Much of a proposed force of small intercontinental missiles would be invulnerable to any plausible attack by the Soviet Union, and development of the force should not be delayed by efforts to arm the missiles with multiple nuclear warheads, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee argued today. The chairman, Representative Les Aspin, Democrat of Wisconsin, made public an analysis that he, with the assistance of his staff, had made of the small missile Midgetman. In it he contended that the $44.5 billion estimated long-term cost of deploying 500 small missiles was reasonable because it was the cheapest method of increasing the number of land-based nuclear warheads that would survive a nuclear attack. Mr. Aspin’s 32-page paper was the latest contribution to the growing debate about new missile programs. The paper suggested that it would be prudent to permit a modest increase in size for the mobile missile to permit it to carry decoys and other devices to make penetration of Soviet air space more certain. The Midgetman is now designed to weigh 30,000 pounds.
The Defense Minister of West Germany, Manfred Worner, has urged that Europe build a new defense against what he sees as an increasing threat from Soviet medium-range missiles. Mr. Worner, in an article to be published this week, proposes a nonnuclear system that would be a more modest version of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which is intended to knock out long-range Soviet missiles. In the magazine Strategic Review, Mr. Worner asserts that a defense consisting of antiballistic missiles, radar, other sensors and the communications to link them could be built with technologies that “are either available or within reach.” Mr. Worner says the United States, with its commitment to European security, should be involved in the proposed defense, but he says the system could be deployed “irrespective of the expectation that current research in S.D.I. will yield innovative spinoffs.” Most European leaders rejected President Reagan’s proposal, made in March 1983, that the United States build a shield against Soviet missiles. They contended that the plan, popularly known as “Star Wars,” would leave Europe defenseless or would add to the arms race.
Yelena Bonner accepted honorary degrees on behalf of her husband, dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, at a meeting of the Committee of Concerned Scientists in New York. The awards were given by Rutgers University, Long Island University and the University of Pennsylvania. Bonner, 62, did not talk with the press, in keeping with a Soviet condition for granting her a temporary visa.
Tight restrictions will be placed on Soviet bloc scholars’ access to supercomputers in the United States, according to National Science Foundation officials and university officials, who have reluctantly agreed to the move. The action came at the insistence of the Defense Department and the nation’s intelligence agencies. An agreement in principle on the restrictions, which has not been announced, was reached late last month after seven months of debate between national security officials and the foundation, a Federal agency, which represented the universities. United States military officials contend that Soviet military specialists posing as scholars could make use of supercomputers, which work at high speeds and constitute the world’s most powerful computer equipment, to design weapons or break codes. As part of a broad battle against leaking of high technology to the Soviet bloc, the Reagan Administration has been attempting to persuade allies of the United States to impose similar restrictions abroad.
Khalil Akawi, a leader of the Sunni Muslim militia Tawhid, was killed by automatic weapons fire as he drove through Tripoli, Lebanon. Police said Akawi was shot at least 50 times and his bodyguard was wounded. The killers escaped before Syrian troops deployed in the city could seal off the area. The gunmen were not identified. Shortly after the shooting, angry Tawhid gunmen abducted two Syrian soldiers, killed them and dumped their bodies on a street, police sources said. The Sunni Muslims controlled Tripoli until they were routed by rival, Syrian-backed militiamen last September.
Hardline Palestinian guerrilla leaders met in Damascus today to plan what strategy they will adopt next toward Israel and the United States. A statement said officials from the six groups that make up the alliance known as the Palestine National Salvation Front “discussed ways of dealing with latest Zionist actions and the increasing collaboration between the Jewish state and Washington.” The Arab radio stations that carried the brief statement did not give details or identify the officials who took part in the meeting. Heads of the six factions have apparently returned to the Syrian capital from Tripoli, Libya, where they attended a conference called by the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, last week.
Haydar Bakr al-Attas appointed president of South Yemen. Prime Minister Yasin Said Numan of Southern Yemen was quoted today as saying his newly installed Cabinet would seek to “rejuvenate” the Marxist Government after the fierce 12-day civil war. The Abu Dhabi-based newspaper Al Ittihad quoted him as saying his new Government “will change nothing” in Southern Yemen’s domestic and foreign policies, including its close ties to the Soviet Union. “The new Government is designed to put the house again in order, implement the Yemen Socialist Party’s policy, and rejuvenate the country,” the Government-owned paper quoted the leader as saying.
