Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev renewed his call for the United States to join a nuclear test moratorium before Moscow’s self-imposed deadline expires next month. “It now depends above all on the United States whether the moratorium will continue,” he said in a message read to the 40-nation disarmament conference in Geneva. The Soviet unilateral halt started on August 6 and was extended for three months at the beginning of the year. Western diplomats at the conference said there was nothing new in Gorbachev’s statement or a 14-page address that followed by First Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy M. Kornienko.
President Reagan is now considering two alternative approaches to respond to the most recent Soviet arms proposal, both intended to allay allied concerns, Administration officials said today. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, proposed on January 15 that all nuclear weapons be eliminated by the year 2000. At the time, President Reagan welcomed the plan as potentially positive, but officials have been divided over whether it contained constructive ideas or was a Soviet ploy. One response now being considered by the United States with a view to addressing Japan’s concerns, would eliminate all American and Soviet medium-range missiles from Europe, confine the Russians’ Asian deployment of SS-20 medium-range missiles to Soviet Central Asia and allow the Americans to store an offsetting number of missiles in the United States.
Britain has blocked Iran’s appointment of a former student leader of the radicals who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran as its top diplomat in London, sources in the British capital reported. They said Iran is furious at Britain’s refusal to extend a visa to Hussein Malaek, a senior official at the Iranian Foreign Ministry. The Tehran government had chosen him as charge d’affaires in London. Iranian sources said that Malaek was prominent among the Islamic students who led the takeover of the U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans captive for 444 days.
A major political dispute has arisen over a move by President Francois Mitterrand to change the composition of France’s highest constitutional court. The controversy stems from the fact that Mr. Mitterrand’s action comes less than four weeks before key legislative elections that might lead to a change of government. Rightist political figures today accused Mr. Mitterrand of lowering “the image of France and attempting to lock up” the tribunal to his political advantage by his appointment Wednesday of Robert Badinter, the Socialist Government’s Minister of Justice, to the presidency of the Constitutional Council, a nine-member body that determines the legality of governmental actions. Mr. Badinter replaced Daniel Mayer, a 70-year-old jurist appointed by Mr. Mitterrand three years ago, who announced his resignation Wednesday, in apparent coordination with the Socialist Government.
A man the authorities say is the head of the Sicilian Mafia was arrested today hiding in a farmhouse near Palermo. The suspect, Michele Greco, was disguised as a peasant. Nicknamed “il Papa,” or “the Pope,” Mr. Greco was one of the most wanted fugitives in Italy. The police had been looking for him since June 1982, when he was first publicly accused of playing a leading role in the Sicilian underworld.
The Polish authorities who threatened to expel Donna Sue Kersey, an American, relented today and granted her a residence permit, allowing her to remain with her Polish husband. Miss Kersey, 32 years old, from Ashland, Kentucky, had been due to leave today with her year-old daughter, Daniela, leaving her husband behind. In a dizzying sequence of events a few hours before her planned departure, she was summoned twice by passport officals, receiving first a visa for a month and then the resident card. Miss Kersey has lived in Poland since 1981 and has been teaching English at Wroclaw Polytechnic. Her husband, Dariusz Olszewski, is a mine rescue worker who lost his job for his part in helping striking miners injured in clashes with riot policemen. Both are Solidarity sympathizers.
The halt in Mideast peace efforts requires that there be an indefinite “period of reflection” by all sides on what to do next, the Reagan Administration said. Administration officials confirmed that in an attempt to get peace talks started, the United States secretly offered last month to allow the Palestine Liberation Organization to take part in an international conference on the Middle East, if it agreed to American conditions on accepting key United Nations Security Council resolutions, negotiations with Israel and on denouncing terrorism. On Wednesday, King Hussein of Jordan announced that his yearlong effort to work with the P.L.O. toward peace talks with Israel through an international conference had collapsed because of P.L.O. failure to live up to earlier assurances to him. In Israel, Prime Minister Shimon Peres said today that he was not surprised that King Hussein had given up his effort to work with Yasser Arafat, chairman of the P.L.O. “The P.L.O. is not a negotiating partner but a stumbling block on the road to peace,” Mr. Peres told The Associated Press.
Eight guerrillas and one Israeli died in the first major battle since an Israeli military force swept into southern Lebanon on Monday in an effort to rescue two captured Israeli soldiers, the Israeli command said. The fighting took place in the Shiite Muslim village of Sreifa. The state-owned Beirut radio said 20 Israelis had been killed or wounded, but there was no confirmation. The clash came on the fourth day of the Israeli operation, begun in an effort to rescue two soldiers captured in a guerrilla ambush in Israel’s border “security zone.”
