The popularity of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party has slumped to its lowest level in the lifetime of the present government, according to a Gallup poll for the Daily Telegraph newspaper. In a survey of 1,000 voters, 60% said they were “dissatisfied” with Thatcher. The poll showed the opposition Labor Party drawing the most support with 38%, followed by the alliance of Liberals and Social Democrats with 32.5%. Thatcher’s Conservative Party trailed with 27.5%. A month ago, the Gallup survey showed Labor and the Conservatives in a tie at 34.5% and the alliance with 30%.
A Soviet airliner crashed on a flight from Soviet Central Asia earlier this month, apparently killing all aboard, an official newspaper said. A brief report in the Uzbekistan Communist Party newspaper said the plane went down July 10 on a flight from Karshi to Leningrad. In keeping with Soviet practice, no other details were given. The Soviet airline Aeroflot uses the three-engine Tupolev 154, which carries up to 150 passengers.
A top Soviet scientist, employing a novel rationale, says it would violate the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to allow Andrei D. Sakharov to emigrate to the West, according to Senator Paul Simon (D-Illinois). Simon, who recently returned from a trip to Moscow, said Anatoly P. Alexandrov, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, gave this explanation for holding the celebrated dissident and one-time nuclear physicist in internal exile: “Part of the treaty is you’re not supposed to spread information about nuclear bombs and how to release them. If we were to let him go, he could spread information.”
The French Foreign Ministry today protested what it called the “unacceptable character” of comments on French politics made to a newspaper by the departing United States Ambassador, Evan Galbraith. The protest, which was made to the American charge d’affairs, John Maresca, followed the publication today in the rightist daily Figaro of an interview given by Mr. Galbraith on July 8. Mr. Galbraith, who left Monday, was quoted as having said that the governing Socialists were likely to lose their parliamentary majority in the elections next year and that the Communist Party was “sort of outside the law” and should not be allowed to participate in the Government, as it did from 1981 to 1984.
With an initial pledge from France of $115 million, President Francois Mitterrand kicked off a West European high-technology project intended to compete with strategic research in the United States and Japan. However, the sponsoring European Community soon bogged down in disagreement over specific steps on how to advance the Eureka project, officially described as non-military.
Prime Minister Wilfried Martens called together his feuding deputies today and forged a limited agenda for the Government’s last two months in office. On Tuesday, Mr. Martens submitted his resignation in a dispute over the handling of a soccer stadium riot in Brussels in May, in which 38 people died. But King Baudouin refused to accept Mr. Martens’s resignation and told him to reunite his splintered coalition. Mr. Martens told reporters that a general election to select a new government, scheduled for December 8, would probably be advanced to October 13. Mr. Martens met today with Deputy Prime Minister Jean Gol, whose offer to resign on Monday led to the coalition’s collapse, and Charles-Ferdinand Nothomb, the Interior Minister whose refusal to accept any responsibility for the soccer riot prompted Mr. Gol to leave the Cabinet. The agenda will be submitted to the full Cabinet for approval Thursday morning, and Mr. Martens will then present it to Parliament.
Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d said today that the United States Government might ask news organizations to adopt a voluntary code of restraint in reporting terrorist incidents. Mr. Meese made his remarks in response to a suggestion this week by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The hijacking of a Trans World Airlines jetliner last month led to news conferences and interviews with hostages on American television, arranged by their captors. That prompted Mrs. Thatcher, in a speech, to propose journalistic self-discipline as one means of starving future terrorists of what she termed “the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.”
Israel rejected a list of Palestinians whom Yasser Arafat has suggested as possible members of a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation that could hold preparatory peace talks with Washington, which had submitted the list to Israel. Israeli officials said the list, which the State Department has been examining for several days, was delivered this afternoon by the American charge d’affaires, Robert Flatten, to Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir. The list was given to the United States by Jordan.
Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross said today that the use of a stolen Red Cross vehicle in a car bombing in southern Lebanon this week had seriously hampered the agency’s work in Lebanon. Officials said the attack, which occurred Monday, was the first incident in years of work in Lebanon in which a Red Cross vehicle had been used in an attack.
The Afghan Government said today that its troops had won a victory over Muslim guerrillas in the 100-mile-long Panjsher Valley near the Pakistani border. Rebel leaders say their forces have the upper hand in the valley. Independent journalists are not allowed into the battle areas, so the conflicting reports cannot be resolved.
