20 days to launch.
A form of Soviet jobless benefits and an unusual public discussion about unemployment have been introduced in the Soviet Union as a result of the economic policies instituted by Mikhail S. Gorbachev. A Soviet Government economist has suggested that the modernization of the economy advocated by the Soviet leader could put millions of people temporarily out of work. Western diplomats said the developments challenge a fundamental precept of the Soviet system, that full employment is guaranteed. The Government has not acknowledged the existence of unemployment since 1930, when it declared that the problem had been eliminated. Soviet law requires people of working age, with rare exceptions, to be employed. Moscow frequently cites joblessness in the West as evidence of the failure and cruelty of capitalism. Any significant loss of jobs could have political and social ramifications, the diplomats said.
A subsidiary of the giant Flick industrial empire paid an indemnity of over $2 million today to a New York-based organization representing the interests of Jews who were used as slave laborers by the Nazis. The payment by the Dusseldorf company, Feldmuhle Nobel A.G., brought to a conclusion a long attempt by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany to obtain reparations for about 1,300 survivors among the Jews who were forced to work in gunpowder factories during World War II. Most of them were young women from Hungary and Czechoslovakia who had been deported from Nazi death camps to work for Dynamit Nobel, as the company was then known. The sale last month of most of the Flick holding company to Deutsche Bank, West Germany’s largest private commercial bank, prompted Robert M. W. Kempner, the former deputy American counsel at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, to urge that steps be taken “to rid the company of the stigma of nonpayment of reparations to the surviving victims of slave labor.”
The French Government announced today that it planned to conduct its largest military maneuvers since World War II in West Germany next year. Officials said the maneuvers were intended to test the ability of France’s new 47,000-man Rapid Action Force to come to West Germany’s defense in the event of an attack by the Warsaw Pact. They will involve a total of 150,000 soldiers, 90,000 of them from France and the rest from West Germany.
A former Prime Minister of Belgium went on trial today on charges of committing business fraud while in office. The former Prime Minister, Paul Vanden Boeynants, who was in office from 1965 to 1968 and 1978 to 1979, is accused of income-tax evasion and other fiscal crimes related to his business activities in real estate and slaughterhouses. Mr. Vanden Boeynants, 66 years old, a former president of the Social Christian Party, reportedly faces a prison term of up to five years if convicted. He pleaded not guilty. The judge ordered a two-week recess to give the prosecution time to respond to a defense motion that all charges filed after 1982 — about half the total charges — be dismissed because of Mr. Vanden Boeynants’s parliamentary immunity from prosecution. The Belgian Parliament suspended the immunity in 1982. The trial is expected to last for several months.
Hundreds of angry Muslims confronted a group of Israeli legislators today on the Temple Mount, one of the most sacred sites for both Jews and Muslims, and forced them to leave the area, the police said. The police said the confrontation began when members of Interior Committee of Parliament, on an official tour, got into an argument with officials of the Muslim religious authority that controls the area. The issue was whether the Israelis were allowed to take photographs.
Maronite Catholics in Lebanon declined to endorse a peace agreement between warring militias, saying they need more time to review the Syrian-brokered accord. Maronite prelates, meeting in a Beirut suburb, said the proposed constitutional changes must be studied thoroughly “to determine whether or not they constitute a threat to the Christians’ existence in Lebanon.” The accord would limit the Christians’ traditionally dominant role in Lebanese politics. Meanwhile, the so-called Islamic Gathering — a body of prominent legislators, former prime ministers and Cabinet members of the economically powerful Sunni Muslim community — endorsed the peace pact.
The President ordered Libyan assets in the United States and in American bank branches overseas frozen. At the same time, the State Department issued a report giving details of its charges that Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Government supports global terrorism. The freeze on assets is less sweeping than one imposed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 on Iranian assets. Mr. Reagan’s order applies to fixed property and funds in American banks and their branches abroad, but not to funds in foreign subsidiaries of American banks. Mr. Reagan’s order is limited to Libyan Government assets and does not affect the holdings of private individuals. The action came a day after the President announced measures virtually severing all economic ties with Libya and ordered Americans living there to depart. The report charging Libyan complicity in terrorism included some new allegations about assistance given to terrorist groups by Colonel Qaddafi. It was issued in an effort to bolster the Government’s case for a worldwide boycott of Libya.
