Moscow increased surveillance of United States Navy movements and is believed to have shared its findings with Libya after the terrorist attacks last month in Rome and Vienna, according to Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger. A senior Pentagon official later confirmed that the Soviet Union moved eavesdropping ships along the Libyan coast after the terrorist attacks on December 27, apparently because of Libyan fears of a retaliatory bombing strike from an American aircraft carrier. The official said recent United States intelligence reports indicated that the Soviet ships were still monitoring American ship movements and sharing the findings with Libya. “I suspect it is continuing,” the official said. American officials have said the United States and the Soviet Union also plan to discuss chemical weapons in separate “consultations” between the two countries. The Conference on Disarmament has been seeking a chemical weapons treaty for more than a decade of talks that have repeatedly failed to reach accord on the issue of verification.
American and Soviet negotiators today held their first meeting in Geneva on a proposed chemical weapons ban since President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, agreed at their summit meeting in November to “accelerate” talks on the issue. Officials had no comment on the outcome of the meeting of an ad hoc committee of the United Nations Conference on Disarmament, which includes nations from the West and the Soviet bloc.
Yelena G. Bonner, the Soviet dissident, underwent open-heart surgery today, and doctors said later that she was in satisfactory condition. A spokesman at Massachusetts General Hospital, Martin Bander, said surgeons bypassed six arteries — three main arteries and three branches. He termed the number of arteries bypassed “an unusual number.”
Norway announced its support for economic sanctions against Libya, providing the strongest endorsement yet of the American action by any European nation, but there was no indication that it would move to apply them. President Reagan’s call for concerted action against international terrorism is “fully justified,” said a spokesman in the office of conservative Prime Minister Kare Willoch. “It is an established fact that Libya is supporting terrorists,” he said.
U.S. diplomats in the Netherlands began a terror alert telephone campaign, calling the 10,000 or so Americans in that country to warn them of possible terrorist acts against U.S. interests there. The calls followed an alert by the Dutch government to protect U.S., Israeli and Jewish sites that may be terrorist targets. In Cairo, meanwhile, a letter in English received by a Western news agency and signed “Islamic Jihad” threatened attacks in the United States.
A furor erupted today in Parliament in the controversy over the future of Westland, Britain’s only helicopter manufacturer. The political storm, which led to the resignation of Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine last Thursday, got worse today when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Minister of Trade and Industry was accused of misleading the House of Commons by first saying he knew nothing about a letter bearing on the controversy.
The United Nations radio service has halted its shortwave broadcasts because it cannot afford a 600 percent increase in transmitting fees charged by the Voice of America. The news and feature broadcasts, amounting to 4,200 hours of air time last year, had been transmitted by Voice of America since the United Nations founded its radio station in 1946.
Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist leader accused of masterminding last month’s bloody Rome and Vienna airport attacks, has defended those and other killings as “very legitimate” acts, an Abu Dhabi newspaper reported. The paper, Al Wahdah, quoted Abu Nidal as saying in an interview in an undisclosed location that he has been traveling freely in Arab and European capitals under fake passports. He said that plastic surgery “several months ago in Italy” has completely changed his features. He was also quoted as saying that he was in the United States in 1977 for heart surgery.
Heavy fighting raged around Beirut between Christian militiamen loyal to President Amin Gemayel and rival Christian forces. The battles erupted as Mr. Gemayel flew to Damascus for talks with President Hafez al-Assad on a Syrian-sponsored peace agreement. Lebanon’s strongest Christian militia battled with followers of President Amin Gemayel for control of East Beirut and the country’s Christian heartland, northeast of the capital. According to reports from the Christian president’s mountain stronghold at Metn, gunmen of the Lebanese Forces have bottled up Gemayel’s Falangist Party loyalists there. The fighting appeared to be concentrated, however, in the eastern and northeastern suburbs of Beirut.
