Bettino Craxi has emerged politically strengthened from the dispute with the Reagan Administration over the Achille Lauro hijacking, according to indications. Italy’s President asked the caretaker Prime Minister to form a new Government four days after his five-party Government fell over its handling of the episode.
A senior leader in the Palestine Liberation Organization, discussing the Achille Lauro hijacking, said today that the four hijackers had been acting under written orders from Mohammed Abbas to carry out a suicide attack as soon as the boat docked in Ashdod, Israel. The P.L.O. official, who did not wish to be identified, dismissed a theory that the hijacking occurred only because an member of the ship’s crew had discovered the hijackers cleaning their guns.
A special American envoy sent to try to ease diplomatic strains growing out of the Achille Lauro hijacking told President Hosni Mubarak today that President Reagan hoped Egypt and the United States would “put our recent differences behind us.” Mr. Mubarak, who in an American television interview broadcast Sunday accused the United States of a “stab in the back,” had no public comment after the two-hour meeting.
The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence criticized President Reagan tonight for failing to give Congress advance notice of United States plans to capture the hijackers of an Italian cruise ship. The chairman, Senator Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota, contended that the Reagan Administration had violated the “spirit” of a law that requires the President to notify Congress about “significant anticipated intelligence activity.” His comments came in a speech at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and other Eastern European leaders arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria, for a long-delayed Warsaw Pact meeting expected to focus on Gorbachev’s summit talks with President Reagan in Geneva on November 19-20. Gorbachev and other leaders of the Communist military alliance were greeted at the airport by Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov.
United States-Soviet talks on resuming airline service between the two countries have ended in disagreement and no further meetings have been set, the State Department said today. “There were considerable differences on the economic basis on which service would be established,” said the department spokesman, Bernard Kalb. American officials have said Washington is insisting on fair treatment for whatever American airline flies to Moscow. Air service to the United States by Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, was halted in December 1981 after imposition of martial law in Poland. The State Department had said a recent American-Soviet-Japanese agreement in principle on air safety in the northern Pacific had paved the way to the negotiations.
Thirteen people, including four children, were killed when about a dozen vehicles collided on a highway in Lancashire, in northwest England. A bus was engulfed in flames and 35 people were injured in what police described as the worst accident ever on the country’s intercity highways. In Italy, a bus filled with Italian tourists plunged 13 feet from a bridge into a farm field near the Adriatic port city of Pesaro, killing nine people and injuring about 40, police said.
The Princess of Wales paid a surprise five-hour visit to Northern Ireland today, mingling with outdoor crowds four times as the police looked on nervously. She got a warm welcome from Protestants, but there was little visible reaction from Roman Catholics in the British province.
Hundreds of thousands of Greeks went on a one-day strike to protest austerity measures by the Socialist government. Building workers, factory and shop employees, taxi and bus drivers, nurses, telephone operators and airport workers were among those who walked out. Flights of state-owned Olympic Airways and many by foreign carriers were canceled. Army vehicles provided public transportation. The strikes were called to protest a 15% devaluation, wage curbs and cuts in public spending.
West German anti-nuclear activists today slashed the tires of a truck carrying nuclear waste, the police said. The protesters blocked the road to a waste dump at Gorleben, 80 miles northeast of here, for about an hour before the truck proceeded under escort, a police spokesman said.
Shimon Peres offered to go to Jordan before the end of the year to take part in a Middle East peace conference. Mr. Peres, the Israeli Prime Minister, made the offer in an address before the United Nations General Assembly as it began the second week of the organization’s 40th anniversary commemoration. “I hereby proclaim: The state of war between Israel and and Jordan should be terminated immediately,” Mr. Peres said. “Israel declares this readily in the hope that King Hussein is willing to reciprocate this step.”
President Reagan will hold separate meetings at the United Nations with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India and President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan, White House officials said today. The officials said the two were the only visiting leaders Mr. Reagan would meet with separately except for those of the major industrialized democracies.
Suspected Sikh militants shot two Indian government workers to death when one of the victims tried to stop a toll-booth robbery at a checkpoint in Kashmir, across the border from Sikh-dominated Punjab. The violence follows the killings within the last week of two local leaders of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress Party in Punjab. Police in Kashmir said earlier that they had broken up a Sikh terrorist group operating there, in Punjab and in New Delhi with the arrest of six leaders of a previously unknown band called the Saffron Tigers.
A Sri Lanka woman made the biggest impression at the First Ladies’ Conference on Drug Abuse at the United Nations. The woman, Hema Premadasa, the wife of Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister, said “the drug menace is a calamity” for developing countries. In an impromptu appeal, she called for such a conference to held again, in an impoverished country.