Advancing behind what a witness called a “wall of fire,” Iraqi troops today pushed back Iranians dug into the strategic Fao Peninsula at the edge of the Persian Gulf. The Iranian news agency, meanwhile, reported that an Iranian passenger plane was shot down by Iraqi aircraft near Awhaz. The Iraqi news agency said the downed plane was a C-130 outfitted as a radar craft. The Iranians said the plane was a Fokker Friendship ferrying passengers on a regular run between Teheran and Ahwaz and was carrying 46 passengers including several members of parliament. All of those on board were presumed to have been killed, Iranian officials said, including Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s personal representative to the revolutionary guards, Hojatolislam Fadlallah Mahallapi. The Iranian news agency said the plane was “blown up in the sky.” Such planes normally fly between Teheran and Ahwaz ferrying passengers, war wounded and, when they are in the country, as they are now, foreign journalists on trips to the Iranian front lines.
Hundreds of thousands of people massed in India’s cities to protest food and fuel price increases ordered by the government to finance an ambitious development program. Calls of “Down with Rajiv Gandhi!” rose from the crowds in the first mass challenge to Gandhi since he became prime minister after the assassination of his mother, Indira, in October, 1984. Most of the items involved are essential goods whose supply and distribution the state controls, so higher prices mean more money for the government. Police arrested about 10,000 people in New Delhi alone.
Seoul confined 275 opposition party members to their homes and deployed thousands of policemen to prevent a party meeting from being held to discuss an expanded petition drive for a proposed constitutional amendment. The plan would permit direct presidential elections. The actions today were the strongest yet in the Government’s effort to crush the petition drive, which it has called illegal and a threat to national security. Opposition members had planned to meet today to expand the petition drive, which is aimed at revising the Constitution to permit direct presidential election. In an elaborate display of force, more than 1,000 policemen cordoned off all entrances to the headquarters of the New Korea Democratic Party, the nation’s largest elected opposition party. Early this morning, according to opposition party spokesmen, the Government placed 275 opposition party members, including 80 elected members of the National Assembly, under house arrest.
A curb on aid to Manila was voted, 9 to 0, by a House subcommittee. The panel agreed to put all American military aid to the Philippines into a trust fund until a “legitimate Government” has been established. The bill also says that all economic assistance to the Philippines must be funneled through nongovernmental organizations, such as the Roman Catholic Church or rural cooperatives. The 9-to-0 vote reflected the pervasive resentment on Capitol Hill against President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines and the widespread fraud that has been reported in the Philippine elections two weeks ago. Six Democrats and three Republicans voted for the measure.
Corazon C. Aquino asked 13 Western European countries and Japan today to boycott President Ferdinand E. Marcos’s inaugural and withhold recognition. In a meeting with the 14 ambassadors, she asserted that she had won the disputed election. A spokesman for the European envoys said a decision would be made by their governments. But he said it was becoming “more and more clear” that ambassadors of the 12 countries of the European Economic Community would not attend the inaugural.
The U.S. State Department’s annual report on worldwide narcotics production says Mexico has once again become the largest exporter of marijuana and heroin to the United States and calls that the “principal disappointment” of the last year. The report attributes the worsening situation in Mexico, after several years of improved enforcement, to “severe problems and deficiencies” in the nation’s drug-eradication programs and notes that other drug-producing countries, “despite greater burdens, met or exceeded our expectations.” The annual report is the Government’s definitive estimate of worldwide drug production. While criticizing Mexico and a few other nations, it offered warm praise for Colombia, Jamaica and Belize among other countries. Those three nations combined eradicated more than 4,400 tons of marijuana during 1985, helping to reduce overall marijuana production by more than 40 percent.
Haiti has been liberated by the departure of former President Jean-Claude Duvalier. Soldiers who had worn chilling stares as a part of their uniform are suddenly relaxed and friendly. Haitians who for 29 years had found it best to kept their thoughts to themselves are joking and laughing and spouting opinions on almost everything. A number of Haitian playwrights, actors and actresses who had been silenced and in some cases had dropped out of sight have reappeared, and some are even said to have been offered artistic jobs by the new interim Government. As if by magic, the sinister tension that pervaded Haiti for nearly 29 years of Duvalier family rule dissipated February 7 with the news that President Jean-Claude Duvalier, confronted by rising popular unrest, had boarded a United States Air Force jet and fled the country.
