President Reagan said today that he saw no need for a communique after the meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev. In an interview with Western European journalists, Mr. Reagan said: “A great measure of success would be if we came away with a decision that we were going to continue meeting and discussing the problems between us.” Secretary of State George P. Shultz discussed the possibility of follow-up summit meetings when he was in Moscow last week, a senior official said today, but nothing definite was agreed to. President Reagan also said, in response to a question, that his main objective was “the elimination of suspicion and distrust” between the United States and the Soviet Union. He said the United States was “willing to engage” the Soviet Union in talks on such subjects as a nuclear-free zone in Europe. In the past, the United States and the Atlantic alliance have opposed the Soviet idea on the ground that it would deprive the alliance of a deterrence against a Soviet missile strike.
Democratic strategy for the summit meeting next week is in place, according to party officials in the House. They said Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. planned to say today he had high hopes for the meeting. The statement is reportedly part of an effort to place the responsibility squarely on President Reagan in the event the meeting is seen to fail and, alternatively, to help blunt the effect on Democrats of a successful meeting.’ In an interview with Western European journalists today, President Reagan said he saw no need for a communique after the Geneva meeting. “A great measure of success would be if we came away with a decision that we were going to continue meeting and discussing the problems between us,” he said.
A senior Reagan Administration official said today that if Mikhail S. Gorbachev allowed “a significant movement” of Jews and others from the Soviet Union, the United States would move to ease restrictions on trade with Moscow. In a briefing for reporters on the human rights issues to be discussed by President Reagan with the Soviet leader in Geneva next week, the official ruled out, however, any concessions just for the release of individual Soviet dissidents such as Andrei D. Sakharov and Anatoly B. Shcharansky. He said the United States would not take part “in highly specific tit-for-tat negotiations.” “It’s going to be a matter of reviewing the total performance on the Soviet Union’s part, and then making a decision on that basis,” the official said.
The plight of Soviet citizens who have clashed with the government or simply want to leave the Soviet Union hovers over preparations for the American-Soviet summit meeting. Many appeals are being revived by dissidents, separated spouses and others. This human rights issue is one that Mikhail S. Gorbachev has confronted in London, in Paris and in his meetings here with Western officials, and it is one that President Reagan has said he will raise in the Geneva meeting a week from now. For the dissidents, divided spouses, relatives of political prisoners, religious sectarians, nationalists and others who have come into conflict with the authorities, the issue is hardly abstract. Once again, fading hopes and yellowing appeals are being revived.
A Northern Ireland guerrilla group claimed responsibility for planting two bombs found outside an army barracks in central London. The bombs, containing 40 pounds of explosives, were defused by army experts. Passers-by spotted the devices, wired to alarm clocks and hidden in shopping bags, outside the Chelsea barracks. In a telephone call to a television station in Dublin, a man claimed responsibility for the bombs on behalf of the Irish National Liberation Army, which, along with the Irish Republican Army, is fighting British rule in Ulster.
Robert A.K. Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of nearly 70 million Anglicans around the world, said he is trying to arrange a “religious summit” for peace comparable to a political summit. “We are trying to soften up opinion about it, and we are trying to think about a place (to meet),” he said in a London interview. He did not detail the nature of such a gathering or what faiths might be represented.
France agreed in principle to pay compensation and apologize to the Dutch family of a Greenpeace photographer who died in the July 10 sinking of the environmentalist group’s flagship, Greenpeace said in Paris. Fernando Pereira drowned trying to retrieve camera equipment from the Rainbow Warrior as it sank in the harbor at Auckland, New Zealand. French. secret agents detonated mines on the ship’s hull to block Greenpeace from interfering with French nuclear tests in the South Pacific.
A third AIDS patient has died after undergoing experimental treatment in France with the drug cyclosporine, the patient’s doctor announced in Grenoble.
The House gave final congressional approval to legislation that postpones until March 1 a confrontation with President Reagan over a $1.9-billion arms sale to Jordan that is opposed by Israel. The action, which follows a similar step by the Senate, defused a controversy that many feared could derail preliminary discussions leading toward Mideast peace talks. Under the agreement, the sale of aircraft, missiles and other advanced weapons to Jordan will be banned unless it enters “direct and meaningful” negotiations with Israel.
