The theatrical exit of the Defense Secretary from the Cabinet room at 10 Downing Street, coupled with his detailed indictment of Margaret Thatcher’s manner of running her Government, may not have enhanced his own chances of becoming the next leader of the Conservative Party. But there was little doubt among politicians today that the resignation Thursday of the defense chief, Michael Heseltine, cut short a seeming revival in the Prime Minister’s political fortunes. It was the first walkout from a British Cabinet meeting since Joseph Chamberlain broke with William Gladstone on the seemingly eternal Irish question 99 years ago. But Mrs. Thatcher went on about her business with the purposefulness that has been her hallmark since she came to power in 1979. In a meeting today with American journalists, she said she was sad to “lose” Mr. Heseltine, then briskly pronounced the matter closed. “We shall have to put this behind us,” she declared. But the issues Mr. Heseltine had scattered in his wake seemed certain to reverberate for weeks to come. Least significant of these, in the view of most politicians, was the one that seemed to matter most to Mr. Heseltine: that of the future of a nearly bankrupt helicopter company with no pending commercial orders that has somehow become the prize in a hard-fought battle between two multinational consortiums that are offering to bail it out in exchange for a minority holding. The general view was voiced by a member of the Cabinet who dismissed it as “the most piddling affair.”
A bid by the United Technologies Corporation and Fiat S.p.A. to rescue Britain’s financially troubled helicopter maker, Westland P.L.C., has been set back by large purchases of the company’s stock by an investor advocating a rival European offer. Analysts and investment bankers said today that it now appeared unlikely that the United Technologies-Fiat offer would receive enough votes from shareholders to succeed. To be approved, the bailout plan would have to be endorsed by 75 percent of Westland’s shareholders at a special meeting scheduled for next Tuesday.
The Soviet authorities today told Irina McClellan, the Soviet wife of an American professor, that her daughter could move with her to the United States. Mrs. McClellan, who has been separated from her husband for 11 years, had delayed her departure to appeal the denial of an exit visa for her daughter by a previous marriage. Mrs. McClellan, who was told late last month that she could leave the Soviet Union but that her daughter could not, wrote on January 2 to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, asking him to intervene. Mrs. McClellan said today that she did not know whether Mr. Gorbachev was responsible for the sudden change. She said an official at the Office of Visas and Registrations, the agency responsible for emigration requests, told her this morning that an exit visa for her daughter would be issued. The daughter, Yelena Kochetkov, is 26 years old and has had two operations for a stomach ulcer. Mrs. McClellan, 47, is married to Woodford McClellan, a history professor at the University of Virginia. They were married on May 4, 1974, and have not seen each other since his visa to visit Moscow expired that August.
Charles Z. Wick, Director of the United States Information Agency, will leave Sunday for a two-week trip to the Soviet Union to discuss implementation of cultural accords, the U.S.I.A. announced today. Mr. Wick will meet with Soviet officials to discuss the accords signed by President Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, at their summit meeting in Geneva last November.
The Spanish police today freed a kidnapped Basque industrialist, arrested 20 people and seized arms in raids that dealt a serious blow to Basque separatist guerrillas, officials said. The industrialist, Juan Pedro Guzman, 43 years old, was freed unharmed before dawn after police officers surrounded an apartment in the village of Basauri where he had been held for 11 days. The police said that in later raids throughout the province they arrested 17 more suspects, seized arms and explosives and uncovered plans to attack security forces and public buildings.
Britain’s Prime Minister warned that retaliatory strikes against targets in Libya might produce “much greater chaos,” and said that terrorism had to be fought by legal means. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made the remarks at a news conference in London that was limited to American correspondents. They pressed her repeatedly on Britain’s response to President Reagan’s call for measures against Libya. Her response about retaliatory strikes came after she had repeatedly ruled out economic sanctions as an effective way of countering terrorism. “We suffer from terrorism in this country and in Northern Ireland,” she said. “Please may I remind you that we have suffered over 2,000 deaths at the hands of terrorists, so are well aware of the problems, and at no stage has anyone in this country suggested that we make retaliatory strikes or go in hot pursuit or anything like that.” The Prime Minister quickly acknowledged that the analogy she appeared to be drawing was inexact, noting that the position of the Irish Republic on terrorism was “wholly different” from Libya’s. “But once you start to go across borders,” she said, “then I do not see an end to it. And I uphold international law very firmly.”
