President Reagan makes a Radio Address to the Nation on U.S. and Soviet relations. President Reagan said today that Mikhail S. Gorbachev had not achieved his “main aim” in Geneva, to force an end to the space-based missile defense program. Mr. Reagan devoted much of his weekly radio speech to discussions at the summit meeting regarding the American program, which is officially known as the Strategic Defense Initiative and popularly as “Star Wars.” Officials have said this topic was the most contentious, and the Soviet leader left Geneva saying that if the United States continued work on the program, it could set back arms control. Mr. Reagan said in his radio speech:”I think it is fair to point out that the Soviets’ main aim at Geneva was to force us to drop S.D.I. I think that I can also say that after Geneva, Mr. Gorbachev understands we have no intention of doing so. “Far from it. We want to make strategic defense a strong protector of the peace. A research and testing program that may one day provide a peace shield to protect against nuclear attack is a deeply hopeful vision. And we should all be cooperating to bring that vision of peace alive for the entire world.”
A “blow-up scenario” for Geneva was quickly devised by American officials who feared early Thursday morning that the summit meeting might collapse at the final ceremony. “We had a nightmare vision with world headlines saying, ‘Summit Breaks Up Over Star Wars,’ ” one official said. The specter of a collapse — and the resolution of this last-minute hitch with the agreement on a joint statement -were among accounts of the summit meeting pieced together from descriptions provided by officials of the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon who had been close to the negotiating sessions and the leaders’ private talks. The President described the private talks to Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Robert C. McFarlane, his national security adviser, and Donald T. Regan, his chief of staff. Details were provided to other officials, and their descriptions were used to reconstruct these episodes.
The Soviet Union has quietly taken steps to reduce some American concerns over purported arms-control violations, according to Administration officials. The Soviet moves involve the cutting up of bombers and, according to intelligence reports, the possible removal of SS-16 missiles from a test center at Plesetsk in northern Russia. The moves are of political importance because the United States has taken the position that it will not undercut the 1979 strategic arms treaty as long as the Soviet Union does not. The 1979 treaty issue was not pursued at the Geneva summit meeting, officials said today. Nor was the question of Soviet violations dealt with in detail.
The summit meeting between the United States and the Soviet Union has not dispelled the controvery over one feature of the Administration’s arms-control proposal: its decision to seek a ban on mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles. The proposed ban, which was disclosed November 1, marks a break with previous policy. It would block the deployment of mobile versions of two Soviet missiles — the 10-warhead SS-24 and the single-warhead SS-25 — and would prevent the deployment of the Midgetman, a single-warhead American missile. Some officials said they wanted a ban because it is difficult to keep track of mobile missiles.
Terrorists seized an Egyptair jetliner carrying more than 100 people Saturday and forced it to land in Malta, where a man identifying himself as one of the hijackers said by radio that four people had been killed. Two people, including at least one American, were reported injured. In Washington, a spokesman for the State Department said officials believed three people had been killed, including an Egyptian security guard. In addition, one of the hijackers was believed to be seriously wounded, the spokesman said. The man calling himself a hijacker said in English, “I am going to look for another American passport,” according to reporters at the Valletta airport monitoring radio conversations between the Boeing 737 and the control tower. The man then said “four bodies are under the plane and a fifth will follow” if the plane was not refueled, the reporters said. They said another man then came on the radio, told the tower he was the plane’s captain and said of the hijacker who had been speaking, “He is very serious.”
The Athens airport, the security of which was strongly criticized by Washington after hijackers boarded a T.W.A. airliner there earlier this year, is to come under renewed investigation as the starting point of another hijacking. An airport spokesman said the Government planned to find out how hijackers of an Egyptian airliner on a flight from Athens to Cairo Saturday night might have smuggled weapons aboard the plane. Tight security had been in force at the airport since a Trans World Airlines jetliner, carrying mainly American passengers, was commandeered to Beirut in June by Lebanese Shiite Muslims. One American seaman was killed in the incident.
Italian newspapers and television said that a prosecutor is investigating allegations that Achille Lauro crew members stole passengers’ valuables during the seizure of the liner last month by Palestinian guerrillas who killed an American passenger. The daily Il Giornale reported that Genoa prosecutor Luigi Carli is investigating the disappearance of the contents of 62 safe deposit boxes on the cruise ship. It added that passengers had also complained of crew members hoarding food and urinating in public.
