Washington accused Libya of aiding the terrorists who carried out airport attacks in Rome and Vienna last Friday and said the United States was ready to work with other governments to “exert pressure” on the Qaddafi Government to halt its export of terrorism. The attacks killed 18 people, including 5 Americans, and wounded more than 110 people. The chief White House spokesman, Larry Speakes, said that although military options were always a possibility, he could not say whether they were under consideration. “There are a number of ways that the United States can take action to discourage terrorism,” Mr. Speakes said. “Certainly U.S. military options are always an option, as are many other areas, and we are always considering those options. As of the moment, we don’t say.” A high Administration official said tonight that President Reagan was awaiting delivery of a list of military options prepared by the Pentagon. The officials said, however, that it was unclear if the options involved direct military action against Libya or were more general. Pentagon officials declined tonight to discuss military options. The officials said there were no preparations for direct military action by American troops, but they did not rule out American military intelligence support for allies in the region. Such support has been offered after previous Middle East terrorist incidents.
Italian investigators believe the terrorist attacks on the airports here and in Vienna were planned in Beirut and partly coordinated in Switzerland. According to a reconstruction based on information from Italian justice officials, the terrorists were recruited in mid-November among Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila neighborhoods of Beirut, flown to Geneva, where they were given money and instructions, then sent by train to Vienna and Rome. According to Italian television, investigators questioning the sole terrorist survivor here, a 19-year old Palestinian named Mohammed Sarham, were told that the attacks in Rome and Vienna had been linked.
The two terrorists who attacked an airport check-in lounge in Vienna have told investigators they planned to take Israeli hostages and fly them out of the country aboard an El Al plane, Austrian officials said. They said the terrorists had said they were followers of Abu Nidal, a Palestinian leader who opposes any accommodation with Israel. The statement came as the Tunisian Interior Ministry said in Tunis that two of the passports used by the terrorists to enter Austria were confiscated last summer by Libyan authorities from Tunisian workers in Libya who were being expelled. The third passport was reported lost by a Tunisian worker in Libya in 1977. The Ministry said that “several hundred” Tunisian passports were confiscated recently by the Libyans from Tunisian workers being sent home.
Three days before the attacks on airports in Rome and Vienna, airlines around the world were warned that groups of “Libyan-backed terrorists” were being sent to Europe for holiday time assaults, airline and security officials said. Airline and security officials said yesterday that the information had been made available by intelligence and police organizations in Europe. On the basis of the information, at least one Western European carrier alerted its offices against “a wave of airplane hijackings and terrorist operations” and specified Italy and Spain as areas in which the terrorists were expected to travel. The warnings said “various European locations” had been targeted.
The Security Council today condemned the recent terrorist attacks at Rome and Vienna airports. The condemnation took the form of a statement issued by the council’s president. Diplomats said that nations professing nonalignment wanted the statement to include a passage opposing Israeli retaliation, but that the United States refused to accept language that would single out Israel or that might prevent the terrorists from being punished. The final statement urges that “those responsible for these deliberate and indiscriminate killings be brought to trial in accordance with due process of law.” On the retaliation issue, it calls on “all concerned to exercise restraint.”
Natasha Simpson, an 11-year-old American slain in the terrorist attack at the Rome airport last Friday, was buried today after a emotional funeral mass attended by her classmates and several hundred other people. She was one of five Americans slain when four gunmen hurled grenades and fired into a crowd of holiday travelers at Leonardo da Vinci Airport. The toll in that attack and a second one carried out minutes later by three assailants at the Vienna airport was 18 people dead and more than 110 wounded.
The Soviet Union denounced Western reports that it will allow a significant rise in the emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel, calling the reports “provocative concoctions” aimed at undermining Soviet Mideast policy. News reports in the West have said that Moscow may restore diplomatic ties with Israel, ruptured since the Six-Day War of 1967, and let thousands of Jews emigrate in a bid to boost the Kremlin’s Mideast influence. But the official news agency Tass, accusing the “imperialist mass media” of circulating “ill-intentioned rumors,” said: “It goes without saying that these fabrications are totally groundless.”