Iran’s relations with the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc are improving, but there is no such prospect now for relations with the United States, the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Hojatolislam Hashemi Rafsanjani, said today at a news conference. He said the visit to Iran last week of the Soviet First Deputy Foreign Minister, Georgi M. Korniyenko, “will have a great effect on our relations with the Soviet Union and the Eastern world.” “One can be optimistic in fields such as technical, military, economic and possibly political relations,” he said. But he also said that Iran’s links with the Soviet Union did not mean there were no remaining problems. The two major ones he listed were Soviet support for Iraq, which is at war with Iran, and the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan.
Pope John Paul II, on the eve of his departure from India, raised the birth control issue today for the first time in his nine-day visit. But he did so in the most guarded terms and avoided any criticism of the Indian Government, which, faced with a swelling population, strongly advocates birth control. Indeed, the Pope did not even use his own words to criticize contraception, but rather quoted the Indian national hero, Mohandas K. Gandhi. “The act of generation should be controlled for the ordered growth of the world,” he quoted Gandhi as saying.
In a Lunar New Year message today, President Li Xiannian criticized Communist Party officials who he said had violated the law and damaged the party’s image with “decadent capitalist thinking.” He said the overwhelming majority of party officials were “good, as well as loyal,” but a few had been “struck by the sugar-coated bullets of the bourgeoisie.” These, he said, trampled on party discipline, violated the law and “aroused the indignation and condemnation of the working people and the majority of party members and officials” The comments by Mr. Li, who favors strong central planning and has reservations about China’s current market-force changes, were reported by the official New China News Agency.
Despite more than a year of Government study and internal debate, Japan has been unable to make up its mind about whether to take part in President Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile-defense program. The most that Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone has said in public is that he has an “understanding” of the project, known formally as the Strategic Defense Initiative. By using the deliberately vague expression, one he has used many times, Mr. Nakasone has hinted at his interest while withholding endorsement. Nevertheless, some Government officials and defense experts say they believe pressure on Japan to make a clear decision has increased, especially now that Britain has agreed to take part in “Star Wars” research and West Germany has signaled its qualified approval.
Widespread election fraud in the Philippines by supporters of President Ferdinand E. Marcos was reported by an international team of observers. Some members of the Government’s own vote-counting agency walked out, saying returns were being falsified in favor of Mr. Marcos. Official Philippine vote counters charged that the Marcos Government was rigging the Presidential vote. Weeping and fearful, the 30 Government computer workers fled from the Commission on Elections with data disks in hand. They sought sanctuary in church where they detailed their accusation that critical printout numbers favoring the opposition candidate, Corazon C. Aquino, were being ignored. “The electoral anomalies which we have witnessed are serious and could well have an impact upon the final result,” said a statement issued by a delegation of 44 observers from 19 countries who came here to monitor the election held Friday, in which Corazon C. Aquino ran for President against Mr. Marcos. “Occurrences of vote-buying, intimidation and lack of respect for electoral procedures were present,” the observers said. They said they had seen no instances of fraud committed by Mrs. Aquino’s supporters. In a separate statement, a group of 20 American observers said it had “witnessed and heard disturbing reports of efforts to undermine the integrity” of the electoral process. The team has 44 observers from 19 countries.
A tough U.S. foreign policy decision would face President Reagan if President Marcos insisted on remaining in office despite evidence that he had lost the election, according to Administration officials. They said middle-level aides were already discussing how the White House should react if Mr. Marcos manipulated the votes to deny his opponent, Corazon C. Aquino, a victory. Mr. Reagan said 10 days ago that he would consider a substantial increase in aid to the Philippines if the elections was fair and credible to the Filipino people. He has not said what he would do if they were not fair and credible. One official said there would be “strong pressure” from Congress to cut back ties and aid to the Philippines and to wait for a change in Manila. But another leading official, while acknowledging that the Administration was disturbed by discrepancies in the vote-counting, stressed that important American security considerations were at stake. He was referring to the future of the American military bases in the Philippines and the growing Communist-backed insurgency there.