Tens of thousands of unionists who want Northern Ireland to stay British turned out for a huge rally in Belfast today to show their opposition to giving Dublin any say in their affairs. The crowd, estimated by the organizers at 100,000 and by the police at 70,000, was galvanized by the British-Irish agreement signed November 15 by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain and the Irish Prime Minister, Garret FitzGerald. The police said they arrested 38 people.
Lech Walesa, founder of the banned trade union Solidarity, said today that a state prosecutor had told him that the police had been taping his telephone conversations since Oct. 1. Mr. Walesa, in a telephone interview from Gdansk, said the prosecutor informed him in a letter Friday that the wiretapping stemmed from a nine-month investigation into allegations that Mr. Walesa had tried to incite public unrest by supporting a strike last February that later was canceled. Mr. Walesa has often said that his telephone was being tapped, but he expressed concern that he was not told of the activity until Friday.
The Greek Government, under pressure from opposition parties and journalists, reversed itself today and scuttled plans to impose new, restrictive policies on press briefings. Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou had announced Friday that his Socialist Government was going to eliminate daily press briefings for reporters as well as the post of Government spokesman. Today he said that he would name a new Government spokesman. The original decision to abolish the post of Government spokesman and daily briefings for reporters came after the resignation Thursday of the Press Minister and chief Government spokesman, Costas Laliotis.
Remarkably candid comments about priestly celibacy were made by Bishop James W. Malone, the head of the American Roman Catholic delegation to an extraordinary synod that starts today in Rome. He said extreme conditions, such as a severe shortage of priests, might warrant an end to mandatory celibacy.
Consumer prices in Israel fell slightly during the first two weeks of November for the first time in 10 years, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics announced. The drop of 1.5% was due mainly to a 16% drop in the cost of fresh fruits and vegetables, which had risen sharply in the past two months. However, a spokesman said several cost factors were not included in the latest statistics, which could result in an overall price rise for November when calculations are made at the end of the month.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak indicated that the Palestine Liberation Organization may decide in Iraq this weekend to recognize Israel in exchange for acknowledgement of the Palestinian right of self-determination. Mubarak, asked about the obstacles to a Middle East peace conference sought by moderate Arab leaders, said, “We are waiting for the PLO, who are convening in Baghdad, to come to a conclusion about (U.N.) Resolutions 242 and 338 and the right of self-determination for the Palestinians.” The resolutions acknowledge Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.
Druze and Shia militias called a cease-fire to end four days of savage street fighting for control of West Beirut that left at least 52 people dead and 225 wounded. “Shells are falling everywhere,” the Muslim Voice of the Nation radio station reported earlier today. “Apartment buildings are burning, but the firemen cannot reach them because of the heavy fighting.” The cease-fire, the sixth declared since the fighting began Wednesday, includes a four-point agreement calling for the withdrawal of all militiamen from the streets, the immediate release of scores of kidnaped civilians, reopening of all roads and formation of a joint task force to enforce security. The fighting has stalled efforts by Anglican envoy Terry Waite to negotiate the release of Americans held hostage by Muslim extremists.
The Iranian Government press agency announced today that Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri had been formally designated as the eventual succesor to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s religious leader. Ayatollah Montazeri, who was chosen by an 83-man Council of Experts, has long been regarded as Ayatollah Khomeini’s personal choice. There is no indication that Ayatollah Khomeini, who is believed to be about 85 years old, is ready to step down or is seriously ill. At various times, since the ouster of the Shah in 1979, he has been reported in frail health, but his family is noted for longevity.
A United Nations report on human rights in Iran has come under fire from Western diplomats, Iranian exiles and other groups who say it does not adequately document the widespread torture and summary executions carried out by the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “The report came as both a surprise and a disappointment,” said a Western diplomat with considerable experience in the Middle East, including Iran. “Is he talking about Iran or Switzerland?” The report, prepared by Andres Aguilar, a former Minister of Justice of Venezuela and special representative of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, says widespread allegations of executions and torture “cannot be dismissed as groundless.”
A bomb exploded Friday night on a train packed with Hindu workers entering Punjab state in India, killing 2 passengers and wounding 18 others, the police said today. They said they suspected that Sikh terrorists were responsible. The train was bound from Chandigarh in the Sikh-dominated Punjab to Ambala in neighboring Haryana, where Hindus are in the majority. The blast occurred as the train pulled into the station at Shambu, the last station before the Haryana border. At least two of the wounded people were reported in serious condition.