Soviet authorities have approved an exit visa for Irina McClellan, who has not seen her American husband for 11 years, but will not allow her daughter to emigrate, Mrs. McClellan said today. “I will not leave without her,” she said. “I have not waited all these years to unite only one part of my family.” American diplomats confirmed that the Office of Visas and Registrations, the police agency that handles emigration, informed Mrs. McClellan on Sunday that she was free to leave, but had refused to approve an exit visa for her daughter by a previous marriage.
The Kremlin for the second time in two days denounced Saturday’s U.S. nuclear test in Nevada, calling it a sign that Washington is working against solutions to the central problems of Soviet-American relations. The news agency Tass distributed a statement saying that the test also indicates that the Reagan Administration is not interested in its commitment to speed up arms control talks in Geneva. “Nuclear tests must be stopped,” the statement said. “This is the demand of reason, the demand of millions of people the world over and an objective military and political necessity.”
The British army said that 550 soldiers will be sent to Northern Ireland this week to bolster border security and safeguard the rebuilding of six police stations damaged by Irish Republican Army attacks. It is the first time an emergency army detachment has been ordered into Northern Ireland since 1981, when jailed Irish nationalist guerrillas staged hunger strikes at Belfast’s Maze Prison, spawning widespread violence. Several developments have heightened tensions since the British and Irish Governments signed an accord November 15 that gives the republic a formal consultative role in administering Northern Ireland. They include the Irish Republican Army’s bombing campaign against police stations, a new hunger strike at the Maze, the weekend arrests of 18 nationalist politicians and preparations for the coming parliamentary elections forced by the resignation of 15 Protestant lawmakers who oppose the accord. Britain keeps a permanent force of about 9,000 troops in Northern Ireland.
Christian and Muslim militia leaders called today for a cease-fire beginning Tuesday as part of the Syrian-sponsored armistice. The militias signed the armistice agreement on Saturday. Today, the militia leaders announced an “all-embracing cease-fire” to go into effect on all fronts at dawn Tuesday, according to Beirut radio stations. Prime Minister Rashid Karami endorsed the armistice and indicated willingness to submit the resignation of his nine-member Cabinet to make way for a new government. The police said all civil war fronts were calm for a second straight day. Christian radio stations said Syria scrambled MIG jets when Israeli planes staged mock bombing runs in the Lebanon mountains.
King Hussein arrived in Syria for talks with an old enemy, President Hafez al-Assad, against whom the Jordanian ruler almost went to war five years ago. Diplomats said they believed the talks could have major implications for Middle East politics. The two leaders had two meetings, their first encounter since October 1979. One meeting, a private session, was said to have lasted three hours. Tonight, Mr. Assad held a dinner in the King’s honor. There were unconfirmed reports that they would hold at least one more session on Tuesday.
Pakistanis’ rights were restored by President Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, who declared an end today to eight and a half years of martial law. At the same time, he restored basic rights and urged his critics to give the new civilian government a chance. But he also called the new system an extension of the military one, cautioned against expecting any radical changes and warned of “terrible consequences” if anyone tried to disrupt the transition to democratic rule.
Americans and Vietnamese will confer in Hanoi next Monday, the State Department announced. The purpose of the meeting is to lay the groundwork for resolving the problem of the nearly 1,800 Americans still unaccounted for in Vietnam. Charles E. Redman, a department spokesman, said the United States hoped to build on “the significant increase” in cooperation that has become apparent. The American team will be headed by Richard L. Armitage, Assistant Secretary of Defense, and by Paul D. Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs. Others in the group are Richard Childress, political and military affairs director of the National Security Council staff at the White House, and Anne Mills Griffiths, executive director of the League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. They will confer with Foreign Minister Nguyễn Cơ Thạch and with a Deputy Foreign Minister, Hoàng Bích Sơn, Mr. Redman said.
