President Reagan’s proposed response to Mikhail S. Gorbachev plan to eliminate nuclear weapons by the year 2000 has been given a generally positive reaction from the United States’ allies, according to Administration officials. But they said that reservations had been expressed, particularly by Japan. As a result, suggestions to modify the response were said to be under consideration, although it is not likely to be fundamentally changed. The allies’ reaction was presented Friday at a White House meeting by two envoys — Paul H. Nitze, who had been consulting with the Western European allies, and Edward L. Rowny, who had been briefing Japan, China, South Korea and Australia. Mr. Reagan’s response to Mr. Gorbachev focuses on the first phase of the wide-ranging nuclear disarmament plan, specifically Mr. Gorbachev’s proposal for eliminating United States and Soviet medium-range missiles in Europe. Mr. Reagan endorses the idea, but also proposes cutting the Soviet SS-20 medium-range missile force in Asia by 50 percent. But the President rebuffs the Soviet suggestions that British and French nuclear missile arsenals be frozen and that the United States pledge not to transfer missiles to other nations. Another element of Mr. Reagan’s proposal would give the United States the right to store medium-range missiles carrying the same number warheads as the Soviet Union has deployed in Asia. Other medium-range weapons would be destroyed.
Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, in a letter attributed to him, described a nightmarish ordeal he endured at the hands of the KGB which he compared with George Orwell’s novel, “1984.” The letter, said to have been smuggled to the West, describes in vivid detail Sakharov’s confinement in a hospital where he was force-fed and threatened while on a hunger strike in 1984 in an effort to win permission, later granted, for his wife, Yelena Bonner, to leave the country for medical treatment. “What happened to me in a Gorky hospital in the summer of 1984 is strikingly reminiscent of Orwell’s famous novel, even down to the coincidence of the book’s title,” according to the letter, published in U.S. News & World Report.
Anatoly B. Shcharansky is unchanged from the man he was in Moscow before his imprisonment nine years ago on treason charges. In an interview in Jerusalem, he said he remained true to “the principles which I formed for myself after my arrest until the minute I left the plane” in East Berlin on Monday as part of an East-West exchange of prisoners. He was referring to the plane that took him from Moscow to East Berlin last Monday as part of an East-West exchange of prisoners. Conveying a bit of new information, Mr. Shcharansky said that the Soviet Union, with a population of nearly 280 million, had 13 million people under some form of confinement or restraint, including 10,000 to 20,000 political prisoners. He said he got the figures from the cellmate of an official who had been arrested a few years ago. As before his arrest, Mr. Shcharansky preferred to talk about human rights problems rather than himself. He has apparently emerged from his nine years of confinement much the same as when he was arrested in 1977 in a campaign to taint the Jewish emigration movement with the charge of treason. He is older, to be sure, with even less hair than before. He was 29 when he was arrested, and he is 38 now. He has lost his chubbiness, despite efforts to fatten him just before his release. His face is a bit drawn. But the grin, the quick retort, the casual sense of the absurd, the reverence for truth are still there. He has not been broken, and he has not been embittered. He has remained whole.
Four Soviet representatives in Greece, including a diplomat and a journalist, were briefly held by the police early today after they were spotted repeatedly driving past the United States Embassy, police sources said. The four, who were detained at about 2 AM, told the police they were looking for a restaurant. Greece’s national news agency ANA said the Soviet Embassy had protested to the Greek Government over the incident.
The director general of Portugal’s prison system was shot to death outside his home in Lisbon. A left-wing terrorist group, the Popular Forces of April 25, claimed responsibility for gunning down Gaspar Trigo Castelo Branco, 52, sources said. He was denounced last September by families of more than 70 alleged members of the Popular Forces over prison conditions. About 50 of the prisoners are on trial for bombings, bank robberies and politically motivated killings over the past five years, and the others are awaiting trial in similar cases.
Officials of more than 50 Italian cities attended a special Palermo City Council session to pledge support for a nationwide attack on the Mafia. “If we all work together, we will not lose,” Deputy Mayor Giuseppe Zola of Milan said at the meeting, timed to coincide with the opening of a mass trial of 467 accused Mafia members. The gathering represented a marked change in the country’s view of the Mafia, which in the past had been considered primarily a problem for Sicily and of little concern to the Italian mainland.
