Moscow has offered new arms ideas in the Geneva negotiations, according to Reagan Administration officials. But they said the concepts appeared vague and designed to perpetuate Soviet advantages in land-based missiles. The second round of the arms talks was adjourned until September 19. Until now, the Reagan Administration had maintained that the Soviet side had not made any new proposals on limiting strategic or medium-range weapons, to try to get the United States to agree to curb research and development of space-based and defensive weapons. But today, the White House said that “late in this round,” the Russians mentioned “some concepts which could involve possible reductions in existing strategic offensive nuclear arsenals.” But the Americans said today that the Soviet negotiators declined to go into details on such questions as what weapons would be included in each category and what the ceilings should be. Nevertheless, officials said the idea showed that the Russians were at least dangling officially the possibility of moves on strategic weapons — one of the three parts of the Geneva talks — when they resume in the fall.
President Reagan, despite his surgery and convalescence, plans to take part in talks next week with the Chinese President and to meet Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, in November. Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, said Mr. Gorbachev had sent the President a get-well message through diplomatic channels and that the Administration would send a 10-member advance team to Geneva Thursday for initial preparations for the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting. Although the President is not due to leave the hospital until Sunday at the earliest, Mr. Speakes said “he will participate in discussions” with President Li Xiannian of China, starting next Tuesday. Other White House officials said, however, that Mr. Reagan would probably take part in business meetings only and would skip the formal dinners and other ceremonial events.
American and Soviet spacemen who joined hands in orbit 10 years ago marked the anniversary by urging new international cooperation leading to a manned space mission to Mars as early as 1995. The biggest obstacle, all agreed, was politics, not technology. And even as signs of cooperation surfaced at a joint news conference in Washington, the threat of Soviet refusal to participate was raised by a Soviet cosmonaut if President Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense research does not stop.
The Defense Department said today that a Soviet Army truck rammed into a Land-Rover carrying three members of the United States Army liaison mission in East Germany last weekend. It said the senior American officer assigned to the mission was injured in the collision. The United States military mission in East Germany protested to Soviet authorities over the incident, the Pentagon said. It was the second such protest this year about Soviet use of force against Americans assigned to monitor the movements of Soviet forces in East Germany under postwar agreements.
Ninety-three congressmen, as well as Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and actress Jane Fonda, urged Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to let dissident Ida Nudel emigrate to Israel. They said they have heard that Nudel has cancer and asked that she be allowed to join her sister, her only living relative. Nudel, 54, has repeatedly been denied an exit visa by Moscow on grounds that she was exposed to “state secrets” when she worked as an accountant for the Ministry of Hygiene.
The Soviet Union announced that it will temporarily halt commercial whale hunting in the Antarctic during 1987. The announcement suggested a slight change in Moscow’s earlier objections to the International Whaling Commission’s call for a worldwide ban on commercial whaling starting this November. The ban, expected to last at least until 1990, was approved in 1982 in an effort to allow severely diminished whale populations to replenish.
A team of investigators today played the cockpit voice recording of an Air-India jetliner that crashed off the coast of Ireland last month and said that the quality of the recording was good. But they said later that it could take weeks for them to analyze the material on the tape, as well as material from a flight-data recorder. The Boeing 747, which was going from Toronto to India, crashed June 23, killing 329 people. The cockpit voice tape contains a recording of pilot conversation,. but American investigators said there was mostly jet noise on the recording. They also said it would be difficult to determine if there was an explosion by using only the voice recording, because a sudden noise could have several causes. The flight data recorder contains information on 64 different aspects of the flight, such as altitude, speed and other items measured by the plane’s instruments.
The Prime Minister of Belgium submitted the resignation of his coalition Government today after it became split in the aftermath of a soccer stadium riot in May. But King Baudouin declined to accept the resignation, and Prime Minister Wilfried Martens agreed to govern with the same Cabinet. “Thus,” Mr. Martens said later, “the Government will continue.”
The bill to abolish the Greater London Council receives royal assent.
