The Reagan Administration’s senior arms control adviser expressed interest today in a recent Soviet proposal for an interim agreement on medium-range missiles that would freeze American and Soviet missiles in Europe and Asia. Paul H. Nitze, who advises President Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz, repeated the United States’ overall criticism of the proposals outlined by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, in Paris earlier this month and later amplified at the Geneva arms control negotiations. But Mr. Nitze noted that the Soviet Union had offered to separate the medium-range talks from the two other parts of the Geneva negotiations, on strategic, or long-range, weapons, and on space-based defenses. The United States has long sought to separate the issues because Moscow was linking progress in the strategic and medium-range talks to an end of the American space-based program.
Defense Department officials denied a Washington Post report that the United States is ready to offer Moscow up to seven years notice before any American deployment of a “Star Wars” anti-missile defense. The Post report said that the Special Arms Control Policy Group, composed of senior Administration officials, agreed to the proposal as a response to Soviet demands for concessions on the Strategic Defense Initiative, as “Star Wars” is formally known. One Pentagon official said, “Not only has this idea not been discussed, much less agreed to, it would not make any sense.”
Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, and other Warsaw Pact leaders said today they would withdraw and destroy any weapon in their arsenals if the West would do the same. They also continued a Soviet-bloc campaign against President Reagan’s research program on a space-based defense system, declaring, “Any work on the development, testing and installation of strike space weapons, including anti-satellite devices, should be suspended.”
President Reagan, arriving in Manhattan under security so heavy that it brought East Side traffic to a standstill, began a round of high-level diplomatic activities today before a scheduled appearance Thursday at the General Assembly. Mr. Reagan attended a reception for heads of state at the United Nations and met at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with three leaders: Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India, President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain. President Reagan met privately with leaders of many nations including Bolivia, Pakistan, India, and the United Kingdom. Later he was host at a reception at the hotel. The activities, which officials described as one of the most intense diplomatic periods in Mr. Reagan’s Presidency, lead up to a major speech Thursday. A high-ranking White House official familiar with the speech said it would “deal with a substantive proposal to resolve conflict situations that can erupt into disputes pitting the U.S. against the Soviet Union.”
People must have credentials to cross many streets in midtown Manhattan these days as the borough absorbs the dozens of presidents, prime ministers and monarchs who are visiting for the United Nations’ 40th anniversary celebration. Stranded on the west side of First Avenue at the corner of 42d Street, Dona Bangor watched with envy as a woman slipped through a cordon of police officers and across to the east side of the street. “How come she can go across?” Miss Bangor demanded of an officer who had barred her from following the same route. “She,” replied the officer, “has credentials.” Crossing the street has become a matter of status — and security — in New York these days, as the city absorbs the dozens of prime ministers, kings, queens and presidents who have come for the United Nations’ 40th anniversary commemorative session.
One of four hijackers of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro was reported today to have told Italian investigators that a leading Palestinian figure, Mohammed Abbas, was the military leader of the hijacking operation. Justice Ministry officials here and in Rome refused to confirm or deny the reports. The reports, carried in Italian newspapers, were similiar to charges raised earlier this week by a senior Palestine Liberation Organization leader in Tunis that the four hijackers were acting on the written orders of Mr. Abbas. The reports, which appeared as Bettino Craxi, the caretaker Prime Minister, left for a meeting with President Reagan in New York on Thursday, said the hijacker was collaborating with Italian magistrates investigating the case. They said he had been brought to a northern Italian prison apart from his three accomplices for further questioning.
Israeli officials said they are making room in immigration centers for thousands of Soviet Jews they hope will be permitted to emigrate in coming months. Zvi Eyal, Jewish Agency spokesman, said his quasi-official group is basing its hopes on the November 19-20 summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. “The Soviets usually make some sort of good-will gesture on the eve of important meetings in the West,” Eyal said, adding. “There’s no meat yet, but there are good smells coming from the Kremlin kitchen.”
King Hussein welcomed the spirit of a peace proposal made Monday by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. The Jordanian monarch, speaking in an interview, reaffirmed his view that an international peace conference under United Nations auspices was the only way to resolve Arab-Israeli differences.
Officials averted an arms sale clash in Washington. Senate Republican leaders and President Reagan agreed to ban any sales of advanced weapons to Jordan until March 1, unless Jordan and Israel begin “direct and meaningful peace negotiations” before then. The resolution was drafted by Senate leaders to head off a defeat for the Administration, and President Reagan agreed to it while in New York, where he is for ceremonies marking the 40th anniversary of the United Nations. The measure is scheduled for a Senate vote on Thursday and is expected to get nearly unanimous approval. Opponents of the arms deal in the House of Representatives reacted positively to the Senate compromise, but said they wanted to study it further.