An illicit Solidarity weekly, founded in 1982, has become an influential source of noncensored information in Poland. The weekly, Tygodnik Mazowsze, is only one of hundreds of underground publications, from a children’s magazine and scholarly quarterlies to worker bulletins. There is even a mimeographed daily in Silesia. But it is Tygodnik Mazowsze, meaning weekly of Mazovia, a region of central Poland, that is usually first in publishing communiques from the underground, criticism of Government policies and reports on arrests and strikes. Over its lifespan of 156 issues, the weekly has often had to change its format as clandestine printers scrounged supplies, dodged the police and improvised editorial decisions on the run.
More than 2,000 fired printers, hurling bricks and other objects, clashed with riot police outside publisher Rupert Murdoch’s new newspaper plant in London in the most violent attempt yet to disrupt the plant’s operations. Five policemen were injured and 35 people were arrested, a police spokesman said. The clash grew out of a running dispute between Murdoch and about 5,000 members of two print unions who were fired more than three weeks ago. The dispute arose over the introduction of new technology in printing Murdoch’s four British newspapers at new plants.
Environmental and economic troubles pose a greater threat to the security of many nations than the prospect of armed aggression, a Washington-based research group said. In its annual “State of the World” report, the Worldwatch Institute said many nations-especially developing countries-can no longer afford to finance both military development and the restoration of their threatened natural resources. “The new sources of danger arise from oil depletion, shrinking forests, deteriorating grasslands and climate alteration,” the report said.
Muslim and Christian militiamen fought with artillery and rockets today across Beirut’s dividing line as the latest attempts to break the country’s political deadlock ended in failure. The fighting spread along the eight-mile Green Line that extends from the port on the Mediterranean to the capital’s southern suburbs, and the city resounded to the din of explosions and machine-gun fire. The police said two people were killed and several wounded in the exchanges between militiamen in predominantly Muslim West Beirut and Christian fighters on the opposite side of the front line. The fighting started as a group of Christian members of Parliament were meeting with Nabih Berri, the leader of Amal, the mainstream Shiite Muslim movement. Mr. Berri, who is also Justice Minister, said afterward that he still insisted that President Amin Gemayel, a Christian, must leave office. The legislators, representing moderate Maronite Catholics, have been trying to find a compromise that would head off more heavy fighting in Lebanon’s 11-year-old civil war. They have primarily pleaded with Muslim members of the Government to agree to meet with Mr. Gemayel to discuss a way to break the impasse. In the eastern mountains today, the Druse leader, Walid Jumblat, told his followers to expect a long battle with the President and his supporters.
Suicide terrorist bombings in Lebanon, once believed to be the work of pro-Iranian fanatics, have in the last year become directly linked to pro-Syrian secular groups, according to evidence collected by the Israeli Army, counterterrorism experts and residents of southern Lebanon. On the basis of their experience with suicide terrorism, senior Israeli officers and counterterrorism experts have concluded that there is no truth to previous assumptions that suicide terrorism is exclusively a phenomenon of the Shiite Muslim religion; that hundreds of devout Shiites have been trained and are prepared to blow themselves up against “infidel” targets, and that there is practically no way to stop such warfare. Based on what they have learned, Israeli officials say they believe suicide terrorism can be effectively combated. They noted that since Nov. 26 there had not been a single act of suicide terrorism, after several months of almost weekly occurrences. They have fought suicide terrorism, the Israelis said, by treating it not as the work of an inexhaustible supply of religious fanatics but instead as the product of national intelligence groups exploiting the psychological weaknesses or religious fervor of a small group of people who can be persuaded to kill themselves or tricked into doing so.
At least 100 people were injured today as Muslim-Hindu violence spread to India’s northernmost state, the Press Trust of India reported. Crowds in Srinagar, the predominantly Muslim capital of Jammu and Kashmir, clashed with the police in protests against a court ruling giving a disputed shrine near Lucknow to Hindu worship, the agency said. It was the second day of violence caused by the court decision ordering the reopening of the Hindu temple. Muslims say the temple site, about 150 miles southeast of New Delhi, is also an important mosque and should not be monopolized by Hindus.
