A dozen people who are not members of the Communist Party were named today along with General Wojciech Jaruzelski and his top aides in a list of 50 at-large candidates who will be running unopposed in Polish parliamentary elections October 13. The announcement served as an overture to an election campaign that the government wishes to project as democratically innovative and socially therapeutic. The 50 included not only top party and government figures but also such unaffiliated Government supporters as a former bicycle champion, a university rector and the head of the anti-Solidarity writers union. The government has also been counting on the presence of independants to win credibility for the election and counter underground Solidarity’s call for an election boycott. Despite months of rumors that prominent lay Catholics and even mild opposition figures might be named for the nonparty seats, the list announced today contained no real mavericks.
The stationmaster on duty when two trains collided in rural south-central France, killing 35 people, has been charged with negligent manslaughter, a judge said today. The stationmaster, Yves Salens, 37, was in charge of the small station at Assier on Saturday when a two-car local train collided with a four-car diesel express from Paris. The crash occurred just outside Flaujac station. Officials said 165 passengers were injured. The manslaughter charge carries a possible prison sentence of three months to two years. A conviction on the charge of involuntary injuries carries a penalty of 15 days to one year in prison. Fines of about $600 to $3,500 could also be levied.
A Turkish leftist who Mehmet Ali Ağca has said was with him in St. Peter’s Square the day in 1981 when he shot Pope John Paul II testified today that he last saw Mr. Ağca in 1979 and never left Turkey before today. The testimony came in the trial of eight men, including Mr. Ağca, accused of conspiring to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981. The thrust of the testimony put forward by Mr. Ağca, the prosecution’s main witness, is that the plot was abetted by the Soviet Union through its ally, Bulgaria. In pretrial testimony, Mr. Ağca told Italian investigators that the Turk, Sedat Sirri Kadem, who comes from Mr. Ağca’s hometown of Malatya, had taken him to Gaziantep, on the Syrian border, en route to a Palestinian guerrilla training camp in the summer of 1977, and introduced him to Teslim Tore, another Turkish leftist.
Gunmen opened fire with automatic weapons in Palermo, Sicily, today and killed a top police official who had been investigating the Mafia. The policeman, Antonino Cassara, 38 years old, the deputy chief of Palermo’s mobile police squad, was killed instantly as he was leaving his home. The spray of bullets also struck two other policemen who were with him. One of them, Roberto Antiochia, died in a hospital a few hours after the attacks. The police said that Mr. Cassara always rode in an armored car and was most vulnerable at the time he emerged from his house. Prime Minister Bettino Craxi’s office said that Mr. Craxi opened a Cabinet meeting this evening with the words: “The Mafia has killed again.”
President Reagan meets with a group of Senators who are leaving on a trip to the Soviet Union.
Two freak 10-foot waves slammed into the coast of southern France, about 46 miles west of Marseilles, drowning a woman and forcing the evacuation of about 2,000 people from a vacation haven of isolated campgrounds and nude beaches, authorities reported. Officials said 12 people were hospitalized and many others were reported to be suffering from shock. Authorities feared that the death toll would rise as rescue workers reached areas cut off by water.
A man riding a mule detonated saddle baskets full of explosives in south Lebanon today. The explosion, which killed both mule and rider, went off near a south Lebanon building that Israel said was used by the Israeli-backed militia known as the South Lebanon Army. The Lebanese National Resistance Front, a guerrilla alliance operating in the south, asserted that the building was demolished with 30 Israelis and 40 militiamen inside, but gave no specific casualty figures. Israel said one Lebanese civilian was wounded in the blast. The National Resistance Front said in a statement issued in Beirut that the rider was Jamal Sati, 23 years old, a Sunni Muslim student from Kamed al Loz village, which was a center of resistance to Israeli occupation after the invasion of June 1982.
President Reagan attends a National Security Council meeting to discuss the pending release of the American hostages in Lebanon.
