East-West talks on reducing troop strength in Central Europe resumed in Vienna after an eight-week recess. The negotiations have stretched over nearly 12 years, with no signs of progress. North Atlantic Treaty Organization spokesman John Karch of the United States told reporters that President Reagan has expressed continuing interest and support for the mutual and balanced force reduction talks, as they are formally known. He said Reagan told the new chief U.S. delegate, Robert D. Blackwill, to “probe for all possible areas of agreement.”
The closed trial of three Solidarity activists charged with organizing an illegal strike opened in Warsaw, but the first session ended abruptly when the union activists refused to testify, Polish court sources said. Two of the defendants pleaded not guilty and the third refused to enter a plea, the official PAP news agency reported. The tightly controlled session ended an hour earlier than expected after Adam Michnik, Bogdan Lis, and Wlasyslaw Frasyniuk refused to take the stand because the court would not allow them to consult with their lawyers for 10 minutes.
A Soviet airliner collided with a small military plane over the western Ukraine this month, killing about 80 people, informed Soviet sources said today. The sources thus appeared to connect two recent Soviet press reports, one disclosing the loss of a Tallinn-based airliner on a flight to Kishinev via Lvov on May 3, and the other reporting the “tragic” death of three air force officers on that day.
An influx of hard drugs poses the most serious peacetime threat to Britain in history, and the armed forces should be used in an intensified anti-drug campaign, a select parliamentary committee declared in a report. Committee Chairman Edward Gardner said, “Every son and daughter of every family in the country is at risk from this terrible epidemic.” Robin Corbett, a Labor member of Parliament, added, “We have seen the future and it is frightening.”
Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin indicated today that Israel really had no choice but to agree to the exchange last Monday of 1,150 Palestinian prisoners and convicted terrorists for 3 captured Israeli soldiers. The trade, which involved the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, has stirred bitter controversy in Israel, with some critics contending that the episode showed that the Government had abandoned its policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists. The 1,150 inmates included people regarded here as notorious terrorists.
Ariel Sharon, Israel’s former defense minister, denied telling American officials before the Lebanon invasion that Israel intended to advance to Beirut. “Never were operational details shared — not a name, nor forces, nor schedules,” Sharon said. “What I said was we would never recoil from terror.” Samuel W. Lewis, the U.S. ambassador in Israel, told Israeli television Wednesday that Sharon had discussed “going all the way to Beirut” at a meeting with U.S. special envoy Philip C. Habib in December, 1981, six months before Israel invaded Lebanon.
A man sought by Israel for questioning in a terrorist bombing that maimed two West Bank mayors five years ago is living in the New York area, where he is directing a city-financed social welfare agency in Queens. The wanted man is Era Rappaport, an American-born Israeli active in Zionist activities.
Fierce fighting continued in Lebanon for a fifth day today in and around three Palestinian refugee camps, the object of a drive by Shiite Muslim militiamen. The militia, Amal, said Wednesday night that its forces had taken control of two of the camps, Sabra and Shatila, in southern Beirut, but were continuing to meet heavy resistance there and in the third camp, Burj al Brajneh, near the international airport. Amal was reported to be directing machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades into Burj al Brajneh but to have made no attempt to move in. The police said at least 201 people had been killed and 1,165 wounded since the clashes broke out Sunday. The Red Cross and officials on both sides said the toll was likely to rise when bodies still in the battle area were counted.
“It’s a horrific tragedy,” a Palestinian spokesman told The Associated Press. He said the Shiites were “pulverizing the camps, house by house, with heavy artillery and tank cannon. Dozens of bodies are lying in the streets. They won’t let the Red Cross in.” The Shiite Muslims are seeking control of the camps as part of an effort to prevent the Palestinians from re-establishing a military foothold in Lebanon. Leaders of Amal have said the return of a significant Palestine Liberation Organization presence in Lebanon would invite Israeli retaliation against Shiites in the south.
Egypt’s Interior Ministry said today it had “thwarted a plot” involving Libya and a Syrian-based terrorist group to detonate a truck bomb at an embassy here. It did not identify the target of the purported plot, but the police and other Egyptian officials said it was the United States Embassy. The Foreign Ministry said that it sealed off Cairo’s embassy row on Wednesday to guard against the possibility of an attack on an alternate target.
