The Soviet Union has suggested holding the second summit between President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev next September, rather than June as proposed by Washington, the Washington Post reported. The newspaper, quoting State Department officials, said Moscow thinks a June meeting would follow too closely after the November summit in Geneva, but has not ruled out June. Administration officials want to avoid having the summit too close to the November 4 congressional elections.
The leaders of the largest Protestant paramilitary organization in Northern Ireland, who until now have distanced themselves from unionist politicians, joined them today at the start of a march across Northern Ireland to protest the agreement last month that gave the Irish Republic a say in their affairs. Politicians, including the 15 Members of Parliament who resigned their seats to force elections on January 23, have repeatedly warned of a violent reaction to the agreement signed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain and the Irish Prime Minister, Garret FitzGerald, on Nov. 15. But it is the members of the paramilitary group — the Ulster Defense Association, led by men like Andy Tyrie and John McMichael, who appeared at the march today from Londonderry to Belfast — who could provide the firepower to carry out such threats. The unexpected appearance today of Mr. Tyrie and Mr. McMichael was one of many recent signs throughout Northern Ireland that the pressure on all sides is mounting.
As 1985 came to a cold and misty end here on Tuesday night, four thin streams of blue-green laser light could be seen racing across the skies to converge at the top of the Eiffel Tower, like ropes tethering the neck of some fantastic giraffe. Then, at exactly four minutes before midnight, the great tower, which has loomed over this city for 97 years, began a subtle transformation, its exterior lights dimming to be replaced by a new illumination coming from within. There were a few bursts of fireworks, blossoms of orange and white that were reflected against the tower’s massive girders. And, as midnight approached, some 290 high density lamps mounted on the structure’s interior and switched on by computer, were giving it a new set of nocturnal clothes, more golden than before, more intense and, according to some, more mystical.
The Abu Nidal Palestinian group is “among the most dangerous of the Middle East terrorist organizations,” the State Department said. A report by the department said the group, which is suspected of organizing airport attacks last week in Rome and Vienna, had carried out 60 terrorist attacks over eight years, half of them in the last two years. Hundreds of people have been killed in the attacks, which have increasingly been aimed at innocent bystanders, the report said. The report stressed what it said were the Palestinian group’s links to Libya. Apparently in an effort to encourage European support for international moves against the sponsors of terrorist acts, it emphasized that the group had increasingly concentrated its attacks in Western Europe. The State Department report blamed the Abu Nidal group for more than 60 terrorist attacks in the last eight years, half of them in the last two years. The attacks have killed hundreds of people and have increasingly been aimed at innocent bystanders, the report said.
The gunman who survived the Rome airport attack said he is one of 300 fighters from Palestinian refugee camps being trained with Libyan backing for suicide attacks on European airports, Italian police sources reported. Mohammed Sarham, 19, said a Lebanese-based training program had the support of “(Libyan leader Muammar) Qaddafi and perhaps Syria,” according to the sources. Eighteen people, including five Americans, were killed and more than 100 wounded in attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports Friday. Four terrorists were among the dead.
Libya denied involvement in the Rome and Vienna airport attacks, which the Libyan press agency has hailed as heroic. Today Libya denied involvement in the Rome and Vienna attacks and asserted that remarks by the United States and Israeli officials reflected plans for “joint aggression against Libya by the American military machine and Israel.”
The airport attacks in Rome and Vienna reflect a new brand of terrorism that European security officials say poses major new challenges. Evidence gathered by the investigators in both cities indicates the assaults were carried out by young Palestinians who were guided from the Middle East to Western Europe by a network of experienced Arab and, possibly, European, backers working behind the scene.
Abu Nidal, who is suspected of having organized the Rome and Vienna airport massacres, is believed by Israeli and Arab analysts to have been responsible for more acts of international terrorism than any other Palestinian leader.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, in a statement marking the 21st anniversary of his guerrilla group’s first military operation against Israel, vowed that the armed struggle will continue. The Palestine Liberation Organization chairman declared that Palestinians have a “legitimate right” to armed resistance, according to the statement published by the Palestinian news agency WAFA. Fatah, the guerrilla group led by Arafat, is the biggest group within the PLO.