Morocco announced a cease-fire in its war against Polisario guerrillas in Western Sahara — as long as there are no attacks from the Algerian-backed rebels. Premier Mohammed Karim Lamrani, addressing the U.N. General Assembly, also offered to receive neutral observers to verify that the truce is being observed. However, a Polisario Front spokesman said that obstacles to peace remain, citing the presence in the territory of Moroccan forces and a Moroccan civil administration.
Iraqi prisoners of war freed by Iran earlier this month claimed that dozens of Iraqis have been killed in Iranian POW camps in recent years. The allegations came from 21 POWs, all crippled or disabled, who were flown home via Turkey. Both sides in the five-year Iran-Iraq War have made accusations of maltreatment and killings of POWS.
The leaders of India and Pakistan met in New York today and agreed to begin talks on how to improve security on their borders and increase economic cooperation, according to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India. Mr. Gandhi, in an interview at the United Nations, said the talks would begin immediately. He said the two Governments had also agreed to start technical negotiations to help reassure each other about the peaceful nature of their nuclear programs, although no timetable was set. Mr. Gandhi said that his meeting with President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan today had “very definitely” produced results.
In an unprecedented move, the United States has granted visas to three scholars from North Korea who have been invited to attend an academic conference this weekend in Washington, the State Department said. Previously, the department has allowed visits only by North Korean diplomats attached to their country’s observer’s office at the United Nations and to sports officials in connection with the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. The United States has no relations with Pyongyang.
China warned that normalizing relations with the Soviet Union is “out of the question” unless Moscow removes obstacles to better ties. The statement by the Foreign Ministry came five days after China and the Soviet Union concluded a seventh round of talks. A Chinese spokesman indicated that Moscow has maintained a tough stance on the key obstacles — Soviet troops in Afghanistan, support for the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia and the military buildup on the Chinese frontier.
Censorship in Nicaragua has intensified since the government issued a decree last week suspending many civil liberties, and many in Nicaragua are uncertain of how strictly other restrictions will be invoked. The censors suppressed five of the six articles that were scheduled to appear Monday on the front page of La Prensa, an acerbic and partisan daily newspaper. Only one, an account of injuries during an exhibition bullfight in Managua, survived the censor’s pencil. The others, all covering aspects of Nicaragua’s domestic or international situation, were banned. Since the government issued a decree suspending many civil liberties last week, politicians, business leaders, Roman Catholic clerics and other critics of the government have continued to act almost as if nothing had happened. But at La Prensa, the decree is being felt as nowhere else.
A high official of the Salvadoran Government confirmed today that Government representatives and the leftist guerrilla front had met for three days in Panama and had worked out out a series of “public” and “private” agreements. Adolfo Rey Prendes, the Minister of Information, said the “public” agreement involved the release of the daughter of President Jose Napoleon Duarte, Ines Guadalupe Duarte, who was kidnapped on September 10. “We reached private agreements which I cannot disclose,” the minister said at a news conference, “and we agreed that one side, the guerrillas, will release Ines Guadalupe Duarte, Ana Cecilia Villeda and 33 mayors and municipal workers. On our side we will give up 22 guerrilla prisoners. Besides, as a humanitarian gesture, we will permit 96 disabled guerillas who are in the mountains to leave the country.”
Gunmen suspected of being leftist guerrillas ambushed and wounded the head of Colombia’s Army this morning, a Bogota radio station reported. Gen. Rafael Samudio was hit in the right arm by a bullet and was taken to Bogota’s military hospital, the radio station, Todelar, quoted witnesses as having said. General Samudio was hit in the right arm by a bullet and was taken to Bogota’s military hospital, the radio station, Todelar, quoted witnesses as having said. One of four soldiers in a jeep following the general’s car was wounded, the station said. The attack came near the army’s officers’ training school in northern Bogota. Two men on a motorcycle pulled up alongside the general’s car and one fired at him with a pistol, wounding him, Todelar quoted witnesses as having said.