An estimated 500,000 members of the ruling Dominican Revolutionary Party will vote today in a primary to choose a presidential candidate for next year’s general elections in the Dominican Republic. The party’s candidate to the May 16 elections will be chosen directly by the party’s membership, and not by party delegates as in the past. President Jorge Blanco, who is not running for a second four-year term, supports Santo Domingo Mayor Jose Francisco Pena Gomez, 48.
The centrist National People’s Party of Prime Minister Maria Liberia-Peters won elections in the Netherlands Antilles. However, the party failed to gain a legislative majority, taking only six of 22 seats in the Curacao-based Parliament.
The four top commanders of the most powerful Salvadoran guerrilla faction sat for an evening recently in this small mountain village and talked of their war against the Salvadoran Government and the United States. The overwhelming sense left after a day with the commanders and their supporters was of a separate world, existing only 60 miles from the capital of San Salvador, but distanced from it by a perhaps unbridgeable difference in political goals, a decade of social struggle and six years of war that has progressively depopulated the area and left a legacy of hatred. A small group of rebel supporters brought into the village from outlying areas to talk to reporters chanted: “Death to Duarte! Death to the Yankee aggressor!” At times, their voices cracked with emotion as they spoke of a future settling of accounts with the Government of President Jose Napoleon Duarte. They accuse the Government and the Reagan Administration of permitting the army to burn their fields, destroy their homes and bomb their villages.
Hondurans will vote for a new president on Sunday, but as of this afternoon it continued to appear that they would do so without knowing how their next leader will finally be selected. The main problem is a continuing dispute over a new electoral law that has left two legally viable methods for selecting the winner of the presidency. Under the electoral law, the leading candidate of the party that gets the most votes will win. But under the Constitution, whichever candidate wins a majority of the vote becomes president.
Thirteen-year-old Omayra Sanchez died last weekend in the mud-covered town of Armero, surrounded by helpless volunteer rescue workers who despite a 60-hour effort were unable to dislodge her from a pool of neck-deep water and slime. For many who saw pictures of the struggle for her life, the girl’s death symbolized a bungled rescue operation in which, according to frustrated volunteers, countless other trapped victims died. The volunteers and others in the vast area laid waste by torrents of mud set off by the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano told of shortages of manpower, helicopters, expertise, medicines and such basics as stretchers, shovels and cutting tools. They also told of bottlenecks in supply lines and of a slavishness to protocol that hampered rescue work. In interviews over the last few days, Colombian officials directly in charge of the rescue effort insisted that they had done the best they could with the resources available in their underdeveloped Latin American country. About 23,000 people died in the disaster. But a senior Colombian police officer with extensive experience in rescue operations said that “there was a lack of organization and planning and a failure to fully use the massive human and material resources” of the country’s 180,000-man armed forces.
The Roman Catholic Church in Brazil published the names of more than 400 people it said tortured political prisoners during 21 years of military rule that ended last March with the election of a civilian president. The list included several high-ranking officers still on active duty. It was prepared by the Archdiocese of Sao Paulo and published in major newspapers. Among those named was General Otavio Aguiar Medeiros, commander of the Amazon region and former head of the National Information Service, Brazil’s CIA. He refused comment on the list.
Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s most prominent black nationalist leader, was returned to prison today from a hospital where he had been recovering from surgery. Mr. Mandela, 67 years old, is the leader of the African National Congress, an outlawed and exiled movement committed to the violent overthrow of apartheid. He has a wide following among South Africa’s black majority of 23 million. Mr. Mandela has been jailed since 1962 on charges of planning sabotage as a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, the military wing of the congress. He is serving a life sentence.
The House Ways and Means Committee early today finished drafting the most sweeping changes in the Federal income tax system approved by a Congressional committee since World War II. The measure differed in a number of ways from President Reagan’s tax proposal, but committee members said the Administration supported the committee version. The measure would affect the tax liability of almost every household and corporation in the nation. It would sharply lower tax rates, abolish many tax preferences, apply a stiff minimum tax to wealthy people and profitable companies, remove the poor from the tax rolls altogether and shift part of the tax burden from individuals to corporations. The committee’s plan would be more favorable to lower- and middle-income taxpayers and less advantageous to the wealthy than the proposals Mr. Reagan sent Congress last May. It would differ from the President’s plan in many other important respects, retaining, for instance, deductions for state and local taxes that Mr. Reagan wanted to disallow and setting a top individual tax rate of 38 percent instead of the 35 percent Mr. Reagan sought.