President Reagan’s appeal to isolate Libya received a tepid response from Western European Governments and Japan today. All expressed doubts about the merits of economic sanctions. In Bonn, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Cabinet considered the President’s trade embargo against Libya at the top of its agenda but affirmed a government decision, announced last week, that it would not impose economic sanctions of its own. “Past experience shows that sanctions, regardless of who imposes them, have never had the desired result and have often produced the opposite effect,” declared Friedhelm Ost, the government spokesman. At a news conference, Mr. Ost expressed sympathy for American outrage over terrorist attacks on civilians at Rome and Vienna airports and said that Bonn condemned terrorism and forces supporting it. Asked if this meant Libya, he answered: “You can interpret it that way.” Mr. Ost appealed to West German companies not to pick up business lost by American concerns because of the steps announced by Washington on Tuesday. After Italy, West Germany is Libya’s biggest Western European trading partner, and some 1,500 West Germans work in the North African nation.
Americans living in Libya reacted with anger and resignation to President Reagan’s order that they leave the country by February 1 or face penalties when they return home. Despite years of strain in American-Libyan relations, Americans interviewed agreed they had not felt threatened or endangered in Libya. “I’m thunderstruck,” said an American who has worked for more than a decade for Oasis Oil in Libya. “I’ve got no earthly idea what I will do.” He asked that his name not be used. But at least one American family, long-term residents here, said they had made up their minds. “We will probably go,” said Skender Brame, head of the recreation department at the Oil Companies’ School, popularly known as the American School, in Tripoli. “We don’t want to do anything to break the law.”
Many Muslim governments, ranging from radical Iran to pro-Western Kuwait, have issued strong statements of support for Libya in its confrontation with the United States. In Fez, Morocco, a meeting of foreign ministers of the Islamic Conference Organization adopted a declaration Tuesday, saying that it considered the “imperialist-Zionist threat” to Libya a threat to all Muslim countries. The declaration of the 45-member organization, which includes such allies of the United States as Pakistan and Turkey, expressed solidarity with the Libyans and “active support in defense of their sovereignty, territorial integrity and territorial waters.” The Sixth Fleet is on station off Libya.
U.S. intelligence officials have detected a “marked increase” in Soviet arms shipments to Afghanistan in recent weeks, Administration sources said. They noted a major increase in artillery shipments and said there is also evidence that the Soviets are sending more advanced helicopter gunships and ground-attack airplanes. One source said that while the Soviets are taking a softer line in recent statements on Afghanistan, the increased firepower indicates they are still “going for a military victory.”
Gunmen from an indigenous ethnic group known as Karens attacked a Government-owned passenger ferry in southern Burma last Thursday, killing 46 passengers and wounding 136 others, the official Burmese press agency reported today. The agency said the Karens had fired on the Sindaw, a vessel belonging to the Water Transportation Corporation. It was taking passengers and cargo from the southern city of Moulmein to Kya-In, a town on the Ataran river 70 miles southeast of Rangoon. The press agency gave no other details. The Karens, entrenched in southeast Burma near the border of Thailand and Burma, have been fighting the Rangoon Government for more than three decades in support of their demand for a separate and independent state.
Thousands of Chinese, many wearing white flowers as a sign of mourning, gathered in Tiananmen Square to pay silent tribute to Communist China’s first premier, Chou En-lai, on the 10th anniversary of his death. Despite the lack of any official commemoration, ordinary citizens left paper-flower wreaths and poetic tributes to Chou at the base of a monument to the people’s heroes. Chinese sources said the Communist Party took no official notice of the anniversary, in part because it would have set a precedent for observing the 10th anniversary of Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s death in September, 1976.
Philippine security guards arrested an armed man after he shook hands with the daughter of President Ferdinand E. Marcos, police reported. Maria, Imelda (Imee) Marcos Manotoc, 30, was campaigning for her father in a crowded district of Manila when the incident took place. The suspect, identified as Ebenezer Villar, 27, had a .38-caliber revolver tucked in the waistband of his trousers, police said. Villar was charged with illegal possession of firearms. The Manila newspaper Tempo quoted Villar as telling police he carried a gun for protection because he was new to the city.
Haiti closed schools and warned that troops will crush all demonstrations in an attempt to halt a wave of violence that has claimed at least five lives since November 28. Thousands of students have boycotted classes to protest poor living conditions and a July 22 referendum that increased the power of Jean-Claude Duvalier, self-appointed president for life. In protests this week, hundreds of people blocked highways in Gonaives and in Petit Goave on Haiti’s southern peninsula, and others tried to set fire to tax and customs offices.