Five Christian political leaders escaped an attempt to kill them when a suicide bomber crashed an explosives-laden pickup truck into a monastery where they were meeting in a Beirut suburb. The assailant and four other people were reported killed and 23 people were wounded. A hitherto unknown Christian faction took responsibility. An anonymous caller telephoned a Western news agency and said “the Vanguard of Arab Christians” had carried out the attack against the Lebanese Front.
A British church official who helped win the release of four Britons from Libya earlier this year will fly to Beirut on Wednesday to seek freedom for four American hostages, his office said today. The church official, Terry Waite, an aide to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, had been “encouraged to believe that a visit to Beirut may be worthwhile” after a telephone conversation with an intemediary for the Islamic Holy War group believed to be holding the men.
[Ed: Waite eventually was himself kidnapped and held captive from 1987 to 1991.]
The relative weakness of Libyan opposition groups and the rising anti-Americanism among several of Libya’s neighbors are likely to complicate any effort to undermine the government of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, according to Western and Middle Eastern diplomats and specialists here. Administration officials and Congressional sources said recently that President Reagan had approved a covert plan aimed at weakening the Libyan Government. But the diplomats and experts said they questioned whether such a plan could succeed, despite their view that the Libyan leader appeared to be at one of his most vulnerable points in his 16-year rule. “The fact that this plan has been made public automatically decreases the chances of success,” said Pierre Lellouche, deputy director of the Paris-based French Institute of International Relations.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered Baghdad as a new site for the Palestine Liberation Organization’s headquarters, which Israeli planes destroyed in Tunisia last month, an Arab diplomat reported in Baghdad. PLO sources in the Iraqi capital said an emergency meeting of the PLO Executive Committee will soon be held to discuss the Iraqi offer and also a pledge by Chairman Yasser Arafat to restrict guerrilla operations to the “occupied land” — Israel and the occupied territories.
The chief delegates from the United States and the Soviet Union clashed here today in a debate over the six-year war Moscow is fighting in Afghanistan. Vernon A. Walters, the American delegate, asserted that the Soviet Union was using military terror and psychological manipulation to “break the Afghan spirit.” But he added: “We are here today to witness that they have failed.” The Soviet delegate, Oleg A. Troyanovsky, defended the Soviet combat role as “international assistance to the people of Afghanistan.” Mr. Troyanovsy, referring to American news reports that the Central Intelligence Agency was conducting a major covert operation in Afghanistan, said “the undeclared war against Afghanistan, far from slowing down, is being expanded.”
A senior Reagan Administration official asserted today that while American military interests in the Philippines were of great importance, United States policy toward the Marcos Government was not hostage to the military bases there. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said United States policy was focused on the creation of a stable democracy in the Philippines and at the same time on the prevention of a victory by Communist insurgents. “While the strategic importance of our facilities at Subic and Clark is beyond debate, it should be stressed that our policy is not, and must not be, hostage to the bases,” Mr. Wolfowitz said in testimony before the Asian subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Jerry Falwell hailed the Philippines as a paradise. Mr. Falwell, the leader of the Christian evangelical group known as the Moral Majority, said the family of President Ferdinand E. Marcos was to thank for the freedoms that Filipinos enjoy. He urged the United States to do “whatever is necessary” to stop the spread of Communism here. “I don’t think any fair person can deny the fact that had it not been for the Marcos family, the chances are that the freedoms you enjoy now would not be here,” Mr. Falwell said at a dinner at Malacanang Palace. His statement, made Monday night, was broadcast today on the government television station.
Central American nations signed their first political agreement with the European Community at a meeting of 21 foreign ministers in Luxembourg. The Latin ministers, including delegates from embattled El Salvador and leftist Nicaragua, also endorsed economic cooperation. Central American disagreements at one point threatened to block approval of a political statement, but the ministers eventually pledged to oppose terrorism and work for the removal of all foreign military elements from the region.