Andean peasants asserted today that soldiers in Ayacucho Province shot or stabbed to death 59 people in a massacre in two villages late in August. They said most of the victims were children and elderly people. Two adults and three children appeared at a news conference in Parliament on Tuesday. One of the adults, Nemesio Gutierrez, said the massacre was carried out by soldiers who arrived August 27 by helicopter in the villages of Bellavista and Umaro high in the Andes and about 425 miles southeast of Lima. If substantiated, it would be the second massacre of a large number of peasants by soldiers since President Alan Garcia took office July 28 and pledged to halt human rights violations by security forces fighting the Maoist Shining Path rebels.
Brazil’s Congress approved a bill to set up a national commission to rewrite the constitution, vastly altered by the military regime that ran the country for more than two decades. The bill, passed on a vote of 399 to 61, calls for a constitution-writing commission to be made up of new senators and House of Representatives members to be elected November 15, 1986. The commission will convene on February 1, 1987.
The House and the Senate moved today toward approval of spending cuts and tax increases needed to meet a major portion of Congress’s target for reducing the Federal budget deficit. Final votes are expected in both branches of Congress by the end of the week. The bills would then go to a House-Senate conference to resolve differences.
The Senate, rebuffing the President on several issues, approved a $9.9 billion transportation appropriation. The Reagan Administration also lost in its effort to abolish operating subsidies for local mass transit systems and Amtrak, the national passenger railroad system. The bill allocated less money for the Coast Guard and the Federal Aviation Administration than the Administration had sought. However, after a daylong debate, including a 71-to-25 vote to continue the Amtrak subsidy, the Administration did not seek to defeat the bill and it won final passage by a vote of 84 to 13.
The House Education and Labor Committee approved a bill to nullify a Supreme Court decision requiring state and local governments to pay overtime to employees working more than 40 hours a week. By unanimous vote, the panel approved the measure to amend the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and sent it to the full House. A nearly identical bill is awaiting action in the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, where quick passage is expected. The Supreme Court ruled last Feb.ruary 19 that all provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act apply to government workers.
The U.S. Parole Commission, breaking a tradition of leniency toward juveniles, said it will treat youths the same as older offenders in deciding when to let them out of federal prisons. Under new parole guidelines that take effect November 4, the parole commission also said less serious offenders — whether adult or juvenile — will serve less time in prison, and those who violate parole will spend more.
The Philadelphia police officer who made the bomb that was dropped on a house occupied by members of the radical MOVE cult refused to testify publicly before a commission investigating the May 13 battle in which 11 MOVE members were killed. A lawyer for Lieutenant Frank Powell made the announcement shortly after a federal judge ruled that police do not have to appear in public before the panel and can refuse to answer questions posed during closed-door hearings. Powell, the head of the city’s police bomb squad who assembled the explosive, dropped it from a helicopter onto the roof of the heavily fortified MOVE headquarters at the climax of a day-long gun battle. Meanwhile, two other police officers testified they had been told that Mayor W. Wilson Good vetoed a plan to destroy a roof bunker with a crane because it would cost too much, $6,500. The bombing started a fire that killed 11 people and destroyed a neighborhood.
The auto workers union and Chrysler reached a tentative contract agreement that could end the strike by 70,000 American employees by Monday. The accord, reached in 42 hours of bargaining, would provide immediate bonuses of more than $2,000 for each Chrysler worker and $1,000 for retirees as well as pay and benefit increases to match those of workers at General Motors and Ford. The raise in the first year is to be 2.25 percent. In the second year workers will not get an increase in base pay but will get 2.25 percent paid in a lump sum. In the third year, the raise will be 3 percent.
Officials in San Francisco say that a year-old legal effort to prohibit “unsafe sex” at public bathhouses appears to be having encouraging but limited success in curtailing the spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS. Dr. Dean Echenberg, director of the San Francisco Health Department’s Bureau of Communicable Disease Control, said Tuesday in an interview that it was impossible to determine precisely the impact of the efforts because the incubation period for the AIDS virus can be as long as five years, and it could take that long to learn the efficacy of preventive efforts. “The people getting AIDS now contracted it even before we knew we were in an epidemic,” he said. However, Dr. Echenberg said that there had been a “dramatic decline” in the transmission of venereal disease among homosexual men, who are most often the victims of AIDS, that strongly suggested there had been a comparable decline in the rate of AIDS cases transmitted in sexual relations.
The nation’s major professional association of pediatricians recommended yesterday that most children with AIDS should be allowed to attend school in a normal manner. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents 28,000 children’s doctors, endorsed the recommendation issued by Federal authorities in August that most children with acquired immune deficiency syndrome be permitted in schools after a case-by-case appraisal of the medical risks. No children are known to have contracted the fatal disorder in schools or day-care centers, the academy said.