A food crisis in two camps housing Laotian exiles has been averted by the intervention of Thailand’s national security chief. Rice deliveries to the camps, Nakhorn Phanom and Chiang Kham, had been held up because of a dispute between the Thai Interior Ministry and United Nations refugee officials acting on behalf of European nations, donor of money to buy rice for the remainder of this year. The Europeans had set bidding and quality control conditions on the purchase to which the Interior Ministry, which controls the camps, objected.
South Korea called for the admission of both North and South Korea to the United Nations as an interim measure pending reunification. South Korean Prime Minister Lho Shin Yong told the U.N. General Assembly that admission of the two states “can only increase the opportunities for dialogue and cooperation… and eventual reunification.” North Korean Vice President Pak Sung Chul told the assembly last week that separate U.N. memberships would “only lead to fixity of the division.” The two Koreas now have observer status at the United Nations.
China has successfully tested a cruise missile within the last month, East European diplomats said in Peking. It was believed to be China’s first test of a cruise missile. The diplomats said they understood that the missile, fired from a land base into the East China Sea 190 miles southeast of Shanghai, was designed for use by submarines. They said that most of the test flights took place over land areas to facilitate electronic tracking.
China is exporting nuclear data to five countries “having the most dangerous nuclear programs” despite a pledge not to help others develop nuclear weapons, according to Senator Alan Cranston, Democrat of California. Mr. Cranston, the minority whip, announced he opposed Congressional approval of a nuclear cooperation agreement with Peking.
The acting Philippine Foreign Minister said today that the United States Government and the American press were overestimating the strength of a Communist insurgency in the Philippines and underestimating the ability of the Government to bring it under control. “I am not saying that there is no problem in the Philippines,” said the diplomat, Pacifico Castro, in a speech to the World Affairs Council. “We have a problem of insurgency. We have a serious economic problem, just like about a half dozen countries of Latin America and many other countries of Asia and Africa.
The Manila police killed at least one person and reportedly wounded 27 when they opened fire on a crowd of rock-throwing demonstrators. The incident involved mostly young farmers who, together with some militant radicals, were protesting the Government’s rice prices and American support for the government. Jean Riboud died of cancer at his Paris home at the age of 65. Mr. Riboud was the former chairman of Schlumberger Ltd., the international oilfield services company that has often been hailed as one of the world’s best corporations.
Almost six weeks after the kidnapping of President Jose Napoleon Duarte’s daughter, the Salvadoran guerrilla front has taken public responsibility for the action. The rebels said in a radio broadcast Sunday night that the kidnapping was part of their strategy to wear down and destabilize the Duarte Government. They said Mr. Duarte’s daughter, Ines Guadalupe Duarte, was also an official of the ruling Christian Democratic Party. They had earlier said she was linked to the Government’s psychological warfare campaign.
The ruling Colorado Party in Paraguay claimed a landslide victory in municipal elections, amid allegations of voting fraud. In unofficial returns, the party of President Alfredo Stroessner captured about 700,000 votes, while the Liberal Party received 62,000 and the Radical Liberals, 25,000. Major opposition parties either boycotted the balloting or were banned. Joaquin Atilio Burgos, Liberal Party leader, charged that “they didn’t let poll watchers work” in Itapua province and that there was “scandalous fraud” in Caaguzu province. Stroessner has ruled Paraguay since 1954.
Somalia says it has repulsed two attacks by Ethiopian troops, killing 64 soldiers and capturing tanks and weapons. Somalia and Ethiopia are longstanding antagonists and territorial rivals. Their accounts of sporadic clashes along the border are generally different, with the statements of one side denied by the other. The Somali Defense Ministry said its troops fought off an attack at Khadar in the northwest Sunday in which 59 Ethiopians were killed and tanks and ammunition captured. Another attack took place at Anod, the ministry said, and five Ethiopians were killed. Somalia said its casualties were 6 soldiers dead and 10 wounded.
A Uganda newspaper reported today that both government troops and rebels recently suffered heavy casualties when Uganda troops tried to break out of the Mbarara barracks, which is under siege by rebel forces. The daily Munno, which is linked to the Roman Catholic Church, said it learned of the battle, which took place last week, in a telephone interview with an officer of the National Resistance Army, a rebel group. The officer told the paper that casualties were heavy on both sides, but gave no further details. The area around Mbarara, a major town in western Uganda, has been under rebel control for about two months. When the area was taken, government troops withdrew to the barracks until food supplies began to run out, Munno said.
