Sweden’s Prime Minister was slain. The Prime Minister, Olof Palme, was shot on a street in Stockholm shortly after he left a movie theater with his wife. Mr. Palme, who was 59 years old, was the leader of Sweden’s Social Democratic Party. He was Prime Minister since September 1982 and also served in the job from 1969 to 1976. He was the first European head of government to be slain while in office in 47 years. There were no immediate arrests. The police said they had questioned about 10 people at the site of the shooting but had learned little, although at least one person, a taxi driver, said he had seen the shooting. “We don’t know whether it was one or several persons who shot the Prime Minister,” said the Stockholm police commissioner, Nils Linder. Six hours after the shooting, an unidentified man was taken into custody outside the Prime Minister’s office for questioning, the police said. “We want to hear this man because he fits the description of a man who has been seen at the site of the murder,” Mr. Linder said. Police Set Up Checkpoints Patrols were stepped up at airports, ferry stations and all other border crossings, and the police set up checkpoints to inspect cars leaving the city. “I refuse to believe it is a political assassination,” said Thorbjorn Falldin, Mr. Palme’s predecessor as Prime Minister. “This must be the work of a lunatic.”
Prime Minister Olof Palme of Sweden, who was shot and killed on a street in Stockholm last night, was the dominant figure in Swedish politics in the 1970’s and 1980’s and was a forceful, often acerbic voice on the world stage as well. First elected chairman of Sweden’s Social Democratic Party and Prime Minister in 1969, Mr. Palme led his faltering party in two consecutive general elections before losing at the polls in 1976 to a coalition of non-Socialists in a defeat that ended 44 years of Socialist government in Sweden. But in 1982, after leading his party as the opposition to a series of non-Socialist governments in Sweden, Mr. Palme once again led the Social Democrats back to power and, re-elected last fall to another three-year term, had remained at the helm until his assassination. Like much in the character of his nation, the 59-year-old Mr. Palme was something of a paradox: an aristocrat turned Socialist, perhaps the most left-wing of the Western leaders, head of a neutral nation of 8.3 million people but seemingly more at home in the international arena.
President Reagan tonight expressed shock and sorrow at the death of Prime Minister Olof Palme and praised him as “a man who made compassion the hallmark of Swedish policy.” In a White House statement issued just before midnight, Mr. Reagan called the Prime Minister’s assassination “a senseless act of violence” and extended his condolences to Mr. Palme’s family and the Swedish people. “The world will remember him for his devotion to democratic values and his untiring efforts to promote peace,” the President said. Mr. Reagan’s comments echoed those of other world leaders, who expressed shock that violence had taken the life of a man so identified with peace.
The head of the Soviet K.G.B. said today that his men had caught Government employees whom he accused of spying for Western nations that “snatch at our secrets.” He warned other Soviet citizens against engaging in espionage. The K.G.B. chief, Viktor M. Chebrikov, said at the 27th Communist Party Congress: “A number of agents of imperialist intelligence services, renegades who sold important official secrets to foreign organizations, have been uncovered at some ministries and departments recently. These persons received strict, but just, punishment in accordance with the law.” Mr. Chebrikov gave few details of the counterespionage operation in the report carried by the official press agency Tass. Western reporters are not allowed in the meeting hall. Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze said in his report to the congress that study of the latest United States arms control proposal had confirmed that it included nothing new or constructive.
Five imprisoned Solidarity activists on long hunger strikes are in perilous physical condition, according to opposition sources. The five, who are in prisons in Warsaw and Gdansk, have not eaten voluntarily for as long as four months and have been kept alive by daily force-feeding. Jerzy Urban, the Government spokesman, acknowledged that Czeslaw Bielecki, the most well known of the men on hunger strike, was in a prison hospital under the care of a civilian cardiologist because his heartbeat had been found to be erratic. Mr. Bielecki, an architect who is the founder of one of the most active underground publishing houses, has maintained his hunger strike since Oct. 13. Mr. Bielecki organized and directed the publishing house while evading capture within a conspiratorial environment. Since his arrest last April and his later indictment on a charge of high treason, he has battled the authorities from his Warsaw prison cell. He has filed formal slander charges against Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, the Interior Minister, for having asserted that the dissident had contacts with foreign powers.
