British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called for a voluntary code of conduct by the media under which nothing would be shown on television that might help hijackers or their cause as long as a hijacking episode lasts. “We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend,” she said in London to more than 6,000 members of the American Bar Association attending a convention, the largest ever held in Britain. It has produced the biggest influx of Americans into Britain since World War II.
Triggering a political crisis in Belgium, the 24 French-speaking Liberal Party members of the ruling coalition resigned over the Christian Democratic interior minister’s refusal to accept responsibility for the May 29 soccer riot that killed 38 people. The walkout means that the Christian Democrat-Liberal coalition of Premier Wilfried Martens no longer can count on a majority in Parliament. Martens, who took office December 12, 1981, said the government will meet on the matter today.
A Soviet expert on computer modeling and on the potentially catastrophic effects of nuclear weapons in changing the world’s climate disappeared while attending a meeting in Spain, according to his American colleagues. The Russian, Vladimir Aleksandrov, vanished while in Madrid on March 31, leaving behind his passport, some airline tickets and perhaps a few additional belongings, the colleagues said. How Alexandrov disappeared and what happened to him afterward remains unknown to this day, but several theories have been put forward. According to an article in the newsmagazine Time in October 1985, the leading thoughts on the matter were that “The mystery of his disappearance had been compounded by the suspicions of some Western scientists that the nuclear winter scenario was promoted by Moscow to give antinuclear groups in the U.S. and Europe some fresh ammunition against America’s arms buildup”…and that others “speculate that Alexandrov was planning to renounce the nuclear winter concept and may have been kidnapped by the KGB. According to another theory, the physicist defected to the West.”
Israeli’s powerful Histadrut trade union federation canceled a nationwide general strike called to oppose the government’s economic austerity program. In all-night talks with Prime Minister Shimon Peres, agreement was reached on the key issue — compensation for low-income wage earners. The federation had demanded that workers be guaranteed compensation for price increases. Negotiations are to continue on the government’s plan to dismiss 8,000 to 10,000 state employees.
Prime Minister Shimon Peres said today that Israel wanted to re-establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Speaking to a meeting of the executive committee of the World Jewish Congress, Mr. Peres said: “Israel is sincerely interested in reopening diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The Russians have never been our enemies. With Gorbachev coming to power there could be a new window of opportunity which we should not overlook. We should attempt to reach a dialogue on all subjects with the Russians.”
A car exploded at a checkpoint at the edge of Israel’s buffer zone in southern Lebanon, killing the driver, two Christian militiamen and seven Lebanese civilians, according to reports from the scene. The car was flying a Red Cross flag. Like the two previous car bombings in the region in less than a week, it appeared directed at the residual Israeli presence in Lebanon. A military source quoted by The Associated Press said the civilian victims in the blast were employees or customers at a bakery near the checkpoint. The source estimated that the car had been carrying about 220 pounds of explosives. The Israeli radio, monitored here, said the booby-trapped car had Red Cross markings and was believed to have been stolen.
A Lebanese state prosecutor announced today that he had ordered a judicial investigation to identify, arrest and formally charge the hijackers of a Trans World Airlines jetliner, and he said the killer of an American passenger could face a death sentence. The state prosecutor, Maurice Khawam, prosecutor general of Mount Lebanon County, which includes Beirut International Airport, said in an interview that he did not know the identities of the Shiite gunmen who seized the T.W.A. Boeing 727 after takeoff from Athens on June 14.
Communist Khmer Rouge rebels, in a major policy shift, said they would accept the creation of a “capitalist regime” in Cambodia and expressed a willingness to sign a peace treaty with Vietnam. The former rulers of Cambodia proposed a coalition government led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk that could include the pro-Hanoi Heng Samrin government in Phnom Penh. There was no immediate response from Vietnam.
China pulled back on its “open door” economic policy by giving priority to only four of 14 coastal cities empowered last year to lure foreign investment and technology. Shanghai, Tianjin, Dalian and Guangzhou are the only cities among the 14 “where fairly good conditions for foreign investment exist,” the New China News Agency quoted State Councilor Gu Mu as telling a Japanese delegation.
A second nightclub hostess broke two years of silence today to support the military assertion that a Communist gunman killed the Philippine opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr.. The witness, Lydia Morata, 31 years old, told a court trying the military Chief of Staff, General Fabian C. Ver, and 25 others in connection with the murder that she saw a “man in blue” shoot Mr. Aquino at the Manila airport moments after he got off a plane in August 1983.
Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister William G. Hayden of Australia ended a day of talks Monday with a declaration that their Governments’ military ties were as strong and as close as ever. The two sides “reaffirmed their expressed views on the essentiality of port and airfield access to the continuing effectiveness of the alliance,” despite the severing of military links between the United States and New Zealand, the third member of the Anzus military alliance.
An easing of restraints on Haitians and a comparatively benign attitude toward freedom of expression and political activity at least for the moment have been noted by Government opponents and Western diplomats in Port-au-Prince. Haiti, an impoverished country of 6 million people, has been notorious for repressing democracy and human rights.
The official results of Mexico’s national elections were announced today, and they showed the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party winning all seven governorships that were at stake, all but five of the 300 elected seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and all but a handful of dozens of local and state offices. But the major damage, some politicians and foreign diplomats here say, was not done to the opposition. There was more than a reasonable chance that most of its candidates would have lost in any case. The big loser, many say, was Mexico’s recently nurtured, and still fragile, image — particularly abroad — as a country trying to open up and clean up its political system and its society.
Those who witnessed the process at work July 7 in the two most hotly contested states, Sonora and Nuevo Leon, had little doubt that a sweeping victory by the governing party over its main opposition, the conservative National Action Party, would be the official outcome. Many opposition pollwatchers were barred from the voting sites, particularly in areas of opposition strength. Reporters saw people leap from cars to stuff mutliple ballots into ballot boxes and saw boxes with uncounted ballots being taken from the polls. Checks of the voting rolls showed instances of fictitious names listed by the hundreds, and other names — including one opposition mayoral candidate — had been purged. In Nuevo Leon, the local congress did not even bother to wait for the official results before declaring the governing party candidate the winner.
The Administration distorts data on human rights in Nicaragua, according to a private human rights group, Americas Watch. It accused the Reagan Administration of manipulating and misquoting information on human rights abuses there to justify United States support for the Nicaraguan rebels. The State Department denied the charges of distortion in the report by the group Americas Watch, the eighth that the group has compiled on Nicaragua since 1982. Unlike the previous reports, which sought to document abuses by Nicaragua’s Government and by the United States-backed rebels, the new publication focuses on what it calls the Administration’s “unprecedented debasement” of the human rights issue.
The previously unknown “Javier Heraud Revolutionary Command” claimed responsibility for shooting out the windows of the U.S. Consulate in Lima, Peru, and warned that it plans more actions. The 10-story building was empty at the time of the attack, which a caller said was, “to protest U.S. support for repressive forces in Peru and (U.S.) anti-Nicaragua policy.”
In Bolivia, Generaal Hugo Banzer Suarez, a retired military officer who once took power in a coup, was the leader today as vote counting continued from presidential elections Sunday. But General Banzer appeared to be headed for a total of less than 50 percent of the vote, which would mean the President would be chosen by the newly elected Congress.
Sudanese Prime Minister Dafallah Gazouli was quoted as saying he doubts the ruling military junta will turn power over to an elected civilian government as promised. “We are getting less support from the people,” he said in an interview with a Saudi newspaper. Two months ago, he told the newspaper he had no doubt that the regime of Gen. Abdul-Rahman Suwar Dahab, which seized power in a coup in April, would permit elections.
A conference marking the end of the United Nations Decade for Women opened here today after the United States delegation agreed to a compromise over its demands for a change in procedural rules. The conference is to assess the achievements and failures of the last 10 years and to plan strategy through the year 2000.
Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s prime minister, dismissed the most prominent white member of his Cabinet, Agriculture Minister Denis Norman, but retained all his other ministers. Mugabe, whose ruling party won a landslide victory two weeks ago, said he decided not to reappoint Norman because the country’s 100,000 whites backed the party of former Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith in a separate poll for 20 seats reserved for them in Parliament.
Violence swept black townships in South Africa, killing eight people and injuring dozens in three days, official and civilian sources reported today. The police used whips, rubber bullets, tear gas and shotguns, and crowds threw stones and gasoline bombs in townships near Theunissen, Graaff Reinet, Parys, Queenstown and Port Elizabeth.
President Reagan recovers from colon surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital and is informed that there were cancerous cells in the polyps removed. The large tumor removed from President Reagan’s abdomen on Saturday was cancerous, his doctors announced. However, they said there was more than a 50 percent chance that he would live out his normal lifespan. The doctors also said there was more than a 50 percent chance that no cancer cells remain in Mr. Reagan’s body after the removal of the malignancy in the large intestine.