The limited economic sanctions against South Africa that were agreed upon by Commonwealth leaders late Sunday are expected to have little effect on the Pretoria Government, officials here said today. Many leaders at the 46-nation gathering here had called for more stringent sanctions. But bowing to pressure from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, the group endorsed a list of limited economic measures that had already been adopted individually by many member nations.
The President hailed legal restraint in criticizing people who view courts as “vehicles for political action and social experimentation.” Mr. Reagan, speaking to a group of United States Attorneys, vowed to use the rest of his second term to appoint Federal judges “who understand the danger of short-circuiting the electoral process.”
President Reagan attends a National Security Council meeting to discuss the upcoming trip to the United Nations.
President Reagan meets with Chairman Anne Armstrong of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
The government plans a new kind of absentee ballot in hopes of getting more votes from 3.5 million eligible Americans who are outside the country every Election Day. Those Americans abroad make up a voting bloc larger than those of some of the 50 states. Under the current system, many Americans abroad receive ballots late or find the system too complicated. Under the government’s plan, a new federal absentee ballot would be available at military installations, embassies, consulates and other places in countries outside the United States. Americans could use them if the regular absentee ballots sent by their home states failed to reach them in time.
The murder of Leon Klinghoffer was not God’s will, Rabbi Harvey M. Tattelbaum told the family members and friends who mourned yesterday at Mr. Klinghoffer’s funeral. It was, he said, the act of an unjust and disordered world in which man’s cruelty and stupidity are infinite. “I cannot believe or express the phrase that it was God’s will,” Rabbi Tattelbaum said from the pulpit of his synagogue, the reform Temple Shaaray Tefila, 250 East 79th Street in Manhattan. “And I stand foursquare in the center of Jewish tradition when I argue with God and contend my case before him, just as Abraham — the first Jew — argued with God: ‘Will the judge of all the earth not Himself do justly? How can the innocent be swept away with the wicked?’ ‘
Fugitive ex-CIA agent Edward L. Howard was paid $6,000 last year by the Soviet KGB for U.S. intelligence secrets, federal officials said in Washington. The officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified, said FBI agents had traced the $6,000 through bank records. The FBI agents determined that the money probably came from the Soviets because of “the juxtaposition in time” with Howard’s alleged meeting with KGB officials in St. Anton, Austria, on September 20, 1984, the officials said. Howard, 33, whom the CIA fired in June, 1983, after two years with the agency, was charged on September 23, 1985, with selling U.S. secrets.
The Senate avoided a skirmish over federal funding for abortion by removing money for family planning from a huge $105-billion bill for federal labor, health and education programs. In an agreement reached with Senator Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), a leading opponent of abortion, money for federal family planning services was deleted from the fiscal 1986 appropriations bill, which includes $221 million for AIDS research.
Dan White, who was convicted of killing Mayor George Moscone of San Francisco and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, a homosexual activist, in City Hall in 1978, committed suicide with carbon monoxide, the police said. Mr. White, who was released from prison 21 months ago after serving five years for the two killings, had been troubled since his release from prison, according to his lawyer, Douglas R. Schmidt.
Nearly two years after seven people were accused of molesting scores of children at a nursery school in nearby Manhattan Beach, the Los Angeles District Attorney has asked his aides to prepare a “candid and complete evaluation” of the evidence in the case. The District Attorney, Ira Reiner, said he had requested a confidential, written report from the three prosecutors assigned to the case, which involves six teachers at the McMartin Preschool and its 77-year-old founder, Virginia McMartin. A preliminary hearing to determine whether they should stand trial is now in its 19th month, with the defense just beginning its presentation. The report is due after the hearing ends. The District Attorney’s announcement last week came after press and court disclosures of a rift among the prosecutors and assertions by defense lawyers of a badly handled investigation.
At least one of the prosecutors, according to published news articles, said charges against at least four of the defendants should be dropped because the prosecutor believed the four were innocent. In an interview Gil Garcetti, chief deputy district attorney, would not disclose which of the prosecutors held these views, but he conceded that “there were leaks from our office” concerning the views of the prosecutors. He said the three prosecutors had denied there was any conflict and had denied talking to the press. Mr. Reiner inherited the case from Robert Philibosian, who as District Attorney when the accusations of abuse came to light described the case as the largest child sex abuse scandal in the nation. At the time, the two men were running against each other for election as District Attorney, and lawyers for the defendants have charged that pressure from the public and the press resulted in a sloppy, unprofessional investigation.