Military experts from the United States may soon be allowed to inspect two top-secret Soviet helicopter gunships flown to Pakistan last week by defecting Afghan military pilots, Western diplomats said today. It would be the first opportunity United States experts have had to examine what is believed to be Moscow’s most advanced helicopter. The gunships are “D” models of the Mi-24 “Hind” helicopter. They may have the latest electronic modifications for Afghan mountain combat.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister said today that “concrete progress” had been made in the latest round of United Nations-sponsored talks on ending the war in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. The Foreign Minister, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, said at a news conference that the talks between Pakistan and Afghanistan had covered noninterference and nonintervention by Pakistan and Afghanistan; international guarantees by the United States and the Soviet Union, to be signed by those countries; the return of Afghan refugees and conditions under which they would return, and the timetable for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The next round is scheduled for August.
The instruments that recorded cockpit voices and other information aboard an Air India jumbo jet carrying 329 people that crashed off Ireland last month abruptly stopped recording data shortly before the crash, according to an investigator. All 329 people aboard the Boeing 747 died when it plunged into the Atlantic from an altitude of 31,000 feet. The suddenness with which the plane disappeared off radar screens suggested that a bomb might have been the cause. But it has also been speculated that structural failure or human error might have been involved.
China today welcomed the Khmer Rouge’s announcement that it would be willing to share power in Cambodia. But Prince Norodom Sihanouk, leader of the coalition fighting the Vietnam-supported regime in Cambodia, cast doubt on the word of his Communist allies. Yu Zhizhong, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, praised the “good faith” of the Peking-backed Khmer Rouge in seeking a settlement of the six-year-old war against Vietnamese occupation forces in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge said Monday that it would abide by the results of elections in Cambodia, even if it loses, once Vietnamese occupation troops withdrew. But Prince Sihanouk, in a letter made public to the press, said of the partners in the three-way coalition, “I absolutely cannot foretell whether they shall keep their promises or not.”
Secretary of State George P. Shultz renewed criticism of New Zealand today, accusing it of undermining the United States nuclear deterrent and weakening its own security. He referred to New Zealand’s refusal in February to allow an American warship to make a port call on the ground that the vessel might be carrying nuclear weapons. “If New Zealand’s objective was to enhance specific security and reduce the nuclear danger, it has acted against its own interests,” Mr. Shultz said in a speech at the East-West Center on the campus of the University of Hawaii. He spoke at the end of a two-week tour that took him to Southeast Asia, Australia and the South Pacific.
Official results of Mexico’s July 7 elections show that the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party received 11.6 million votes, or 65% of the total, compared with 2.7 million, or 15%, won by the opposition National Action Party. The ruling party won 292 of the 300 seats filled in the lower house of Congress. National Action won six and the remaining two went to the tiny Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution.
El Salvador’s Air Force has come to play an essential role in the Government’s war against leftist rebel forces and has almost doubled in size in the last year, according to both United States and Salvadoran officials. The number of bombs and rockets used in combat is increasing, and American-provided helicopter and AC-47 gunships are now commonly deployed against guerrilla units. Some Western officials contend that the army might have lost the war without the sharply increased air power provided by the United States in recent years, especially a new fleet of helicopters used to place troops rapidly in rebel areas. In the last year, the air force appears to have used its new muscle mostly in concentrated attacks on areas regarded by the Government as guerrilla strongholds. Such attacks have become the focus of criticism of the Salvadoran Government. Several human-rights organizations have accused the Salvadoran Air Force of bombing civilians in guerrilla areas and of trying to drive rebel supporters into refugee camps.
The United States plans to maintain a major military presence in Honduras for at least the next three to five years, a memo from a U.S. Air Force officer indicates. The May 29 memo, released by the Pentagon, is from Lt. Col. Philip G. Stowell, the engineering officer at the U.S. Southern Command in Panama. It outlines a series of staffing problems facing his engineering mission in Honduras if it is to provide long-range support for American-built airfields in the country. Pentagon officials said that Stowell’s memo involves “contingency planning” only.
Nicaraguan agrarian reform officials said land titles were given to more than 1,000 peasant families to coincide with this week’s observances of the 1979 Sandinista revolution. The officials said 25,000 more peasant families will receive land titles by the end of the year. Jaime Wheelock, minister of agriculture, said 46% of peasant families have received some form of land title since the revolution.
A group of South African youths attacked a bus carrying American and West German tourists in Soweto outside Johannesburg today, and widespread unrest was reported from the sprawling settlement for the first time in months. None of the 15 foreigners were reported injured in the attack by about 100 youths, a police spokesman said. Brig. Jan Coetzee, the police commander for the area, said violence “reached serious heights of intensity” elsewhere in the segregated township, which is home for 1.5 million to 2 million blacks.
