The State Department denounced the Polish government for moving ahead with plans to try Solidarity union founder Lech Walesa for slander. Walesa faces the charges for saying that voter turnout in an October 13 election was only 60% — not 79% as the government said. If convicted, Walesa, 42, winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, could be imprisoned for up to two years. State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb said, “We deplore the Polish government’s reliance on repression.
Protestant leaders in Belfast hope to portray the results of parliamentary by-elections Thursday as a referendum on the decision of the Thatcher Government to give the Irish Republic a consultative role in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Up for vote are 15 seats in the House of Commons that had been held by unionist Members of Parliament, who want Northern Ireland to stay British. They resigned, en masse, to force a vote they could take as a referendum on the British-Irish accord signed in November by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Irish Prime Minister, Garret FitzGerald, and approved in both Parliaments. The voting will mark the largest number of simultaneous by-elections in recent memory, and the campaign has probably been one of the strangest: The unionists have nominated an unidentified candidate whom they call by the name of the Irish Foreign Minister, a man they hate; and a nationalist candidate, Owen Carron, the former Sinn Fein Member of Parliament for Fermanagh, has been given bail on a weapons charge for the duration of the campaign.
Yelena Bonner, the wife of dissident Soviet physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, has been readmitted to the hospital because of complications related to her recent open heart surgery, a spokesman said. Bonner, 62, was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston by relatives, spokesman Martin Bander said. Doctors listed her condition as good. She underwent multiple bypass surgery January 13.
World chess champion Gary Kasparov said in Moscow that he has agreed to a late summer rematch with Anatoly Karpov. The date and location have not been decided, but both London and Leningrad have offered to host the championship match between the two Soviet players. Kasparov, 22, took the title from Karpov, 34, in a 24-game series that ended last November.
Elie Wiesel returned to Germany this week for the first time since he was released from the Buchenwald concentration camp almost 41 years ago. Mr. Wiesel, a writer and teacher who serves as chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, was in West Berlin for a two-day meeting of a West German-American group established to keep alive the memory of the Nazi horror. The group, called the German-American Council of the United States Holocaust Committee, was created last summer, after President Reagan went ahead with a wreath-laying visit to a West German military cemetery in Bitburg where Waffen SS soldiers are buried.
Ariel Sharon and TIME magazine announced an out-of-court settlement in the libel suit the former Israeli Defense Minister had brought against the news magazine under Israeli law. A lawyer for the magazine, Shmuel Barzel, said a Tel Aviv District Court approved the compromise. Sharon sued TIME Inc., seeking damages of $250,000 for an article that alleged he discussed avenging the 1982 murder of Lebanese President-Elect Bashir Gemayel with Gemayel’s family two days before Israel-allied Christian militiamen killed hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Beirut. Time acknowledged that a reference in the article to the supposed conversation involving Mr. Sharon in Beirut in 1982 was “erroneous” and it agreed to pay part of his legal fees.
Walid Jumblat, the Lebanese Druze leader, said today that Lebanon may be headed for a blood bath because of the failure of the peace plan brokered by Syria. Speaking in an interview from the small apartment he keeps in Damascus, Mr. Jumblat said: “The situation is worse than ’82 when Israel invaded Lebanon.I see the Lebanese Army and Israel against us, and maybe even another war involving Syria. If this happens, it will be another blood bath.” Mr. Jumblat said he could see no hope for peace in Lebanon. “It’s going to be an endless war,” he said, “dividing Lebanon and maybe the whole Middle East.” Mr. Jumblat said he feared that President Amin Gemayel of Lebanon, with Israeli backing, would ultimately try to militarily link areas held by his forces and the Lebanese Army to those held by the Israeli-backed South Lebanese Army, thereby “kicking the Druze out of Lebanon.” Mr. Jumblat blamed the 43-year-old President, a Christian, for sabotaging the peace plan to end the eleven-year-old Lebanese civil war.
An American envoy said today that France and most other Western European countries had pledged not to undercut United States economic sanctions against Libya by taking over contracts or filling jobs abandoned by Americans. The envoy, Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead, has been trying to persuade the allies to join in collective action against Libya on the ground that it supports terrorism. He made his comments after a meeting with President Francois Mitterrand, Foreign Minister Roland Dumas and Interior Minister Pierre Joxe. “France promised us that they will not undercut us,” Mr. Whitehead said at a news conference. “That is one of our accomplishments today.”