Cuban Attorney General Idalberto Ladron de Guevara, who headed the state prosecution office, has been replaced. A brief Government communique said today that Mr. Guevara had been replaced by Ramon de la Cruz Ochoa, formerly Deputy Minister of Justice. No reason for the change was given. Diplomats said the change, announced less than a month before the Communist Party congress opens, was a further indication of a shake-up in Cuba’s police and legal departments. Last month, the Government replaced Interior Minister Ramiro Valdes Menendez.
As many as four million people face starvation in Sudan because too little food has been donated and supplies are stranded on Red Sea docks, relief agencies said. “What’s happened is that the world thinks the famine is over, and they’re wrong,” said Chris Daniel, medical director in Sudan for Oxfam, Britain’s top private relief agency. Less than half of the 400,000 tons of food relief that agencies believe that Sudan needs in 1986 has been pledged by wealthy nations and still less has been delivered, said Nick Winer, Oxfam’s field director in Sudan.
An American Congressional delegation met today with South Africa’s President, P. W. Botha, and members indicated later that they had come away with the impression that the prospects for racial change in this divided land were limited. Across the country, meanwhile, the authorities reported continued turbulence in the nation’s schools, with 900,000 black pupils defying official orders to return to their classes at the beginning of a new semester. In Johannesburg, Winnie Mandela, the black anti-apartheid activist, brought a court action against the authorities to seek the annulment of an order, announced December 21, that forbids her from living at her home in Soweto. Her lawyer, Ismail Ayob, said it was the first time Mrs. Mandela had sought legal recourse against the restrictions that have limited her movement for much of the last 23 years.
Half a block from the South African Embassy, Bishop Desmond M. Tutu today addressed a crowd of cheering, chanting demonstrators opposing that country’s policy of strict racial separation, telling them that their support was a “wonderful boost” to the “victims of apartheid.” “I know I speak on behalf of millions when I say ‘thank you’ to you and the many others who can’t be here physically,” said Bishop Tutu, the Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg who won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize. The Bishop was presented with letters of support signed by more than one million Americans, according to Randall Robinson, director of TransAfrica, a human rights group, and co-chairman of the Free South Africa Movement, which has organized protests at the South African Embassy for more than a year. Truck Delivers the Letters The letters, in scores of boxes delivered by a pickup truck, were circulated in response to criticism of Bishop Tutu last year by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the head of Moral Majority. After a trip to South Africa last summer, Mr. Falwell questioned Bishop Tutu’s authority to speak for South African blacks.
The shuttle Columbia and its crew were delayed again today when problems with a rocket fuel control valve forced the space agency to cancel the launching set for Thursday morning. It was the fifth postponement of this flight. A new launching date for the Columbia was tentatively set for 6:55 AM Friday, but conditions were expected to be marginal. “This launching date adjustment is required to determine why” a liquid oxygen valve “failed to close property,” the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. Since the first countdown started December 18, the Columbia has been gounded six times. While engineers worked on the Columbia, another ground team put the shuttle Challenger and its crew, including a school teacher, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, through a countdown rehearsal nearby. The Challenger is due to be launched January 23.
[Ed: The frustration over the delays with Columbia will tragically create an environment where too many — both inside NASA and in the government — press ahead with the Challenger launch in spite of concerns from engineers.]
The Reagan Administration’s 1987 budget will propose that some government loans be sold to private investors in an effort to reduce the federal deficit, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget confirmed. “There will be some loan sales, but it will not be a major part of the budget,” the spokesman said. The sales would amount to $2 billion to $3 billion out of the government’s $245-billion portfolio, according to the New York Times, but they could grow substantially in subsequent years. “I think that will be a theme in the budget,” said a senior economic policy official who asked not to be identified. The report said that officials at various government departments were studying an OMB proposal to sell loans.
Despite President Reagan’s assurances, the order he signed secretly November 1 calls for wide-scale polygraph tests that could subject more than 129,000 people to random lie detector testing, a congressional chairman charged. “I was stunned by the President’s denial that his directive would implement a massive, random polygraph screening program,” said Rep. Jack Brooks (D-Texas), chairman of the House Government Operations Committee. “It is apparent that the President still doesn’t understand his own directive.” At a news conference Tuesday, Reagan said the polygraph would be used only “as an investigatory tool,” and would apply to “only a limited number that actually deal with classified materials.”