Anonymous donors in the United States have provided a new ship for the conservation group Greenpeace, whose flagship was sunk in New Zealand last week, a Greenpeace spokesman said today. But he said the new ship, a 1,000-ton ocean-going tug called The Greenpeace, was acquired several weeks ago and was not a replacement for the Rainbow Warrior, whose sinking by two explosions is being investigated as a possible sabotage. One crewmember was killed by the second blast. The new ship, valued at several hundred thousand dollars, will be shown to the public at Greenwich, near London, next Wednesday before going to Antarctica to monitor various national expeditions.
President Reagan continues to recover from colon cancer surgery at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. The President continued to improve from his operation, the White House said. It said Mr. Reagan had been removed from intravenous feeding and placed on a liquid diet after the best of his five nights in the hospital. Vice President Bush, after meeting for 45 minutes with Mr. Reagan, remarked, “It really is dramatic the way this recovery is taking place.” He said the President “looked very well, indeed” and was not “experiencing any discomfort” since the surgery Saturday in which a cancerous polyp was removed from his large intestine.
A debate over the cancer treatment provided for President Reagan intensified as a doctor who had examined Mr. Reagan said his medical team recommended in March that the President receive a colonoscopic examination as soon as possible. The White House contended there was no recommendation of urgency in the medical team’s report. Mr. Reagan did not receive a colonoscopic examination of his large intestine until last Friday, at which time surgeons at Bethesda Naval Medical Center discovered a polyp that proved to be cancerous. Since that time, the question of whether the colonoscopy and surgery should have been performed last March has been debated among physicians. Today, Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, defended the decision not to conduct a colonoscopy until this month, and he strongly denied that White House physicians had ignored warnings that they should have acted sooner.
The White House defended limits on interviews with doctors treating President Reagan, saying that speculation about his medical examinations last year was “distateful.” Cancer specialists and other physicians not involved in the case have questioned why he did not receive an immediate examination of his entire colon after an examination found a polyp in his intestine.
House-Senate budget talks collapsed in anger after the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee rejected a compromise offer made by the House Democrats and said he did “not see a way” to reach an agreement. The conferees, who have been meeting for more than a month, then recessed indefinitely.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee, with its Republican minority playing a crucial role, refused to impose a mandatory cleanup schedule on the Superfund toxic waste abatement effort. With Congress facing an October 1 deadline for renewing Superfund, the panel voted 26 to 16 against a plan to force the Environmental Protection Agency to begin cleaning up at least 600 chemical dumps by 1990. Supporters of a schedule said it was necessary to produce more intensive EPA action against leaking toxic dumps. But opponents argued it would deny the agency needed flexibility to deal with complex chemical mixes found at many sites.
The Senate majority leader, Bob Dole, said this evening that the Reagan Administration did not plan further efforts to have William Bradford Reynolds, the Justice Department’s civil rights chief, confirmed as Associate Attorney General. Mr. Dole, Republican of Kansas, made the announcement on the Senate floor after consulting with Donald T. Regan, White House Chief of Staff, and Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d.
Unable to agree in private on new farm subsidies, the Senate Agriculture Committee took its disagreements public and came away with a variation on current law that at a three-year cost of $31 billion was $10.5 billion over target. On a 10-4 vote, with four voting “present,” the panel agreed to use at least as a basis for a new farm bill a plan offered by Senators Edward Zorinsky (D-Nebraska) and Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kansas) that would allow for reductions in price supports but make up for that with higher subsidy payments.
A deepening agriculture recession has forced the Administration to retreat from much of its plan to change and shrink the federal farm support program. There is a consensus that the current farm program is antiquated and a cause of the four-year recession, but officials regard the farm economy as too weak now to assimilate the big adjustments that the changes would require. The Administration originally proposed changes in the program to diminish the government’s role and suject farms, like industries, to the forces of the marketplace. It wanted to gradually eliminate government payments to farmers when the prices of their products fell below Congressionally prescribed amounts, and it wanted to tighten the criteria under which farmers qualify for government loans they often do not have to repay. Instead, the economic strains on farmers have forced the Administration to settle for a modest shift toward reduced Government intervention.
A Congressional study has concluded that valuable gains in science and important insights into Soviet society could flow from renewed space cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Scientists who participated in the study by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, a report of which was released today, suggested that resumption of official cooperation should begin with “modest exchanges of solid scientific substance in relatively well-bounded areas,” with the possibility of a large-scale mission being held out as a long-term goal. They cited life sciences and planetary exploration as two areas for early cooperation.
Many high-voltage transformers in seven Smithsonian Institution buildings in the nation’s capital are leaking toxic PCBs that could contaminate national treasures forever, the Washington Post reported. The newspaper also quoted an anonymous source as saying that circuit breakers that are supposed to reduce the risk of fire are fire hazards in themselves. “Every building has defective circuit breakers,” the source said, which “may not trip under overload conditions.”