As rival Marxist factions fought in Southern Yemen for a 10th straight day, efforts were reported under way tonight to rescue a thousand foreigners still trapped in Aden, the capital. A British Defense Ministry spokesman in this East African port, across the Strait of Bab al Mandeb from Southern Yemen at the entrance to the Red Sea, said tonight that the royal yacht Brittania had taken aboard “several hundred” people beginning this afternoon and that the effort was continuing tonight. The refugees are to be brought here.
Three Sikh men were convicted in New Delhi and sentenced to be hanged for conspiracy and murder in the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Two of the men were security guards at the former Indian leader’s residence. Lawyers for the defendants said they would appeal, a process that could take months.
At least 34 people were killed when a fire broke out in a luxury hotel in southern New Delhi early this morning, police and doctors said. At least five of the victims died of skull injuries when they jumped from the second and third floors of the Sidharth Inter-Continental Hotel to escape the flames that broke out in the banquet hall on the ground floor, a doctor at a nearby hospital said. The doctor said that at least nine of the dead were foreigners.
Three members of Congress criticized Vietnam and Laos today for rejecting a suggestion that an international team be sent to investigate reports that American servicemen have been seen alive in the two countries since the release of prisoners in 1973. The Congressmen — Senator Frank H. Murkowski, Republican of Alaska who is chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, Senator Dennis DeConcini, Democrat of Arizona, and Representative Bob McEwen, Republican of Ohio — recently returned from a trip to Indochina and appeared today at a news conference. “We made the point that if you have nothing to hide, open the books,” Mr. McEwen said. Senator Murkowski said the delegation returned without any indication that American prisoners remained there, but he endorsed the Reagan Administration’s refusal to rule out the possibility. Vietnam denies it holds Americans.
President Reagan participates in a meeting with Noboru Takeshita, Minister of Finance of Japan.
Claims by Ferdinand E. Marcos that he headed a guerrilla resistance unit during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines are “fraudulent” and “absurd,” according to American Army conclusions after World War II. President Marcos, throughout his political career, has portrayed himself as a heroic guerrilla leader. But documents that had rested out of public view in United States Government archives for 35 years show that repeated Army investigations found no foundation for Mr. Marcos’s claims that he led a guerrilla force called Ang Mga Maharlika in military operations against Japanese forces from 1942 to 1944. Mr. Marcos declined today to respond to six written questions about the United States Government records, which came to light only recently. The questions were submitted to Mr. Marcos’s office this morning in Manila.
The Philippine opposition tried today to subpoena tapes made by American television networks of local news shows to demonstrate that President Ferdinand E. Marcos had unfairly monopolized election coverage of the presidential campaign. In challenging Mr. Marcos’s 20 years of rule, Corazon C. Aquino, the major opposition candidate, has complained that she is being systematically denied equitable news coverage and commercial opportunities on the government-owned television channel. Government officials have rejected the charge.
A bomb explosion in the forward cargo hold was blamed by Canadian investigators for the crash of an Air-India jet that killed 329 people last June. The finding is contained in a draft report by the Canadian Aviation Safety Board, Bernard Caiger, a consultant to the board, testified in a New Delhi court investigating the crash of the Boeing 747 in the North Atlantic. He said a loud sound that could have been an explosion was recorded just before the cockpit voice recorder ceased functioning. Earlier, five Indian scientists reported that an explosion apparently occurred in the front cargo hold.
An unarmed U.S. cruise missile launched from a B-52 bomber made a 1,500-mile test flight over northwestern Canada, but it landed five minutes earlier than planned, falling into a woods 10 miles off target, Canadian military officials said. They said it was not known whether the missile’s parachute had opened. The test, one of several permitted under a U.S.-Canadian defense pact, was held to evaluate the missile’s ability to hug terrain similar to parts of the Soviet Union. Four protesters from the Greenpeace environmental group were arrested at the Canadian Forces base at Cold Lake, Alberta, near where the missile landed.
