raul Hilberg, premieres in Paris.
NFL Draft: Virginia Tech defensive end Bruce Smith is the first pick by the Buffalo Bills. The defending champions 49ers made the best move of the day, however, trading three picks to move up in the first round. They selected Jerry Rice, who went on to do pretty okay in the NFL.
Major League Baseball:
Dale Murphy drives in his 28th and 29th runs of the season in Atlanta’s 8–4 win over the Reds, tying Ron Cey’s 1977 record for RBI in the month of April. Murphy belted a two-run double to cap a five-run seventh inning, giving him a total of 29 runs batted, tying the opening-month mark set by Ron Cey in 1977. Gene Garber (2-0), the second of four Braves pitchers, was the winner. Zane Smith and Bruce Sutter finished.
For six innings last night, Dwight Gooden was outpitched by a man twice his age and with half his speed. But the Mets had something in reserve, namely, Clint Hurdle and Danny Heep, and they finally got to Joe Niekro in the seventh and went on to defeat the Houston Astros, 4–1, at Shea Stadium. Gooden pitched what he called “one of my better games” – a neat, 103-pitch four-hitter, with eight strikeouts and only two walks. But he trailed, 1–0, going into the bottom of the seventh because one of his better pitches, a low, inside fastball, was lined for a first-inning home run by Denny Walling.
Ryne Sandberg drove in the tying run with a double and scored the go-ahead run in the third inning to lead Chicago Cubs past the San Francisco Giants, 3–1. Sandberg, winner of the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award last season, went 3 for 4 with two doubles and a single.
Von Hayes, who had three singles and a double in five trips to the plate, drove in two runs as Philadelphia gained its fourth straight victory, as the Phillies crushed the Expos, 11–0. In his last 10 games, Hayes is 20 for 41, a .488 average, and has knocked in 11 runs.
The Cardinals downed the Dodgers, 6–1. Joaquin Andujar pitched a seven-hitter and Lonnie Smith rapped a two-run double to key a five-run uprising in the sixth inning for St. Louis. Andujar (4–0) struck out four and walked one. The only run Andujar allowed was a one-out homer in the ninth by Terry Whitfield, his first of the year. Jerry Reuss (1–3) took the loss.
Kansas City does all its scoring in the 3rd off Jose Roman as the Royals topple the Indians, 5–1. With only one hit in his previous 18 at bats, Steve Balboni went to the plate with the bases loaded and Jose Roman on the mound. Balboni, the Kansas City first baseman, drilled a grand-slam home run deep into the left-field seats to lead the Royals.
It was another rough day for the Yankees, who yielded five runs in the first inning tonight and were beaten, 8–4, by the Texas Rangers. It was their fifth straight loss and eighth in nine games. The defeat gave the Yankees a 6–12 record, tying them with Pittsburgh for the worst record in the majors.
Gary Gaetti drove in four runs and Kent Hrbek and Tim Teufel hit homers to highlight a 10-run Minnesota fourth inning as the Twins gained their ninth consecutive victory, routing the Tigers, 11–2. John Butcher (3-1), who turned in his fourth consecutive complete game, held Detroit to five hits.
Chicago White Sox 7, Baltimore Orioles 9
Boston Red Sox 2, California Angels 3
San Francisco Giants 1, Chicago Cubs 3
Atlanta Braves 8, Cincinnati Reds 4
Minnesota Twins 11, Detroit Tigers 2
Cleveland Indians 1, Kansas City Royals 5
Houston Astros 1, New York Mets 4
Toronto Blue Jays 4, Oakland Athletics 3
Montreal Expos 0, Philadelphia Phillies 11
San Diego Padres 2, Pittsburgh Pirates 6
Milwaukee Brewers 2, Seattle Mariners 4
Los Angeles Dodgers 1, St. Louis Cardinals 6
New York Yankees 4, Texas Rangers 8
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1258.06 (-1.66)
Born:
Gal Gadot, Israeli actress (“Wonder Woman”, “Fast & Furious”, “Heart of Stone”), in Petah Tikva, Israel.
Brandon Bass, NBA power forward and center (New Orleans-Oklahoma City Hornets, Dallas Mavericks, Orlando Magic, Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Clippers), in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
History Diaries 