A senior State Department official said today that the United States told the Soviet Union before the Geneva summit meeting that it would indefinitely continue its policy of not undermining the 1979 arms treaty, but only under certain conditions. Because of this advance discussion, there was no need to discuss the 1979 strategic arms limitation treaty at the summit meeting this week, the official said. “They understood our policy,” he said. Most of the arms-control discussions at the summit meeting, he said, revolved around Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s sharp criticism of President Reagan’s missile defense proposal and Mr. Reagan’s support of research to see if such a defense is feasible.
In another development, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed today to resume direct commercial airline service between the two countries, the Department of Transportation announced. Service will probably resume in late April, officials said. The pact, initialed today in Moscow, authorizes Pan American World Airways, which stopped serving Moscow in 1978, to fly to Moscow and Leningrad from the United States. Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, would be granted authority to serve New York City and Washington from the Soviet Union. Merle Richman, a Pan Am spokesman in New York City, said the airline hoped to begin service April 27 via Frankfurt. Negotiators for the two countries had been meeting in Moscow since Monday trying to work out an agreement that their leaders could announce at the summit conference in Geneva this week as evidence that their talks had borne fruit.
The State Department official also said that although the Administration had repeatedly complained to Moscow about what it sees as Soviet violations of arms-control accords, this subject was not discussed in detail at the summit meeting. He said such compliance issues were fully discussed by Secretary of State George P. Shultz in Moscow earlier in the month. Mr. Shultz told some columnists today that both sides in Geneva strongly reaffirmed the need for compliance but that no specific violations were raised.
President Reagan told the Cabinet today that his talks with Mikhail S. Gorbachev had “cleared the air” and that the two leaders had agreed to “keep in touch, keep in contact” even before they meet again next year. Mr. Reagan acknowledged that he had failed to soften the Soviet leader’s opposition to the Administration’s space-based missile defense plan, and that the United States and the Soviet Union remained divided on major issues. But the tone of Mr. Reagan’s remarks to the Cabinet members, who applauded vigorously as he entered the White House Cabinet Room, was upbeat as he discussed the results of the two-day summit meeting in Geneva. “We made a good start in Geneva,” Mr. Reagan said. Speaking to a group of columnists and editors today, Mr. Reagan said his conversations with Mr. Gorbachev had indicated to him that the Russians “want a solution” to the fighting in Afghanistan, which has been occupied by more than 100,000 Soviet troops for almost six years.
As Mikhail S. Gorbachev returned to Moscow today, there was a palpable sense of optimism among many Russians over his meetings with President Reagan. Many Muscovites said they had a more favorable impression of President Reagan after seeing him on television this week and hearing the remarks he made Thursday at a joint appearance with Mr. Gorbachev. Whether Soviet authorities intended it or not, Western diplomats here said, the extensive television coverage seemed to have produced at least a momentary change in public opinion about Mr. Reagan. Western news organizations that took informal samplings of public opinion today found similar responses among dozens of Muscovites questioned. Typical was the response of a metalworker who said, “Now that I have seen Reagan, I think he is a man who wants peace.”
In the first major Soviet Government reorganization since Mikhail S. Gorbachev took power in March, five ministries and a committee dealing with agriculture were abolished today and their responsibilities combined in a new super agency. The consolidation of authority over the chronically weak agricultural sector was seen here as the most dramatic step to date in Mr. Gorbachev’s effort to revitalize the Soviet economy. Diplomats said the move was the first step in a sweeping reorganization of the Government that Mr. Gorbachev is expected to carry out over the next several months. Mr. Gorbachev and other top officials have hinted that many of the nation’s 50-odd economic ministries may be abolished and other super agencies created to streamline management of the economy.
The U.S. Federal Government today picked the Hanford National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, to develop a compact, space-based nuclear reactor to power the weapons and radar in President Reagan’s planned missile defense system. The decision, announced by Energy Secretary John S. Herrington, revives a program to build a space reactor that began in the 1950’s but was dropped a decade ago. The government hopes to have completed a 300-kilowatt reactor by 1991.
Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou announced today that he was eliminating the post of government spokesman and the practice of daily government news briefings and that he was preparing legislation to regulate the press. His announcements came after the resignation on Thursday of the Press Minister and Government spokesman, Costas Laliotis, who quit after a 15-year-old boy was shot dead by the police during street riots in Athens on Sunday. A Press Ministry statement said reporters would now be told about daily events through press releases. Mr. Papandreou said he would personally brief reporters at regular intervals. Since he took office in October 1981, he has met with the press twice.
President Reagan attends a National Security Council meeting to discuss the hostage situation in Beirut, Lebanon.
Many residents of Beirut huddled in basement shelters on Lebanon’s independence day today as Druse and Shiite Moslem militiamen battled in the streets for a second consecutive day. Radio reports said 30 people had been killed and 140 wounded so far. A Druse commander said at least 11 Druse fighters and 13 Shiites had died. It was not immediately clear if his figures were in addition to those reported by the radio stations. After 24 hours of continuous street fighting, residents and radio reports said nine buildings were ablaze in West Beirut, the Moslem sector of the city, making a total of 15 in two days. Radio reports said the battles, which began before noon on Thursday and raged through the night, had engulfed most of West Beirut despite several cease-fire agreements, appeals from militia chiefs and strong pressure from Syrian leaders.
Prime Minister Rashid Karami appealed for militiamen to end “this hateful conflict” and stop “destroying homes over the heads of their inhabitants.” The clashes began Thursday after Druse militiamen tore down Lebanon’s national flags all over town, on the eve of the independence day holiday. They were confronted by fighters from the Shiite militia Amal, wearing paper hats in the national colors. A statement by the Druse militia, the Progressive Socialist Party, called the flag a symbol of “counterfeit independence” and the anniversary a “big lie,” because, it said, the state was a Christian-dominated product of Western colonialism. Tanks and mortars were reported in action in some districts, as well as truck-mounted antiaircraft guns, heavy machine guns and recoilless rifles, automatic weapons and antitank grenade launchers.
Iran said today that its warplanes hit an industrial plant and a troop concentration in northern Iraq, causing “high casualties and losses,” and Iraq reported that it had repelled an Iranian ground attack and raided the Kharg Island oil terminal again. An Iraqi spokesman said Iraqi troops on the central front repulsed a battalion-sized Iranian force Thursday night, killing 50 Iranian soldiers. The Iranian communique said the industrial plant was in the Darbandikhan border region north of Baghdad. The attacks were the latest in a series of raids on border areas reported by both countries in the last two weeks.
Hundreds of anti-South Korean Government protesters clashed with riot policemen at a university and in the streets of Seoul today, and about 20 people were arrested, witnesses said. The protesters shouted slogans demanding the resignation of President Chun Doo Hwan and hurled stones at the police, who responded by firing tear gas. At Hanyang University in Seoul, the police battled students demanding the release of 191 protesters arrested Monday after occupying and damaging a training center operated by the ruling Democratic Justice Party.
Defense Minister Paul Quiles said today that he hoped to arrange the quick return to France of two covert agents who were sentenced to 10-year prison sentences for their role in the sinking of the flagship of the antinuclear, environmentalist organization Greenpeace. The agents, Major Alain Mafart and Captain Dominique Prieur, officers in the French intelligence agency, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the planting of mines on the vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, in the harbor of Auckland, New Zealand, last July. They were sentenced by a judge there earlier today, New Zealand time.
Nearly 2.5 million acres of sugar cane were damaged by Hurricane Kate, which whipped across Cuba on Tuesday and Wednesday with winds of more than 100 miles per hour, the official Communist Party newspaper Granma reported today. The damaged areas, in 7 of Cuba’s 14 provinces, amount to about a quarter of Cuba’s cultivated land.