President Reagan leaves the White House for a trip to Central America and the Caribbean. President Reagan flew to Grenada and told thousands of cheering Grenadians that “I will never be sorry” for ordering an invasion in 1983 after the leftist Government had been toppled by hardline Marxists. President Reagan met with various Prime Ministers of Caribbean nations today. Mr. Reagan, who was praised in a song by a calypso singer as he sat on a podium with other Caribbean leaders as “Uncle Reagan,” was introduced by Prime Minister Herbert A. Blaize as “our own national hero” and “our rescuer after God.” About 7,000 United States troops invaded this 133-square-mile island after the leftist Government of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was toppled by hardline Marxists in his regime. At the time, the United States said it was invading to protect the safety of about 1,000 Americans in Grenada.
Diplomats and military analysts in Managua said in interviews this week that rebel activity has declined sharply in recent months and that the Sandinista Government is in its strongest military position since it took power six and a half years ago. The large majority of the rebel force is believed to have retreated to bases in Honduras. As the Sandinista Army has become more effective, the diplomats and analysts said, the rebels have been crippled by problems of supply, training and logistics. The most graphic demonstration of the weakening of the rebel forces, diplomats said, was their inability to disrupt the vital coffee harvest, which recently ended. Pickers were able to work in areas that were considered too dangerous last year, and Comdr. Manuel Salvatierra, the senior military officer in the coffee-growing province of Matagalpa, said Tuesday that the harvest was completed without a single casualty.
Democratic leaders in the House today sharply criticized President Reagan’s proposal to send military aid to the rebels in Nicaragua and expressed confidence that they could defeat his plan in a showdown vote. The Democrats also said they opposed the President’s plan to give $15 million in covert military aid to insurgents in Angola, but they acknowledged that they faced a tougher fight on that issue that they might lose. The Administration’s determination to aid the forces that President Reagan calls “freedom fighters” in the two countries and in other places around the world has created a critical point of contention between the President and many Democrats.
The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee assailed a White House plan to declassify and release a secret Nicaraguan document on the Managua regime’s lobbying tactics as a bald political ploy and a “betrayal of the American people.” In a written statement, Senator Dave Durenberger (Minnesota) charged that the Administration is planning to release the document on Monday as part of its campaign to win congressional approval of $100 million in new aid for anti-government rebels, or contras. “The Administration clearly intends to lobby Congress — to portray every senator and congressman who votes against the lethal aid as a stooge of communism,” he said.
President Pieter W. Botha of South Africa refused to meet with black Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu and other anti-apartheid clergymen about turmoil in black townships. Tutu and the others flew into Cape Town expecting to talk with Botha about recent bloodshed in Alexandra, a black suburb of Johannesburg, where at least 23 blacks have died. They said they understood that Botha had agreed to the meeting, but when they arrived, they were told that other commitments kept him from seeing them. They met instead with a deputy Cabinet minister.
A Presidential inquiry is focusing increasingly on the top managers of the Marshall Space Flight Center to determine whether they exerted any pressure on the manufacturer of the shuttle Challenger’s booster rockets to approve the disastrous January 28 launching, sources close to the commission said. At a news conference this morning, Jesse W. Moore, the space agency official who gave final approval for the launching, reiterated that he had never been informed of a near-rebellion among the manufacturers’ engineers fearful that a launching would lead to disaster. The explosion, 73 seconds into liftoff, killed the seven astronauts on board. As expected, Mr. Moore announced he was relinquishing his position as associate administrator in charge of the shuttle project while remaining head of the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Rear Admiral Richard H. Truly of the Navy is to replace him. Tonight, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration released the document it received from the booster manufacturer the night before the January 28 launching giving final authorization to proceed. Signed by Joseph C. Kilminster, Morton Thiokol Inc.’s vice president for space booster programs, the one-page assessment warned that the O rings sealing critical joints on the booster would harden in the cold and thus take longer to “seat” properly, but concluded with a statement that Morton Thiokol “recommends STS-51L launch proceed on 28 January 1986.”
Reagan ruled out general tax hikes in his fiscal 1987 budget, but did propose selected revenue measures including an extension of the current cigarette tax and increases in user fees on such things as federally guaranteed home loans.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Bob Packwood (R-Oregon) said his committee can hit President Reagan’s deficit-reduction targets, but implied the panel will consider tax hikes as well as budget cuts as a way to do it. About a third of Reagan’s requested $38 billion in budget cuts fall under the jurisdiction of the Finance Committee.