After nearly a year of negotiation and a week of often bitter debate, the Senate reached a compromise today and passed a four-year farm bill by a vote of 61 to 28. The compromise ended a filibuster by three farm-state Democrats who were pressing the Republican leadership for concessions and accommodations on the bill, which they said was unfair to wheat, grain and corn farmers of the Middle West and West. Under the agreement reached today, price supports would be frozen for two years and reduced by 5 percent a year in subsequent years. This plan replaces a provision, proposed by Senator Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, and passed Wednesday, that would have either frozen price supports for four years at 1985 levels or frozen them for one year and reduced them in the next three years by 5 percent a year.
A retired analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency was charged today with selling American secrets to China for more than 30 years. Federal law-enforcement officials said the analyst, Larry Wu-Tai Chin, worked for the C.I.A. for nearly three decades and continued providing documents to China after his retirement in 1981. In the Korean War, prosecutors said, Mr. Chin supplied the Chinese with information about Chinese prisoners of war held by American forces. Mr. Chin, 63 years old, is one of only a handful of C.I.A. officials ever arrested on espionage charges. He was charged with espionage and conspiracy, which carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.
A black civil rights group canceled a march through a racially troubled Philadelphia neighborhood at the request of Mayor W. Wilson Goode, who called the area “a time bomb.” Goode had declared a state of emergency after two days of demonstrations against the arrival of a black family and an interracial couple in the all-white area. Operation PUSH, a civil rights organization founded by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, had planned a march and motorcade in support of the blacks.
Senator Arlen Specter, faced with the possibility of a political embarrassment, today backed away from plans to force the Pennsylvania Republican Party to endorse him for re-election next year. The Senator’s decision not to seek the party’s backing, after spending weeks lining up support in the Republican State Committee, was regarded as a victory for Governor Dick Thornburgh. The Governor, who has indicated that he will announce by next month whether he will seek the Senate seat, is being promoted by conservative Republicans. Mr. Thornburgh, who is barred by law from running for Governor after his current term expires in January 1987, supported Mr. Specter in his 1980 Senate race. Mr. Specter told the State Committee that he felt he had enough votes to win the endorsement but agreed to delay seeking it until February, as originally scheduled, to avoid splitting the party.
At least 700 AIDS patients have turned to the Veterans Administration for treatment, and the agency is bracing to accommodate an even larger number as the Pentagon begins screening active-duty military personnel for signs of the deadly disease. Patients with acquired immune deficiency syndrome are being treated at many of the 172 VA medical centers around the country, and the agency will establish major AIDS centers at its hospitals in New York City, San Francisco, Miami and perhaps two or three others, an official said. VA medical care is free to former servicemen.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the convictions of the Rev. Daniel Berrigan and seven others — the so-called “Plowshares Eight” — who broke into a General Electric Co. plant and damaged nuclear missile cones. The court reversed, 4 to 3, a lower court decision throwing out the 1981 convictions of burglary, conspiracy and criminal mischief. Members of the group, which took its name from the biblical admonition to “beat your swords into plowshares,” hammered nose cones designed for two nuclear missiles.
The crew of the shuttle Atlantis, preparing for launching at the Kennedy Space Center, promised a “light show” spectacle when the ship is blasted aloft Tuesday night for its weeklong mission. Countdown was to begin today for the crew of seven, which includes Rodolfo Neri, who will be the first Mexican to go into space. The shuttle will launch three communications satellites owned by Mexico, Australia and RCA American Communications Inc.
Members of this religious community in central Oregon will disband their commune now that its leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, has left the United States, its Mayor says. The Mayor, Swami Prem Niren, said the community was “no longer viable” with the departure of Mr. Rajneesh, who left the country as part of a plea bargain after being charged with immigration fraud. But Sheriff Art Labrousse of Wasco County said he was skeptical that the commune would actually close. “If it does come about,” he said, “it will make it a little easier on the rest of the residents of Wasco County.”