A Muslim fundamentalist group that says it is holding four Americans hostage in Lebanon threatened to mount new attacks against Americans and Israelis. An anonymous caller in Beirut purporting to speak for the Islamic Holy War organization said that it would carry out more kidnappings and acts of sabotage.
Israeli troops and their Lebanese Christian allies were reported today to have stormed a Shiite Muslim village in southern Lebanon and forced its entire population of about 2,000 to leave. The police here said Israeli soldiers and militiamen of the Israel-allied South Lebanon Army ringed the village, Kunin, in the Israeli-designated “security zone,” and ordered all the inhabitants to gather in the village square. There, according to witnesses quoted by the police, 32 young men were rounded up and the rest of the villagers were ordered to move out.
A senior Lebanese Christian leader who had helped negotiate a cease-fire among warring militias narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. The Christian leader, Assad Shaftari, was unhurt but one of his aides was killed when their car came under a rocket attack by unknown assailants. Mr. Shaftari is the chief aide to Elie Hobeika, the chief of the Christian militia known as the Lebanese Forces.
The Islamic Jihad terrorist group said in Beirut that it plans more kidnappings and suicide bombings against Americans and will strike Israeli targets “all over the world” in 1986. The shadowy group also singled out Turkey as a “tool for the implementation” of Israeli and U.S. policies in the Mideast and threatened attacks on Turkish embassies. The group has claimed responsibility for suicide-bomb attacks on U.S. and French installations in Beirut in 1983-84 and says it holds Americans and Frenchmen missing in Lebanon.
A Jordanian-Syrian meeting ended with no public statements on the results. President Hafez al-Assad of Syria and King Hussein of Jordan, who nearly went to war in 1980, hugged and kissed each other at Damascus International Airport before the king returned to Amman.
Iraq said today that it had stepped up air attacks on Iran’s oil operations and troop positions, with “hundreds of raids” against opposing forces in retaliation for what it said were Iranian raids on civilian areas. In another development, a special envoy of Pope John Paul II arrived in Iraq late Monday to visit Iranian prisoners of war, the Gulf News Agency said today. The envoy, Roger Cardinal Etchegaray of France, earlier visited Iraqi prisoners of war in Iran.
Rebel rockets hit the Soviet Embassy and a Soviet-built housing project in snow-bound Kabul last week on the sixth anniversary of Moscow’s intervention in Afghanistan, Western diplomats in Islamabad, Pakistan, said. Several rockets landed in the embassy compound in western Kabul but caused no visible damage, they said, quoting their first reports of the December 27 anniversary.
The Afghan Government has informally presented a timetable for the withdrawal of all Soviet troops from Afghanistan within a one-year period as part of an overall accord, a senior State Department official said today. He said the schedule for withdrawing the 120,000 Soviet soldiers was shown to the United Nations Under Secretary General for Political Affairs, Diego Cordovez of Ecuador, during the most recent United Nations-sponsored talks on a political settlement in Afghanistan in Geneva from December 16 to 19. An agreement on a timetable for the pullout of Soviet troops has been the major stumbling block in the negotiations, the official said. In earlier talks, considerable progress has been made in resolving such issues as the future of the existing Soviet-backed Government, the return of Afghan refugees from Pakistan, new elections, and guarantees of noninterference in Afghanistan, the official said.
Faced with one of the sharpest drops in the size of the grain harvest in 36 years of Communist rule, China’s reform-minded leaders have decided to adopt a more cautious policy next year that will defer further relaxation of the controls on peasant producers and seek to put grain yields back on a rising path. The pullback from the ambitious pace of change that had been set in recent years was announced last week in Peking at a special conference on the situation in rural areas. Details were made public Monday in a report by the official New China News Agency, which also revealed a figure for the 1985 harvest of “close” to 380 million tons, 27 million tons below the record figure for 1984 but considerably better than the Government estimate of about 354 million tons made two weeks ago. Still China remains the world’s largest grain producer, with a crop nearly twice that expected this year in the Soviet Union and import requirements that are substantially lower. Grain stocks from the 1984 season are at record levels, and officials have said that a second poor yield next year would cause no immediate hardship. But the political implications of the decrease are considerable, particularly when weighed with other retreats forced in recent months on the reform-minded leadership under Deng Xiaoping.