Cancer of the colon is one of the leading deadly cancers among Americans. Only lung cancer is more deadly. Yet, colon cancer is highly curable when detected in its early stages, and it may even be preventable by adjustments in diet. When colon cancer is detected and treated while it is limited to the polyp in which it arose, the five-year survival rate is 87 percent, according to statistics gathered by the cancer society. But if the disease has spread to other parts of the body, 47 percent of victims can expect to live at least five years. President Reagan’s doctors said there was was no sign that it has spread to any distant site. According to his doctors, the cancer had grown through the muscle wall but had not invaded the nearby lymph nodes, a stage that is associated with a five-year survival rate of approximately 80 percent.
Nancy Reagan has resolved to present a business-as-usual posture in public, according to several White House officials, while keeping private her deep personal concerns about President Reagan’s health. They said that Mrs. Reagan had coped with her husband’s illness by appearing upbeat in his presence while turning inward when away from him. Shortly after standing at President Reagan’s bedside as doctors told him today that they had found cancer, Nancy Reagan returned to the White House, changed clothes and stood in for her husband at a reception on the South Lawn.
President Reagan’s top advisers will seek to take over some of his workload during his convalescence, but still keep him sufficiently informed to make major decisions on foreign and domestic policy, White House officials said. They said the National Security Council and Cabinet councils would meet as usual, despite Mr. Reagan’s absence, Congressional groups would come to the White House and the President would be briefed later by Donald T. Regan, the White House chief of staff, Vice President Bush and Robert C. McFarlane, the national security adviser.
The President set a precedent for any President to transfer his powers to the Vice President temporarily before being anesthetized for surgery, according to legal experts. The experts also said that the drafters of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution clearly intended to allow and encourage Presidents to transfer their powers in such temporary periods of incapacity as the one caused by Mr. Reagan’s surgery Saturday, notwithstanding Mr. Reagan’s suggestion to the contrary.
House and Senate negotiators made no progress as they resumed budget talks in the wake of last week’s agreement between President Reagan and congressional leaders to allow inflationary growth. House Budget Committee Chairman William H. Gray III (D-Pennsylvania) said that he expects to present an alternative today that would reduce next year’s deficit by more than the $56 billion claimed in the budget that the House already has passed.
The Administration, opposing abortion, asked the Supreme Court to overrule its 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to the procedure. Before then, women who obtained abortions and doctors who performed them faced criminal penalties in many states. In a Supreme Court brief urging the Justices to uphold state laws restricting access to abortions in Pennsylvania and Illinois, the Administration said that “the textual, doctrinal and historical basis for Roe v. Wade is so far flawed” and is “such a source of instability in the law” that the Court should “abandon it.” Federal courts of appeals declared both state laws unconstitutional in what the Administration’s brief today called “harsh and one-sided” decisions that “betrayed unabashed hostility to state regulation of abortion and ill-disguised suspicion of state legislators’ motives.”
A House panel approved legislation that will require newly hired employees of state and local governments to come under Medicare coverage beginning next year, a decision that would bring in an estimated $500 million in payroll taxes over three years. The House health subcommittee also agreed to establish a new Medicare premium formula that will require the wealthy and middle-income elderly to pay more for medical insurance than lower-income elderly. Both changes came as the panel drafted a Medicare bill that trims growth in the program.
Environmentalists filed suit in federal court against the Administration in an effort to stop mining and mineral exploration on millions of acres of land now used for hunting, fishing and camping. The National Wildlife Federation said the Interior Department is running its so-called land withdrawal review program illegally, without the necessary regulations and without publicly stating the purpose of the program.
A purser aboard TWA Flight 847 hijacked June 14 by Muslim extremists used her personal credit card to pay for $11,000 worth of fuel after officials at Algiers airport refused to refuel the plane because TWA did not have an account there, TWA officials said in New York. The airline will pay purser Uli Derickson’s bill, said TWA spokeswoman Sally McElwreath.
Svetlana Ogorodnikova, who admitted conspiring with Richard W. Miller, the former agent for Federal Bureau of Investigation, to spy for her native Soviet Union, was sentenced today to 18 years in Federal prison. Federal District Judge David V. Kenyon gave Mrs. Ogorodnikova the sentence her attorneys had negotiated with prosecutors last month in exchange for her guilty plea.