A prosecutor’s request for acquittal in the trial over the shooting of the Pope has raised the uncomfortable question of how Italy could hold a Bulgarian defendant for more than three years when the state’s own prosecutor now admits there was insufficient evidence for conviction. The proposal by the prosecutor, Antonio Marini — that the Bulgarian, Sergei I. Antonov, and two other Bulgarian defendants, who are being tried in absentia, be “absolved for lack of proof” — would not amount to full absolution. Their defense attorneys have protested the proposal, demanding a full declaration of innocence. But the recommendation, made to the jury of two judges and six lay jurors who will get the case after nearly nine months of intense debate, constituted an admission that the evidence against the Bulgarians was ambiguous at best.
European Economic Community signs “Special Act” for Europe free trade.
John Demjanjuk, a 65-year-old retired automobile worker from Cleveland and accused Nazi war criminal, was delivered by United States marshals to Israeli justice today at Tel Aviv airport. He will be tried on charges that he operated the engines that killed by exhaust gas untold thousands of Jews in the German extermination camp of Treblinka in Poland in 1942-43. Israeli law provides for a maximum penalty of death. In more than five years of denaturalization, deportation and extradition hearings in American courts, Mr. Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian captured by German forces while serving in the Soviet Army, denied all accusations. The Supreme Court rejected his final appeal against extradition on Monday.
Egypt’s Interior Minister, Ahmed Rushdi, regarded as one of the country’s most powerful political figures, was dismissed today in the aftermath of a rebellion by thousands of paramilitary policemen under his command. At least 36 people died in the rioting, which was set off Tuesday night by a rumor that the conscript security policemen would be held on duty an extra year. The damage to burned-out luxury hotels and nightclubs near the Great Pyramids totaled hundreds of millions of dollars. What was more difficult to calculate was the damage to President Hosni Mubarak’s shaky Government, already beset by an overwhelming economic breakdown and a growing lack of public confidence. Army tanks and armored vehicles stood in the main roads and intersections for a third day as soldiers manned roadblocks and checkpoints. More than 3,000 paramilitary policemen have been arrested, the Government says, along with at least 700 civilians who were said to have been involved in the uprising. The situation appeared to be calming down today, although there was still sporadic gunfire in several areas.
President Reagan has decided to sell more than $300 million worth of missiles to Saudi Arabia despite the strong possibility that the sale will be blocked by Israeli supporters in Congress, a senior White House official said today. The official said the Saudis were concerned about recent successes by Iran in its war with Iraq because Iranian troops had moved close to Kuwait and the Persian Gulf oilfields. “We’re going to ask the Congress for it,” the official said of the sale, “on the grounds that the Saudis think they need it. They feel threatened right now with Iran seemingly pushing Iraq back and seizing Iraq territory. They are getting very close to Kuwait, and you know from Kuwait to the oilfields doesn’t take that much time.” Congress will be asked to approve the sale of more than $300 million worth of missiles because of concern over the movement of Iranian troops toward Kuwait and Persian Gulf oil fields in the latest fighting against Iraq. The official said the arms package included advanced models of the Sidewinder air-to-air missile and the shoulder-held Stinger antiaircraft missile. Harpoon anti-ship missiles may also be included. The exact number of missiles was still being worked on, State Department officials said, but are said to include as many as 1,700 Sidewinders, 800 Stingers, and 100 Harpoon missiles.
President Reagan participates in a message taping session for a Tribute to King Hassan of Morocco.
Freedom for all Filipinos jailed by the Marcos Government on charges considered political by the new Government was ordered by President Corazon C. Aquino. The order to free all remaining such prisoners promptly became surrounded by confusion an controversy, with debates going on inside and outside the Government on both definition of political crimes and the wisdom of freeing people believed to be leaders of armed insurgencies. Officials estimate that about 450 detainees will be eligible for immediate release. The President’s order promptly became surrounded by confusion and controversy, with debates inside and outside the Government on both the definition of political crimes and the wisdom of freeing people believed to be leaders of armed insurgencies. Also today, Mrs. Aquino said she was studying the option of declaring what her aides called a “revolutionary government” that would allow her to bypass the institutions left behind by former President Ferdinand E. Marcos.