An Australian, employed on a U.N. water project in Pakistan, and his wife were kidnaped by Pakistani tribal rebels and then jailed for seven months in Afghanistan where the authorities considered them counterrevolutionaries and forced them to read Communist propaganda, the couple told a news conference in New Delhi. Robert Williamson, 34, and his wife, Jennifer Lade, 32, said they were locked separately in isolation in Kabul prisons but were “never treated badly.” The couple were freed last week after an appeal to Afghanistan by U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar.
The Japanese celebrate New Year’s Day with the simultaneous delivery of nearly 3.5 billion cards. Postal authorities labored for weeks to guarantee the simultaneous deliveries. The exercise incorporates three of Japan’s great passions — paying attention to detail, performing tasks with precision and doing things en masse.
Haitian President Jean-Claude Duvalier reorganized his government today, bringing home his Ambassador to Washington to join the Cabinet and sending four powerful ministers abroad as envoys. Altogether, 14 new ministers were appointed in the Cabinet shake-up. Five ministers had their positions downgraded. Adrien Raymond, Ambassador to the United States, was called home to serve as Information and Public Relations Minister for the Caribbean nation, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
El Salvador’s leftist guerrillas said today that they had killed a mayor and several municipal officials for crimes against the people and vowed to begin a campaign to put common criminals to death. The rebel announcement, which was made on Radio Venceremos, said the killings were carried out in 1984 and December 1983. The rebel announcement, which was made on Radio Venceremos, said the killings were carried out in 1984 and December 1983. The rebel radio said: “It is public knowledge that the Mayor of Cacaopera and other members of enemy networks from that town who took part in criminal actions against the people were executed on the day of their capture in 1984. The same goes for the municipal secretary from Villa el Rosario, who was executed in December 1983.” Mayor Jose Santos Flores of Cacaopera and six other officials from the town in Morazan Province were seized by the rebels and have been missing since July 1984.
The Colombian town of Armero, devastated by a mid-November volcanic eruption and mud slide, has been declared a national monument and will be converted into a national park, the government said in Bogota. The town area, now covered by dried mud dotted with green patches of rice and sorghum, will be named the National Park of Hope. A reconstruction fund set up after the November 13 tragedy will build a chapel and a monument in memory of the 23,000 people killed.
Winnie Mandela, one of South Africa’s most prominent black anti-apartheid campaigners, was freed on bail today after being arrested for defying a Government order forbidding her to visit Soweto. The terms of her bail included a prohibition on entering the magisterial districts of Johannesburg and Roodepoort, which include Soweto. The conditions seemed to reinforce an order served on December 21 by the Minister of Law and Order, Louis LeGrange, relaxing earlier and more severe restrictions on Mrs. Mandela’s movements, but forbidding her from entering Soweto, Johannesburg’s sprawling black satellite, which she regards as home. By mid-evening, lawyers acting for Mrs. Mandela said they were seeking negotiations, thus far fruitlessly, with the authorities to relax the restrictions until January 7, when she is to challenge them in a higher court.
The American trade deficit surged to $13.68 billion in November, the Commerce Department reported. It was the third-biggest monthly imbalance ever recorded between the value of goods the United States imports and the value of goods it exports to its foreign trading partners. For the first 11 months of 1985 the deficit exceeded the $123.31 billion record posted for all of 1984. Although the November result was not unexpected, analysts said they found very little of comfort in the latest data and warned that protectionist sentiment could revive if the trade gap did not start to narrow by springs.
Many farmers face foreclosure if they fail to bring their Government loan payments up to date, according to the Agriculture Department’s Farmers Home Administration. The lending agency maintained a moratorium on farm foreclosures for 25 months, but it has begun preparations to notify farmers who owe the Government nearly $6 billion that they must bring their loan payments up to date or lose their farms. The action comes when growers face the worst farm economy in half a century, with little prospect of improvement in the near future, according to agricultural experts. The 1985 farm bill, signed last week by President Reagan, will lower the price the Government pays to farmers for their crops. Critics of the new law contend it will cause farmers’ income, which has been dropping sharply since 1981, to continue to decline.