Louisiana Governor Edwin W. Edwards, who is on trial on federal racketeering and fraud charges, said on the courthouse steps in New Orleans that he is a candidate for reelection in 1987. He told a reporter: “I announced that last night to a group of about 600 screaming Cajuns in Opelousas.”
Former Teamsters President Roy L. Williams has agreed to testify at the Kansas City trial of nine reputed underworld figures in hopes of gaining a lighter prison sentence, according to published newspaper reports. The defendants are accused of skimming money from a union-financed Las Vegas casino. The Kansas City Star & Times and the Chicago Tribune quoted unidentified sources as saying that Williams will testify for the government.
A tearful Anna Hauptmann said in Trenton, New Jersey, that recently discovered documents prove New Jersey killed an innocent man when it executed her husband in 1936 for the 1932 kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr., the famous aviator’s infant son. “He was framed,” Hauptmann, 86, said of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. “The case was built on lies only. All I want now is that his name should be cleared.” State investigators say the documents, which were found in the garage of former Governor Harold Hoffman, show the case was solved correctly. Hoffman, who died in 1954, had borrowed the documents and failed to return them.
The state of Tennessee cannot accept any new prisoners until overcrowding is relieved at its three centers for incoming prisoners, a federal judge ruled in Nashville. U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Higgins berated the administration of Gov. Lamar Alexander for missing deadlines on court-ordered reductions in inmate populations. “The court has acted with enormous restraint and responded patiently time and time and time again to delays,” Higgins said. The judge rejected a request by state Attorney General Mike Cody to put off the ruling until after the Legislature meets in special session beginning November 5 to take up the governor’s new prison plan.
The Board of Aldermen of Spring Hill, Tennessee, city of 1,100 people, voted Tuesday to delay annexing adjacent land owned by the General Motors Corporation, which threatened Monday to pull its $3.5 billion Saturn automobile plant out of the area if the annexation went through. Mayor George Jones said after a brief board meeting that the city was negotiating with officials of Maury County to try to get a share of payments in lieu of property taxes that General Motors is to pay the county.
The U.S. Government’s ability to track people has increased dramatically in the last 20 years while the development of laws to prevent abuse in these practices has lagged, according to a nonpartisan Congressional research agency.
Republican strategists in Virginia seem to be increasing their campaign firepower at L. Douglas Wilder, the Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor, who is black. The Republican candidates say the issue is not Mr. Wilder’s race but what they term his liberal record.
The U.N.’s 40th anniversary fete and the arrival of President Reagan, as predicted, tied up traffic for several hours in midtown Manhattan, but officials said the situation was not as bad as expected.
The Defense Department said today that more than half of the new German-style Army and Marine Corps helmets were defective and thus jeopardized the lives of soldiers and marines wearing them. The Pentagon said that 461,000 of the helmets made by the Gentex Corporation of Carbondale, Pa., did not meet the specifications of a production contract signed in February 1983. Each of the helmets cost $82. Officials said that the helmets had been made improperly, that materials not specified in the contract had been used, and that the crown of the helmet was therefore defective. A Pentagon statement said that the possibility of fraud was being investigated.
1985 World Series, Game Four:
John Tudor’s complete game shutout put the Cardinals on the verge of winning their second World Series in four years. Tito Landrum, only playing due to a tarp injury to Vince Coleman, continued to make his case for series MVP with a home run in the second off of Bud Black. Next inning, Willie McGee homered also to make it 2–0 Cardinals, who added to their lead in the fifth when Terry Pendleton tripled with one out and scored on Black’s throwing error on Tom Nieto’s bunt attempt. The best chance for the Royals to score was in the seventh inning, when they loaded the bases on two singles and a walk. With pinch-hitter Hal McRae up for Buddy Biancalana, he grounded to the third baseman to end the threat. Tudor allowed just five hits in a complete game while striking out eight with one walk while Black went just five innings and allowing three runs on four hits and three walks.
Kansas City Royals 0, St. Louis Cardinals 3
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1367.16 (+2.80)
Born:
Sam Demel, MLB pitcher (Arizona Cardinals), in Channelview, Texas.
Jake Ingram, NFL long snapper (New England Patriots, New Orleans Saints), in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
James Kotecki, American political blogger, in Syracuse, New York.
Miguel [Pimentel], American R&B singer (“Kaleidoscope Dream”), in San Pedro, California.
History Diaries 