President Ferdinand E. Marcos today accused his challenger, Corazon C. Aquino, of playing “political football” with United States military installations in the Philippines, and he vowed to maintain the bases. Mr. Marcos spoke less than a mile from the gates of the Seventh Fleet’s logistics and supply center at Subic Bay to a cheering crowd of some 5,000 people. Many people in the area depend on the bases for their livelihood.
Eight guards on duty during the theft last week of priceless artifacts at Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology were released from federal custody after five days of questioning, Attorney General Sergio Garcia Ramirez said. Garcia said the guards will not be charged with any federal crimes but could be punished by city authorities if they are found to have neglected their duties. Meanwhile, the news agency Notimex reported that the eight guards have confessed that at least some of them were sleeping during their shift the night the theft took place.
Cuba will reduce its outlays for the military and public security next year after failing to meet production goals for sugar and other leading exports this year, according to newly published figures. The report, which appeared Sunday in the newspaper Juventud Rebelde, said military and security spending would be cut by more than $165 million, to $1.43 billion, under the 1986 budget and economic guidelines approved on Saturday by the National Assembly. The paper said economic growth of 3 to 3.5 percent was foreseen for 1986, down from 4.8 percent this year and 7.4 percent in 1984. It quoted Planning Minister Jose Lopez Moreno as saying the average growth rate between 1981 and 1985 had been 7 percent. Cuba this year has suffered from a drought, a devastating hurricane that caused an estimated $1 billion worth of damage last month and record low prices for sugar, its main export.
Nicaragua’s Defense Minister said today that rebel forces had killed 1,143 Government soldiers during 1985 while suffering 4,608 dead. It was the first time the Government had given casualty figures for the army. The Defense Minister, Humberto Ortega Saavedra, also said 281 civilians were killed by insurgents in 1985. Diplomats have estimated that more than 15,000 Nicaraguans have died as a result of military action in the last five years.
About 300 peace marchers gave up their efforts to cross into Honduras from Nicaragua after being showered with the seeds of stinging plants by Honduran soldiers and civilians at the frontier. The demonstrators, many suffering rashes from seeds of the pica-pica plant, returned to the Nicaraguan capital after failing for two days to persuade Honduran authorities to let them enter. The group, made up of pacifists from Europe, Asia and the United States, will now try to go by sea to El Salvador, although the U.S.-backed government there has said it will not let them enter.
Mali and Burkina Faso, which fought a five-day border war, have agreed to cease-fires worked out by two separate parties, and the result today was confusion over which was the operative pact. The first cease-fire was promoted by Libya and Nigeria and included both these countries in a military observer force. The second accord was worked out by the foreign ministers of Burkina Faso, Mali, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Togo — the seven signers of a West African non-aggression and defense accord known as Anad. The second pact made no mention of Libya and would draw on Anad members for an observer force. Moderate West African countries have in the past accused the Libya of trying to undermine what is already one of the world’s most politically turbulent areas, sources said.
Arrangements are being made to bury slain American naturalist Dian Fossey in a cemetery she built for the mountain gorillas she studied in Rwanda, a U.S. official announced. Fossey, 53, was killed by blows from a machete last week at her mountain camp. Police have yet to make any arrests, but reports from Rwanda indicated that suspects have been identified. Helen Picard, information officer at the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda, said that Fossey’s parents, who live in Atherton, California, have given permission for the burial to take place in the Central African country.
Winnie Mandela was arrested for the second time in eight days today for breaking government restrictions on her movements. White plainclothesmen in unmarked cars detained her after forcing her car to pull over on a freeway leading to Soweto from Jan Smuts Airport outside Johannesburg. “Don’t touch me with those hands,” Mrs. Mandela shouted at one white policeman. “I do not know if you have AIDS.” In a fierce altercation, she pushed police officers whom she accused of hurting her 2-year-old grandson, Zondwa. Mrs. Mandela said they had banged the child’s head against a door when they tried to drag him from her car. Her lawyers said she was being held under the Criminal Procedures Act, which permits the detention of people for 48 hours without charges. The authorities said she would appear in court Tuesday in Johannesburg.