A group of American members of Congress said today that Vietnamese officials had acknowledged for the first time that missing Americans might be living inside Vietnam, in remote areas not under full government control. They said Deputy Foreign Minister Hoàng Bích Sơn had told them that three Vietnamese teams were investigating reported sightings of Americans and had invited the United States to take part. The members of Congress, who came here after two days in the Vietnamese capital, said Vietnamese officials also promised to return the bodies of 14 more Americans missing in action from the Vietnam War and had increased to 70 the number of missing on whom they promised reports.
The South Korean Government today released four of five opposition leaders they had placed under house arrest. But Kim Dae Jung, the most prominent critic of the Government, remained under house arrest tonight and under the threat of imprisonment. The release of some of the opposition leaders came a day after the United States criticized the Government crackdown as “inconsistent with basic democratic principles.” In an interview published today, the South Korean Justice Minister said Mr. Kim, who is under a suspended jail sentence, could be sent back to prison if the Government found he had broken the law by signing a petition to revise the nation’s Constitution and permit direct presidential elections.
National Assembly of the Philippines proclaimed Ferdinand Marcos President for six more years after rigged elections against Corazon Aquino, supercharging the EDSA people power revolution. President Marcos won the election, the Philippine National Assembly decided. The move came after a week of slow and conflicting counts of the balloting on February 7. His opponent, Corazon C. Aquino, planned a rally today at which her supporters were expected to endorse her as the winner. ‘Even before I am finally declared the winner of this election, I think we can all agree who is the biggest loser: Mr. Marcos,” Mrs. Aquino said. “No tinsel and celebration of the President’s make-believe win can hide his loss of moral and political authority. He is beaten. When is he going to go?” The assembly said Mr. Marcos’s running mate, Arturo M. Tolentino, had been elected Vice President. Mrs. Aquino’s running mate, Salvador H. Laurel, asserts he actually won.
The citizens’ watch committee for the presidential election has concluded that an ingenious method of registration fraud helped to produce wholesale disenfranchisement of up to two million opposition voters. The purported scheme involved the use of neighborhood letter carriers and water-meter readers in a surreptitious “litmus test” of voter sympathy, according to Jose Concepcion, the chairman of the citizens’ watch, the National Movement for Free Elections, or NAMFREL. He said the workers, watching street by street on their regular rounds, carefully noted which householders removed pro-Government campaign stickers that had been affixed, as if casually, to doors and windows before the election February 7. This produced precinct patterns of residents likely to be opposed to the candidacy of President Ferdinand E. Marcos, and many of these houses were systematically culled from the registration rolls before election day, according to Mr. Concepcion.
President Reagan, in a shift of emphasis, today directly blamed President Ferdinand E. Marcos’s party for widespread fraud and violence in the recent Philippine presidential election. But Mr. Reagan and his aides did not say whether the Administration planned any action to influence the situation in the Philippines, where the National Assembly today decreed Mr. Marcos the winner despite estimates that his opponent, Corazon C. Aquino, received a majority of the ballots cast in the election. In a statement issued by the White House in California, Mr. Reagan said that although American observers’ final reports on the Philippine election are not in, “it has already become evident, sadly, that the elections were marred by widespread fraud and violence perpetrated largely by the ruling party.” The statement went on to say that the evidence “was so extreme that the election’s credibility has been called into question both within the Philippines and in the United States.”
President Reagan’s special envoy, Philip C. Habib, arrived in Manila today for an assessment of the Philippine election. Mr. Habib, who declined comment after landing in a United States Air Force jet, arrived as the National Assembly completed its ballot-counting and officially proclaimed President Ferdinand E. Marcos the winner. The Habib visit, which is expected to last 10 days, was welcomed by the Marcos camp, but treated coolly, to the point of suspicion, by the forces of Corazon C. Aquino, the presidential challenger. A spokesman, Rene Saguisag, said he was not sure whether she would even agree to meet with Mr. Habib on his fact-finding mission.