17 Arab countries are represented at a meeting today in Casablanca of the 21 active members of the Arab League. The meeting on Wednesday, called by King Hassan II of Morocco to discuss “issues dividing the Arabs” and the “Palestinian question in all its aspects,” is being boycotted by Syria, Lebanon, Southern Yemen and Algeria. The meeting was to have brought together all Arab League heads of state. But only eight leaders are expected to be present Wednesday, along with the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
An Egyptian state security court ruled that the government was holding an Islamic fundamentalist leader illegally and ordered him released. Sheik Hafez Salama, 70, was arrested July 13 and charged with instigating resistance to the government, possession of anti-government pamphlets and other political offenses. Salama advocates imposing sharia — the 1,300-year-old Muslim legal code — in Egypt, which has a secular legal system based on Western European models. It was not immediately clear when Salama would be freed from custody.
Afghan rebels tortured 264 Afghan government soldiers with medieval-style instruments, killing many of them before fleeing into Pakistan, a Soviet television report charged. An unusually detailed 20-minute film report showed dismembered bodies lying in a ruined village 40 miles from Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. It was not immediately clear when the reported incident took place.
The South Korean government said it will introduce a new law to “re-educate” students engaged in anti-government activities. Education Minister Sohn Chae Suk said investigations revealed that “some students have formed pro-Communist organizations that give aid and comfort to the enemy.” Leading dissident Kim Young Sam said the New Korea Democratic Party, the main parliamentary opposition, and other anti-government groups will oppose the bill.
The 13-nation South Pacific Forum unanimously adopted a treaty for a nuclear-free zone that bans the testing or use of nuclear weapons and the dumping of nuclear waste across a vast area of the South Pacific. New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange, speaking for the forum, said the five nations known to have nuclear weapons, although not forum members, will be asked to sign protocols observing the treaty’s terms. He said he especially hopes that France, which has tested weapons in French Polynesia, will sign.
Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel d’Escoto, following medical advice, ended his month-long hunger strike, which he began to protest the Reagan Administration’s “terrorist strategy” toward his country’s leftist government. D’Escoto, a former Maryknoll priest, began his “fast and prayers” in a suburban Managua church July 7 to call attention to continued U.S. support for thousands of right-wing rebels trying to overthrow the Sandinista government. Weighing 205 pounds at the beginning, he lost 33 pounds, he said.
A group of 31 Americans set out by boat Monday on Lake Nicaragua for a former rebel base on the Costa Rican border that was recently captured by Nicaraguan soldiers. Eden Pastora Gomez, Costa Rica-based rebel leader, threatened to attack the Americans, who belong to a group called Witness for Peace.
Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, who ruled the South American country of Guyana since 1964, died today in a Guyanese hospital after a throat operation. He was 62 years old. Desmond Hoyte, the country’s Prime Minister, was sworn in to succeed him under the Guyanese Constitution. Mr. Hoyte has served as a senior minister in the Guyanese Cabinet for more than a decade, mostly in economic posts, and had been named Prime Minister by Mr. Burnham last year. The new President is viewed as a political and philosophical protege of Mr. Burnham. “I don’t think you’re going to see much of a change,” said John Galinas, an American consultant who represents Guyana.
Zimbabwe has arrested at least 31 supporters of opposition leader Joshua Nkomo, among them Sydney Malunga, a member of Parliament and chief whip of Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union. Most of those were seized at Nkomo’s homes in Harare, the capital, or Bulawayo, regional center of Matabeleland, where Nkomo’s Ndebele minority holds sway. Nkomo said the arrests were designed to “build a case against” his party that would justify its being banned. Prime Minister Robert Mugabe has said he wants to make Zimbabwe a one-party state.
South African police raided the home of Winnie Mandela, an anti-apartheid leader, after firing rubber bullets and using whips to break up a demonstration outside. Lawyers for Mrs. Mandela, the wife of the jailed nationalist leader Nelson Mandela, said a 20-month-old grandchild had disappeared after the raid near Brandfort, in a remote part of the remote Orange Free State. Mrs. Mandela has been banished to Brandfort for the last eight years. At the time of the raid, she was in Johannesburg to meet a visiting United States congressman. According to a police spokesman, police fired tear gas into Mrs. Mandela’s house to evict demonstrators who had taken refuge inside. Thirty people were said by the police to have been arrested and charged with public violence.