The State Department accused the Nicaraguan Government today of harassing Nicaraguan employees of the United States Embassy in Managua by subjecting them to hours of interrogation by state security agents. Charles E. Redman, a department spokesman, said the United States had protested the questioning to the Nicaraguan Government and demanded that the practice be halted immediately. Mr. Redman said 14 Nicaraguans who work for the embassy were summoned to the headquarters of the National Directorate of State Security for questioning between November 2 and November 7. He said the sessions had lasted 6 to 13 hours and had been “intense and abusive.”
Nicaragua’s Defense Minister suggested today that Nicaragua might soon acquire new military aircraft to counter what he said was a United States decision to send F-5 jet fighter planes to neighboring Honduras. The Defense Minister, Humberto Ortega Saavedra, also predicted that Government forces would make decisive blows against rebels in the coming months and assure the insurgents’ “total defeat” by early 1987. In Washington, a State Department official said the United States would eventually replace Honduras’s Super Mystere fighters, possibly with F-5’s, but said he knew of no plans to do so in the near future. The F-5’s are more sophisticated than any aircraft in the arsenal of any Central American country.
The United States Secretary of Agriculture John R. Block indirectly criticized the Soviet Union today for not doing enough to assist the victims of famine. Mr. Block, speaking at the 23rd Biennial Conference of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, also said that “excessive government intervention” was aggravating world food problems. Without naming the Soviet Union, Mr. Block in effect contrasted the American response to the African famine with that of the Russians. “Those who criticize us, portraying themselves as champions of the downtrodden, should take a hard look at their record,” Mr. Block said. “How generous have they been in fighting the hunger that afflicts so much of the developing world?”
A former military commander tried to topple President Samuel K. Doe in a coup Tuesday, but Mr. Doe said he crushed the revolt 13 hours after it began in this West African nation. Mr. Doe called on rebel holdouts to lay down their arms and proclaimed a dusk-to-dawn curfew. “I take this opportunity to inform the nation that the coup has failed,” Mr. Doe said in a “special statement” broadcast Tuesday on a Monrovia radio station that had been taken over by rebel forces 13 hours earlier. “I am still the commander in chief of the armed forces of Liberia and head of state,” he said. Diplomats in Monrovia had reported fierce fighting between loyal forces and rebel troops led by a former military commander, Gen. Thomas Quiwonkpa, that left at least 16 people dead. Early today, a United States Embassy official here said the last shots heard in the capital had been fired about two hours before midnight. In Washington, a State Department spokesman said, “It is not yet clear what forces are in control.” Mr. Doe said in his broadcast that he was in firm control of the country and he called on the army, the police and “all Liberians” to stand firmly behind him.
Amnesty International charged that Zimbabwe has intensified a campaign of arrest and torture of political opponents since Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s ruling party won a landslide election victory in July. The rights organization said prisoners have been beaten with whips and given electric shocks. Citing a “wide variety of sources,” it said those arrested and held without charge include members of Parliament, city officials and supporters of opposition leader Joshua Nkomo’s party.
South African authorities have freed from detention the only four whites held under the state of emergency that was declared almost four months ago, the parents of one of those released said tonight. A fifth detainee, Ram Salojee, who is of Indian descent, was also said to have been freed. The motive for the release remained unclear. According to figures published last week, more than 1,100 persons, the bulk of them black, are still being held under the emergency decree, now in force in 38 magisterial districts, while 392 out of 1,633 people held apart from the provisions of the emergency under the nation’s wide-ranging security legislation are still in detention.
House Democrats told the President he “can’t have it both ways” and must choose between a weapons buildup and deficit reduction. White House officials said Mr. Reagan had appeared “visibly angry” as he insisted that Congress could achieve both objectives. The exchange, at a White House meeting between the President and lawmakers of both parties. came as Administration officials said Mr. Reagan would not hold an 11th-hour meeting with Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill and Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader, about a compromise on legislation on the debt ceiling. The government’s authority to borrow money and pay bills was due to expire Thursday at midnight. Representatives from both parties agreed that Mr. Reagan should not have the prospect of government default hanging over his head when he goes to next week’s meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Geneva. “We’re leaning over backwards to help him,” said Mr. O’Neill. “The fight will be waged when he comes back.”