Speaking publicly for the first time since he was deposed as President of the Philippines, Ferdinand E. Marcos said today that he had decided to surrender power despite having “overwhelming force” in order to avoid “the bloody carnage of our innocent civilians.” “I have been called, perhaps immodestly, brave in my time, but brave as I may have been against foreign invaders, I had no heart to shed Filipino blood,” Mr. Marcos said in what he called “a letter to the Filipino people” read to about 150 journalists here this afternoon. “My life has been devoted to the upliftment of the Filipino by re-establishing his identity and dignity after centuries of repression. And so, knowing I could lose everything if I did not use military power, I chose my authority over such military powers to protect the Filipino people.”
Reagan Administration officials said today that the United States was willing to return Philippine currency removed by Ferdinand E. Marcos or his associates when they fled if the money was removed in violation of that country’s laws. The gesture by the Administration would appear to provide a way around a potential problem with the new Philippine Government of Corazon C. Aquino over the disposition of assets that Mr. Marcos might have taken along when he fled Manila. A senior White House official placed a value of several million dollars on the currency and other property that Customs Service agents found in a United States transport plane that landed at Hickam Air Force base near Honolulu on Wednesday. The inspection is still continuing and a final determination has not been made, the official said.
Canada’s opposition Liberal Party, still recovering from its crushing defeat in the 1984 national elections, has been jolted by the sudden departure of Jean Chretien, one of its most effective politicians. Mr. Chretien, a veteran of nearly 23 years in the House of Commons, resigned his parliamentary seat and walked out on Thursday, saying only that “enough is enough.” When reporters asked later when he would return to politics, Mr. Chretien, 52 years old, told them, “I hope it will be never.” The effect of his departure here has been what it might be like in the United States if Edward M. Kennedy abruptly quit the Senate, though Mr. Chretien’s popularity among voters was, if anything, more widespread.
The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said today that the United States should offer to drop its support of the rebels fighting the Nicaraguan Government if the Sandinistas hold a free election “like the Philippines.” The proposal by the chairman, Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, went beyond any suggestion of the Reagan Administration. It also appeared to be an effort by the Senator to gain more support for the $100 million in military and nonmilitary aid to the rebels, known as “contras,” that President Reagan formally requested this week. Mr. Lugar is now arguing that the aim of the $100 million should be to press the Nicaraguan Government to hold free and fair elections rather than to overthrow the Government, as has been implied by the Reagan Administration. The President’s request for $100 million in aid faces strong opposition in the House and a tough fight in the Senate.
Brazil is freezing wages and prices and will establish a new currency in what President Jose Sarney called “a war of life and death” against inflation. Mr. Sarney said drastic measures were needed because inflation had become Brazil’s “worst enemy.’ Price rises in January and February pointed toward an annual inflation rate of 500 percent.
One of four Chilean dissidents imprisoned over the last week said today that the latest crackdown by the military Government was an effort to block a new wave of anti-Government demonstrations planned for March. The dissident, Manuel Sanhueza, president of the group calling itself Democratic Intransigence, was arrested Thursday.
Rebels controlling the southern Sudan have refused a United Nations request to allow a convoy to enter the area and bring food to 900,000 people facing starvation there, a Western relief official said in a telephone interview today. The official said Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar’s representative in the Sudan, Winston R. Prattley, appealed to rebel forces in recent weeks for safe passage for the convoy of 60 white trucks, which were waiting at the Kenyan border.
Democratic Congressmen have begun a campaign to block President Reagan’s covert military aid plan for Angolan rebels in what could be the start of a pitched battle, House aides said today. Representative Lee H. Hamilton, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and seven other Democrats from that committee introduced a bill Thursday that would allow aid to the rebels only if “provision of that support is the openly acknowledged policy of the United States,” an aide said.