The Reagan Administration said it is taking steps to make sure that hospitalized Medicare recipients are aware of their legal rights against premature release but insisted the action merely reinforces efforts already in place. An official of the Health Care Financing Administration, which runs Medicare, said the agency is drafting a model letter to be given Medicare recipients when they are hospitalized, which will detail appeal rights. Consumer groups have urged the Government to require such notices as a way to combat what they call the “dumping” of patients: the premature discharge of Medicare patients by hospitals to save or make money. President Reagan said in response to a question at his news conference Tuesday that the Administration was examining the issue, but he gave no specifics. Medicare finances health care for 30 million elderly or disabled people.
President Reagan receives a report about the U.S.-Canadian bilateral study of acid rain.
President Reagan places a call to former President Richard M. Nixon.
The unemployment rate dropped by one-tenth of a percentage point in December to 6.8 percent, the lowest level in nearly five years, the Labor Department reported. This is the lowest rate since the start of the Reagan Administration. Coupled with a solid December gain in employment, the reduction in unemployment suggested that the economy continued to expand at a healthy pace, stronger than most private analysts expected. Several favorable aspects of the report included a 320,000 rise in the number of nonfarm wage and salaried jobs; a record total of 60.4 percent of the civilian population 16 years and over at work, higher than even the peak of World War II, and total employment, reaching a record of 108.2 million, including agriculture and the self-employed.
The Justice Department is actively investigating ways to blunt the effects of the Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda decision requiring the police to inform criminal suspects of their constitutional rights before questioning, or to overturn it, department officials say. In recent weeks they have said that the department was considering several options but that it had made no final decision on how, or whether, to attack the decision in Miranda v. Arizona, which Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d recently described as “infamous” and wrong. The department, one official said, may file a brief with the Supreme Court asking the justices to overturn the earlier decision, which came in a rape and kidnapping case involving Ernesto A. Miranda. Under another proposal, the official said the department would attempt to enforce a 1968 Federal law designed by Congress to reverse some effects of the Miranda decision. The law, which has been largely ignored because of concern about its constitutionality, permits use of voluntary confessions in Federal cases, even if suspects are not advised of their rights before questioning.
Military bases around the United States have been seeking ways to prevent terrorist attacks since the bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American servicemen in October 1983. But commanders and security officers readily acknowledge that there is a limit to what they can do to protect bases that are close to cities, as are many Navy ports, or that contain wide-open areas for training, as do many Army posts. “You have to understand,” said Lieutenant Colonel George B. Atkinson, provost marshal at the Marine Air Station here, “that American military bases were not built to defend themselves against the American people.” The marines here, as at most other stations, have added guards at the gates, roving patrols, electronic surveillance, patrols with automatic weapons near aircraft and quick-reaction teams to repel invaders.
Selling Government loans to private investors is likely to be part of President Reagan’s budget for the 1987 fiscal year, according to Administration officials. Proceeds from the sale of some of the $245 billion portfolio of Government loans would be a step in efforts to reduce the Federal budget deficit and would be in line with Mr. Reagan’s desire to reduce the size of the Government.
Nuclear regulators have been trying for more than a decade to get the Sequoyah Fuels Corporation in Gore, Oklahoma, to devise an evacuation plan for chemical and nuclear accidents, following a 1972 accident similar to the one that killed a worker and injured dozens Saturday, according to documents and officials. No detailed evacuation plan was drawn up, officials said, and those living around the plant said they received no specific instructions from the company about what to do in an accident. There were no public sirens, leaflets, emergency drills or other measures, the residents said. The principal measure listed by the company in its response plan was calling the local Highway Patrol, which it did on Saturday, 20 minutes after a chemical storage tank ruptured. The documents on the subject, held by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in two file cabinets at a library near here, also urged the company to do “what-if” planning for the worst possible accidents, but there is no indication that such planning occurred.
More than 600 people gathered with bowed heads today at the Vian High School auditorium to mourn their neighbor, James N. Harrison, the only man to die in an industrial accident Saturday that released a cloud of toxic gas from the Kerr-McGee Corporation’s nearby uranium processing plant. The blacks, whites and a few Indians filled most of the seats at the funeral for Mr. Harrison, 26 years old, a man widely known as Chief, apparently because his heritage was half Cherokee. Silently, at the direction of the Rev. Cecil Eaves, pastor of the Mount Olive Baptist Church, to which Mr. Harrison belonged, they bowed their heads to read an obituary that ended: “Chief, you told no one farewell No, not even a goodbye. You were gone before we knew it, And only God knows why.”