The Sri Lankan Parliament began a two-day debate on extending the national state of emergency for another month to help cope with violence by Tamil guerrillas. About 500 saffron-robed Buddhist monks sat near Parliament waving flags to protest the killing by guerrillas of about 150 people in the shrine city of Anuradhapura last week, and the main opposition party spokesman called for the resignation of President Junius R. Jayewardene.
The Vietnamese-backed Cambodian Government offered today to start negotiations with Bangkok to solve the problem of Cambodian refugees in Thailand. The official Cambodian press agency said in a report monitored in Bangkok that Phnom Penh was ready to enter discussions. The Thai National Security Council chief, Prasong Soonsiri, said last week that Thailand would soon send 230,000 to 240,000 refugees now in Thai camps back to border camps in Cambodia. The Cambodian press agency demanded an immediate halt to any plans for Thai repatriation of Cambodians and said such a move would be “barbarous, inhuman, criminal and a grave violation of human rights.” There was no comment by Thailand on the Cambodian offer.
About 60 South Korean students peacefully occupied a United States Government office in Seoul today. They vowed to stay until the American Government apologized for what they said was its complicity in the suppression of a 1980 political uprising. They also demanded that the South Korean Government investigate the episode, which occurred in the provincial capital of Kwangju five years ago this week. About 200 people are believed to have been slain in the uprising, although the students say more were killed than that, and the government says less than 200 died.
China and Portugal announced today that they would open talks soon on the return of Macao to Chinese rule. But President Antonio Ramalho Eanes of Portugal said no date had been set for the start of the negotiations. The joint statement followed talks in Peking between President Eanes and Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang. Mr. Eanes said at a news conference that the issue was raised at the initiative of the Chinese and had not been on the agreed agenda for their talks. He stressed that China and Portugal had a common objective of maintaining the stability and prosperity of Macao, a tiny Portuguese-administered territory on the southern Chinese coast near Hong Kong.
Philippine prosecutors in the Benigno S. Aquino Jr. assassination trial announced that they will rest their case, confident that the former armed forces chief, General Fabian C. Ver, and 25 other defendants will be convicted. The court gave prosecutors 11 days to submit exhibits and told the defense to start calling witnesses June 17. The opposition leader was shot to death on August 21, 1983, as he stepped from an airliner in Manila upon his returned from three years of self-imposed exile in the United States.
Canada’s new Progressive Conservative government presented a belt-tightening $76.7-billion budget that sought to trim the rapidly expanding government deficit. CaInadians will be hit with 1% increases in tobacco, alcohol and gasoline taxes “to get off this deficit treadmill,” as Finance Minister Michael Wilson put it. A special deficit-reduction surtax was imposed on top-bracket money earners by Wilson, who pledged to reduce the deficit by $3.2 billion to $24.7 billion this fiscal year. Federal spending was slashed in many sectors, with plans announced to sell up to 14 state-owned corporations.
George P. Shultz, citing Nicaragua, referred for the first time to a possible use of American combat troops in Central America. The Secretary of State, in an address in Washington, said that if Congress failed to aid the anti-Sandinista rebels, the Reagan Administration would have to make “an agonizing choice” whether to involve American troops in combat in the region. Mr. Shultz has been warning since February that failure to aid the rebels would increase the risk of direct American involvement, but he has not talked directly of combat troops before, nor has any other senior Administration official. Mr. Shultz noted that some critics of the Administration’s policy say “they would favor the military option if all else fails and a real threat comes.”
United States and Salvadoran officials say they intend to reopen an investigation into the 1981 killings of two American agrarian advisers and the head of the Salvadoran land-redistribution institute here. They added that they expected an army officer to be indicted in the case. Such claims of coming investigations have been made by the Salvadoran Government in the past, only to be unfulfilled. President Jose Napoleon Duarte, when he took office, pledged repeatedly to investigate the killing of the agrarian advisers and at least five other notorious human rights cases here, including the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.
A Supreme Court Chief Justice jailed in a dispute between the Honduran President and Congress was released Wednesday. An agreement ending the confrontation, reached Tuesday, called for the resignation of all justices in favor of another court appointed by the Congress. The justice, Ramon Valladares Soto, said he submitted his resignation Monday to the President of Congress, Efrain Bu Giron. Mr. Valladares, one of Honduras’s best-known lawyers, was imprisoned March 29, hours after the Congress dismissed five members of the nine-man Supreme Court. The Congress, saying the members were corrupt, replaced them with new justices, including Mr. Valladares. The President, Roberto Suazo Cordova, charged the new justices with treason and ordered Mr. Valladares jailed.