Ricky Nelson was killed along with his fiancée and five other people when his DC-3 plane crashed in flames near De Kalb, Texas. Mr. Nelson, 45, gained childhood fame on his parents’ radio and television programs and went on to become one of rock-and-roll’s earliest teen-age idols.
President Reagan plays golf in Palm Springs, California.
President Reagan attends a New Year’s Eve party at the home of Walter Annenberg.
The espionage case against a retired Central Intelligence Agency analyst began in 1983 with a tip from a Chinese defector, Government sources said today. Prosecutors have said in court documents that the analyst, Larry Wu-Tai Chin, had admitted to Federal agents that he was a spy for the Chinese. According to a motion filed by prosecutors today, Mr. Chin was impressed at the agents’ knowledge of his activities, so much so that he speculated aloud that his principal Chinese contact might have defected to the United States. The motion did not disclose whether Mr. Chin’s suspicions were accurate, but intelligence sources said today that the case arose from information provided by a Chinese official who fled to the West.
An arson fire damaged an abortion clinic early today, a day after two clinics in Cincinnati were set afire and 12 hours after a bomb threat emptied another clinic here, the authorities said. The fire today caused $20,000 damage at Toledo Medical Services, the site of an arson fire August 10 that is unsolved. Robert Stellingworth, the director of the Toledo office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said his agency was helping local officials. “The fire is of suspicious origin,” he said. Joyce Arend, the president of the Toledo chapter of the National Organization for Women, said a bomb threat was made at 2 PM Monday at the Center for Choice, another clinic, forcing the police to evacuate the building. The Cincinnati police reported no progress in the investigation into the fires at the Margaret Sanger Center of Ohio and the Women’s Health Care Center, where damage came to $75,000 each.
The Chicago Police Department’s “Red Squad” used illegal tactics when it spied on two dissident groups and an activist without any evidence that they were breaking the law, a federal judge ruled. U.S. District Judge Susan Getzendanner’s opinion was the first judicial finding that the now-defunct squad acted illegally while keeping an eye on dissidents during the turbulent 1960s and early ’70s. Getzendanner said her ruling ends the case because both sides agreed not to appeal.
Bert Lance was overwhelmingly reelected as chairman of the Calhoun, Georgia, First National Bank, despite a pending lawsuit by a federal agency accusing him of banking violations. Shareholders at the annual meeting cast 99% of their votes in favor of the slate of directors presented by Lance and the bank, said bank spokesman Mike Jones. He said 76% of the outstanding shares voted. Lance, one-time director of the federal Office of Management and Budget under former President Jimmy Carter, is the largest shareholder in the bank with 87,452 shares, or 14.75% of those outstanding.
Rep. John F. Seiberling (D-Ohio), one of the most liberal members of the House, announced in Akron, Ohio, that he will not seek a ninth term in Congress. Seiberling, 67, decided to end his career after a recent bout with cancer. “Happily, as it turned out, I do not have generalized cancer,” he said. “My health is excellent, but that still made me think a lot about the situation. I decided this was a good time for me to bow out.”
A textile worker was arrested today and charged with kidnapping two 12-year-old girls who turned up Monday after being missing for about a week. The man, Buford Williams, 23 years old, was also charged with rape. The authorities said he participated in the week-long search for the girls. Mr. Williams, who lives in a rural area near here, was arrested after he left his job at midnight at the J. P. Stevens Company textile plant, Sheriff Zollie Compton of Jefferson County said. Sheriff Compton said Mr. Williams was being held without bail. The two girls said they were released blindfolded from a pickup truck Monday on the same dirt road where they told the authorities they were kidnapped while riding bicycles December 22. The authorities said the girls had told them they were raped in the week they were held captive and had said they spent part of the time in a dark closet.