President Reagan’s proposal to seek military aid for the insurgents battling the Government of Nicaragua ran into stiff opposition on Capitol Hill today. Asked if such a proposal could pass, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., the Speaker of the House, replied, “Unless there’s a big change in the House, I’d have to say no.” Representative Michael D. Barnes, a Maryland Democrat who heads the subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, wrote a letter to the President arguing that “this would be a particularly bad time for the United States to increase the level of conflict in Central America.” He pointed out that four Central American nations, known as the Contadora Group, recently renewed their appeal for a regional solution to the strife in Nicaragua and called for an end to outside aid to rebel forces. Last year Congress rejected a request by the Administration for military aid but agreed to provide $27 million in nonmilitary support. That support runs out on March 31. White House officials said on Tuesday that Mr. Reagan had decided to seek about $100 million in new money, with at least $60 million of that devoted to military support. Congressional reluctance to go along with Mr. Reagan’s aid request for the Nicaraguan rebels, known as contras, is only one of several areas where the lawmakers seem opposed to a newly resolute foreign policy emanating from the Reagan Administration.
Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte announced broad-ranging austerity measures. His program-endorsed by the United States, El Salvador’s backer in the war against leftist rebels-includes a currency devaluation, 50% increases in gasoline prices, a one-year moratorium on luxury imports and emergency taxes to finance the fighting. To counteract expected popular discontent, Duarte announced a $30-a-month pay raise for public employees, price controls on basic food items and a rent freeze for low-income housing. In announcing the steps on nationally televised broadcasts Tuesday night and today, Mr. Duarte repeatedly defended the politically sensitive measures as “necessary for economic stabilization and reactivation.” His new economic program is a “recognition of reality,” he said, and is as important for the country as land distribution was six years ago.
Several people, including four schoolchildren, were shot dead by Ugandan Government soldiers today after clashes with rebels on the edge of Kampala, residents said. A shopkeeper said he saw the bodies of the four children by the side of the road as he was hurrying home to avoid soldiers who were shooting, robbing and harassing civilians.
South African police killed seven blacks and wounded 40 outside Johannesburg after two white police officers were killed. The officers’ deaths were the first known white police fatalities in 16 months of political violence. Initially, the police said two blacks had died in the incident, in which a black crowd estimated by the police at 500 faced an uncertain number of officers. Today, however, the police said two more bodies had been found, and a police spokesman tonight said the total of black casualties was 7 dead and 40 wounded. It remained unclear, however, whether the black casualties were inflicted during the clash Tuesday or in what were called follow-up operations in a black township, where house-to-house searches were reported continuing tonight. More than 250 blacks were said to have been seized for questioning, including those with shotgun wounds.
Punishing illegal aliens’ employers would adversely affect the economy and reduce the output of goods and services, according to a confidential report by President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. Imposing sanctions on employers for hiring illegal aliens would reduce the national output of goods and services and would impose a new “labor market tax” on employers, the council says in a confidential draft of its 1986 report, to be submitted to Congress in early February. The report undermines the rationale for a comprehensive immigration bill designed to curtail the influx of illegal aliens by imposing penalties on employers who hire them. In the past, the Reagan Administration has supported such bills, including one passed by the Senate last September and awaiting action in the House, But the Council of Economic Advisers said in its draft report that “restrictions on immigration, like restrictions on trade, are costly” to employers and to the economy as a whole.
President Reagan hosts a luncheon for the newly constituted Presidential Board of Advisors on Private Sector Initiatives.
The economy grew at a sluggish rate of 2.4 percent in the last quarter of 1985, much more slowly than last month’s official estimate, the Commerce Department reported. The revision from an initial estimate of 3.2 percent was attributed largely to a worse-than-expected deficit in the nation’s trade. For all of 1985, the department said, the economy expanded just 2.3 percent, its worst level since 1982. In the final three months of 1985, furthermore, inflation picked up sharply, although in December the Consumer Price Index slowed to a rise of four-tenths of 1 percent, as the Government reported today. With the economy entering its fourth year of expansion, public officials and many private analysts discounted the negative features of today’s report on the gross national product, the Government’s broadest economic gauge.