Israel agreed conditionally overnight to submit a long-festering border dispute with Egypt to international arbitration, and today rival Labor and Likud ministers each claimed a political victory in the Cabinet’s decision. The announcement of the agreement came after a stormy 13-hour meeting of key members from both sides in the national unity Cabinet. Prime Minister Shimon Peres later spoke by telephone with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to inform him of the decision to accept arbitration over the 700-yard strip of Red Sea beachfront known as Taba. The Cabinet members approved the terms with the understanding that Egypt would agree to the return of the Egyptian ambassador to Tel Aviv and to a full normalization of the almost frozen relations between Cairo and Jerusalem.
Growing discontent within the Libyan armed forces has presented Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi with one of the most politically sensitive challenges in his 16-year rule, according to diplomats and Libyan officials. The officials and diplomats attributed the restiveness, particularly within the army, to efforts by Colonel Qaddafi to create “armed masses.” They also cited the country’s deepening economic crisis as a factor. The malaise is said to have deepened since the death — and possible slaying — of Colonel Hassan Ishkal, the third most powerful man in Libya’s Government and head of the military region of Sirte, on November 23 or 24.
South Yemen’s leader, Ali Nasser Hasani, survived an assassination attempt, and leaders of the failed coup were executed, staterun Aden radio reported. The report said that the plotters against Hasani, 49, included Abdul Fattah Ismail, a former chief of the Marxist-ruled state, and Ali Ahmed Nasser Antar, first deputy prime minister and a close associate of Hasani. Both were summarily executed, the broadcast said, as were two other officials. Several of their accomplices were arrested and held for trial, the radio added. South Yemen is considered strategic because it controls the southern entrance to the Red Sea.
The Reagan Administration said today that Iran might have been within its rights in forcing an American merchant ship to submit to a search by armed Iranians in international waters near the Persian Gulf on Sunday. At the same time, the United States sent two Navy warships to the Gulf of Oman where the freighter, the President Taylor, was docked in the United Arab Emirates port of Fujaira. The vessel was boarded and searched Sunday by seven Iranian officers and seamen, who were looking for signs that it was carrying military cargo for Iraq. The Iranians, who have been stopping neutral ships for the last five months to search for contraband destined for Iraq, Iran’s enemy in a five-year-old war, allowed the President Taylor to proceed after a 45-minute search.
Vietnam has agreed to investigate 95 United States reports that some Americans are still being held prisoner in Indochina, senior Administration officials said today. The officials, Assistant Defense Secretary Richard L. Armitage and Assistant Secretary of State Paul D. Wolfowitz, who led an American delegation in talks in Hanoi last week, said progress report on their investigation at a meeting in Hanoi next month. “We have been unable thus far to prove that any Americans are being held against their will,” Mr. Armitage said at a news conference. “But on the information that is in our possession,” he said, “we act under the assumption that at least some Americans are held against their will in Indochina.”
For the first time in years, Japan sees reason to hope for better relations with the Soviet Union, the country most Japanese say they trust least and fear most. Many of the expectations for closer ties are hinged to a planned five-day visit to Tokyo this week by the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze. A full decade has passed since a Soviet official of that rank last came here, although not for lack of invitations from the Japanese Government. Japanese officials say they have no illusions that the Shevardnadze trip will, of itself, bring about a smooth relationship. There is too much bad blood between the two countries, they say, going back more than a century. The mutual disdain has been kept vibrant by a 40-year-old dispute in which Japan insists that the Russians wrongfully occupied four northern islands that it considers to be Japanese land.
Philippine Cardinal Jaime Sin said he has secured a commitment from top generals not to stage a coup if the result of next month’s presidential election is not to their liking. Sin, Roman Catholic primate of the Philippines and a frequent critic of President Ferdinand E. Marcos, who is seeking to stay in power, said he met with the generals because “I was foreseeing something.”
Before he even takes the oath of office on Tuesday, Guatemala’s new civilian leader is facing angry demands. On Friday, nearly 1,000 relatives of missing people marched through the capital demanding to know the fate of their loved ones. At the rear of the march was a contingent of dissatisfied teachers, who are threatening to call a nationwide strike if the new government does not move quickly to meet their wage demands. President-elect Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo, who is to take office on Tuesday, reiterated last week that he would not order an investigation into the whereabouts of missing people. Such an inquiry, diplomats and political activists say, would probably anger the army and could provoke a coup.