Foreign ministers from the 12 European Economic Community nations plan to meet in The Hague this month to discuss President Reagan’s call for economic sanctions against Libya, the Dutch Foreign Ministry announced today. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the Netherlands, which is the current chairman of the Common Market Foreign Ministers Council, had proposed January 21 for the meeting and believed this date would be accepted, although not all members have sent replies yet. The spokesman said the main purpose of the meeting was to discuss “ways of strengthening Europe’s fight against terrorism” as well as the call by the United States for economic sanctions against Libya. Most European governments have already ruled out economic sanctions, arguing that these would damage their own economies at a time of high unemployment without changing Libya’s behavior. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain again ruled out economic or military reprisals against Libya in a talk with reporters in London today.
Greece has deported eight unidentified Arabs suspected of terrorist links in the last few days but has so far denied information on them to other Western governments, Western officials say. These officials said the case highlighted dissatisfaction among some of Greece’s friends over what they consider a failure by the Government of Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou to cooperate fully in joint international measures to combat terrorism. The criticism is not directed at Greece’s political attitude, which is in line with the general Western European unwillingness to join American sanctions against Libya. Rather, Greece is said to lag in such matters as sharing information with other Western countries on the movement and activities of suspects, or their extradition for trial. In the case of the eight suspects deported separately since last week, Greek authorities were said to have withheld from some allied and friendly nations any information on their names or nationalities, and in some cases to have also withheld information on their destinations or on the nature of the activities of which they were suspected. Nevertheless, some foreign officials say they believe Greek security agencies had done a good job in detecting and arresting the suspects, who the officials believe came here from various countries for what may have been a session to plan future actions.
U.S. sanctions against Syria similar to those imposed on Libya are possible, Reagan Administration officials said, but they added that there were no plans for them at this time. Amid sometimes contradictory comments by different officials, Robert B. Oakley, the head of the State Department’s counterterrorism office, said today that he and other high officials stood by a statement on Thursday that there could be sanctions against Syria if its support for the Abu Nidal Palestinian group could be traced to future terrorist actions.
The Administration has accused the Abu Nidal group, which is opposed to the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization faction led by Yasser Arafat, of carrying out terrorist attacks, including the attacks December 27 at the Rome and Vienna airports. Mr. Oakley, in an interview, said there were no plans for sanctions against Syria at the moment because the United States lacked the direct evidence against Syria that it said it had against Libya, linking it to the airport attacks. Those attacks left 19 people dead, including 5 Americans and 4 of the attackers.
The Internal Revenue Service says it will investigate the tax-exempt status of the Iran Relief Fund, a group that Federal officials have linked with an Iranian terrorist organization. “We’re going to take whatever action is necessary,” said Rod Young, a spokesman for the I.R.S., after confirming that a group listed as the Iran Relief Fund of New York was on the exemption rolls. The State Department said last month that the Iran Relief Fund was the American fund-raising arm of the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, a group that the department said had engaged in “bombings, assassinations of Iranians, attacks on Israeli offices in Tehran and bank robberies” since it was started in 1960.
At least 3 people were killed and 500 Sikhs were reported arrested today in clashes between the police and Sikh extremists staging an anti-Government protest throughout the northern Indian state of Punjab. The militants, who were protesting the imprisonment of fellow Sikh extremists, exchanged gunfire with the police, threw stones at traffic, set fire to trucks and buildings and blocked roads and railways, according to Indian news agency reports. It was the most extensive day of agitation and violence since the signing of an accord last summer between Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and moderate Sikh leaders. The moderates later went on to win the state election and take over the state government. The violence also marked the first open clash between the Sikh extremists and the state government of Surjit Singh Barnala, the Chief Minister of Punjab state. News agency reports said that a police officer was shot dead by three extremists in Ludhiana and that shots were fired at another officer. A man speaking against the statewide protest was also reportedly shot and killed in a Sikh temple. Police officers killed one of the assailants and captured the other three.
President Reagan meets with the Foreign Minister of Japan Shintaro Abe.