A transcontinental train carrying almost 250 passengers collided head-on with a freight train about five miles west of Quebec City, injuring 42 people in the second such collision in Canada in a week. No one was seriously hurt, and only two of the passengers examined in hospitals remained for observation, a spokesman for the government-owned Via Rail line said. Authorities could not immediately determine why both trains were on the same track. The crash came a week after a Via Rail train slammed head-on into a freight train in western Canada, killing 25 people.
The United States authorities have obtained tape recordings of the torture of an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration and believe that a high official of the Mexican national police may have participated in the agent’s torture and murder, a senior Justice Department official said yesterday. The tapes were reluctantly turned over to the United States by the Mexican Government last year after the intervention of Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d, the official said. The official said that the agent, Enrique Camarena Salazar, could be heard on the tapes screaming as he was tortured at a site somewhere in Mexico. The bodies of Mr. Salazar and Alfredo Zavala Avelar, a Mexican who sometimes worked as his pilot, were found buried at a ranch near Guadalajara last March.
Salvadoran Army commanders said today that they were continuing what appears to be the most sustained Government drive against a strategically vital rebel base just outside the capital on Guazapa Volcano. The drive, which began last month, is seen as important because the volcano has become a symbol of guerrilla resistance that the rebels have successfully defended again and again. In the last few weeks the sounds of air force bombings and exploding mortars have repeatedly jarred the capital, San Salvador, echoing from Guazapa’s jagged peaks. The army has often promised to clear the guerrillas from their mountain camps, but it has never done so and will still have to demonstrate that it can carry out its pledge to do so this time. In the current operation, however, the army has appeared more determined than ever before.
Three months after the release of President Jose Napoleon Duarte’s eldest daughter, her kidnapping continues to hold political costs for the Salvadoran leader and emotional distress for his family, according to friends of the President and Salvadoran military and political officials. “It has been a terrible experience,” a family acquaintance said. “The effects of this are not over.” Ines Duarte Duran, the victim of the kidnapping by leftist rebels, has been carefully shielded from public view since she was released last October. But close friends say she and her family have been more deeply scarred by the experience than is generally realized. A government press official declined a request for an interview with Miss Duarte.
An American who had lived in El Salvador for five years was shot dead early today, and a United States Embassy spokesman said it was not known if the shooting was connected with this country’s civil war. United States and Salvadoran officials said the American, Peter Stryker Hascall, 35 years old, was shot in the throat with a .45-caliber Magnum at about 3 AM. They said the unidentified gunmen escaped. An embassy spokesman, Jim Williams, said, “Apparently, he belonged to the merchant marine.” He said it was not clear if the killing was a street crime or connected with the six-year-old civil war between leftist guerrillas and the government. “I am unaware of the circumstances and motives of the crime,” Mr. Williams said.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs in a civil lawsuit asked an appeals court here this week to lift an order that has delayed an investigation of the Reagan Administration’s support for Nicaraguan rebels. The request before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit came more than two years after a Federal District Court Judge ordered the United States Attorney General to investigate charges that American support for the rebels violated the longstanding United States Neutrality Act. The neutrality law makes it a criminal offense punishable by three years in jail and $3,000 in fines to furnish money or prepare for a military enterprise against a country with which the United States is at peace.
Prime Minister Laurent Fabius said today that renewed attacks by Libyan-supported rebel forces in Chad had been repulsed by Government troops. France, he said, had made no decision on a request by President Hissen Habre of Chad that France send troops into the country to combat the attacks. “Hissen Habre’s troops have resisted well and have pushed back the essential if not the totality” of the rebel forces, Mr. Fabius said.
At least five people were killed today in rioting in South Africa’s segregated townships, the police said. Police headquarters in Pretoria said one black woman had been killed in a clash between blacks and riot policemen in Alexandra township, near Johannesburg. A black policeman, set on fire by rioters, was seriously wounded. Doctors at a local clinic said that the bodies of at least two blacks, including a 13-year-old boy, had been brought to the clinic and that the death toll could rise. The clashes took place after a funeral attended by a crowd estimated at 4,000 people.