Perónist-led Argentine labor unions held a nationwide strike today, paralyzing much of the country’s industry but failing to win widespread support in the commercial sector. Tens of thousands of union members gathered in front of the presidential palace and cheered as their leaders criticized the Government of President Raul Alfonsin for its handling of the foreign debt and for its economic program. Saul Ubaldini, one of the secretary generals of the General Labor Confederation, told the crowd that the Government should change its economic policy “or leave.” But he said there would not be a coup. The strike was the second general strike called by Perónist-led labor unions since Mr. Alfonsin took office more than 17 months ago.
South Africa mounted covert forays by military reconnaissance groups in neighboring Angola, Johannesburg acknowledged for the first time. In Angola, the government announced that two South Africans had been killed and a third captured in an ambush directed at saboteurs at a key oil installation. The two statements, South African commentators said, could seal the demise of a faltering detente between Pretoria and its black-ruled neighbors that was once depicted as a triumph for the United States policy called “constructive engagement” with South Africa. Under this policy, the United States seeks to persuade South Africa to liberalize its internal racial policies, negotiate independence for the territory of South-West Africa, which it now rules, and come to terms with its black-ruled neighbors, including the Marxist Government of Angola.
In Washington, the State Department said it deplored the presence of South African “intelligence gathering teams” inside Angola. A spokesman said such activity ran counter to American goals of “stopping violence, obtaining the removal of foreign forces and securing respect for national sovereignty and the inviolabiity of international borders.” A South African statement today by General Constand Viljoen, the commander of the armed forces, made no reference to the Angolan assertion that South Africans had been killed or captured.
The House approved a 1986 budget that would reduce the projected Federal deficit by $56 billion. The vote was 258 to 170, with 24 Republicans joining 234 Democrats in backing a budget that projects spending at $967 billion. Over three years, the plan would cut projected deficits by a total of $259 billion. Fifteen Democrats voted no. In both cases, the Republicans and Democrats who crossed over were a mixture of conservatives, moderates and liberals. The House and the Senate have approved budget resolutions that are poles apart on the politically sensitive issues of the military and Social Security.
The MX program would be halved under a provision approved by the Senate. The 78-to-20 vote followed two days of tense negotiations that ended when the White House and Senate negotiators reached a compromise calling for the deployment of 50 of the intercontinental missiles, rather than the 100 proposed by President Reagan two years ago. The votes against the plan were cast mainly by conservatives from Western states who called the compromise a “sell-out” of American strategic interests, and by a handful of liberals who favored tighter restrictions on the weapon. In the original MX program proposed by President Carter, 200 missiles were provided for. Two years ago, Mr. Reagan proposed 100.
Nearly doubled personal exemptions that taxpayers may take for themselves and their dependents would be allowed next year if President Reagan’s tax-revision plan is approved by Congress, according to Administration officials. The exemption was one of the last matters to be decided. Last Friday a senior Administration official said the President would propose that the exemption, now $1,040, rise to $1,500 for the 1986 tax year and then gradually to $2,000 over a period of years. That decision was reversed this week in favor of a rise to $2,000 next year, the officials said.
President Ronald Reagan awards Jimmy Stewart the Presidential Medal of Freedom and promotes him to Major General on the Retired List. President Reagan also awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to entertainer Frank Sinatra
President Reagan calls the Middle and High School winners of the 1984 Weekly Reader “Goals for our President Essay Contest”.
Senator Alan K. Simpson today introduced a new version of his comprehensive immigration bill that would delay the granting of legal status to illegal aliens until after the United States had better control of its borders. It was the third time in four years that Senator Simpson, a Wyoming Republican, had introduced a bill to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws and curtail the influx of illegal aliens. There was, however, no sponsor for the new bill in the House. Representative Romano L. Mazzoli, the Kentucky Democrat who has led the campaign for the bill in the House, did not attend Senator Simpson’s news conference today and was silent on his intentions.
The F.B.I. expects more arrests in what some officials described as one of the gravest security breaches in the Navy’s history. Bureau spokesmen said they expected to arrest associates of a retired Navy communications specialist and his son, a seaman, who have been charged with smuggling secret documents to the Soviet Union. “I would expect more charges against more people, associates of the father,” said Bill Baker, the assistant F.B.I. Director for Congressional and public affairs. “We think this ring is bigger than the two now charged.” The investigation centers on John A. Walker, 47 years old, a former warrant officer who had access to detailed information about the movement of the American and Soviet fleets in his 20-year naval career.