A stream of witnesses took the stand in Circuit Court here today and attested to the honor and character of the six young men who sat silently at a courtroom table before them. The five Miami policemen and one former officer who are defendants were at the same table Tuesday when other policemen linked them to one of a series of drug-related crimes. Their arrests, and other incidents, have rocked the city and raised questions about Miami’s police officers, especially those hired after the department was pushed early in this decade to rapidly absorb many new recruits from minority groups. The six officers face charges ranging from cocaine trafficking to murder. They are accused of raiding a lobster boat docked on the Miami River last July and making off with about 750 pounds of cocaine stored on board.
A new right for Medicare patients will take effect soon, according to Federal health officials. They said the Federal Government would require hospitals to tell the patients they have a legal right to challenge their discharge from a hospital if they think they are being sent home prematurely.
Army personnel have returned to the site of last month’s charter plane crash in Canada in an effort to find “anything” that would help identify the rest of the 248 soldiers who died there, a spokesman said in Dover, Delaware. He added that 111 bodies have been identified. Military experts and Canadian officials are working at the crash site in Gander, Newfoundland, “to see if there are any additional body remains,” the spokesman said.
About 46,500 members of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union continued working today under an extension of contracts with the nation’s oil and gas industry. The union’s old contracts expired at 12:01 AM, but the members continued to work as negotiations proceeded, despite the fact that the union rejected contract proposals today from Amoco and seven other major companies.
The U.S. Government said today that it would require pilots, flight engineers and cabin attendants to take tests of blood alcohol when requested by the authorities or face the loss of their certificates. Donald D. Engen, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, said the rule would take effect April 9. Mr. Engen said incidents of alcohol abuse among pilots have dropped since 1971, when it was cited as a contributing factor in 12.6 percent of all fatal accidents on flights other than those of airlines or the military. In 1984, he said, the figure was 4.8 percent.
A group of sea lions passed up their morning feeding foray into the Ballard Locks in Washington state today, apparently unwilling to undergo a second day of noise from underwater firecrackers. Observers at the locks failed to spot any of the five sea lions, one of which has been nicknamed Herschel, that have gorged for weeks on steelhead trout beginning their run through a canal to their spawning beds around Lake Washington.
Surgeons had no choice but to finish transplanting a liver into a middle-aged man after learning the donor had been exposed to the deadly AIDS virus, a doctor said in Pittsburgh. “The risks are really nil,” that the donor, an unidentified teenage boy, had AIDS, said transplant pioneer Dr. Thomas E. Starzl of the Presbyterian-University Hospital.
An advance on the common cold has been made, according to research teams in the United States and Australia. The two studies, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that the antiviral substance interferon was useful in preventing the spread of cold virus infections in families after one member of each family had developed cold symptoms.
A snowstorm socked parts of Texas with a seven-inch fall in Del Rio on the Mexican border. Winds up to 65 mph battered Montana, while gusts also swept over northeastern Florida and from St. Simons Island, Georgia, to Daytona Beach, Florida. In Del Rio, “everything is closed,” a sheriff’s clerk said. The city is full of visitors who went south to escape the frigid winter. Scattered snow showers were reported over the Great Lakes, northern Rockies and the northern Plateau.
The Voyager 2 spacecraft, speeding toward Uranus, has discovered another moon orbiting the giant planet, the sixth to be identified, space agency scientists announced yesterday. The new moon was detected in long-exposure television images taken late last month when Voyager 2 was still 19 million miles away from Uranus, the third-largest planet in the solar system and the seventh out from the Sun. The spacecraft is now 12.8 million miles away and is scheduled to pass within 50,600 miles from the planet’s cloud tops January 24.
Willie McCovey is the only player elected this year to the Hall of Fame by the BBWAA, and becomes the 16th player elected in his first year of eligibility. Billy Williams falls 4 votes shy of the 319 needed for election.
The Dow Jones industrials plunged 39 points, the biggest fall ever for the average, as the stock market was shaken by a sudden shift in Wall Street’s thinking about interest rates. Trading on the New York Stock Exchange exceeded 180 million shares, making it the fifth-busiest day in history. At a time when stock prices have been rising rapidly on hopes that rates would continue to drop, a switch to predictions of stable borrowing costs troubled many traders.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1526.61 (-39.1)
Born:
Peng Shuai, Chinese tennis player (1st Chinese player to reach No.1 ranking — doubles with Hsieh Su-wei of Taiwan, 2014), in Xiangtan, China.
James Russell, MLB pitcher (Chicago Cubs, Atlanta Braves, Philadelphia Phillies), in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Jaclyn Linetsky, Canadian actress (“Caillou”; “15/Love”), in Montreal, Quebec, Canada (d. 2003).
Died:
Yaroslav Seifert, Czech poet (Nobel 1984).
History Diaries 