The U.S. approached a new deadline for resolving a longstanding financial impasse amid warnings that no further maneuvers remained to prevent a default if Congress does not raise the national debt ceiling within two days.
The STS 61-B launch vehicle with the orbiter Atlantis moves to the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center. This would be 23rd NASA space shuttle mission, and its second using the space shuttle Atlantis. The seven-man Atlantis crew is to test techniques for space station construction and launch three communications satellites, one of them for the Mexican Government. The shuttle was launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on November 26, 1985.
A judge sentenced Arthur J. Walker to three concurrent life terms and ordered him to pay a $250,000 fine as prosecutors indicated his espionage activities had been more serious than previously charged. Prosecutors said some evidence indicated that Mr. Walker might have started spying while still in the Navy and might have recruited his brother John into espionage, rather than the other way around. That would contradict previous accounts by law-enforcement officials who had said John Walker, another Navy veteran, had formed the espionage operation, described as one of the most damaging in American history. According to most accounts, John Walker, who has pleaded guilty, became a spy in the mid-1960’s and recruited his brother and son a decade later.
A Reagan Administration official, defending Medicare’s payment system, said there is no evidence that elderly patients have been prematurely discharged from hospitals in a systematic manner. C. McClain Haddow of the Health Care Financing Administration differed with reports of thousands of Medicare patients being prematurely released from hospitals because of the health program’s cost-containment system. Haddow said that out of 8.6 million people released from hospitals, only 4,500 cases involved a “quality problem,” including premature discharge.
A high-ranking official in the federal Office of Personnel Management, whose Senate testimony helped prevent her former boss from continuing as OPM director, has been asked to resign. The White House denied reports that Deputy OPM Director Loretta Cornelius was asked to resign because her testimony had angered conservative supporters of former OPM Director Donald J. Devine. Cornelius told a Senate panel that before Devine resigned as OPM director to become executive assistant temporarily, he signed documents delegating himself powers to continue running the agency. The disclosure caused Devine to withdraw his name for a second term at OPM.
The first Cuban-born Mayor of Miami is Xavier Suarez, a 36-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer. He decisively defeated Raul Masvidal, 43, who was also born in Cuba. In heavily Hispanic neighborhoods Mr. Saurez outpolled his opponent by four to one. At a news conference after the results were in, Mr. Suarez said: “We won without money, we won without the support of the business community. We are not against the business community; we are going to work with it, but we did not get its support in this election.”
UPI’s managers, workers and creditors agreed to sell the financially troubled news agency to a Mexican newspaper magnate and a real estate developer based in Houston. Lawyers said the agreement would very likely win the approval of a bankruptcy judge.
United Auto Workers members ratified a contract with General Dynamics Corp., ending a threestate, 7-week-old strike by 5,000 workers that cut tank production in half. Exact voting figures were not available, but a company spokesman said the contract was ratified by 53% to 47%. The workers build M1 and M1A1 Army tanks under a contract scheduled for completion by 1991. The union pact boosts wages 2.25% in the first year, provides a 2.25% lump-sum payment in the second year and a 3% increase in the final year.
A group of liberal Roman Catholic bishops has urged a re-examination of a key passage of a 1983 pastoral letter on war and peace that provisionally accepted the idea of deterring war through a balance of nuclear might. They say they believe the United States and the Soviet Union are expanding their stockpiles of nuclear weapons rather than moving toward disarmament. At the annual meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops this week, six bishops, part of a larger group of 30 bishops, put forward a resolution that the group “publicly recognize the increasing evidence that the conditions for the moral acceptance of deterrence are not being met.”
Kansas City mob leader Nick Civella told associate Frank Rosenthal that an attempt to bribe Nevada Governor-elect Robert List, then attorney general, in 1978 could be harmful and advised him to drop it, according to wiretap evidence presented in the casino skimming trial in Kansas City. The tape revealed that Rosenthal had evidence that List had charged the state for a complimentary hotel room and threatened to make the information public unless List helped Rosenthal get a gaming license. Rosenthal was a silent partner of San Diego businessman Allen R. Glick, who owned the four Las Vegas casinos where the alleged skimming occurred.