For the first time since General Alfredo Stroessner seized power here 32 years ago, Paraguay’s traditional political silence has suddenly been disrupted by debate, controversy, scandal and even protests. A bitter squabble among the President’s own supporters has bubbled to the surface and is being fought out in full public view, while a regime that was infamous for overlooking, if not condoning, official corruption has jailed 29 bureaucrats and businessmen on embezzlement charges. In December, in another startling incident, street vendors demonstrated against an order evicting them from sidewalks. When heavily armed policemen arrived, the protesters shielded themselves with the Paraguayan flag, refused to budge and won the day.
About 2,000 leftists protesting a visit by David Rockefeller burned a U.S. flag and set fire to a car in Buenos Aires before they were dispersed by police. There were no reports of injuries. Leftist parties had called for the demonstration, charging that Rockefeller, now retired as Chase Manhattan Bank chairman, had maintained friendly relations with the military juntas that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Rockefeller also was accused of representing banking interests that contributed to Argentina’s huge foreign debt.
The Nigerian military leader, Major General Ibrahim Babangida, today set a target of October 1, 1990, for his Government to hand over power and said he would leave it up to the Nigerian public to determine the form of the next government. General Babangida, who assumed office after a coup four months ago, was in Abuja for the inauguration of a 17-member panel assigned to oversee a national debate on what form of government should be adopted and how to insure an orderly succession.
Bishop Desmond M. Tutu today criticized the Reagan Administration for being “coy to taking actions against South Africa” while imposing sanctions against Libya at the “drop of a hat because of terrorism.” “When a few whites are killed, the world talks about terrorism,” the bishop said at a news conference. “What about the terrorism of a child being killed by a legal group?” he added, referring to blacks killed by South African security forces. “Why is it not terrorism when defenseless people have their brains bashed out in jail?” Accusing the Reagan Administration of “not caring a tuppence about the fate of black people,” he said the United States’ opposition to sanctions against South Africa was inconsistent with its actions toward other countries.
The South African Supreme Court today rejected an appeal by Winnie Mandela of a Government order forbidding her to live at her home in Soweto, Johannesburg’s sprawling black satellite city. But Judge Louis LeGrange said the prominent anti-apartheid campaigner could challenge his decision at a later hearing. “The matter in issue here is a matter of personal freedom of the individual, a very important principle,” he said. In Cape Town, Chester A. Crocker, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, met with President P. W. Botha and other senior South African officials.
President Reagan signed legislation giving cost-of-living increases to 2.2 million disabled veterans and their dependents. The bill, which passed the House 388 to 0 and the Senate on a voice vote in the closing days of the legislative session, provides the 3.1% cost-of-living increase that Social Security beneficiaries receive to veterans with service-connected disabilities. The measure, which is retroactive to December 1, 1985, is expected to cost $272 million in the current fiscal year, and $315 million in the next fiscal year.
President Reagan participates in a photo opportunity with Glamour Magazine’s 1985-86 Outstanding Young Working Women.
President Reagan hosts a luncheon with founders of Citizens for America.
Automobile fuel economy standards would not rise for 1987 and 1988 models under a proposal expected to be announced by the Department of Transportation later this week, department and industry sources said. It would be the second time in two years that the department has not insisted on higher fuel economy standards.
The Department of Transportation said yesterday it would broaden its airline inspection program, giving priority to carriers with contracts to carry military personnel. Department officials said the program would be announced today. They said that the decision had been prompted by the crash of an Arrow Air DC-8 jet in Newfoundland on December 12 that killed 248 American soldiers returning from peace-keeping duties in the Middle East. Eight crew members also died.
The Supreme Court agreed today to hear the Government’s appeal of a court order that it restrict Japanese fishing rights in American waters because of Japan’s whaling activities. The Government argued that the ruling, in a Federal appellate decision, interfered with “the President’s pre-eminent role in the conduct of foreign affairs” and “would have serious for-eign relations implications” unless reversed. The lower court, in a victory for a coalition of private wildlife organizations, said a 1979 law was intended to require the Government to impose tough, specified sanctions against any nation that failed to follow the International Whaling Commission policies designed to end the decimation of whales, especially scarce sperm whales.