The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee predicted today that Congress would reach a compromise with the White House to cut the Federal budget deficit for the next fiscal year to its statutory $144 billion ceiling entirely by reducing spending and without a tax increase. At the same time, the director of the Congressional Budget Office estimated that if Congress and the White House failed to agree, the automatic spending cuts required to reach the deficit ceiling for the fiscal year 1987 would be 18 percent for the military and 25 percent for nonmilitary programs. The point emphasized today by the finance chairman, Senator Bob Packwood, Republican of Oregon, was that, precisely to avoid such large, across-the-board cuts, Congress would decide on more selective spending reductions of its own. Mr. Packwood was asked at a breakfast meeting with reporters today whether taxes had to be raised to achieve the deficit goal for the fiscal year that begins October 1. He replied, “I don’t think they have to be if we’re willing to make cuts in programs that we previously didn’t think we could make cuts in.” He did not specify which programs.
A U.S. judge in Tucson considered a motion to dismiss alien-smuggling charges against 11 members of the sanctuary movement after it was disclosed that a key government witness had perjured himself by denying that he had been a paid government agent in another case. In addition, Salvadoran Miguel Angel Mejia testified that the witness, Jesus Cruz, was the only person who helped him cross the border after he had been denied aid by the sanctuary movement. Several of the defendants are charged with having helped Mejia enter the country.
Eleven Chicago doctors and medical workers were found guilty today of defrauding the Medicaid system out of $20 million. The defendants were convicted of running 22 places that illegally handed out narcotics to drug addicts in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods. The defendants dispensed the narcotics and, in return, drug users submitted to tests and accepted other prescription drugs they did not need to cover the illegal activity, prosecutors charged. Federal District Judge John Grady did not set a sentencing date.
Health maintenance organizations and new health care programs will cut the number of physicians needed in the United States in half by 1990, a Johns Hopkins University study released in Baltimore said. The study said earlier projections by the federal government and medical groups overestimated the need for doctors by as much as 50%. “Because of the staffing patterns and the differing styles of providing care, HMOS need fewer physicians than conventional care sites,” said Donald Steinwachs, director of the study.
More than half of Pennsylvania’s nearly 3,500 state-employed nurses and health care workers went on strike and set up picket lines at hospitals and other facilities. The health care employees, who have worked without a contract since September 30 and rejected the state’s latest contract offer Friday, went on strike with shifts beginning at 6 AM. “We’re encouraged by the turnout,” said Marcie Boyer, a member of the union bargaining committee.
Geo. A. Hormel & Company reopened its struck plant today after Minnesota National Guardsmen and city police officers occupied access roads. Only Hormel employees, including new employees and strikers returning to work, were allowed to enter the plant. Strike leaders had planned to renew a tactic of sending caravans of strikers to keep workers out, in what one leader, Ray Rogers, called “fighting from their cars.” But by 3 AM police officers and guardsmen carrying long batons had surrounded the intersection at the main gate of the plant and had notified Hormel it had access to its plant. Three union pickets were allowed at each gate. With workers driving easily from a nearby expressway into the plant, strikers milled around for a time in 4-degree temperatures. Most then returned to the union hall. The big hog-processing plant had been closed for two days, Monday by strikers who blocked roads to the plant and Tuesday by guardsmen and police officers who closed the plant in exchange for an agreement by strikers to reduce picket lines and not to hinder motorists in the area., Some 800 Guardsmen are reportedly in town, ordered here Monday by Gov. Rudy Perpich after the company complained that extensive violence existed in the town. On the picket line the last three days violence has been limited mostly to strikers’ rocking or pounding on automobiles.
About 200 students and faculty in Hanover, New Hampshire, occupied Dartmouth College offices and vowed to stay indefinitely to protest the destruction of an anti-apartheid shantytown by students. The sit-in prompted college president David McLaughlin to cut short an alumni tour of Florida to return to the troubled campus and called an emergency faculty meeting for today.
Missouri revoked the licenses of two structural engineers who designed the sky walks that collapsed and killed 114 people at the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel in 1981. The order was issued by the Missouri Board of Architects, Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors hours after Jack Gillum and Daniel Duncan of St. Louis had pleaded with the board not to take away their licenses. The accident also injured 200 people.