Mayor W. Wilson Goode and neighborhood residents broke ground today for 61 houses to replace those destroyed by fire May 13 when the police tried to evict the radical group Move from its fortified rowhouse. Fifty-three homes were destroyed and eight heavily damaged in a fire that broke out after police dropped an explosive device on the rooftop bunker of the home. Officials have said 11 MOVE members died in the blaze -seven adults and four children. Damage has been estimated at $10 million, and 270 residents were left homeless.
Charles Ng, a drifter suspected in up to 25 California killings, was ordered today to remain in custody in Canada until a hearing in September on local charges stemming from his arrest. If the preliminary hearing, set for September 12, determines that he should be tried on the Canadian charges, defense lawyer Brian Devlin said, the 24-year-old former Marine will likely remain in Canadian custody at least until January or February, and appeals could keep him in Canada even longer.
A jury in Ashland, Kentucky, ruling against General Electric Co., found that outdated aluminum wiring was the chief cause of the 1977 Beverly Hills Supper Club fire that killed 165 persons. GE was the last of 14 defendants still involved in the retrial of a lawsuit, filed by the families of those killed and injured, against electrical manufacturers. The other companies have reached out-of-court settlements since the trial began April 30.
Prosecutors have refused to grant immunity to the former business partner of a man accused of being part of a naval espionage ring and have called off her appearance before a Federal grand jury, according to a source close to the investigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had previously told the business partner, Laurie Robinson, that she was a suspect in the case involving the man, John A. Walker Jr., according to her lawyer.
The Pentagon conducted the first in a series of new “Star Wars” laser experiments in Hawaii, but the test was only partially successful because laser operators were unable to lock on the target properly, sources said. Over the weekend, a laser station on the island of Maui had succeeded in focusing a laser beam on a fast, high-flying rocket, but had failed to bounce the beam off an eight-inch reflective shield attached to the rocket, said the sources, who asked that they not be identified.
Air Force Secretary Verne Orr will resign and return this fall to his hometown of Pasadena, the Pasadena Star-News reported in today’s editions. Orr told the newspaper that he is retiring because his wife, Joan, broke her hip two years ago in Washington and has been advised against spending another winter in an icy climate. Orr, 68, a successful businessman before becoming Air Force secretary, said he would like to remain active in local civic affairs but has no immediate plans to enter private business.
The first atomic bomb test at Trinity Site, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, resolved instantly the major technical questions about atomic fission. The ethical questions have proved to be infinitely harder to answer.
Exercise over a lifetime lessens the chances of heart attack and premature death, even for people who have already suffered one heart attack, according to researchers. The studies also show that to be most protective, exercise should be vigorous.
Governor Bill Janklow of South Dakota declared a state of emergency in the smoking Black Hills yesterday, and brush and forest fires also persisted in California, Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, Idaho and in Canada, where a firefighter had been killed by a falling rock. In many areas, however, firefighters had headed home as more blazes subsided after destroying more than a million acres in the United States and hundreds of thousands more in Canada.
Deborah Carthy-Deu, of Puerto Rico, is crowned the 34th Miss Universe.
Mats Wilander, the world’s third-ranked tennis player, returned the United States Pro Tennis championship to Sweden tonight with a 6-2, 6-4 victory over Martin Jaite of Argentina. Wilander, seeded No. 1 and playing with the skill that earned his countryman Bjorn Borg the title here in 1974-76, completed his first visit to Longwood’s clay courts with his fifth consecutive straight-set triumph in the $267,000 tournament.
During the first day of the All-Star break before the Mid-summer Classic to be played in Minneapolis, the Players’ Association sets an August 6th strike date. The union will keep its word, but the season will resume two days later.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1335.46 (-3.14)
Born:
Adam Cracknell, Canadian NHL right wing (St. Louis Blues, Columbus Blue Jackets, Vancouver Canucks, Edmonton Oilers, Dallas Stars, New York Rangers, Anaheim Ducks), in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada.
David Carpenter, MLB pitcher (Houston Astros, Toronto Blue Jays, Atlanta Braves, New York Yankees, Washington Nationals, Texas Rangers), in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Chris Johnson, NBA center (Portland Traliblazers, Boston Celtics, New Orleans Hornets, Minnesota Timberwolves), in Washington, District of Columbia.
Ecstasia Sanders, American-born Canadian actress (“Superman & Lois”, “Final Destination 3”), in San Diego, California.
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