A man who tried to open the door of an Eastern Airlines jet today while the plane was 14,000 feet above ground was taken into custody after the plane landed here. The police said the man attempted to open a forward exit door of the DC-9 at 12:40 AM, about 10 minutes before the scheduled stop in Philadelphia. The authorities said crew members and passengers scuffled with him and got him away from the door. A spokesman for Eastern, Mark Hegel, said an airline employee suffered a broken jaw.
A Philadelphia neighborhood is rising five months after it was destroyed in a fire generated by a police helicopter bombing of a radical group’s fortified house. Mayor W. Wilson Goode has promised to have 61 row houses rebuilt for the 250 displaced people by Christmas, but the project’s private developer said she hoped to get only some in by that deadline.
Chicago has agreed to pay $306,250 in damages to 20 targets of the Police Department’s now-defunct Red Squad, an attorney said. The tentative out-of-court settlement, which must be approved in U.S. District Court, was the result of a 1974 federal lawsuit by 25 plaintiffs who contended that the Red Squad unit systematically spied on and disrupted lawful activities of local community, church and civic groups.
The Justice Department is investigating allegations that McDonnell Douglas Corp., in five separate schemes, fraudulently overcharged taxpayers on defense contracts in the early 1980s, congressional sources said. The sources said the allegations were outlined for a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee last month by the Defense Contract Audit Agency, which has referred each of the matters to the Justice Department. McDonnell Douglas spokesmen were unavailable for comment.
The recession in the energy industry has brought a halt to the explosive population growth of Texas. There were projections as recently as two years ago that the unbridled growth would push the state’s population past New York’s and make it second only to California’s by 1990. But migration from other states dropped significantly after the energy recession began in 1982 and demographers now doubt these projections. The Census Bureau in Washington says it will offer new, sharply scaled-down projections by the end of this year.
Researchers have eased cocaine craving and withdrawal with a drug that triggers production of an important brain chemical partly depleted in chronic cocaine users. Cocaine use gradually reduces the brain’s supply of a chemical that certain brain cells use to communicate. The chemical, called dopamine, is believed to play a critical role in the pleasure centers of the brain, Dr. Todd Estroff said in a report at a Dallas seminar.
There are links between emotions, the body’s immune defenses and the course of serious diseases, according to mounting evidence.
Missourians danced and sang on a whistle-stop train from Kansas City to St. Louis, hailing the all-Missouri World Series. The state contest resumes tomorrow night, with the Cardinals holding a two-games-to-none lead over the Royals.
NFL Monday Night Football:
William Perry, the 325-pound defensive lineman who carried on the final two plays of the Chicago Bears’ victory last week in San Francisco, resumed his rushing career tonight by scoring a touchdown and throwing key blocks on two others, as the Bears won their seventh straight game without a loss. The 23–7 victory over the Green Bay Packers gave the Bears a three-game lead over the Detroit Lions and the Minnesota Vikings, who are 4–3, in the Central Division of the National Conference. The Packers fell to 3–4. Perry’s touchdown run, from 1 yard out, and his blocks for Walter Payton who scored on runs of 2 yards and 1 yard, highlighted a victory which was otherwise marked by highly imaginative plays by the Bears, the use of three quarterbacks by each team, nine turnovers, several fights, a skirmish on the sidelines between two Bear defensive players, Gary Fencik and Steve McMichael, and — finally — a safety. The Packers lost the ball on four interceptions — three by Lynn Dickey, the first of three quarterbacks who was replaced by Randy Wright in the second quarter because of a thigh injury — and one fumble. Wright was relieved in the fourth quarter for no apparent reason other than fatigue by Jim Zorn. The Bears lost the ball on four fumbles — all in the first half and two by Payton. He, at least, made amends, carrying 25 times for 112 yards. Jim McMahon, who started at quarterback for the Bears, completed 12 of 26 passes for 144 yards but left in the fourth quarter with an injured ankle. He was replaced by Steve Fuller, who was later replaced for one play by Mike Tomczak, who was then replaced by Fuller, who finished up.
Green Bay Packers 7, Chicago Bears 23
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1364.14 (-4.70)
Born:
Quinton Culberson, NFL linebacker (St. Louis Rams, Carolina Panthers), in Jackson, Mississippi.
DaJuan Morgan, NFL safety (Kansas City Chiefs, Indianapolis Colts), in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Daniel Baldridge, NFL tackle (Jacksonville Jaguars), in Opelousas, Louisiana.
Darius Walker, NFL running back (Houston Texans), in Atlanta, Georgia.
Maximillian Roeg, English actor (“Aria”), in London, England, United Kingdom.
History Diaries 