A key provision of a new law designed to balance the Federal budget by 1991 is unconstitutional, the Justice Department said. It told a federal court that the law’s procedures leading to automatic cuts in government spending violated the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. But despite that stand, the Justice Department asked the court to dismiss a suit challenging the law, saying the 12 members of Congress who filed it had no standing to do so. The Justice Department’s primary argument was that the suit should be dismissed. The questions about the constitutionality of the law were raised as secondary arguments in the event the court allowed the suit to proceed. President Reagan has hailed the law, intended to force a balanced Federal budget by 1991, as essential to accomplishing his economic and political objectives. But he said when he signed the bill December 12 that it raised “serious constitutional questions.” This was the first time the Administration had flatly called any provision of the law unconstitutional. The Justice Department said in Federal District Court here that the law’s procedures leading to automatic cuts in Government spending violated the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. Specifically, the Administration said the Comptroller General, who would calculate the cuts required in each budget account, was an officer of the legislative branch but had been given a mission that encroached on the powers of the executive branch.
President Reagan plays golf in Palm Springs, California.
Chicago City Council elections must be held in March in seven predominantly black and Hispanic wards, a Federal District judge ordered. “There have been no fair aldermanic or committeemen elections in these wards since the city redrew the ward map in 1981,” Judge Charles R. Norgle said. The special elections could give Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black Mayor, a majority on the 50-member Council for the first time since he took office in April 1983. It could also mean a further weakening of the Democratic machine that reached its zenith in the 21-year reign of Mayor Richard J. Daley.
A jury convicted 10 neo-Nazis of racketeering charges based on a cross-country crime spree and of plotting to bring about a racist revolution. The jury in Seattle, Washington, heard 14 weeks of testimony from 370 witnesses and then deliberated for 55 hours over nine days. Nine men and a woman accused of conspiring to bring about a racist revolution were convicted today on racketeering charges based on a cross-country crime spree by a white supremacy sect called the Order. Prosecutors said the group committed crimes from Philadelphia to California to finance its efforts to create an Aryan homeland and eliminate blacks, Jews and “white traitors.” The defendants were among 23 members of the Order accused last April in a wide-ranging racketeering indictment of involvement in two murders, robberies that netted more than $4 million, counterfeiting, weapons violations and arson. The assistant United States attorney, Gene Wilson, said the jury’s verdict “sends a message that you can’t do things like this,” adding, “Obviously the Government is capable of dealing with people who choose to do that.”
A New York federal jury found reputed Mafia leader Matthew (Matty the Horse) Ianniello guilty of racketeering and tax evasion. Prosecutors said Ianniello and eight other defendants conspired to skim $2.5 million of the profits from five Manhattan restaurants and nightclubs. Ianniello, 65, and Benjamin Cohen, 66, secretly owned and controlled the restaurants and evaded taxes on the skimmed profits, the government said. Ianniello, reputedly a captain in the Genovese crime family, was convicted on 43 counts of racketeering, mail fraud and income tax evasion.
Two persons, including a pregnant woman, were hospitalized and 52 others suffered minor injuries when a rush-hour commuter train rammed a concrete abutment in the Hoboken, New Jersey station, authorities said. “People went flying everywhere,” said Clare Sylvestri, a rider who suffered a slight nose injury. “People were all over the place.” Officials said it appeared that a loose rail contributed to the accident, which caused $25,000 in damage to the six-car New Jersey Transit train and other equipment.
Arsonists attacked two Cincinnati abortion clinics this morning, causing $75,000 damage to each and forcing both to close. Mayor Charles Luken called the fires “terrorism on our community” and said the city would work with the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to find those responsible. Cincinnati fire officials said the fires had been started either by firebombs or by somebody pouring gasoline through basement windows. They said they had no suspects. On Saturday, one of the two clinics, Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Center of Ohio, was picketed by a national group called Americans Against Abortion. “We had nothing to do with it nor do we encourage that kind of action,” said Melody Green, a group spokesman, from Columbus, Ohio.