The Honduran Government has not allowed any supplies from the United States to be shipped to Nicaraguan rebels since it confiscated an air shipment on October 10, a Reagan Administration official said today. The official said the barrier to supplying the rebels had developed because the Honduran military wanted to gain “total control” of the rebel arsenal and because civilian officials in Honduras feared the rebel operations would become a campaign issue before the Honduran presidential elections that are scheduled for Sunday. He said the dispute could probably be resolved once a new president is elected, but he also said a solution was likely to entail giving Honduras increased control over the supplies and additional financial aid. American economic and military aid to Honduras totals about $210 million a year.
To many of his followers, an order by President Jose Napoleon Duarte for an investigation of a series of political killings seemed a daring move, a signal that the military and well-to-do would become accountable before the law. Now, 15 months later, the presidential commission set up to conduct the investigations is to be dismantled without achieving any of its objectives, according to senior Government officials. A new investigative body, financed by the United States, was recently formed to take its place. But instead of concentrating on the human rights cases, a member of the group said, it is giving priority to investigating a ring of car thieves and the illegal “trafficking” in Salvadoran babies destined for adoption abroad.
The General Assembly heard two sharply divergent voices today as it opened a debate on the situation in Central America. Nicaragua’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Nora Astorga, denounced what she said was Washington’s policy of backing mercenary forces, and the chief United States delegate, Vernon A. Walters, insisted that it was Nicaragua, not the United States, that was responsible for armed aggression in the region. “The United States has not only created a mercenary army that it trains, finances, advises and directs,” Miss Astorga told the Assembly. “The United States also expects us to recognize it as a legitimate counterpart for resolving what it sees as the Nicaraguan problem, for normalizing relations between our countries, and for bringing peace to the entire Central American region as if by magic.” The Nicaraguan official, 36 years old, who was rejected by Washington last year as Nicaragua’s Ambassador to the United States, cited the Senate’s authorization of assistance for planes, helicopters, trucks and other vehicles for the insurgents and challenged assertions that the equipment would not be used for military purposes.
Liberia’s leader, General Samuel K. Doe, promised today that speedy and fair trials would be granted to those arrested after abortive coup against him last week. In a speech to diplomats and Government officials that was broadcast from Monrovia and monitored in Abidjan, General Doe appeared to be trying to placate the United States, Liberia’s chief source of financial aid. Last month, as Liberia prepared for national elections that led to widespread charges of fraud, Washington said continued aid depended on Liberia’s holding fair elections. Since the coup attempt, the State Department has voiced concern about the detentions and urged General Doe to show moderation.
President Reagan said today that his Administration favored covert aid to insurgents seeking the overthrow of the leftist Government of Angola. He said the Administration felt covert aid “would have much more chance of success right now” than the open economic and military aid proposed by some members of Congress. Mr. Reagan made the remarks in an interview with editors and columnists on the Geneva summit meeting. A State Department official said Mr. Reagan was referring to a recent secret policy decision to oppose public financing for the insurgents and to examine instead the provision of covert aid through the Central Intelligence Agency. Such aid would not have to be approved by Congress.
The authorities said today that 13 people were killed Thursday in clashes with the police in the black township of Mamelodi. Until today, only two deaths had been confirmed by the police, although witnesses had reported at least six dead. It was one of the highest death tolls in a single day since the Government decreed a state of emergency on July 21 in several magisterial districts. The newly confirmed deaths in Mamelodi, near Pretoria, brought to at least 36 the number of people killed in townships around the country since last Sunday. It was one of the worst five-day periods of killings since widespread violence broke out in black townships in September 1984.
The House of Representatives has rejected a bill sought by organized labor that would have required employers with more than 50 workers to give at least 90 days’ notice of plant closings. The bill, defeated Thursday by a margin of 5 votes, 208 to 203, would also have required notification in cases of layoffs under a formula that varied with a plant’s size. Layoffs of 50 to 100 employees would have initiated action under the requirement. The measure was defeated after business groups argued that it would harm the ability of businesses to function in a crisis. The groups also said most large employers had labor contracts already calling for them to inform unions of closings and layoffs. Labor officials said the bill could have been a small step toward better worker-management relations.