Two major religious denominations and four Arizona congregations sued the Federal Government today, asserting that it had unjustifiably intruded on their services in its search for illegal aliens and those who help them. The suit, which the churches say is intended to “defend the guarantees of religious freedom,” was filed in Federal District Court in Phoenix. It charges that the government, in authorizing secret tape recordings of church services and infiltration of congregations suspected of harboring aliens, violated constitutional guarantees of religious freedom, protection against unreasonable search and seizure, and due process of law. The government says the infiltration was a normal and legal part of a criminal investigation.
The Seattle City Council voted unanimously to declare Seattle a “city of refuge” for illegal aliens fleeing persecution in their homelands, especially Guatemala and El Salvador. The compromise resolution, approved 8 to 0, omitted language that would have restricted city employees from cooperating in the investigation or arrest of Central American refugees seeking shelter in the United States. The measure, however, pays homage to “the courage and personal conviction of Seattle residents who offer refuge to such persons.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of “the great promise” of the United States was praised by President Reagan as a week of observances leading to a holiday honoring the slain civil rights leader began. Mr. Reagan, who initially opposed the national holiday on Dr. King’s birthday, met with a group of black business executives and educators.
Most employees did not return to work at the Geo. A. Hormel & Company plant in Austin, Minn., despite the company’s call to end a five-month strike. Only a handful of the plant’s 1,500 workers crossed picket lines and Hormel officials said they would begin today to interview replacements for workers who refuse to return to work. The plant manager, Deryl Arnold, said: “Our telephones have been flooded for the last week and a half with people” inquiring about work. At 6:30 AM, before the sun rose, 350 strikers gathered at the plant gate where returning workers had been directed, The temperature was near zero. Plant security guards were out in force. There was no violence, but there were some boos and shouts of “scab” as a dozen or so cars drove through the gate. Although some of the cars contained two or more workers, the small number crossing the picket line buoyed strikers immensely.
Accidents involving large chartered airplanes accounted for nearly two-thirds of the 526 deaths last year that gave the nation’s large air carriers their worst fatality record since 1977, federal safety investigators reported. The National Transportation Safety Board said that 329 people were killed last year in three accidents involving large chartered aircraft, including the Dec. 12 crash of a military charter at Gander, Newfoundland, that killed 256 people. In addition, 197 people were killed in four of the 18 accidents involving large scheduled airlines that occurred last year, according to the board. It was the worst fatality rate for the larger commercial airlines since 1977, when 655 people were killed.
The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers accepted Amoco’s proposal for a two-year pact, which union leaders said would lead to a settlement of a nationwide contract dispute between 46,500 workers and 80 petroleum companies. The agreement, subject to ratification by the 4,800 Amoco employees it covers, includes a $1,000 lump-sum payment for each employee the first year, a 2% raise the second year and increases in company contributions for health benefits, union officials said in Denver.
Teamsters Union President Jackie Presser will not be compelled to testify at the federal trial in Kansas City of five men accused of skimming untaxed gambling profits from Nevada casinos. The agreement was worked out in a telephone conference call between the attorney for defendant John Cerone, a reputed Chicago crime boss, and Presser’s attorney, said John Miller, law clerk for U.S. District Judge Joseph E. Stevens Jr. Details of the agreement were not made public.
The authorities have reopened the investigation of the death of a man whose skull was broken by 32 hammer blows, though the local police have said it was a suicide, officials said today. State police detectives have begun a review of the evidence in the death last April 6 of James A. Cooley, 52 years old, of Hobart, according to Jack F. Crawford, Lake County prosecutor. A feud erupted in June between Hobart police and Dr. Daniel D. Thomas, the county coroner, who ruled the death a homicide and began a campaign to re-open the investigation.