The chairman of a Presidential panel investigating the space shuttle disaster said today that the process by which the decision was made to launch the craft “may have been flawed.” William P. Rogers, the chairman, also asked that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration exclude from the agency’s separate internal investigatory panel all people involved in the decision to go ahead with the launching of the space shuttle Challenger Jan. 28, when it exploded and killed all seven crew members. “In recent days the commission has been investigating all aspects of the decision-making process leading up to the launch of the Challenger and has found that the process may have been flawed,” Mr. Rogers, the former Secretary of State, said in his statement. Mark Weinberg, a spokesman for the commission, said President Reagan was informed today about concern over the decision-making process and the request that the space agency eliminate anybody involved in that process from investigating the explosion. Mr. Weinberg said NASA officials had given their assurance that they would comply.
Tonight at the Kennedy Space Center, Hugh W. Harris, the director of public affairs, issued a short written statement. “At this point,” he said, “we are awaiting word from NASA headquarters as to precisely what changes may have to be made in the data and design analysis task force,” a reference to the group of NASA officials who are aiding the Presidential inquiry. The statement added that Dr. William R. Graham, the Acting Administrator of NASA, had “previously pledged complete cooperation with the Presidential commission.” Sources familiar with the commission investigation said that the panel’s concern increased sharply after a two-day visit to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral that ended Friday. The key discovery, according to those sources, appeared to be that some NASA officials had expressed reservations about proceeding in the days leading up to the launching because of concerns over the safety of the solid-fuel booster rockets. Today’s statement is the latest indication that the commission is focusing on NASA’s response to warnings about the safety of the shuttle, particularly the effectiveness of the seals that join sections of the boosters. “Some people had reservations about this,” said a source close to the investigation. “Some people raised qualms about the launch.”
Photos of Challenger’s last moments were released by NASA. A step-by-step sequence shows fiery plumes emerging from the right-side solid-fuel booster, the chief suspect in the space shuttle’s explosion. The last photograph shows the booster’s destruction by remote control after the shuttle itself exploded in flames. The photographs seem to contain no startling revelations but rather confirm in rich detail current public knowledge of the events that led to the shuttle’s destruction. For instance, in one sequence a ring of fire can be seen surrounding the outside of the booster rocket, flames emerging on both left and right sides. In previous photographs, only a single plume could be discerned in this general area. The new view suggests that the seal of the rocket started to burn through all around its circumference, rather than through a single break or rupture in the booster’s casing. The booster rocket is made up of four main segments joined together by complicated seams.
It was “Reagan-bashing” time in Kansas City this weekend, in the words of one Democrat who attended a policy-making session here on farm and rural problems. And the 100 party members who were present waded into the task with a vigor that made it clear they felt they had an issue that could hurt the Republicans in the Middle West this year. There was Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa opening the two-day session, which ended today, with a rousing attack on President Reagan and his farm policies but adding, “Let’s not give the President all the credit — Republicans in Congress and in the states gave him support.” And there was Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, who has been mentioned as a prospective candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1988, accusing Mr. Reagan of leaving the “historic partnership” of government programs and agriculture “in the dust.”
President Reagan today deplored “misguided welfare programs” that he said had led to a “national tragedy” involving family breakdowns, teen-age illegitimacy and worsening poverty. “We’re in danger of creating a permanent culture of poverty as inescapable as any chain or bond, a second and separate America, an America of lost dreams and stunted lives,” said Mr. Reagan in his weekly radio address. “The welfare tragedy has gone on too long,” said Mr. Reagan. “It’s time to reshape our welfare system so that it can be judged by how many Americans it makes independent of welfare.”
The President returns to the White House after his three day stay at Rancho del Cielo.
International tensions were considered by 30% of Americans as the most pressing problems facing the nation, according to the latest Gallup Poll. That figure is up sharply from last October, when 20% cited foreign affairs as the major issues. The most significant problems cited by the January survey were the threat of nuclear war and the arms race (11%), terrorism (6%) and the problems in the Middle East (5%). Unemployment and the fear of recession were cited by 18%, down from 24% in October. The budget deficit was named by 11%, down from a peak of 16% in January and October last year.