Many contested arms systems would be continued under a tentative agreement reached by House and Senate conferees. The compromise would allow deployment of 50 MX missiles in existing silos, authorize the Air Force to proceed with testing of new antisatellite weapons and approve $2.75 billion in spending for unrestricted research on an anti-missile defense system.
A sixth suspect has been arrested in an investigation of a group suspected of sending stolen military parts and equipment to Iran, the Federal Bureau of Investigation says. The suspect, Julie Roque Agustin, 46 years old, the wife of Franklin Agustin, 47, who was among five men arrested Friday, was arrested Tuesday at the couple’s San Diego home, the F.B.I. said.
The leader of a white supremacist group was convicted in Fort Smith, Arkansas, of racketeering charges related to fires at a Jewish center and a homosexual church and the bombing of a natural gas pipeline. A federal jury deliberated less than two hours before convicting James D. Ellison, 38, founder and spiritual leader of the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, described by the FBI as a survivalist, white supremacist organization.
Alabama Governor George C. Wallace will undergo surgery in Colorado next week in an effort to relieve his “incapacitating” pain, his physician said in Birmingham, Ala. Dr. Sam Stover said the pain caused by Wallace’s paralysis has doubled in the last year, and he recommended that the governor go to Denver to have a surgical procedure developed about two years ago. Wallace was left partly paralyzed by shots fired by a would-be assassin 13 years ago.
Jane M. Byrne is again a candidate to be Chicago’s Mayor. She announced plans to enter the 1987 Democratic primary, insisting she could do a better job than Mayor Harold Washington, who defeated her in 1983 in a racially-divisive campaign. Her announcement, which followed months of announcing plans to announce her intention, is a sure signal, if one was needed, that the heat is on in this most political of cities. Mrs. Byrne, who is 52 years old, is the first announced challenger to Mayor Harold Washington, who is 63. However, many others are said to be considering a run for the office even though the race is nearly two years off.
Federal District Judge Charles A. Moye today found the city of Atlanta in contempt for abandoning a court-ordered police promotion process after white officers did better than black officers on tests. Judge Moye said the decision violated a 1980 federal court order. He said the city abandoned the tests without sufficient evidence that they were invalid. He ordered the city, the Fraternal Order of Police, and the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League to report to him by July 31 on how the city should fill 55 sergeant and lieutenant positions.
A takeover of teaching hospitals by private, for-profit hospital chains would imperil the future of teaching, research and care of indigent patients, according to a Johns Hopkins University study. But a second study, also published in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that the takeovers reflected the hospital chains’ commitment to teaching, resarch and indigent care.
In an unprecedented case dealing with rare Hebrew books that were smuggled out of Berlin in 1940, Sotheby’s auction house has agreed to recall from buyers books and manuscripts sold last summer and redistribute them to public institutions, it was disclosed in papers filed in New York State Supreme Court. The papers spelled out an out-of-court settlement under which Sotheby’s waived all profits from the $2.2-million sale of the collection of 56 Jewish books and manuscripts consigned to the auction house by Dr. Alexander Guttmann.
Acid rain is estimated to cause $5 billion in damages annually in a 17-state region by corroding buildings and other structures, according to a new draft study for the Government. The study, conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Army Corps of Engineers, based its estimate on what it would cost to repair or replace paint, stone, mortar, metals and other materials damaged by acidic pollution. The study found that two-thirds of the damage was created by pollution from sources more than 30 miles away. Courtney Riordan, director of the environmental agency’s acid rain office, said this finding could be “very critical” in establishing that pollution transported over long distances by prevailing winds was having a severe impact on the environment.
The New York Yankees acquired Neil Allen, 27-year-old former Met right-handed relief pitcher, from the St. Louis Cardinals in exchange for a minor league player to be named and “other considerations.”
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1357.97 (+10.08)
Born:
Loui Eriksson, Swedish NHL left wing and right wing (NHL All-star, 2011; Dallas Stars, Boston Bruins, Vancouver Canucks, Arizona Coyotes), in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Antonio Dixon, NFL defensive tackle (Philadelphia Eagles, Indianapolis Colts), in Miami, Florida.
Tom Fletcher, British pop singer, and guitarist (McFly – “5 Colours In Her Hair”; “All About You”), in Harrow, London, England, United Kingdom.
Died:
Susanne Langer, 89, American philosopher and educator (Philosophy in a New Key).
Margo, 68, Mexican-American actress (“Rumba”, “Viva Zapata”), of a brain tumor.
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