The South Pacific island nation of Palau signs the Compact of Free Association with the U.S.
Canada announced a series of steps tonight in support of the Reagan Administration’s sanctions against Libya. In a statement issued by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, the Government said it would halt all help to Canadian companies doing business with the Government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, ban new exports of technically advanced oil-drilling equipment to Libya and block any attempts by Libya to obtain technical assistance through Canada that was denied by the United States. “We do not want them to do by the back door what they could not do by the front door,” the Foreign Minister, Joe Clark, said after Mr. Mulroney issued a statement condemning terrorism.
President Reagan will fly to Grenada next month to confer with Caribbean leaders and honor the 19 American servicemen killed when United States forces stormed the island and ousted its Marxist Government, it was announced today. During the four-hour visit on Feb. 20, the President also will address citizens at Queen’s Park in St. George’s, the capital, and visit the campus of the island medical school, where a 6-foot bronze monument was unveiled last year in tribute to the servicemen killed in the invasion that began Oct. 25, 1983.
Thousands of Bolivian coca farmers, enraged because a Government anti-drug squad destroyed hundreds of coca paste factories, have held 245 police officers under siege for three days, the police said today. Coca paste, made from the leaves of the coca plant, is the basic ingredient in making cocaine. The head of Bolivia’s narcotics police, Colonel Guido Lopez, said in a telephone interview that he and Interior Ministry officials would meet with leaders of the farmers to try to negotiate an end to the siege, in a remote area of east-central Bolivia. About 17,000 angry coca-leaf farmers, led by cocaine traffickers, surrounded the police camp in Ivargazama in the Chapare area on Tuesday after the officers destroyed the cocaine paste factories, Colonel Lopez said.
Six United States members of Congress, on the last day of a tour of South Africa, ran into harsh criticism today when they were attacked by the state-run radio and snubbed by a black group. The South African radio said the delegation led by Representative William H. Gray 3d, Democrat of Pennsylvania, personified a “form of foreign interference in the country’s affairs that has grown dramatically in popularity among a certain kind of Western politician in the last year or two.” The black group that refused to meet with the delegation is the Azanian People’s Organization. A spokesman, Muntu Myeza, said the group regarded the legislators as part of an American administration hostile to change in South Africa. Mr. Gray said the delegation had asked for a meeting with Winnie Mandela, the black nationalist leader, but had not received a reply.
Florida storms delayed the launching of the space shuttle Columbia at Cape Canaveral for the seventh time, setting a record for space shuttle launching postponements. Disappointed space officials scheduled another attempt for early Sunday. “Looking out the window, we could pretty well see that we weren’t going anywhere today,” the mission commander, Lieut. Comdr. Robert L. Gibson of the Navy, said as the postponement was announced. So far, the mission’s three weeks of delays have had little impact on future shuttle missions, even though this year’s schedule is the most ambitious yet, with 15 flights planned. Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said one reason was that new launching pads were giving the shuttle program greater flexibility. This year the original shuttle launching pad at the Kennedy Space Center, 39A, is to be joined by two others, 39B here in Florida and another at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. In the past a single delay could upset a whole year’s schedule. The postponement today had its biggest impact on the forthcoming flight of the space shuttle Challenger, pushing its scheduled launching back a day to January 24.
President Reagan will ask for a stronger Presidential hand in shaping the Federal budget when he delivers his State of the Union Message on January 28, the White House said today. Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, said one of the ideas Mr. Reagan wanted to talk about was changing the way Congress considers the budget, so that the spending ceilings that Congress now adopts by nonbinding resolution would instead be signed into law. “The President thinks that if it’s going to be called the President’s budget, it should become more of the President’s budget,” Mr. Speakes said. “But from the moment it leaves the White House in early February and arrives at Capitol Hill it is no longer the President’s budget; he has very little to do with it except his powers of persuasion.”