For the first time in more than three decades, the Senate today voted to remove a crop, honey, from the Government’s price subsidy program. By a vote of 60 to 36, the Senate approved a farm bill amendment offered by Senator Dan Quayle, Republican of Indiana, to end the Government’s $100-million-a-year program to protect the price of honey. The plan would lower the number of Government price-protection programs from 10 to 9.
Democrats have little to gain, and possibly something to lose, if they turn the 1986 elections into a political debate on President Reagan’s policies, party officials were told here today. That message was delivered not by a Republican intruder but by officials of the Democratic National Committee at a gathering of state party chairmen. It was one of several findings from a national public opinion survey that dominated the political strategy discussions being held today and Saturday at Walt Disney World. Against the backdrop of fantasy, Democrats confronted some of the political realities facing their party as it struggles to broaden its base and regain the political momentum.
President Reagan meets with Secretary of State George Shultz to discuss the Secretary’s desire to retire from government service.
The arrest of an American Navy analyst suspected of spying for Israel highlights a longstanding practice among allied intelligence services of spying on each other. Former intelligence officers say, however, that the case of the Navy analyst, Jonathan Jay Pollard, is unusual because the charges involve the use of a clandestine agent rather than other methods of gathering information. Mr. Pollard was arrested Thursday. His wife, Anne L. Henderson-Pollard, was arrested tonight and charged with unauthorized possession of classified documents. The spying is partly motivated by the need to avoid being surprised by sudden shifts in policy.
The wife of a Navy counterintelligence analyst was arrested tonight and charged with unauthorized possession of classified documents, the day after her husband was arrested and accused of spying for Israel. The woman, Anne L. Henderson-Pollard, 25 years old, was arrested at her home in Washington. Her arrest came as a law-enforcement official knowledgeable about the case reported that her husband, Jonathan Jay Pollard, sought help from an Israeli intelligence agent in escaping arrest within the last several days and was told the agent “might help” if they could evade American surveillance. Before the Israeli agent could act, the official said, Mr. and Mrs. Pollard drove to the Israeli Embassy on Thursday in an apparent attempt to to seek asylum. Mr. Pollard, 31, was arrested outside the embassy gates by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation but his wife was permitted to go free.
Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d said Thursday that a Federal grand jury in Washington had indicted the three men believed to have been responsible for the hijacking of a Trans World Airlines jetliner on an Athens-to-Rome flight last summer. The plane was eventually flown to Beirut, where 39 Americans were held hostage.
Mayor W. Wilson Goode declared a state of emergency today in a predominantly white neighborhood where residents have demonstrated for two nights outside houses bought recently by a black family and an interracial couple. “There is imminent danger of civil disturbance which poses a serious, substantial and continuing danger to the health, safety and property of the citizens of southwest Philadelphia,” the Mayor said. He banned groups of more than four people from gathering on public property in a 30-block area of the Elmwood neighborhood, whose streets are lined with sycamores and neat row houses.
The NASA space shuttle orbiter Columbia moves to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for mating with her external tank and solid rocket boosters for the upcoming STS-61-C mission.
A leader of the American Indian Movement who was a fugitive for nine years after being convicted of riot and assault was granted parole today from the South Dakota Penitentiary. The Indian rights leader, Dennis Banks, whose 14-month parole is to begin December 9, was convicted on charges resulting from a disturbance in 1973 at the Custer County Courthouse. He fled the state before he was sentenced but returned last year, surrendered and was sentenced to three years in prison. Mr. Banks, who sought sanctuary in California and New York State in his flight to avoid sentencing, will serve his parole at Lone Man School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Leveraged buyouts of big companies by private investors, are reshaping corporate America, while raising wide concern that these risky ventures may one day collapse. This year has set records for such buyouts, which are financed by borrowings of billions of dollars. This year has set records for leveraged buyouts: From the jeans maker Levi Strauss & Company to the tire maker Uniroyal Inc., from the department store chain R. H. Macy & Company to the drugstore chain Jack Eckerd Corporation, LBO’s, as these deals are known, are taking place in all industries and in all corners of the land. Last year, a record $18.6 billion was spent on 247 leveraged buyouts, and 1985’s frenetic pace is expected to top that — including the biggest such deal ever, the $6.2 billion buyout of the Beatrice Companies, the Chicago-based consumer goods concern. In the view of some, leveraged buyouts are creating new and innovative forms of big business — huge privately owned companies that are heavily laden in debt, yet liberated from the insecurity, supposed short-sightedness and maze of security regulations said to afflict companies whose shares are traded in the public market.