The NASA space shuttle Challenger landed safely at Edwards Air Force Base, California. The spacecraft lost a main engine after liftoff, but an official said the eight-day mission STS-51-G had otherwise been “superbly successful.” Colonel C. Gordon Fullerton of the Air Force guided the 108-ton spacecraft to a landing at 12:46 P.M. on a dry lake bed that danced with watery mirages in 96-degree heat. Plumes of dust rose like steam as the craft rolled to a stop, returning a crew of seven men and the largest, most advanced scientific instruments ever built for space flight. On this mission the Challenger became an orbiting astronomical observatory, with more than $72 million of telescopes and other sensitive instruments to study the sun, the stars and distant galaxies. Dr. Burton Edelson, an Associate Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said some instrument problems had seemed “insurmountable when we started out.”
The STS-51-I launch vehicle with the Space Shuttle orbiter Discovery moves to the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Republican and Democratic governors ended a bitter 24-hour fight over a fundraising appeal by President Reagan, allowing the National Governors Conference in Boise, Idaho, to end on a conciliatory note. The highly partisan appeal by Reagan, mailed in 120,000 letters to GOP financial contributors, characterized Democratic governors as free-spending liberals. Democratic governors called the six-page letter “a pack of lies” and threatened to walk out of the conference. The GOP ended the fight when Governor Dick Thornburgh of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Republican Governors Conference, apologized for “unfair” characterizations and said they would not be repeated.
The Environmental Protection Agency said it would soon propose rules requiring offshore oil and gas drillers to treat the wastes they produce before discharging them to the ocean. The EPA also said the rules would require future shallow-water drillers to inject back into the sea floor the briny liquids called “produced water,” toxic pollutants that emerge with oil and gas. The offshore industry will have to spend about $36 million annually to comply, and 126 shallow drillers will have to spend about $56 million a year, but there should be no effect on production or prices, the EPA said.
Jerry A. Whitworth, one of four men accused of spying on the Navy, provided the Soviet Union with extensive information about a computer system used to transmit confidential military messages, officials charged today. According to a 12-count indictment announced here, Mr. Whitworth also gave Soviet agents photographs and documents regarding “classified activities” on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. He served on the carrier as a communications specialist in 1982 and 1983. The communications network, the Remote Information Exchange Terminal, is used by the Navy to send messages to the Department of Defense. Officials said it was possible that the Soviet Union used information they say was obtained from Mr. Whitworth to get secret information about other military services.
A former CIA employee and a Ghanaian national were indicted by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, on spy charges. Sharon M. Scranage, who worked for the CIA in Ghana for two years, was accused of passing information to Michael Agbotui Soussoudis, a Ghanaian. The 18-count indictment of Scranage alleges she disclosed classified information and the names of CIA personnel working covertly in Ghana. Soussoudis, Scranage’s former boyfriend, was charged in a separate eight-count indictment that alleged he sought information from Scranage about Ghanaians working with the CIA and about dissident groups opposed to Ghana’s government.
The Education Department said it will begin warning nearly 2 million student loan defaulters this week that the amount of their outstanding loans could be withheld from their federal income tax refunds next year as part of a crackdown on loan “deadbeats” if they do not pay off their debts within 60 days. If the debt is more than the refund, more money will be deducted from the defaulter’s 1986 refund. The department estimates the crackdown could recover as much as $250 million of a debt of $5 billion.
The United States Court of Appeals here ordered the Government today to restrict Japanese fishing rights in American waters because of Japan’s continued killing of scarce sperm whales in defiance of an international pact. The decision would require Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige to enforce a 1979 statute. Secretaries of Commerce have generally interpreted the law as discretionary. Japan, which has an important whaling industry, has been in violation of a moratorium on the taking of sperm whales established by the International Whaling Commission in 1981.
A baseball strike began as 650 players stayed away from major league parks and forced the cancellation of 13 games. Negotiators held their longest bargaining meetings of the nine months of talks, but no significant progress was reported in efforts to reach a new collective-bargaining accord. The last baseball strike, in 1981, lasted 50 days.