Corazon C. Aquino attended services today at two churches in Manila and attracted huge crowds. The services were for opposition party workers who were attacked, kidnapped or slain in the Presidential campaign. Jaime Cardinal Sin of Manila officiated at the 6 PM mass at the Bayside church before 15,000 people. Two hours earlier Mrs. Aquino attended a mass at the church of Saint Dominic. It was the church where in 1983 her assassinated husband, Benigno S. Aquino Jr., had lain in state before his funeral. At Saint Dominic, Mrs. Aquino prayed for those who had fallen in the campaign. “It is a moment to reflect on the courage of those who have sacrificed so much to protect justice and return our nation to the way of democracy and peace,” she said.
Canadian work crews began pulling bodies from the smoking wreckage of two trains that collided head-on in western Alberta after a freight failed to allow a passenger train to pass. At least 29 people were confirmed dead. Officials at first estimated the death toll as high as 40, but Dr. Derrick Pounder, a medical examiner, said the count has been reduced. He said that most of the dead appeared to be in one passenger coach that was swept by fire. Pounder said 122 people were believed to have been aboard the two trains.
Plunging oil prices pushed Mexico to the edge of economic disaster, according to government and private economists, bankers and diplomats. The situation is considered by experts to be graver than that in mid-1982, when the Mexican debt crisis began. It will require a dramatic financial rescue package that goes well beyond lending additional money and enlarging Mexico’s indebtedness. “We must have a new treatment, not just another renegotiation of the debt, but a new approach, a new focus on the whole thing,” a senior Mexican Government official said over the weekend. He added, “Lending Mexico more money is not the solution. We will have to get something from everybody involved — from the banks, the international lending agencies, the United States Government.”
A Haitian prelate urged Haitians to stop the bloody wave of vengeance that swept Port-au-Prince, the capital, following the ouster of the Duvalier Government. Archbishop Francois W. Ligonde of Port-au-Prince described the ouster as a “victory of truth, justice, prayer, and love,” but added, “We do not have the right to hate anyone.” In his message this morning, read to packed, jubilant congregations at the National Cathedral and most other Roman Catholic churches in this city, Archbishop Francois W. Ligonde spoke vividly and forcefully about the struggle that the church, as the only organized force in Haiti beyond the Government and the army, had quietly led against Jean-Claude Duvalier and his father, Francois, before him. It was a victory, the Archbishop said, against vice, torture and violations of human rights. But he asked Haitians not to seek revenge.
Discarded on a living room floor in Haiti lay a state invitation engraved with the name of the villa’s owner: Son Excellence Jean-Claude Duvalier. Part of the ornate script was smudged by the rough footprint of an uninvited guest, a Haitian peasant. Within hours after the Duvaliers secretly fled this country early Friday morning, angry mobs started sacking the family estates. A tour of the estates today found most of them picked clean. But enough clues remained to show that the family maintained a regal way of life in a country generally regarded as the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.
Former President Jimmy Carter, ending a three-day visit to Nicaragua, where he met separately with Sandinista and opposition leaders, won the release of two political prisoners. During talks with Interior Minister Tomas Borge, Carter obtained the freedom of Luis Mora, a journalist for La Prensa, Nicaragua’s opposition newspaper, and Jose Altamirano, a labor leader, diplomats said. The two men appeared later at a Baptist church service with Carter and his wife, Rosalynn. The former President, on a trip through Central America, plans to visit El Salvador today.
He came into office promising revolutionary change in El Salvador, but many of his supporters now appear to see President Jose Napoleon Duarte as a far more adept political campaigner than President and administrator of their country. As a consequence, Mr. Duarte’s domestic political fortunes appear to have fallen and this has placed him, for the moment at least, in the paradoxical position of being more esteemed abroad than he is at home. “He has weakened politically and he knows it,” said a Western European diplomat who keeps in touch with Mr. Duarte. Except for a peace offer to leftist guerrillas that is now moribund, Mr. Duarte began no major initiatives last year, according to members of his own party, foreign diplomats and Salvadoran political commentators. At a time of severe economic decline, it took him a year and a half to present a basic economic program, which he put forward this month. Although the Salvadoran leader can count on more than $300 million a year in United States economic aid, his critics blame him for failing to start a national literacy campaign, medical program, employment policy or workable refugee policy in a country where illiteracy, disease, unemployment and displacement by war affect a majority of the population.
Nigerian authorities canceled a Lagos lecture by U.S. Black Muslim figure Louis Farrakhan, and police officers armed with automatic weapons turned away hundreds of people who had planned to attend. They said the cancellation order had come from “higher authorities.” It was believed that Farrakhan might have been barred because authorities feared he would make inflammatory political or religious statements and use the forum to attack the United States and other Western nations.