Ruth Westheimer, champion of good sex, good contraception and good information, has a bad error in her sex guide for teenagers that has prompted a recall of all 115,000 copies. In a chapter on avoiding pregnancy, the sex therapist and radio-TV lecturer, known to her admirers as “Dr. Ruth,” mistakenly tells girls that they are least likely to get pregnant at times when they really are most fertile. “I’m very upset that that happened,” Westheimer said. “I immediately said on my television show and the radio that there is a typo, that we are going to recall all the books.” Her publisher will replace the white-covered $3.50 paperback with a red-covered corrected version, said Barbara Uva, speaking for Warner Books.
A Minneapolis ordinance requiring that sexually explicit material considered harmful to minors be displayed in sealed wrappers or under opaque covers was upheld by a federal appellate court in St. Paul. “We believe that the ordinance … is one that is ‘carefully limited,’ and that does not unduly burden the First Amendment rights of adults,” wrote Judge Pasco M. Bowman in the 2-1 ruling of the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.
A Soviet defector was arrested today as a suspect in the killing of his lover, a Soviet defector who testified briefly in the spying trial of a former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The man, Vladimir Ratchikhine, 44 years old, was jailed in the death of Ludmilla Kondratjeva, 38, whose body was found Saturday in the back of an automobile that plunged off Pacific Coast Highway into the Malibu surf, Sheriff’s Deputy Dave Hogan said.
Floodwater backed up by ice and wind kept scores of people out of their homes in Michigan, and a 35-mile-long ice jam on Oregon’s Snake River grew as high water forced at least one family to flee. Meanwhile, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was blasted with snow and subzero temperatures. Areas along Lake Superior expected another 4 to 8 inches of snow by New Year’s Day.
Sam Spiegel, the producer, died at the age of 84. Mr. Spiegel won three Academy Awards for producing such landmark motion pictures as “The African Queen,” “On the Waterfront,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Lawrence of Arabia.”
Army edges Illinois, 31–29, in the Peach Bowl in Atlanta. Army, a team that seldom puts the football in the air, scored two unlikely touchdowns today on passes from its halfbacks, Bill Lampley and Clarence Jones, one in each half. Those scores were the key ones as the Cadets defeated Illinois in a Peach Bowl game played mostly in rain before a crowd of 29,857 at the 60,000-seat Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Apart from the surprise passes, the contest matched the running of Rob Healy, the Cadet quarterback, who gained 107 yards rushing, and the record passing of his counterpart, Jack Trudeau for Illinois. The Army defense could not muster a decent pass rush on Trudeau, who had unlimited time to survey the downfield movement. He completed 38 of 55 passes for 401 yards, a Peach Bowl record, and three touchdowns. Two other passes were intercepted and Illinois had four damaging turnovers to just one for Army.
Pat Evans, showing no effects from an early-season knee injury, set up one touchdown with a 48-yard run and scored on a 19-yard run today to lead the Air Force to a 24-16 victory over Texas in the 27th Bluebonnet Bowl. The Falcons forced Texas to settle for second-half field goals of 24, 31 and 28 yards by Jeff Ward, the last coming with 7 minutes 34 seconds left in the game. The Falcons, who won their fourth consecutive bowl game, took a 14-7 halftime lead with a pair of touchdowns in 1:59 of the first quarter.
The Dow Jones industrial average lost 3.79 points, to close at 1,546.67, in a not-so-stunning finale to what has been the stock market’s second-best year ever, in terms of percentage gain, and its finest performance in a decade. For 1985, the Dow was up 27 percent, fueled by the yearlong drop in interest rates and inflation. Volume remained somewhat depressed, at slightly more than 112 million shares, as investors, already fat with profits for the year, took an early start on today’s New Year’s Day break.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1546.67 (-3.79)
Born:
Antwan Applewhite, NFL linebacker (San Diego Chargers, Carolina Panthers), in Los Angeles, California.
Evan Reed, MLB pitcher (Detroit Tigers), in Santa Maria, California.
Died:
Ricky Nelson, 45, American pop-rock star (“Hello Mary Lou”; “It’s Late”; “Garden Party”) and actor (“The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”), in a plane crash.
Sam Spiegel, 84, American film producer (“On the Waterfront”, “The Bridge on the River Kwai”, “Lawrence of Arabia”).
History Diaries 