Among pundits and politicians here, the biggest guessing game in Alabama these days is whether George Corley Wallace, the South’s most enduring political icon, will seek a fifth term as governor this year. So when word spread here Tuesday that Billy Joe Camp, the governor’s press secretary and closest aide, was going to resign this week to seek Mr. Wallace’s job, the Capitol was rife with rumor that the governor might end the months of guessing and announce his own retirement at a news conference today. But when Mr. Wallace appeared in his wheelchair before the dozens of reporters who had come to witness the end of an era, the 66-year-old governor, whose political and physical health is not what it once was, had nothing of the sort on his mind. Using the occasion instead to make a denunciation of Federal spending cuts for state social programs, Mr. Wallace added, in response to questions, that he just might, or just might not, run again. He said he expected to have a decision before the end of the month, after he gave it more thought.
Economic and social gaps between black Americans and white Americans have widened significantly in the last year and the country has moved nearer to being “permanently divided between haves and have-nots,” the annual report of the National Urban League says. The 220-page report on “The State of Black America,” to be made public at a news conference in Washington this morning, cites statistics showing that income and educational attainment among blacks has declined in relation to those of whites, and poverty, youth unemployment and single-parent families have increased. John E. Jacob, president of the civil rights organization, said that despite the economic recovery “economic inequity” between blacks and whites “is greater now than it has been at any time since 1970.” He said Government figures showed that the median income of blacks declined to 56 percent of the white median in 1984, the latest year for which such figures were available; it was 62 percent in 1970. Unemployment last year was 14.9 percent among adult blacks and 5.6 percent among adult whites. Mr. Jacob said an unemployment rate of 40.1 percent last year among black youths was leading to a “rejection of the American dream” by a “frightening number of black teenagers.”
A chemical widely used on apples, peanuts and other produce will remain on the market for at least two more years while scientists try to clear up questions about its ability to cause cancer, the Environmental Protection Agency announced. Last summer, the agency proposed banning the substance daminozide, sold by Uniroyal Co. under the brand name Alar. EPA officials said they backed away from a ban after industry groups argued that exposure to Alar was overestimated.
Soft shell clam beds are infected with a leukemia-like cancer from Maine to Maryland. The disease ravaging the steamers does not affect humans or hard-shell clams. At the same time, oyster beds are being destroyed by the worst outbreak of a parasite in nearly 30 years.
Air travel is losing its glamour as hotly competing airlines cut fares and fight to lure more Americans into air travel. The changes, unleashed by Federal airline deregulation, are providing millions of recreational travelers with airplane speed at bus prices, but they are also costing travelers some amenities and are reducing levels of service, particularly domestically.
Heredity, not family environment, plays the main and perhaps only role in determining a person’s tendency to be fat or thin, according to a major new study. It found that adults, including those who had been adopted, strongly resembled their biological parents in weight.
They met in the late 1920s and fell in love at first sight, a slim man in fancy clothes and the prettiest girl he ever saw — and so they married, 58 years later, last December 1. Fate separated Edna Bowyer and Dave Guthrie after their chance meeting before the Great Depression. Edna moved away from Charleston, West Virginia, with her family. Dave headed west, married and was divorced soon after. Dave returned to West Virginia in the late 1930s, couldn’t find Edna and got married a second time. This marriage lasted 43 years, until his wife died. Edna, meanwhile, had run away from home when she was 16 and married a coal miner. She returned to Charleston a few years later, a widow with two children. “I was working in a restaurant looking for Dave,” she said. She didn’t find him and eventually married a salesman. They moved to Pittsburgh, where he died in the early ’50s, and “I lived with my granddaughter and raised my great-grandchildren.” Dave kept looking, and last October he found Edna, now 78 and blinded by glaucoma. “We got married December 1,” she said with a smile. Both vividly remember their first meeting, and they never fell out of love. Dave turns 80 on Friday. “She’s as pretty today as she was the day I met her,” Dave said, “and our love is as strong.”
Uranus has windblown clouds, a brownish haze at its south pole and two more small moons than previously known, according to new photographs transmitted by the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it closes in on the planet, which is almost 2 billion miles from Earth.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1502.29 (-12.16)
Born:
Larry English, NFL defensive end (San Diego Chargers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers), in Aurora, Illinois.
History Diaries 