A panel of three Federal judges heard nearly three hours of impassioned debate today on the constitutionality of a new budget-balancing law signed 29 days ago by President Reagan. The court heard from six lawyers representing a multitude of interests, including the Reagan Administration, the Senate, the House of Representatives and retired Federal employees, who say they have already lost a cost-of-living increase in their pension benefits as a result of the law. The law, whose Republican sponsors in the Senate were Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire, requires that the deficit be reduced in large installments over the next five years to achieve a balanced budget by 1991. The statute sets deficit ceilings for each year and requires that Federal spending be cut automatically, across the board with a few specified exceptions, if the expected deficit exceeds the targets.
The President and First Lady watch the movie “The Jewel of the Nile.”
A dispute over hiring goals for Federal contractors nears resolution as Cabinet officials iron out differences over wording of an executive order on affirmative action, Reagan Administration officials said. The order would establish voluntary goals instead of strict quotas for the hiring of minorities and women. The officials said the two key disputants, Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d and Labor Secretary Bill Brock, were moving toward an agreement calling for “voluntary goals.” Such wording would satisfy Mr. Meese’s insistence that contractors not be legally required to meet the goals. He had, in effect, urged the elimination of the current executive order, a move Mr. Brock resisted. The order was issued in 1965 by President Johnson.
The Reagan Administration has no plans for shortening workers’ hours throughout the Government as a way to help bring spending and the deficit within targets set in the new budget-balancing law, although some agencies may choose that course instead of layoffs, the Office of Management and Budget said today. Edwin L. Dale Jr., the budget office spokesman, responded to reports circulating among Federal agencies that starting in February, Federal workers might work four days a week or nine days in two weeks.
In a speech today commemorating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bishop Desmond M. Tutu praised the slain civil rights leader as being “part of a great tradition of American blacks who have served to inspire us black South Africans in our struggle for justice.” Addressing more than 800 hospital employees and city political leaders at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, the 54-year-old Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg also said the greatest evil of South Africa’s policy of strict racial separation was the negative self-image it imposed on blacks. “You who have been the victims of injustice and oppression know only too well just how debilitating, how demoralizing, how conditioning oppression can be,” he told his racially mixed audience. In a speech interrupted several times by applause, Bishop Tutu praised Dr. King as a visionary who saw clearly the indivisible nature of human freedom.
Texaco won a crucial round in its high-stakes legal battle with the Pennzoil Company when a Federal judge in White Plains ruled that Texaco would not have to post a $12 billion bond to appeal the tangled court case in Texas. Federal District Judge Charles L. Brieant said that the “concept of posting a bond of more than $12 billion is just so absurd, so impractical and so expensive that it hardly bears discussion.”
A South Carolina man was executed for the murders of two teenagers, committed eight years ago when he was 17 years old. Despite international protest, James Terry Roach was the first person involuntarily put to death in the United States in 22 years for a crime committed by someone under the age of 18. Governor Richard W. Riley’s refusal to stop the execution brought entreaties from Mother Teresa, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the secretaries-general of the United Nations and the Organization of the American States, to halt it because of the age issue. Several months ago, former President Jimmy Carter wrote Mr. Riley asking clemency for Mr. Roach. Mr. Roach was pronounced dead at 5:16 A.M., nine minutes after receiving the first of two electrical surges. He was executed for the brutal killings of Tommy Taylor, 17, and Carlotta Hartness, 14, in late October 1977. Another defendant, Joseph C. Shaw, then 22, was executed last year. A third man, Ronald Mahaffey, was a state’s witness and was sentenced to life in prison.
A man walked into the hospital where his 2-year-old grandson, beaten and burned with cigarettes, lay in a coma and killed the man he believed responsible, the police said today. Investigators said Charles Edward Jones, 48, shot Bobby Gann, 23, “several times” with a .38-caliber revolver in a waiting room at Vanderbilt Hospital Thursday night. Mr. Jones was charged with murder today. The police said Mr. Gann was a suspect in the beating and apparent torture of the child, Ryan Reed, and that they had planned to arrest him today. A hospital spokesman said the child, who had severe head injuries, was “declared brain dead” at 11:17 AM today. The police said Mr. Gann, fiancé of the boy’s mother, Angela Reed, 24, brought the boy to the hospital Wednesday. Mrs. Reed’s husband was recently killed in an automobile accident.