The Boston Globe today asked a judge to enter a judgment in the newspaper’s favor after a jury found Monday that three paragraphs in an article about a gubernatorial candidate were “false and defamatory” and had been published “with reckless disregard as to the truth.” The Globe’s attorney, Francis H. Fox, told Judge George Jacobs of Superior Court that because the jury had found that the plaintiff had suffered no damages, its finding lacked one of the key elements that defines libel. The article published in August 1982 challenged statements that the plaintiff, John R. Lakian, then a candidate for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, had made about himself. Jury trials in civil cases usually end with the filing of a judgment, which in straightforward liability cases often award an amount specified by the jury.
Saying 30 years in the business was enough, the man who pioneered Nevada’s move into legalized prostitution has announced the sale of the nation’s largest legal brothel for $18 million. The pioneer in the business, Joe Conforte, and his wife, Sally, announced Monday they had sold the brothel, the Mustang Ranch. It includes two buildings with 108 bedrooms and 400 acres of adjacent desert 10 miles east of Reno. The buyer is a California company, Strong Point Inc. The Confortes say they owe the government as much as $10 million in back taxes. They had sought $25 million for the brothel and the land. Mr. Conforte said he and his wife planned to return to Brazil, where they lived for two years starting in 1981. “I think 30 years is enough, don’t you?” Mr. Conforte said, speaking of the years he had been in the business.
The savage killing of Anthony Darnell Wilson, 9, because he refused to share his bicycle has resulted in the filing of delinquency charges against two Beloit, Wisconsin, boys, 12 and 14. According to police, Wilson was first stabbed in the back with a stick by an 11-year-old girl, then suffered multiple stab wounds to the chest and a blow to the head. Two knives were found near the body. A 5-year-old witness was put in protective custody because of threats by the suspects. The 11-year-old is too young to be charged even with delinquency in what a prosecutor called “one of the most vicious” killings he has ever seen, but she could be sent to a treatment center.
Three girls have contracted the tick-borne Rocky Mountain spotted fever after visiting a camp in Pennsylvania and all remained hospitalized today, one in critical condition, state health officials said. The officials said tall grass had been cut to keep ticks away at the camp near Downington and counselors had started checking children for ticks, whose bites transmit the sometimes fatal disease. Bobby Jones, a state epidemiologist, said there had been 11 cases of the disease last year in Pennsylvania and added, “So this is not totally unusual.”
The federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta confirmed that patients who received blood-derived drugs dispensed by a cancer clinic in the Bahamas were exposed to AIDS virus. The patients at the Immunology Researching Center Ltd., which has been closed, also were exposed to hepatitis, the CDC said. The Associated Press reported last month that possibly 1,000 of the clinic’s patients may have been exposed to the AIDS virus. The CDC said no AIDS cases have been reported thus far as a consequence of treatment at the clinic, but that it has documented hepatitis in two clinic patients with no history of susceptibility to hepatitis.
A 3-year-old boy suffering from acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, has been barred from a class for handicapped children and will receive private instruction at his home if he is accepted into the county special education program, officials said today. “We’ve come to an agreement with parents,” said Bob Grossman, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Office of Education. “We will go ahead with the tests to see if he is eligible and if he is, he will get education through home instruction.” The child, who contracted the deadly disease, which breaks down the body’s immune system, from a tainted blood transfusion. Parents had expressed fears that the child would infect others if he attended class.
Major League Baseball:
Ronald Reagan writes in his White House diary: “Baseball went on strike — they are nuts.”
For the 2nd time in 5 years the Players’ Association stages a mid-season strike. But unlike the 50-day strike that interrupted the 1981 season, this one will be settled by the following day and all 25 canceled games will be made up. The new collective bargaining agreement, which runs through 1989, raises the Major League minimum salary to $60,000, extends the time of service required to be eligible for salary arbitration from 2 years to 3, and eliminates the free-agent compensation pool that resulted from the 1981 strike settlement.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1325.16 (-21.73)
Born:
Cory Boyd, NFL running back (Denver Broncos), in Orange, New Jersey.
Died:
Forbes Burnham, 62, Premier of Guyana (1964-1985), during surgery.
History Diaries 