Security at Athens airport is better and has been increased to satisfactory levels in the last month, according to the world trade group of scheduled airlines. The trade group, the International Air Transport Association, noted that Greece had agreed to improve security after the visit on June 26-28 by a five-member team of security experts from airlines and the trade group. “At the moment, it is one of the best guarded airports in the world,” said David Kyd, group spokesman. “That is one less place to worry about.”
Hundreds of newly arrived Ethiopian Jews set out on a march today to protest the refusal of Israel’s chief rabbis to recognize them as full Jews. Late today, midway through the march that began in this northern Israeli city and that was to have ended in Tel Aviv, the leaders of the demonstration called it off after Prime Minister Shimon Peres agreed to discuss their grievances. The anger of many Ethiopian Jews over the refusal of Israel’s grand rabbis to recognize the immigrants as full Jews has been building since their arrival. Thousands of Ethiopians were secretly airlifted to Israel from refugee camps in the Sudan last fall.
The Egyptian Government announced today that it had charged the country’s leading advocate of Islamic law with sedition. The state security prosecutor said the government would probably file other charges against the fundamentalist cleric, Sheik Hafez Salama, and 13 of his supporters. They were arrested three days ago in a major Government crackdown on Islamic fundamentalists. In the last 48 hours, the Government has announced the arrest of at least 45 Muslims characterized as extremists. The arrests and charges against Sheik Salama constitute a sharp rise in a government campaign to curb Islamic fundamentalism by cracking down on those it views as potential agitators.
Special Lebanese police units, accompanied by Syrian military observers, began patrolling West Beirut in the first phase of a Syrian-sponsored security plan to separate rival Muslim militias and bring peace to the western sector, torn by fighting for a decade. Initial reports indicated that the program was going smoothly, as police dismantled barricades and searched cars for weapons.
Iran announced today that its fourth presidential election since the 1979 revolution would be held on August 16. The election was originally scheduled for July. No explanation was given for its delay. President Ali Khamenei’s four-year term ends in October. No candidates have been announced. The President heads the Defense Council, Iran’s inner cabinet, and appoints the Prime Minister with the approval of Parliament.
Western diplomats said today that Afghan guerrilla attacks on government military posts in the Panjshir Valley had developed into a major offensive, inflicting heavy losses on the Afghan Army. No independent confirmation was available for the reports. The rebels held off Soviet soldiers trying to push them out of the Puzhghur military post, the diplomats said. Reports reaching Kabul said most of the 400 Afghan soldiers sent to retake the post were killed or had surrendered. Several hundred reinforcements were killed, wounded or captured, the reports said. The diplomats said they thought the Soviet Army, which took the valley in in April 1984, would probably launch another assault to re-establish control over the main villages in the Panjshir Valley. One diplomat said, “We doubt the generals of the Soviet 40th Army will be able to let the situation in Panjshir deteriorate much further without some response.”
The Communist rebels in Cambodia have announced for the first time that they would be willing to share power in Cambodia with officials of the present Vietnamese-backed Government. But the rebels, known as the Khmer Rouge, defended Pol Pot, the former Cambodian ruler, as the only person who could prevent Hanoi from “swallowing Cambodia forever.”
The Philippine government arrested Francisco S. Tatad, a former information minister and now an opposition politician and leading newspaper columnist, on charges of corruption. Tatad, 45, rejected the charges as false and as “political persecution pure and simple.” He said the government of President Ferdinand E. Marcos is trying to divert attention from published assertions that the Marcos family, top officials and presidential friends have made huge investments in U.S. property, draining wealth from the country and hiding it overseas.
Secretary of State George P. Shultz, in an apparent warning to the Soviet Union, told Fiji Islanders that the United States is determined to keep the South Pacific free of international rivalries. Speaking at a colorful welcoming ceremony during a four-hour stopover on his way home from a Pacific tour, Shultz told island officials that their decision to reopen ports to all U.S. warships was a wise move that will improve security in the region. Until last year, the islanders barred visits by nuclear warships.
Mexico’s ruling party rolled to a landslide victory in the July 7 election, capturing 291 of the 300 congressional seats, according to official results released today. The results gave the conservative opposition National Action Party only six seats, and the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution took three. Six parties gained no seats, the results showed. One hundred other seats will be distributed among opposition parties based on their percentage of the vote. No results were released for the seven state governors’ races. President Miguel de la Madrid’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has governed Mexico since 1929, faced its strongest electoral challenge ever this year. The stiffest opposition came from the National Action Party, which charged the ruling party with responsibility for the nation’s worst economic crisis in 50 years.