A Florida convict serving time in a murder-for-hire plot and his wife have been arrested on charges that they planned to kidnap Governor Bob Graham in a bid for the convict’s freedom, the authorities said. Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said the man, Howard Wayne Crawford, 44 years old, and his wife, Vicki Jill Crawford, 39, of Portland, Oregon, intended to demand his release from Union Correctional Institution in exchange for the Governor.
The Norfolk, Virginia house of John A. Walker Jr., vacant since June when he was charged with running a spy ring for the Soviet Union, has been defaced by vandals, the police say. The police said Thursday that bullets had been fired through two windows. A neighbor said a hammer and sickle, covered with the circle and bar of the international “no” symbol, was spray-painted on the front of the house. The interior of the house was torn apart by Federal agents after Mr. Walker’s arrest in a hunt for evidence. Mr. Walker, 48 years old, a retired Navy chief warrant officer and former private investigator, is serving two life terms plus 10 years at the Montgomery County Jail in Rockville, Maryland. He pleaded guilty to espionage and conspiracy charges in October.
Mississippi families living along a drainage ditch dubbed “Sugar Ditch” began moving from dilapidated shacks into mobile homes Thursday after state officials freed funds to allow utility hookups. Jeanie Smith of the Governor’s Office of Federal-State Programs said the local people had been unable to pay deposits to utility companies and that her office’s authorization allowed Tunica officials to pay the estimated $2,000 in deposits on the first of 17 trailers to be moved to a site near town. The first five mobile homes arrived in Tunica Dec. 23 but various problems, including delays in paying for gas, electric and water hookups, kept families from moving in. The residents, mostly unemployed, are to receive Federal assistance to pay rent. Sugar Ditch Alley, a row of shanties without running water or indoor plumbing, received national attention last year when the Rev. Jesse Jackson visited it several times. Two families moved into their new homes Thursday.
The Securities and Exchange Commission today accused a Baptist denomination of selling members a retirement plan that could not pay them the benefits the church promised. The denomination, the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., agreed to refund all $985,000 collected from more than 2,500 individuals who signed up for the plan. A lawyer for the church said a revised retirement plan would be offered by September.
Nuclear regulators largely ignore potential chemical hazards to workers and the public at the plants they inspect, officials of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged. “It is clear we have a gap in our Federal procedures,” said Landro W. Zech Jr., an N.R.C. commissioner at a briefing in Washington on the fatal chemical accident January 4 at a uranium processing plant in Gore, Oklahoma. “We clearly don’t regulate other than in the radiological end of the business,” the agency’s staff director said.
The Federal Aviation Administration has begun an intensive inspection of maintenance at Eastern Airlines amid concern about reports of deferred repairs on too many aircraft, officials said today. The inspection began in early December and is expected to continue for several more weeks.
Soaring compact disk player sales have followed a price plunge to as low as $150 from $1,000 or more three years ago. The audio industry, which regarded the disk player as a toy for rich audiophiles, now sees its future completely differently. Last year’s sales leaped to about 1 million players, and many expect 1986 sales to top 2 million. For the first time, there is open talk of compact disks overtaking and then replacing records, if not immediately, then in 5 to 10 years. Last year, sales leaped to about 1 million players, and many expect 1986 sales to top 2 million, turning them into a half-billion-dollar business.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of the Los Angeles Lakers scores his 34,000th career point during 124-102 win over Indiana Pacers; only NBA player to reach the milestone at that time, holds career record until 2023.
Ending a tumultuous week, the stock market yesterday suffered its third consecutive loss, though a minor one. Trading in blue-chip issues at times became frenzied. The week was one that will be long remembered. On Tuesday, the Dow Jones industrial average rose by 18.12 points to a record close of 1,565.71. But on Wednesday, concern that interest rates would no longer decline caused a 39.10-point drop in the Dow, a record decline.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1513.53 (-4.7)
Born:
Phillip Hunt, NFL defensive end and linebacker (Philadelphia Eagles, Detroit Lions), in Fort Worth, Texas.
Mike Rivera, NFL linebacker (Miami Dolphins, New England Patriots), in Shawnee, Kansas.
Died:
Jaroslav Seifert, 84, Czech poet (Nobel Prize for Literature 1984).
Joseph Kraft, 61, American columnist.
Joe Farrell, 48, American jazz saxophonist.
History Diaries 