Nelson Mandela’s wife forecast that the jailed South African black nationalist would be freed, but she said she did not know when or where. Winnie Mandela spoke on her return to Johannesburg from Cape Town, where she visited Mr. Mandela. Newspaper reports speculated that his release was imminent. In other developments, the police said three black policemen were shot dead when they sought to intervene in a tribal dispute south of Durban that claimed six more lives. In Honeydew, north of Johannesburg, meanwhile, the police said they were looking for a group of whites who opened fire in unprovoked attacks on blacks Saturday.
The commission investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger asked the space agency today to produce all records relating to problems involving safety seals on the booster rockets. The commission, headed by former Secretary of State William P. Rogers, announced that it would examine the documents at a private session Monday and hear testimony from officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration about the seals on Tuesday. The commission’s action comes in the wake of a report in The New York Times today that NASA had been warned by its own engineers and analysts last year that the seals were eroding in flight and might leak. According to documents from the agency’s files, one budget analyst warned last July that failure of the seals, which are designed to prevent flames from burning through the seams where segments of the booster rockets are joined, “would certainly be catastrophic.”
Two Challenger astronauts’ lives: Christa McAuliffe, an energetic, enthusiastic social studies teacher, led a traditional life until she was chosen to go into space, and she strove to keep things that way. Gregory Jarvis, an engineer for Hughes Aircraft, loved excitement and outdoor sports. Supremely confident in the technology of space, he told jokes to break the tension when problems delayed the launching of the space shuttle before its fatal flight January 28.
Christa McAuliffe spent her last few days on earth excited and anxious about her space mission, answering mail from well-wishers and telephoning friends as she waited through the delays in the launching of the Challenger. Eileen O’Hara, a friend from Concord, asked how it felt to sit in the orbiter waiting for a liftoff that did not come. “Go borrow a motorcycle helmet,” Mrs. McAuliffe reportedly said. “Lie on the floor, with your legs up on the bed. Lie there for five hours. You can’t read, you can’t have anything loose around, you’re strapped down really tightly, with oxygen lines and wires coming out of your suit. The only people who had anything to do were the pilot and the co-pilot.” But there was one thing about the delay: it gave her family and friends time to have a nice party at Cape Canaveral and she was glad about that, though she could not attend because of preflight quarantine. All this was related in a phone call the night before the flight, Miss O’Hara said, and her friend seemed enthusiastic and ready for her adventure as the teacher in space. The same enthusiasm came through in a letter from Mrs. McAuliffe to her 9-year-old son, Scott, that was delivered a week after the explosion that killed the Challenger crew, according to people close to the family. “Before she got on the shuttle,” said Barbara Cmar Eldridge, another friend, “she probably did a complete soul-searching, an act of contrition and an Our Father, and then sat back and enjoyed.”
Close to the end, when problems delayed the launching of the Challenger for days before its fatal flight on January 28, Gregory Jarvis told jokes to break the tension. Mr. Jarvis, a 41-year-old payload specialist who worked for the Hughes Aircraft Company, was not without apprehension. It was, after all, his first flight aboard the space shuttle. An engineer who was supremely confident in the technology of space, Mr. Jarvis sat next to Christa McAuliffe, the social studies teacher with whom he had formed a close working relationship. “He was trying to help her through the tension of the countdown,” said Gerry Dutcher, a Hughes engineer who was a close friend of Mr. Jarvis. Mr. Dutcher said his information was based on his telephone conversations with Mr. Jarvis in the days before the launching and on a description of his friend’s last hours given to him by Mr. Jarvis’s widow, Marcia. “Marcia told me that Greg was just super in the orbiter during the holds on Sunday and Monday,” Mr. Dutcher recalled the other day in his office in the cluster of space and military research facilities at the eastern end of Los Angeles International Airport. “When they had trouble opening the orbiter after Monday’s hold and had to send for technicians to drill open the hatch to release the crew, Greg told Christa, ‘I bet those guys are going to come up here with a portable drill and the batteries are going to be dead.’ “