A federal district judge today ordered a halt to a federal auction scheduled for Wednesday of oil and gas drilling rights to 5.6 million acres off Alaska. But the judge allowed the Interior Department to accept bids while fighting the decision. The judge, James von der Heydt, said that in proceeding with the auction, Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel had probably violated a law protecting wild food sources of residents in coastal villages. Government lawyers are appealing his ruling before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which sits in San Francisco. The tracts, off Alaska’s southwest coast, are believed to contain $15 billion worth of oil and gas. The judge said Mr. Hodel probably violated the Alaska National Interests Lands Act by not holding hearings on whether the villagers’ resources would be affected. Three remote Alaskan villages, populated by Eskimos, Aleuts, and Indians, are among dozens of parties involved in the case, including seven states, 10 major oil companies and several environmental groups.
An uprising at the Indiana Reformatory last weekend in which one inmate died and two dozen people were injured was triggered by racial unrest, Cloid Shuler, a Department of Correction official, said today. “There is no question that the outbreak was a black-white confrontation,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of inmates that are doing a lot of time, and they’ve got to learn to live together.” “We outlined some very specific security procedures to be taken,” Mr. Shuler said after meeting with prison officials today. Supervision will be intensified in three of the prison’s largest cell complexes and certain privileges will be suspended, he said.
A 24-year-old Vietnamese refugee who went on a pasta-rich diet and did special exercises has added enough flesh to his buttocks to meet measurement standards for flight training, Navy officials said today. The refugee, Ensign Hung Dinh Vu, who is 5 feet 5 inches tall, came up three-tenths of an inch short in upper leg length, measured from the back of the buttocks to the inside of the knee, when he applied for training last year.
A layer of fat surrounding the heart may cause heart attacks by producing chemicals that prompt the growth of leaky new blood vessels in the walls of the heart’s arteries, and the discovery could lead to new ways of preventing heart disease, researchers said. The condition may form blood clots that are often the cause of heart attacks, which kill more than 500,000 Americans each year. The research, being conducted at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, was presented at a writers’ forum in Sarasosta, Florida.
The 36 Gimbel stores in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee will be sold by B.A.T Industries, the British company that bought them from the Gimbel family in 1973. In its announcement yesterday, the diversified London-based company, whose American subsidiary, Batus Inc., has its headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, said that the chain’s performance had proved disappointing. For the same reason, it said it would also sell the Kohl’s department stores in Minneapolis, the Frederick & Nelson stores in Seattle and the Crescent department stores in Spokane, Washington. It will retain its five other American retail companies: Saks Fifth Avenue, based in New York; Marshall Field, Chicago; the Ivey’s department stores in Charlotte, North Carolina; Breuner’s, a furniture chain in California, and Thimbles, a chain of popular-price apparel stores.
The soaring popularity of blackened redfish, that spicy, Louisiana-born dish that has become the hit of fashionable restaurant menus from New York City to California, has stirred a growing debate around the Gulf of Mexico. Driven by demand among wholesalers and restaurateurs keen to cash in on the trend, commercial landings of redfish have more than doubled from 1982 to 1984, to 5.5 million pounds, according to the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Council. As a result, sport and recreational fishermen in the Gulf, who say the best part of the redfish is not its filet but its fight, contend that the future of the fish is at stake. That is because the strongest pressure is on the population of adult redfish, or bull redfish, which spawn offshore, grow up to 50 pounds and are the breeding stock on which future generations depend.
ABC’s TV premiere of “The Right of The People”, whose writer and director is said to have been inspired by the 14 December 1980 massacre at Bob’s Big Boy in Los Angeles.
NCCA institutes eligibility requirements based on college exams.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1520.53 (+7)
Born:
Joannie Rochette, Canadian figure skater (Olympic bronze medal, 2010; World Championship silver medal, 2009), in La Visitation-de-l’Île-Dupas, Quebec, Canada.
Died:
Mike Garcia, 62, American baseball pitcher (MLB All-Star 1952, 1953, 1954; AL ERA leader 1949, 1954; World Series, 1948, Cleveland Indians), from kidney disease.
History Diaries 