Thomas Patrick Cavanagh, an aerospace engineer who admitted trying to sell “stealth” bomber secrets to the Soviet Union, is sentenced in Los Angeles to life in prison.
In a test of one element of prospective antimissile technology, a laser beam will be fired from Hawaii next month at a reflector on the space shuttle Discovery, the Defense Department said today. The laser, a tightly focused beam of light that the Pentagon described as low in power, is not meant to demonstrate the ability to destroy an object in space, a Defense Department spokesman said, but rather to gather information on how much the light spreads after traversing the atmosphere and how corrections for such spreading can be made. It is difficult to form a judgment on the scientific significance of the test on the basis of the information made public today, said Dr. Kurt Gottfried, a physicist at Cornell University who is a critic of President Reagan’s plan to spend large amounts of money to develop a defense against intercontinental nuclear missiles. Dr. Gottfried said the general physics of laser behavior in the atmosphere were already generally well understood. Ground-based lasers have been used to measure distances to the moon with great accuracy, and many laser experiments have been conducted in the atmosphere. The Strategic Defense Initiative Office, which is coordinating the project, may wish to confirm theoretical calculations.
Several tobacco-state lawmakers, saying the tobacco price support program is in jeopardy, proposed to shift the program’s cost from the farmers to the smokers. The group, led by Rep. Charlie Rose (D-North Carolina) and Senator Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tennessee), introduced legislation that would add about 2 cents a pack to the excise tax levied on cigarettes. Revenue from the additional tax, which Rose estimated at about $500 million a year, would replace the assessments now made on growers.
The Commerce Department announced it was issuing final regulations governing U.S. exports under a special licensing procedure that allows multiple shipments of high-technology products such as computers. The department said the regulations, which will take effect July 23, apply to holders of distribution licenses, which permit exporters to ship many high-technology products to several destinations under a single permit.
Septuplets’ California parents did not seek a multiple birth when they went to a fertility clinic for treatment, according to the babies’ father. Doctors at the Tyler Clinic in West Los Angeles, where the septuplets’ mother received the drug, Pergonal, said that when they administer the drug, they always follow the directions of the manufacturer. The father of the septuplets, Samuel Frustaci, said yesterday that his wife, Patti, had sought treatment at the clinic for infertility and that the couple had hoped to conceive one child. The Frustacis have a 1-year-old son who was also conceived while Mrs. Frustaci was taking fertility treatments.
Testimony from Claus von Bülow’s former mistress in his first trial in 1982 of trying to murder his wife cannot be admitted at his retrial, a judge ruled in Providence, Rhode Island, in a major blow to the state’s case. The witness, Manhattan socialite Alexandra Isles, was last known to be in Europe and unwilling to testify again. The state alleges Von Bülow injected his wife — Martha (Sunny) von Bülow — with insulin, which has left her in a coma for the last several years, in murder attempts prompted by his desire to be free to marry Isles and to obtain his $14-million share of his wife’s $75-million fortune.
Negotiators in the week-old strike by 5,000 United Airlines pilots returned to the bargaining table today after 15 hours of “earnest and cooperative” talks that ended shortly before dawn, a Federal mediator said. The mediator, Helen Witt, head of the National Mediation Board, characterized the talks Wednesday as “tense and difficult.”
A judicial ethics panel in Providence investigating Rhode Island’s top judge and his friendships with underworld figures announced it was suspending its work for four weeks. The panel said it voted to delay its closed-door hearings on undisclosed ethics charges against state Supreme Court Chief Justice Joseph A. Bevilacqua until June 19 pending action by the state Supreme Court on “certain rulings of the Superior Court in matters relating to the inquiry.”
The four men charged in Youngstown, Ohio, with the involuntary manslaughter of nine workers in an explosion at an illegal fireworks factory were free on $25,000 bond each Monday, awaiting their next date in court, which has not been set. The four men were arrested Wednesday by Beaver Township police.
A Federal grand jury has indicted two men on charges that they falsified documents to import 2,000 European luxury cars into the United States. The documents accompanying the cars, which included Mercedes-Benzes, Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Porsches, falsely said that they were modified to meet domestic emissions standards, Assistant United States Attorney Daniel Broderick said after the indictment Wednesday. The two men were accused in what Mr. Broderick said was a scheme to file false statements with the Federal Environmental Protection Agency, which permitted the Customs Service to allow the cars into the country to be sold at a profit.