Mr. Jarvis was aware of the risks. “He knew there were no guarantees once they torched that ship up,” said John Ladd, Mr. Jarvis’s stepfather. Mr. Ladd spoke by phone from his home in Mohawk, an upstate New York community of 3,000 people where Mr. Jarvis grew up. Mr. Jarvis’s mother, Lucille Ladd, had returned home with her husband from Cape Canaveral on January 27 after two days of delays in the launching of the Challenger. “She has angina and we worried the stress was too much for her,” Mr. Ladd said. As it was, she was at home alone watching the launching on television the next morning when the spacecraft exploded, he said. Mr. Jarvis’s father, A. Bruce Jarvis of Orlando, Florida, was in the viewing stand at Cape Canaveral with Marcia Jarvis and Edward and Grace Corrigan, the parents of Christa McAuliffe. Bruce Jarvis collapsed and was hospitalized for the day for observation of a heart condition. “Greg had some reasonable apprehension about the flight,” Mr. Ladd recalled. “But he told us: ‘Don’t worry. We know we’re sitting on a keg of dynamite. But they have this thing down to a routine.’ ” Still, Mr. Ladd reported, Mr. Jarvis placed Challenger lapel pins in an envelope and gave them to Mrs. Ladd, saying, “If anything happens this goes to John.” Mr. Jarvis’s hard aluminum seat aboard the orbiter was on the mid-deck level, to the right of Mrs. McAuliffe’s assigned position. Mr. Ladd recalled talking to Mrs. McAuliffe’s father later at the memorial service in Houston. He quoted Mr. Corrigan as saying, “I’d lay a bet that when they went Greg and Christa were holding hands.”
President Reagan enjoys breakfast with his daughter and her husband.
The President and First Lady enjoy lunch in the White House Solarium.
Attorney General Edwin Meese III rejected charges that he wants to weaken federal affirmative-action rules and insisted that his goal is to protect businesses from overzealous officials who have “perverted” the program. Meese, who has been leading efforts within the Administration to alter a 1965 executive order that requires federal contractors to set goals for the hiring of minority-group members and women, said also in a televised interview that it is “simply not true” that most of Congress disagrees with his plan. Meese said that most businesses support his view. In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Meese said that it would be a “gross exaggeration to say there’s a controversy” between him and Labor Secretary William E. Brock III.
A jury convicted a Federal judge in Mississippi of two counts of perjury, but acquitted him of a third perjury count and of receiving an illegal gift. Federal District Judge Walter L. Nixon Jr., chief judge for Mississippi’s southern district, was cleared of accepting $60,000 worth of oil and gas interests from Wiley Fairchild, a businessman, in exchange for the judge’s help in trying to get state drug charges dropped against his son, Drew. But he was convicted of twice lying about the deal.
A Georgia farmer’s suicide may have saved his land from foreclosure. L. D. Hill, involved in one of the many foreclosures putting family farms on the auction block, killed himself Tuesday when he could see no other way to raise the money to pay his debts. And as the life insurance helps to keep the farm in the Hill family, officials are concerned about the emotional health of other burdened farmers.
Free speech at shopping malls is a civil rights issue being raised around the country since a 1980 Supreme Court decision gave states the right to grant protection to political activity at malls under their own constitutions. State courts and legislatures are taking varying views of the rights of mall owners and those who want political platforms, creating a patchwork of regulations.
A jury acquitted Ramona Africa of the most serious charges that followed the May 23 confrontation in Philadelphia between the radical group Move, of which she was a member, and the police. She was found guilty on one count of riot and one count of conspiracy, and faces a maximum prison sentence of 14 years. Miss Africa, who was her own counsel, based her defense on the contention that Move only resisted a police attack.
Doctors implanted a second artificial heart into a woman whose transplanted human heart failed hours earlier. Bernadette Chayrez, 40, apparently is the first person to receive two of the devices, hospital officials in Tucson said. The mini-Jarvik implanted during emergency surgery was not the same one that kept Chayrez alive for four days until it was replaced with a human heart on Friday, said Nina Trasoff, spokeswoman for University Medical Center. Chayrez had been improving since she underwent surgery for bleeding problems Saturday, when “serious problems developed suddenly,” said Trasoff. Dr. Jack Copeland and the family made the decision to go ahead with the second implant.
City police departments could reduce the fear of crime and, in some cases, crime itself, by contacting residents door to door and opening storefront police stations, a federally financed study released in Washington concluded. The two-year study of experimental projects in several low-income and middle-income neighborhoods of Houston and Newark, New Jersey, found that among the failed approaches were police follow-up contact with crime victims, police publication of neighborhood newsletters and cleanup programs aimed at physical deterioration.