Federal authorities are conducting a comprehensive security review of the nation’s airports to see how vulnerable they are to terrorist attacks, Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole disclosed. Dole said the department has already assessed security standards at foreign airports having direct service to the United States. The secretary said officials from her staff, the FBI and other federal officials have met in Washington with airline executives and major airport directors to discuss security concerns.
After March 1, military personnel convicted of espionage during peacetime could be executed, under a new directive. The directive, signed without fanfare by President Reagan, formally incorporates the death penalty into military law as a possible penalty for peace-time espionage. Congress authorized the change last summer. The action grew out of the arrest last summer of four men involved in the so-called Walker family spy scandal. Three of the four have since either been convicted or pleaded guilty to the charges. The fourth is still awaiting trial.
The Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service warned today that there had been a “startling” surge of illegal aliens entering the United States from Mexico in recent months. “We are seeing the greatest surge of people in history across our southern border,” Commissioner Alan C. Nelson said at a news conference called to renew the agency’s appeal for tougher immigration laws. Mr. Nelson said American border agents were apprehending nearly 40 percent more illegal aliens from Mexico each day than were captured last year. Immigration officials expect to apprehend 1.8 million illegal aliens nationwide this year, he said, 50 percent more than last year’s record total of 1.2 million. Even though the number of immigration agents assigned to the Mexican border has been greatly enlarged, he said, the improved law-enforcement effort has not kept pace with the number of people trying to cross into the United States.
The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 1.2 percent in the final three months of last year, only half as fast as was estimated in January, the Commerce Department reported today. The department also revised a major inflation measure to show a slower rate of price increase — 3.9 percent instead of 4.5 percent. Today’s report of weaker economic growth helped push interest rates down a bit in the credit markets while the dollar fell sharply. Although the revised data on fourth-quarter growth were lower than most economists had expected — mainly reflecting a further worsening of the country’s trade deficit — the general reaction of analysts was to underscore a series of favorable reports for early 1986 that already have shown the economy to be rebounding smartly from its poorest year since the 1982 recession.
Secretary of Education William J. Bennett sketched a glowing portrait of American public schools today in his department’s annual state-by-state review of public education. As high school drop-out rates decline, he said, college entrance examination scores are climbing. “Some have said we can’t have both excellence and equity in our schools,” said Mr. Bennett. “Clearly, raising standards and expectations for everyone means everyone benefits.”
Environmental Protection Agency tests at an Olin Corp. toxic waste dump on 102nd Street in Niagara Falls, New York, found the dangerous chemical dioxin at 630 times the level needed for federal action, officials said. But an EPA spokesman said there is no immediate health threat because the buried dioxin is not moving and no one lives on top of the site. The 22-acre dump has the highest levels of the deadly compound found in the Niagara frontier with Canada, the officials said.
A top federal housing official resigned after being cleared by the Justice Department of any criminal wrongdoing for getting outside speaking fees while on official trips paid for by the government. Gordon Walker, a deputy undersecretary of the Housing and Urban Development Department, was the subject of a lengthy internal HUD investigation, which had been forwarded to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
A new AIDS antibody test has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and is more accurate than any other test available, its developer said. Genetic Systems Corp. in Seattle said its test detected the antibody in 100% of all AIDS patients tested in clinical studies. The test also lowered false-positive results by up to 80%, wrongly reporting the antibody in only 0.2% of normal blood donors. The FDA confirmed that it has approved the test, but said it could not characterize it as the most accurate.
Oil drilling in the Great Lakes would be barred under a “statement of principle” to be signed Sunday by eight governors, the office of Michigan Governor James J. Blanchard announced. The governors of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota will join Blanchard in signing the pact in Washington during the National Governors’ Association winter meeting. Ontario Premier David Peterson also has reiterated his support for the Canadian province’s policy blocking oil drilling in the Great Lakes.
The U.S. Navy has launched a major fleet training exercise in the Pacific off Southern California that, for the first time in decades, centers on a battle group led by a battleship instead of an aircraft carrier. The three-week exercise, code-named Readiex 86-2, began with the battleship USS New Jersey assuming the lead role. Fourteen other ships are also participating, the Navy said. Although the Navy has conducted numerous exercises using battleships in the past, the largest fleet training maneuvers have centered on aircraft carriers ever since those huge ships were developed. The exercise began just two weeks after Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger informed Congress that the Navy is planning to begin alternating Pacific Ocean deployments between carrier battle groups and battleship groups. The Navy said about 5,000 men and women aboard the 15 ships are participating in the exercise.