Moscow secretly tried to acquire three banks in northern California and an interest in a fourth to gain access to advanced American technology, United States intelligence and military officials say. The attempt, was made in the mid-1970’s.
An engine on an Eastern Airlines L-1011 caught fire as the jet taxied toward takeoff at New York’s Kennedy International Airport, and six passengers were injured as they slid down emergency chutes, police said. About 25 of the 256 people aboard decided on their own to slide down two emergency chutes before the fire was put out, police Sgt. Kevin Ward said. Eastern spokesman Lee Bright said the fire was normal and was most likely a burn off of fuel built up in the engine’s tail. Ward said the injuries varied from a broken hip to sprains. Airport police extinguished the blaze and halted the evacuation. Remaining passengers left the plane in a bus.
Dartmouth College trustees, calling for “stability and calm” after a week of protests, rejected student and faculty demands to remove President David McLaughlin and divest $63 million in holdings linked to South Africa. Trustees told more than 200 student protesters that repeated calls for divestiture would not solve problems in racially divided South Africa. Protesters circulated petitions calling for McLaughlin’s removal and accusing him of creating a “consistently unacceptable rapport” between students and administrators.
Some 3,500 people from as far away as Chicago, Florida and Vermont rallied in front of Philadelphia City Hall and marched through downtown in a protest “to stamp out” racial violence from “Cleveland to South Africa.” The National Mobilization Against Racism organized the march as a response to racial protests last November in which several hundred whites gathered outside the homes of two families in a southwest neighborhood, chanting “Beat it” and “Get out.”
The executive director of the NAACP, describing the organization as stronger than ever, called on members to boycott the products of oil companies doing business in South Africa. Benjamin L. Hooks, addressing the group’s annual meeting in New York City, cited “historic gains” in civil rights during the past year and a $2-million budget surplus. His report was challenged by Michael Meyers, former assistant to past director Roy Wilkins, who said the group has fallen into “disarray” under Hooks’ leadership and is being influenced by white-run corporations. His call for Hooks’ resignation brought a chorus of boos from the floor.
A federal judge decided today to keep a woman on the jury panel hearing the racketeering trial of reputed leaders of Boston’s crime syndicate, saying he had no evidence that she discussed the case with her boyfriend. Roy Lawrence Sanville of Weymouth, who described himself as a “close friend” of the juror, testified at a daylong emergency hearing today that he spoke with the woman after an order sequestering the jury Tuesday, but denied that they discussed the trial.
The Army put its 68 McDonnell Douglas AH-64A helicopters back into service and resumed taking deliveries of new ones after deciding that surface cracks on the aircraft’s rotor blades are not a significant defect. The helicopters had been grounded since the cracks were discovered Jan. 27.
Public outrage has forced the University of Florida to delay experiments in which 22 dogs would be nearly drowned, school officials said. University Vice President Al Alsobrook said the experiments were needed to test the effectiveness of the Heimlich maneuver — a quick, upward press below the rib cage to force objects out of the windpipe — on drowning victims. The Gainesville school will mount a campaign to convince the public that the project is necessary, Alsobrook said.
Several nonunion fishermen who returned to work despite a strike against fishing boat owners sought refuge Friday aboard a Coast Guard cutter because of friction with union members aboard their boat, officials said. The men asked to board the cutter after she pulled up to the fishing boat near Nantucket to give medical aid to a nonunion fisherman, according to Petty Officer Michael Caton of the Coast Guard.
Union members from around the country gathered in Austin, Minnesota today for a rally to back meatpackers who have been replaced in the six-month strike against Geo. A. Hormel & Company. Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union struck the plant August 17 over wages and working conditions. The company reopened the plant January 13 and resumed hog slaughtering Monday, saying 1,025 replacements were at work. Peter Rachleff of St. Paul, head of a Local P-9 Support Committee, was among 300 people who came here in buses and cars. He said longshoremen from Los Angeles, hospital workers from New York, pressmen on strike against The Chicago Tribune and union members from St. Louis, Seattle, Bath, Maine, and Boston were on hand.