Seven people and five corporations have been indicted on charges that they illegally sent China high-technology equipment related to U.S. nuclear-weapons production. The seven-count federal indictment, issued in Denver, charges the defendants with exporting the equipment in 1984 from the United States through Hong Kong to China, in violation of U.S. export laws. The indictment named, among others, F.L. Kleinberg and Co. and Dataventures, both of Boulder, Colorado, and Richard J. Leary, former vice president of both companies.
The Coast Guard today gave up its search for four people missing from a charter fishing boat in California’s Bodega Bay hit by a freakish wave that pitched 17 people into the sea. Five bodies have been recovered. A Coast Guard helicopter, two patrol boats, a cutter and a shore crew had been searching the bay north of San Francisco and the shoreline for the people missing from the 65-foot Merry Jane, which pitched to one side when it was struck by a huge wave Saturday afternoon. The search was called off late tonight and the four missing people were declared lost, said John Hollis, a Coast Guard spokesman. Rich Tiesso, the boat owner, said the Merry Jane left Bodega Bay at 7 AM Saturday with three crew and 48 passengers and was returning at 4 PM when she was struck from behind by a wave 10 to 16 feet high. Hospital officials said that five of 22 people taken to four hospitals remained in the hospital today.
At least one pipe bomb exploded inside a house in Los Angeles Saturday, shaking the neighborhood and killing two bomb squad officers who were trying to de-fuse the device, the authorities said. Detective Arleigh McCree, 46 years old, an explosives expert, and Officer Ronald Ball, 43, were killed, according to Police Chief Daryl F. Gates. Chief Gates said the incident began Saturday morning when officers served a search warrant at the North Hollywood home of Donnell Morse, 35, who was questioned in the shooting of Howard Smit, 74, a union official. Mr. Smit was hospitalized in serious condition on Tuesday, but the police and hospital officials would not comment on his condition on Saturday. The officers found two pipe bombs and the bomb squad was called, Chief Gates said.
3 classmates have committed suicide at Bryan High School in Omaha in a single week. Three apparent suicides in a week have shattered students at the high school, and officials have begun special programs to help teenagers. Teenage suicides are “an illness in our community,” Rene Hlavac, assistant superintendent of the Omaha Public Schools, said at a news conference Saturday. Grieving students wore yellow buttons reading “We care at Bryan.”
Marilyn Klinghoffer, the widow of Leon Klinghoffer, who was slain by terrorists aboard the hijacked Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro last fall, died of cancer today at Lenox Hill Hospital. She was 58 years old and lived in Manhattan. Mrs. Klinghoffer, who had entered the hospital two weeks ago, died at about 5 AM, according to Letty H. Simon, a friend who often spoke for the Klinghoffer family during the ordeal that had thrust its members into the public spotlight. Though Mrs. Klinghoffer had been ill for more than a year, she had never mentioned it in interviews or her public statements.
A winter storm swept across the Southwest, dumping two feet of snow on New Mexico, while a mixture of snow, sleet and freezing drizzle fell on the southern plains. As much as 15 inches of snow fell in the Texas Panhandle, and police closed a 120-mile stretch of Interstate 40 from Amarillo to Tucumcari, New Mexico. West Texas State University, near Amarillo, canceled today’s classes. Up to a foot of fresh snow fell in Arizona’s mountain ranges, and the deserts were soaked with rain. Very cold air continued to move south across the plains, the Mississippi Valley and much of the Southwest.
Halley’s Comet reaches 30th recorded perihelion (closest approach to Sun).
Tomb of Tutankhamun’s treasurer Maya found in Egypt.
West German team swims world record 4×200 m freestyle (7:05.17).
Marvin Johnson stops Leslie Stewart in 7 rounds in Indianapolis to win WBA light heavyweight boxing title; record 3rd time he regains a version of light heavyweight crown.
36th NBA All-Star Game, Reunion Arena, Dallas, Texas: East beats West, 139-132; MVP: Isiah Thomas, Detroit Pistons, guard.
Born:
Raiyah bint Al Hussein, Princess of Jordan, in Amman, Jordan.
Josh Judy, MLB pitcher (Cleveland Indians), in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Died:
Marilyn Klinghoffer, 58, widow of Leon Klinghoffer, who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists, of cancer.
History Diaries 