A farmer who faced eviction from the land his family had owned since the Civil War has been spared from eviction because he was remembered as a man “who never turned anyone down.” The 66-year-old farmer, Oscar Lorick, and his wife, Virginia, 59, can continue to live on the 79-acre farm under an agreement announced today by Alvin McDougald, an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
A 55-gallon drum of toxic silver cyanide exploded at a military contractor’s plant today, injuring at least 46 people and forcing the partial evacuation of the plant, the authorities said. The 10 AM explosion occurred in a hazardous waste disposal area outside the ECI Systems plant, said Robert Steele, a spokesman for the company, which manufactures electrical components for the Defense Department. About 200 of the plant’s 1,250 employees were evacuated and the area was cordoned off, officials said. The injured were brought to the Bayfront Medical Center for treatment of burns and respiratory injuries. Ten were admitted and four were in intensive care, a hospital spokesman said.
When he was 19, Richard Wright, the impoverished son of Mississippi sharecroppers, left his native soil forever, fleeing what he would later describe as “that most racist of all the American states.” Now, 58 years later, Gov. Bill Allain has proclaimed Richard Wright Week from November 21 to November 28 in Mississippi. And the University of Mississippi here is sponsoring a three-day international symposium on him through Saturday. Mr. Wright. long considered the literary godfather of other black writers in America, died in self-imposed exile in Paris in 1960, at the age of 52. The symposium, which has attracted 57 scholars from the United States, China, France, West Germany, Japan and the Ivory Coast to this lovely 1,800-acre, leaf-strewn campus, is titled “Mississippi’s Native Son.” Even though “Native Son” is the title of one of the best-known of Mr. Wright’s 15 books — the harrowing novel of black suffering and white racism in Chicago in the 1930’s that became a best-seller soon after its publication in 1940 — the irony of the symposium’s title is not lost on the sponsors.
Above the narrow roads that wind through the Nantahala National Forest here, the areas totally cleared of trees stand out distinctly, bald patches of up to 40 acres hewn out of the densely wooded mountainsides. “They used to put them way up in the hills, where you couldn’t see them,” said Walton R. Smith, a retired Forest Service official who lives on a wooded hillside north of here. “Now they want to cut a tract right above my house. I’m not against tree harvesting, but I think the agency is on a wrong track these days.” Emotions have run high in the rural mountains of western North Carolina, where opponents forced the United States Forest Service to withdraw a long-range plan that recommended increased logging and clear-cutting, rather than selectively harvesting individual trees, in the Nantahala and the neighboring Pisgah National Forest.
In the largest swearing-in ceremony ever, 38,648 immigrants become U.S. citizens.
A police detective was surprised last week when he found himself in the middle of an armed robbery as he dropped off his wife’s watch at a swank jewelry store in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale. He was surprised again after the six young men who were arrested turned out to be suspected of being members of a Los Angeles street gang. Law-enforcement officials say the case is an example of a new breed of mobile young thieves and bandits who travel the West, and possibly the rest of the country, to commit crimes. The robbers bounce from city to city in airplanes and automobiles in a sophisticated and sometimes daring bid for richer treasure and greater anonymity, law-enforcement officials say. Often from low-income or refugee communities, and sometimes armed with advanced weapons, most of the robbers are young adults and teen-agers, One of the suspects in the recent holdup of a jeweler in Bellevue, Washington, is believed to be 12 years old.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1464.33 (+2.06)
Born:
Adam Ottavino, MLB pitcher (St. Louis Cardinals, Colorado Rockies, New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, New York Mets), in New York, New York.
Tom Santi, NFL tight end (Indianapolis Colts), in New Orleans, Louisiana.
History Diaries 