The gap between Bolivia’s two top presidential candidates appeared to narrow as rural returns from Sunday’s elections trickled into La Paz, the capital. In projections based on unofficial returns, the national television network gave former military ruler Hugo Banzer 36% of the vote. His closest rival, former President Victor Paz Estenssoro, had 27%. Banzer conceded that he will fall short of the 50% needed to avoid a runoff vote in Congress. Only a few thousand votes-all of them cast in La Paz, Banzer’s stronghold-have been officially counted.
Ghanaian authorities have arrested a number of Ghanaian citizens on charges of spying for the CIA since the arrest in Washington of a Ghanaian man and a female CIA employee accused of passing secrets to Ghana, press reports in Accra, the capital, said. There was no official confirmation. Those arrested were not named, but the reports said the navy commander and a principal secretary in the Foreign Ministry were among those who spied for the CIA and now are in hiding.
President Reagan is eager to work despite the removal of a cancerous tumor from his abdomen, the White House said. The White House spokesman, Larry Speakes, said that despite some “discomfort” as a result of the surgery Saturday, Mr. Reagan “continues to recover very well” and “is in excellent spirits.” Mr. Reagan conferred with Donald T. Regan, his chief of staff, for 25 minutes today and spent most of the afternoon with his wife, Nancy, in a suite at Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland. At one point, Mrs. Reagan accompanied the President for a walk up and down the hall, according to her spokesman, Jennefer Hirshberg.
For months and years to come President Reagan’s physicians will be confronting the most important uncertainty in their patient’s case: Has any cancer eluded their search? Does any still lurk in the President’s body, seeding new growth elsewhere? Even those closest to the case, the experts at the National Cancer Institute and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology who are part of the team caring for Mr. Reagan at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center, said they could not tell for some time. Although Mr. Reagan’s doctors spoke with guarded optimism at a news conference Monday about his chances for cure, there were clues in their words that signaled concern that the cancer might have been caught too late to prevent spread elsewhere.
George Bush has resumed his duties as Vice President with his characteristic low profile after serving nearly eight hours as Acting President last Saturday during President Reagan’s surgery. The White House, seeking to give the impression of business as usual, has made little effort to expand Mr. Bush’s duties. “Life goes on,” the Vice President said. “I think the news is so encouraging that’s it’s really going to slip back just as if the President were off on vacation somewhere.”
House Democratic budget conferees made a new effort to break an impasse with the Senate and the White House. They offered a compromise that would reduce non-military spending by an additional $24 billion over three years and increase the House-approved military budget by $5.4 billion in 1986, a little more than half the increase in military spending authority approved by the Senate.
Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III defended President Reagan’s tax reform plan, saying a study showing the plan hurts the middle class is biased. Writing last week to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Bob Packwood (R-Oregon), Baker raised numerous questions about a report from the Oregon Department of Revenue that showed the President’s plan actually would be a tax hike for many middle-class families, especially those with two incomes.
By overwhelming margins, the Senate today confirmed three key diplomatic appointments, ending a month-long battle with Senator Jesse Helms over nominations to State Department positions. Richard R. Burt, now Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, was approved as ambassador to West Germany by a vote of 88 to 10. Rozanne L. Ridgway, now envoy to East Germany, was confirmed to succeed Mr. Burt by 88 to 9. Edwin G. Corr was endorsed, 89 to 8, as envoy to El Salvador.
The handling of U.S. casualties by the Air Force after the 1983 truck bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon is called indefensible “medically, morally or ethically” in an internal memorandum prepared by an Army officer. Other Pentagon officials said the harsh criticism in the Army memo reflected the extent to which rivalry and lack of coordination between the services is undermining medical readiness in the entire European command. Two memorandums written shortly after the Beirut bombing reveal a little-known story of competition between the Air Force and the Army to care for victims of the bombing who were taken to Europe, and to reap the publicity rewards from providing the care. In the course of the struggle, Air Force officers, who took charge of patient distribution, shunted wounded servicemen to an overburdened Air Force hospital while better-prepared Army hospitals were pushed into the background, according to the memorandum by the Army officer who complained of the decisions.