A government drug informer was shot dead by machine guns in a parking lot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Wednesday night. Border patrol agents in Miami and New Orleans and the Mississippi state police today arrested three suspects, two of them Colombians. Federal Attorney Stanford Bardwell said “we believe two of them fired the shots” that killed the informer, Barry Seal. Mr. Bardwell said officials were seeking a fourth suspect. Mr. Seal, 45 years old, was slain outside a halfway house where he had been ordered by a judge. He was to be a key witness in the trial of a man accused of being the kingpin of a cocaine ring. The three men were picked up as a result of a bulletin describing them. The Mississippi state police arrested Miguel Velez, a Colombian, in Meridian, after the taxicab in which he was riding struck a deer. Border Patrol agents arrested Eliberto Sanchez, 27, also of Colombia, near the New Orleans International Airport. A third suspect, who was not immediately identified, was arrested by customs agents when he flew to Miami, Mr. Bardwell said.
Philadelphia’s 61-house rebuilding plan is mired in controversy nearly two months after the deadline passed for reconstructing the houses destroyed in a fire generated by the police bombing of a radical group’s house. Work on the houses has slowed and each of the houses may cost the taxpayers more than $130,000 each, four times the average assessed value of nearby houses.
Accused child molesters Raymond Buckey, 27, and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 59, will not go to trial until summer at the earliest. Lawyers for the Buckeys — the only remaining defendants in the McMartin Pre-School molestation case — said they will file motions to dismiss all 101 charges of molestation and conspiracy on grounds that the preliminary hearing judge committed dozens of serious errors that resulted in a denial of their defendants’ constitutional rights. They also said they may request that the intertwined cases be severed, with separate trials. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Roger W. Boren scheduled a hearing on the motions for May 30, when he will set a trial date. Both defendants waived their right to a speedy trial and agreed to a delay of up to six months from their January 23 arraignment. They are charged with sexually abusing, photographing and threatening 14 children who attended the Manhattan Beach nursery school.
[Ed: In retrospect, the entire McMartin case was a study in mass hysteria. No physical evidence was ever produced, and the child testimony was largely retracted or unreliable due to coaching by prosecution psychologists.]
Water surged over a crumbling levee in northern California and flooded hundreds of homes as Westerners began cleaning up from nine days of storms. The 21,000 residents of two towns in northern California were being evacuated last night after a levee crumbled at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather Rivers, state disaster officials in Sacramento said. The evacuations were being carried out while residents in other parts of the West were cleaning up after nine days of heavy storms. Bill Helms of the California Flood Control Center in Sacramento said that National Guard helicopters were dispatched to Yuba. County to assist in evacuating the 12,000 residents of Linda, California, after 40 feet of river levee gave way. The 9,000 residents of the nearby town of Olivehurst were also being evacuated, said Nancy Hardaker, a spokesman for the Office of Emergency Services in Sacramento.
Judy-Lynn del Rey, a leading publisher of science fiction and fantasy books, died at Bellevue Hospital in New York. Mrs. del Rey, who had suffered a brain hemorrhage last October, was 43 years old and lived in Manhattan. Mrs. del Rey was the publisher and editor in chief of Del Rey Books, an imprint which she and her husband, Lester, founded and developed for Ballantine Books.
Mike Tyson sexually harasses a woman in Albany, New York.
Los Angeles Dodger pitcher Orel Hershiser is the first to win a $1 Million salary by arbitration.
After a one-day pause, the stock market resumed its upward march yesterday with the help of late afternoon buying programs that transformed a losing session into a winning one. Richard King, a trader with Morgan Stanley & Company, said the final hour turnaround was caused by institutions buying stocks at the same time that they were selling stock index futures in an arbitrage move. “They just cannot take this market down,” he added.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1672.82 (+14.56)
Born:
Julio Borbón, Dominican-American MLB outfielder (Texas Rangers, Chicago Cubs, Baltimore Orioles), in Starkville, Mississippi.
Died:
Judy-Lynn del Rey, 43, leading publisher of science fiction and fantasy books (Del Rey Books), after a brain hemorrhage last October.
Koss Rietkerk, 58, Dutch foreign minister (VVD).
History Diaries 