A former “officer of the month” became the sixth Miami policeman arrested in an alleged racketeering and dope-trafficking plot, dubbed “the Enterprise,” which resulted in the drowning of three drug smugglers. Officer Rodolfo Arias, 29, who received 33 commendations this year, surrendered and was booked into the Metro-Dade County jail. He is charged with cocaine trafficking, murder conspiracy and violation of the state’s racketeering statute. Officer Arias was the 11th member of the Police Department to have been charged in the last year in crimes that included murder, drug trafficking, robbery and kidnapping. The drownings occurred in the course of what the authorities say was the police theft of more than 300 kilograms of cocaine. Officer Arias’s lawyer, Jay Levine, said the charges were fabricated by drug smugglers who were trying to make a deal with prosecutors.
A Newport, Kentucky heroin addict who was holding two teen-age brothers hostage was shot to death today by a police sniper after a 30-hour siege in which the addict demanded $50,000 and plane tickets for himself and the boys. A sharpshooter from the Kentucky State Police killed the man, Dennis Lucas, 20 years old, with a single shot from a high-powered rifle. The officer fired from about 50 feet away. The hostages, Larkin Wardlow, 16, and his brother, Robert, 14, were freed unharmed. The older brother was found handcuffed to a bed in their home, an aging brick apartment building in this Cincinnati suburb. The authorities said they feared Mr. Lucas was about to kill one of the brothers. “Due to the fact that the situation was deteriorating, it became necessary to take the life of Dennis Lucas,” said Captain A. D. Fortner of the State Police. “We had no other choice.”
In their most optimistic report to date, doctors said artificial heart recipient Mary Lund is “quite awake” at times and is particularly responsive to her husband’s voice. “She seems to be responding to spoken words by opening her eyes. and looking around the room, which she had not done previously,” said Dr. Fredarick Gobel, spokesman for the Minneapolis Heart Institute at Abbott Northwestern Hospital. Lund, who became the first woman to receive an artificial heart with the December 18 implant of a Jarvik-7, remained in critical but stable condition.
Two 12-year-old girls who vanished more than a week ago while riding their bicycles were released blindfolded on a dirt road today and told the police they had been kidnapped and raped by two masked men. The girls said the men, whom they could not identify, held them captive in the closet of an old house. A statewide alert was issued for a white pickup truck the men used to drive the girls, Jennifer Barrow and Elizabeth Tanner, back to Stapleton. After their release early today, the girls walked up to the nearby Barrow home at 7:30 AM. The girls, who said their abductors wore ski masks, were taken to the Jefferson County Hospital, where they were reported in stable condition. Hundreds of volunteers, sometimes as many as 300 a day, ignored the holidays and combed 400 square miles of eastern Georgia in vain for a week after the girls vanished December 22.
Six workers were slightly contaminated today when radioactive water sprayed from a broken pump seal for 10 minutes at the Unit 1 reactor of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, plant officials said. About 300 gallons of the water, used to cool the reactor, escaped before the leak was stopped, said Douglas Bedell, a spokesman for the plant operator. The water was contained in an auxiliary building. Radiation monitors in the building indicated a low-level release of slightly radioactive gas from the plant’s vent as a result of the 10-minute leak, Mr. Bedell said. He said the gas quickly decayed and the workers did not need to be decontaminated. They returned to work. The incident was classified as an “unusual event,” the lowest of four emergency categories used in the nuclear power industry.
The need for security during visits with prison inmates outweighs an infant’s right to privacy, a Federal appeals court has ruled in rejecting a prisoner’s complaint about the strip search of his diapered son. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit last week upheld a lower court’s dismissal of a 1983 lawsuit filed by Robert Farrar, who is serving a 20-year sentence for grand larceny, kidnapping and assault in Richmond. Mr. Farrar had contended that the removal and search of his son’s diaper violated the child’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. In defending the search, the state argued that contraband can be concealed in diapers, and the only way to search is to remove the diaper.