Congressional critics said today that they would move Wednesday to kill a program that has funneled millions of dollars to pro-Western labor, business and political party institutes abroad. Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, said he planned to offer an amendment to the State Department appropriation bill that would cut off further money for the National Endowment for Democracy. The program will disburse $18 million this year. Mr. Conyers said he opposes the project because its grants were likely to be counterproductive and interpreted by other countries as an attempt to manipulate local politics.
A federal appeals court said the Energy Department acted improperly in setting energy efficiency standards for appliances in a ruling one group-the Energy Conservation Coalition-said could save consumers billions of dollars a year. In a 154-page opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the department had adopted low standards for energy savings that “openly violated congressional intent.”
Jane M. Byrne, denied reelection after one term as mayor of Chicago two years ago, announced she is running again for the post. Byrne said she will challenge Mayor Harold Washington, the first black ever to head the city, in the 1987 election. Washington edged out Byrne and Richard M. Daley, son of the late mayor, in a Democratic Party primary two years ago.
California’s outer continental shelf would be protected from drilling for oil until the year 2000 under a tentative agreement, Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel announced. The preliminary agreement was praised by Richard Charter, who represents many of California’s coastal municipalities. The preliminary agreement, outlined in a letter to Congress by Mr. Hodel, was praised by Richard Charter, who represents many of California’s coastal communities, and by the Natural Resources Defense Council, but was denounced by the American Petroleum Institute. “It cuts pretty deeply into a few areas, but from a statewide viewpoint I feel this is a pretty good outcome,” Mr. Charter said. Lisa Speer, a senior project scientist with the resources council, said the understanding “represents an important step toward achieving a balanced policy of offshore oil and gas leasing off the California coast.”
Calling I.B.M. anti-union, Morton Bahr, the new chief of the Communications Workers of America, announced that the union has opened a worldwide drive to organize the company’s employees.
The leader of the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord ordered members of the group to commit crimes for monetary gain and to aid in the collapse of the Government, a former elder of the group testified Monday. The testimony began after a jury was selected for the trial of James D. Ellison, the group’s leader, on racketeering charges. Mr. Ellison is accused of using his position as leader of the white supremacist group to burn the Missouri home of his sister for insurance purposes, to burn a church with a homosexual congregation at Springfield, Missouri, to burn a Jewish community center in Bloomington, Ind., and to blow up a natural gas pipeline near Fulton, Arkansas, in 1983. Two former elders on the group, William Thomas and Randall Rader, said Mr. Ellison had preached to the group about the end of society and the need for creating chaos. Mr. Thomas said Mr. Ellison’s beliefs led to some of the incidents.
A General Electric Co. executive and two former company officials were indicted in Philadelphia on charges of bilking the federal government out of nearly $800,000 in a contract to build nuclear weapons components. The three were charged as part of a continuing investigation into an alleged scheme by top-level GE executives to overcharge the military on defense contracts, U.S. Attorney Edward Dennis Jr. said. GE pleaded guilty on May 13 to 108 counts of making false statements in the overcharging scheme and agreed to pay the maximum fine of $1.04 million. The company issued a statement saying that it “is not a party” to the new series of indictments.
Firefighters today controlled a blaze at an abandoned Iowa sewage plant that had spewed clouds of smoke containing hydrogen chloride for 21 hours. The smoke forced more than 10,000 people to flee their homes temporarily and prompted the police to close the city to outsiders. Don Canney, Mayor of Cedar Rapids, city of 110,000 people, announced shortly after noon that “the emergency situation that existed is now ended” and that residents could return home. Fire Marshal Phil Saunders said firefighters had broken through a concrete dome at the plant allowing bulldozers to pile dirt on the fire, which reduced the thick black smoke to steam.
A judge today dismissed a lawsuit filed earlier in the day by the Philadelphia city police union that sought to halt a mayoral commission’s inquiry into a fire that killed 11 members of the radical group Move and burned 61 houses. The police contended that the commission, formed shortly after the May 13 fire, was created illegally, might violate officers’ rights and should be dissolved.