Radon is tainting 1 million homes around the United States at levels that pose a significant risk of lung cancer, according to data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency. Officials of the agency proposed a major Federal effort to locate areas of the country where the naturally occurring radioactive gas poses risks to public health.
A $50-million weather satellite tumbling uselessly in space for nearly a year is back in working order thanks to a ground crew that refused to give up, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. The NOAA 8 satellite, in a polar orbit 506 miles above Earth, should resume relaying data July 1, the agency said, with only one of its functions — a vertical profile of the atmosphere — remaining damaged.
The artificial heart, embroiled in argument over costs and ethical questions since it was first used, has received a sweeping endorsement from a committee of experts appointed to study its potential impact on society. In anticipating the day when an artificial heart not connected to a power source outside the body becomes available, the study group estimated the annual cost for Americans at up to $5 billion each year, making it probably the single most expensive medical procedure available. Yet in a report yesterday that could well redirect national priorities on one of the boldest experiments in medical history, the study group called for greatly expanded federal research efforts to develop a fully implantable, permanent artificial heart. Such devices “could provide a significant increase in life span, with an acceptable quality of life, for 17,000 to 35,000 patients below age 70 annually,” the committee said. That projection, which falls in the middle range of previous estimates, was based largely on a new study, undertaken for the committee, of deaths in Olmsted County, Minnesota. The committee estimated that each implant would cost about $150,000 and that recipients would survive an average of 54 months, but only after painstaking research through experience with inevitable tragic failures.
Major League Baseball:
At Texas, Gary Ward belts a 1st-inning grand slam, then scores the winning run in the 9th inning as the Rangers beat the Red Sox, 7–6. Ward walks in the 9th and scores from third base when Bob Ojeda hands out a walk with the bases loaded. In the ninth, Ward walked with one out and stole second. Mark Clear (1–1) intentionally walked Larry Parrish. Ojeda relieved and retired Pete O’Brien on a fly ball that advanced Ward and Parrish. Ojeda intentionally walked Glenn Brummer to load the bases, then walked Wilkerson on four pitches to force in the winning run.
Jim Beattie serves up three homers — two to Don Baylor and one to Don Mattingly — but is the victor as Seattle tops the Yankees, 6–4. Phil Niekro goes the distance in the loss. Ken Phelps grand slam is the difference. His homer erased a 3–1 lead the Yankees had given Niekro after two and a half innings.
Willie Upshaw hit a two-out, two-run single in the ninth inning tonight, rallying the Toronto Blue Jays to a 6–5 victory over the Cleveland Indians. With Cleveland leading by 5–4 in the ninth, Tom Waddell (1–3) allowed leadoff singles to Lloyd Moseby and George Bell, putting runners at first and third. After Moseby was thrown out at the plate trying to score on Jesse Barfield’s grounder to third baseman Brook Jacoby, Bryan Clark relieved and got pinch hitter Ron Sheperd to ground out, with both runners moving up. Upshaw then stroked a single to center to make a winner of Dennis Lamp (3–0). Bill Caudill pitched the ninth to record his eighth save.
Dave Kingman’s two-out single in the sixth scored Mike Davis from second base, leading the A’s and a rookie pitcher, Tim Birtsas, past the Orioles, 4–2. Birtsas (1-0) worked six innings in his first major league start, allowing five hits and both Baltimore runs. Keith Atherton pitched 1 ⅔ innings of hitless baseball, and Jay Howell closed out the game to earn his 10th save, the top total in the American League.
Toronto Blue Jays 6, Cleveland Indians 5
Baltimore Orioles 2, Oakland Athletics 4
New York Yankees 4, Seattle Mariners 6
Boston Red Sox 6, Texas Rangers 7
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1296.71 (-7.05)
Born:
Mike Dunn, MLB pitcher (New York Yankees, Atlanta Braves, Florida-Miami Marlins, Colorado Rockies), in Farmington, New Mexico.
Matt McBride, MLB pinch hitter, outfielder, and first baseman (Colorado Rockies, Oakland A’s), in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Trey Lewis, NFL defensive tackle (Atlanta Falcons), in Topeka, Kansas.
Jessika Van, Asian-American actress (“Awkward”, “The Messengers”), in Los Angeles, California.
History Diaries 