Extensive investments in America have been made by Japan and other countries in the last several years. Local officials are virtually unanimous in praising the social and cultural impact of the foreign investments, and say they may also be helpful catalysts in promoting greater efficiency and competitiveness in American businesses. In Murfreesboro, Esther Seeman, a professor of political science, has found that Japanese-style meticulousness is contagious. Those are all small signs of the growing social and cultural effects of foreign investment in the United States. Billions of dollars from West Germany, Britain, Japan and other lands have poured into Tennessee and across the nation, creating jobs, filling the Federal Government’s borrowing needs, skirting protectionist trade barriers and reviving some industrial areas.
Buffalo hunters killed three bull bison, but a soon-to-be-built fence sponsored by an animal-protection group may keep other buffalo safely inside Yellowstone National Park. The three bison were shot by hunters with special licenses just outside the park. The shaggy beasts wandered out of the park over the weekend, necessitating Montana’s first buffalo hunt in more than 25 years, authorities said in Gardiner, Montana. Last year, 88 bison that had wandered outside the park were shot and killed by state wildlife officials.
Citrus canker has been identified at a 40-acre nursery in central Florida, the largest of 18 nurseries where the highly contagious bacterial disease has been discovered so far, officials said in Tallahassee. The Hutchinson Citrus Nursery, south of Sebring, has 4.3 million plants with an estimated value of more than $2 million. It was not yet certain whether all the firm’s citrus stock will have to be destroyed, an official said. The canker threatening Florida’s $2.4 billion citrus industry is harmless to humans but deadly to trees.
Chip Ferguson passed for 338 yards and two touchdowns and ran for another score tonight to lead Florida State to a 34–23 victory over Oklahoma State in the Gator Bowl. Tony Smith rushed for 201 yards on 24 carries for the Seminoles (9–3) while the all-America tailback Thurman Thomas of Oklahoma State gained 97 yards on 26 carries. Ferguson, a freshman, threw touchdown passes of 19 and 39 yards to Herb Gainer and ran 1 yard for a score in the fourth quarter. Cletis Jones scored on a 3-yard run for the Seminoles, and Derek Schmidt kicked field goals of 23 and 39 yards.
Washington edged Colorado, 20–17, in the Freedom Bowl, in Anaheim, California. David Toy and the freshman Tony Covington each scored on short runs and Washington held off Colorado in the final minutes for a victory in the Freedom Bowl. With the game tied 10–10, Covington dived into the end zone from a yard out to put the Huskies ahead to stay at 17–10 with 5:35 left in the third quarter. Jeff Jaeger’s second field goal of the game, an 18-yarder on the first play of the fourth quarter, extended Washington’s advantage to 20–10. Colorado, with momentum going the other way, converted a faked field goal into a 31-yard touchdown pass from the punter Barry Helton to the tight end Jon Embree. With the extra point, Colorado was back within 3 points at 20–17 with 11:05 to play. The Buffaloes got within 2 yards of a go-ahead touchdown with five minutes left. But the sophomore halfback Mike Marquez fumbled and the ball was recovered at the Huskies’ 2-yard line by the linebacker David Rill, who was credited with 17 tackles in the game.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1550.46 (+7.46)
Born:
Sean Gallagher, MLB pitcher (Chicago Cubs, Oakland A’s, San Diego Padres, Pittsburgh Pirates), in Boston, Massachusetts.
Jalen Parmele, NFL running back (Baltimore Ravens, Jacksonville Jaguars, Arizona Cardinals), in Midland, Michigan.
Julius Pruitt, NFL wide receiver (Miami Dolphins), in Newport, Arkansas.
Nate Jones, NFL wide receiver (St. Louis Rams), in Texarkana, Texas.
Roman Wick, Swiss National Team and NHL right wing (Olympics, 2010, 2014; Ottawa Senators), in Zuzwil, Switzerland.
History Diaries 