A judge in Portland, Oregon today voided a $39 million fraud verdict against the Church of Scientology, declaring a mistrial in a suit brought by a former church member. In a ruling that criticized his own actions in conducting the 11-week-long trial, Judge Donald H. Londer of Multnomah County Circuit Court said the case had gone astray from the fraud accusations leveled by Julie Christofferson Titchbourne. He said it had become an attack upon the religion. The judge said he had erred in allowing testimony not directly related to the fraud charge. He added that Mrs. Titchbourne’s attorney, Gary McMurry, had violated the judge’s instructions by telling jurors in his closing arguments that Scientology was not a religion. Judge Londer said the Oregon Court of Appeals had already ruled that Scientology “was a religion” and that he had so instructed the attorneys. The judge also took Mr. McMurry to task for comparing Scientology to totalitarian Communism and referring to the church’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, as a “warped sociopath.”
Retired Air Force General Richard L. Collins was acquitted in federal court in West Palm Beach, Florida, of stealing $450,000 from a super-secret government fund that financed covert CIA missions in Southeast Asia. A nine-woman, three-man jury deliberated two hours before finding the highly decorated former fighter pilot innocent of all six charges against him. The government contended Collins had abused the public trust by diverting the $450,000 from the fund’s Swiss bank account.
The new archbishop of Los Angeles will be Roger Mahony, the 49-year-old bishop of Stockton, California. Pope John Paul II chose Bishop Mahony, a Spanish-speaking native Californian with a long record as a social activist, to succeed Cardinal Timothy Manning, who has reached the mandatory retirement age of 75.
A juvenile home-computer plot has been under way in New Jersey, the authorities said. They arrested seven young people, all under the age of 18, and charged them with conspiring to use their computers to exchange stolen credit-card numbers and information on how to make explosives and free long-distance telephone calls and to call coded phone numbers in the Pentagon. Officials said the defendants had also obtained codes that would cause communications satellites to “change position,” possibly interrupting intercontinental communications and making legitimate phone calls impossible.
The number of firefighters battling blazes in the West dropped below 10,000 yesterday for the first time in more than a week, but a 30,000-acre fire continued to burn out of control near California’s scenic Big Sur. Fires were also burning in Idaho, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, South Dakota and Canada, and a second wave of brush fires caused by lightning struck northern Nevada. After a peak of 17,000 firefighters on the lines last week when more than a million acres had burned, the force dropped to 9,800 yesterday, according to Bill Bishop, a spokesman at the Federal Interagency Fire Center at Boise, Idaho, which has coordinated the battle against 3,500 fires in 12 Western states since June 27.
Heinrich Boll died at a son’s home near Bonn at the age of 67. The West German novelist’s bittersweet chronicling of German life in World War II and postwar West Germany earned him wide popularity throughout Europe and won him the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Major League Baseball:
The National League beat the American League 6–1 at Minnesota’s Metrodome for its 13th win in the last 14 All-Star Games. San Diego’s LaMarr Hoyt allows one unearned run in 3 innings and is named MVP. The Metrodome was supposed to yield some offense tonight and produce an All-Star Game filled with home runs and crazy bounces, but it refused. Instead the game belonged to the National League pitchers; to Hoyt and Nolan Ryan. Even with a lineup that included some noted power hitters — among them Eddie Murray, Jim Rice and Dave Winfield — the American League failed again in its pursuit of respectability. Five National League pitchers held the American League to only a single unearned run in the first inning — it came courtesy of the Yankees’ Rickey Henderson — and the National League cruised to victory before a sellout crowd of 54,960.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1347.89 (+12.43)
Born:
Kevin Huber, NFL punter (Pro Bowl, 2014; Cincinnati Bengals), in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Jay Rosehill, Canadian NHL left wing and defenseman (Toronto Maple Leafs, Philadelphia Flyers), in Olds, Alberta, Canada.
Died:
Heinrich Boll, 67, German author, Nobel laureate (1972).
Wayne King, 84, American saxophonist and bandleader, known as the Waltz King (“The Waltz You Saved for Me”).
History Diaries 