Investigators tracing the routes of two bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol containing cyanide-laced capsules have found that both were handled at the same distribution center in Pennsylvania two weeks apart last summer. Federal officials and the product’s manufacturer said the chance that the tainting occurred at the distribution facility was remote, but the finding prompted investigators to examine that possibility as part of their sweeping inquiry. In another development, the Westchester County District Attorney, who is investigating the fatal poisoning of 23-year-old Diane Elsroth on February 8, said that after extensive tests, officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation believe that the seals on both tainted bottles were not broken after they left the factory. The District Attorney, Carl A. Vergari, said he was thus inclined to believe that the tainting occurred “at the plant” and was not the work of someone who put potassium cyanide in the capsules and then placed them on the shelves of two stores in Bronxville, New York. Jack French, a spokesman for the F.B.I. in Washington, declined yesterday to confirm or deny Mr. Vergari’s assertion. “We’re not commenting on anyone else’s comments,” Mr. French said. “We’re not commenting on the Tylenol case other than to say we are devoting all our resources to it. We are certainly not commenting on any evidence or the investigation thus far.”
Court documents indicate that prosecutors will try to prove that a murder suspect in Salt Lake City set out to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by forging embarrassing historical documents and then offering to sell them secretly to church leaders. The prosecutors contend that at least 10 of more than 40 documents the suspect, Mark W. Hofmann, sold to the church were forged. Most of the documents were then locked away at the church’s headquarters here in a special vault accessible only to the three top church officials. For nearly four months this city, the seat of Mormonism, was gripped by a murder mystery that began October 15, when separate bombs killed Steven F. Christensen, a 30-year-old businessman, and Kathleen Sheets, 50, wife of J. Gary Sheets, a former business associate of Mr. Christensen.
When Dallas voters approved an $8.7 billion transit plan in August 1983 that included a 147-mile commuter rail system, it was viewed as a historic commitment in a city where the automobile had long been king and mass transit had never been a major public priority. Officials here viewed the decision to build Texas’ first commuter rail system with particular pride because it came about the same time that Houston voters were angrily turning down that city’s rail proposal. The Dallas commuter rail network, which officials said would be second in size only to New York’s among system’s nationwide, was supposed to be under construction by the end of this year and to have its first line in operation by the end of the decade. But getting the Dallas proposal passed came easier than has getting the system going. Officials of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit System now say that they do not have enough money to finance the original plan and that the entire program for bus and rail service is being re-evaluated.
A storm that formed in the Pacific sent high winds and torrential rain into the California hills yesterday, turning them into walls of water and mud, and did severe damage elsewhere in the West. Nancy Reagan stuffed towels under the door to keep water out of the family ranch house at Santa Barbara as rains posed a threat of more flooding and mud slides in areas denuded by summer brush fires. President Reagan declared Washington state a major disaster area because of storms, landsides and floods. As the storm moved inland warnings were posted across much of Washington, northern Idaho, Montana, western Wyoming and the Colorado Rockies. There were heavy snowfalls in the northern Sierra Nevada yesterday. Winds reached velocities near 70 miles per hour yesterday at San Francisco. and there were gusts up to 78 mph Friday night at Boulder, Colorado, the National Weather Service said.
44,180 largest NBA crowd to date-Philadelphia at Detroit.
Born:
Johnny Cueto, Dominican MLB pitcher (World Series-Royals, 2015; All Star, 2014, 2016; Cincinnati Reds, Kansas City Royals, San Francisco Giants, Chicago White Sox, Miami Marlins, Los Angeles Angels), in San Pedro de Macoris, Dominican Republic.
Fautino De Los Santos, Dominican MLB pitcher (Oakland A’s), in Samana, Dominican Republic.
Paul Kruger, NFL defensive end (NFL Champions, Super Bowl 47-Ravens, 2012; Baltimore Ravens, Cleveland Browns, New Orleans Saints), in Rexburg, Idaho.
History Diaries 