Air traffic controllers at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport allowed airliners to fly closer to each other than regulations allow five times in the last week, the Federal Aviation Administration said. FAA spokesman Mort Edelstein said the jetliners are required to keep a lateral distance of five miles between them, and in the O’Hare incidents, planes remained more than four miles but less than five miles apart. He said the FAA is investigating but the deviations are regarded as minor errors.
Federal agents arrested 27 members of a family and seized nearly 1,500 pounds of cocaine they said was worth about $2 billion. Authorities said the arrests — resulting from raids in New Jersey, New York, Florida and Puerto Rico — put a 10-year-old drug distribution ring out of operation. The ring allegedly was led by Gerardina Lopez Vanegas, of West Palm Beach, Florida, her brother, six of her children, several in-laws and other relatives, authorities said. They called it the second largest drug seizure in U.S. history.
The floods that overran Pennsylvania’s Monongahela River earlier this month put a blue-collar river out of work, and workers using cutting torches and explosives are laboring round the clock to clear wrecked barges from the channel. Engineers say it will be December 10 before they can remove the last of the 19 steel hulks that jammed against the Maxwell Locks on November 5, halting shipping on a river dotted with coal-burning power plants, coke plants and steel mills. Businesses are losing $500,000 each day the river is closed, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. Five coal mines have been shut and 1,500 miners laid off because no coal can be shipped through Maxwell. Barge crews are in drydock, and utilities are trucking coal.
Fifty-eight grain cars on a Union Pacific Railroad freight train jumped the tracks in a remote canyon in eastern Oregon today, tearing up more than 500 feet of track and disrupting Amtrak traffic. No injuries were reported in the accident, which occurred in frigid weather at 8:45 AM on Oregon’s main east-west rail line. The 75-car train was heading from the Middle West to Kalama, Wash., when the 58 grain cars derailed in Pyles Canyon, 20 miles east of La Grande, officials said. The railroad brought in work crews, cranes, tractors and other heavy equipment to help right the cars, clean up grain and repair the track.
Normally busy classrooms and playgrounds in the Sandy Elementary School District in Oregon are locked and empty these days, shut since November 7, when the town’s middle school and three grade schools were closed for lack of money. Most of the district’s 1,400 pupils have had to stay home, stay with baby sitters or go to relatives out of town. Some have been enrolled in private schools. Teachers have been laid off. It is a situation that has been repeated with increasing frequency in Oregon, where eight school districts have shut temporarily since 1976 because voters refused to spend the money needed to keep them open.
The United States military commands in Europe and the Pacific region are beset by a range of problems that would prevent them from providing adequate medical care to casualties in wartime, according to two long-classified Pentagon reports that were made available today. The reports were prepared by the military health authorities last year but were promptly classified as Government secrets by the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the objections of Congressional committees and the Pentagon’s health affairs office. Members of both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have repeatedly asserted that the reports were classified primarily because they would embarrass the military services and perhaps frighten military personnel concerned about their safety in wartime, but the Joint Chiefs argued that release of the reports would endanger national security.
Broad changes in Medicare will soon be proposed by the Reagan Administration to encourage beneficiaries to use Federal funds to sign up for private insurance offered by Blue Cross and Blue Shield or by commercial insurance companies.
Residents of Florida’s Wakulla, Jefferson and Taylor counties were the last of 100,000 evacuees to return after Hurricane Kate, but thousands of homes in Florida and Georgia remained without power or water. Tallahassee lifted its curfew, but a state of emergency remained in effect in 19 counties where officials pleaded for donations of food, blankets and other relief supplies. As the storm diminished and moved into the Atlantic, gale warnings for the Carolinas and Virginia were called off.
A nine-stanza love lyric attributed in the manuscript copy to Shakespeare has been discovered in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library by an American scholar. It appears to be the first addition to the canon of Shakespeare’s works since the 17th century. It is untitled.
Born:
Ahn Hyun-Soo, South Korean short track skater (6 Olympic gold medals and 2 bronze, for both South Korea and Russia), in Seoul, South Korea.
Mike Tolbert, NFL running back (Pro Bowl, 2013, 2015, 2016; San Diego Chargers, Carolina Panthers, Buffalo Bills), in Carrollton, Georgia.
Pedro Figueroa, Dominican MLB pitcher (Oakland A’s, Texas Rangers), in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
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