A reputed neo-Nazi shot and killed a Missouri state trooper and wounded a second trooper because his religious beliefs taught him that law-enforcement officers wanted to kill him, a psychiatrist testified today. The defendant, David C. Tate, a 23-year-old resident of Athol, Idaho, is charged with first-degree murder in the April 15 slaying of Jimmie L. Linegar, 31, a state trooper, and with first-degree assault in the wounding of the second officer, Allen D. Hines, 35.
Federal investigators, acting on evidence gathered in the crash of a Midwest Express DC-9 in Milwaukee, urged airlines today to replace an engine part on hundreds of jetliners with a newer, stronger part that has been available since the the late 1970’s. The National Transportation Safety Board said the part, a series of spacers that separate the engine’s high-compressor rotors, broke apart in the right engine of the Midwest Express jetliner, causing the September 6 crash in which all 31 people aboard the plane were killed. The board’s recommendation, which also urged the Federal Aviation Administration to require that the outdated spacers be replaced, is the latest in a series of problems for the Pratt & Whitney JT-8D engine, which is used on the Boeing 727, the Boeing 737 and the McDonnell Douglas DC-9.
Federal investigators recovered the cockpit voice recordings from a jet that collided with a plane over New Jersey, killing six persons, and said the “black box” is expected to help explain the tragedy. A National Transportation Safety Board spokesman said the contact point of the two aircraft was between the propeller of one plane and the left wing of the other, but “who struck who, we are not sure of.”
Two contradictory statements by Governor Edwin W. Edwards in television interviews last year provided the final dramatic moment today in 24 days of testimony in his federal trial for racketeering and wire and mail fraud. Shortly afterward, the prosecutors rested their case. Mr. Edwards, a 58-year-old Democrat, his brother, Marion, 56 years old, and their nephew, Charles David Isbell, 40 years old, are defendants in the trial along with two close friends of the Governor and three others. Prosecutors say the defendants participated in an elaborate scheme to profit from the sale of fraudulently obtained state certificates of hospital approval entitling the holder to lucrative federal aid.
Federal officials in Washington helped direct an investigation of the sanctuary movement and rejected all alternatives but criminal prosecution, James A. Rayburn, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agent who conducted the investigation, said at a pretrial hearing in Tucson for 11 people charged with conspiracy to smuggle Central Americans into the United States. Defense lawyers said their clients were singled out for prosecution and asked that charges against them be dropped.
Navy personnel will be at sea less and with their families more to increase morale and save money, Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. announced. Under the new policy, Mr. Lehman said, the Navy will reduce the number of ships that escort aircraft carriers and battleships, cut back on some show-the-flag port visits and abolish some routine operations.
The Job Corps benefits many youths, according to a panel of the National Academy of Sciences. Large-scale government job training programs for poor youths have had only limited success in increasing employability and preventing socially destructive behavior, a panel formed by the National Academy of Sciences has concluded. However, the panel’s study, to be made public tomorrow, said that the Job Corps “stands out” as a program that provided “positive benefits to participants.” Reagan Administration officials have argued that the Job Corps was a waste of taxpayer money and have sought to kill the program in the budget for the 1986 fiscal year.
Up to two feet of snow fell yesterday over northern Arizona and Utah as a storm turned eastward after piling up huge drifts in the Sierra Nevada, stranding hunters and hikers and breaking records for cold temperatures. At least 20 deaths had been attributed to a series of winterlike storms since last week, but most hikers and hunters reported missing in northern California had been found as of yesterday.
Singer Jerry Lee Lewis, suffering from ulcers, survived surgery in Memphis that removed one-third of his stomach. Lewis, 50, was in satisfactory condition, and his vital signs were stable, a hospital spokesman said. Lewis’ road manager said the entertainer would have to rest for a month, then could return to performing.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1433.60 (+1.72)
Born:
Yvonne Nelson, Ghanaian model and acrtress, in Accra, Ghana.
Lamar Divens, NFL defensive tackle (Baltimore Ravens), in Fayetteville, Tennessee.
Chante Black, WNBA center (Connecticut Sun, Tulsa Shock, San Antonio Silver Stars), in Austin, Texas.
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