A Belgian woman was charged in South Africa today with treason or terrorism in helping the main black guerrilla group fighting white rule. The woman, Helene Pastoors, 44 years old, was served with an indictment at Johannesburg magistrates court charging treason, which can carry the death penalty, or alternatively terrorism. Bail was refused, and her trial is to open on April 14. Belgium protested to Pretoria last week over her eight-month detention without charge. Miss Pastoors is the former wife of Klass de Jonge, a Dutch national who took refuge in the Netherlands Embassy in Pretoria in July after escaping from policemen investigating arms smuggling. The state charged today that Miss Pastoors had carried out reconnaissance work for the African National Congress and set up arms caches for the banned guerrilla group.
White House officials said today that Dr. James C. Fletcher, a former Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had emerged as the leading candidate to take over the troubled agency in the wake of the Challenger disaster. A senior aide to President Reagan who asked not to be identified said that Donald T. Regan, the White House chief of staff, had already spoken to Dr. Fletcher about the job and told him he was the leading candidate. The same official and others in the White House said that a strong consensus was building around Dr. Fletcher, not only in the White House but also in Congress and in other quarters involved with space. Senator Jake Garn, Republican of Utah, who is the chairman of a Senate subcommittee on space budgets, has twice strongly recommended Dr. Fletcher to the White House, an aide to the Senator said today. The aide said he understood that several other chairmen of key Senate and House subcommittees dealing with the space agency had also either recommended Dr. Fletcher or said they would be happy if he was selected, but this could not be immediately verified today.
NASA announced a personnel cut of 10 percent among the 11,000 people working on the shuttle program. The officials also announced a suspension of space shuttle flights for at least a year. “This is a difficult time for all of us,” John T. Conway, director of shuttle payload operations at the Kennedy Space Center, said at a news conference. Since the shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, killing all seven crew members, people here have expressed fear that grounded shuttles and inevitable layoffs would recreate the “ghost town” atmosphere that prevailed at the end of the Apollo moon program. The announcement that 1,100 employees are to be laid off ended weeks of rumor and speculation along Florida’s “space coast.” A NASA official said 650 of the layoffs were planned before the Challenger explosion.
President Reagan participates in a briefing for columnists, television commentators and anchors on defense and foreign policy matters.
Spending in hundreds of Federal programs around the country will be cut by 4.3 percent Saturday as a new budget-balancing law takes full effect. Officials acknowledged that some cuts will diminish services to the public but said they hoped to continue to provide all essential services. Officials at many agencies said they had already reduced staff travel and had cut back on the hiring of employees. As an example, Lou L. Gast, associate administrator of the Food Safety and Inspection Service, said all of the agency’s 9,000 employees would be furloughed for up to nine days, but not all at the same time. “That includes me, that includes the administrator and everybody in the agency,” which is part of the Agriculture Department, Mr. Gast said.
Cathy Evelyn Smith, a former singer and companion to rock musicians, was ordered today to stand trial on a charge of second-degree murder in the drug overdose death of the comedian John Belushi four years ago. Judge David Horowitz of Los Angeles Superior Court rejected a defense motion to dismiss the murder charge against Miss Smith and said her trial would start May 28. Miss Smith, a 38-year-old Canadian, also faces 13 counts of furnishing and administering cocaine and heroin to Mr. Belushi before his death here in March 1982. Mr. Belushi, 33, was a star of the “Saturday Night Live” television program. His films included “Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers.” Miss Smith was extradited from Canada and indicted by a Los Angeles County grand jury in March 1983 after she was quoted in The National Enquirer as saying she accidentally killed Mr. Belushi by injecting him with heroin and cocaine.
The parent union of the Minnesota local on strike against Geo. A. Hormel & Company is considering ending its sanction of the six-and-a-half-month walkout, a union official said today. Al Zack, director of publications for the United Food and Commercial Workers union, said the union’s leaders were considering withdrawing support for Local P-9 because they thought the local had either lost its strike or its leadership would not settle it. If the action is taken, striking meatpackers in Austin would no longer receive $40 a week in strike benefits from the international union, which had supplied $1.8 million in benefits through last week, Mr. Zack said. About 1,500 members of the local walked off their jobs August 17 in a dispute over wages and job security.
The most effective schools focus on core academic subjects, like mathematics, give lots of homework and have students memorize and emphasize the teaching of history, according to the United States Department of Education. The agency will present President Reagan next Tuesday with a list of 41 findings beginning with the assertion that “what parents do to help their children” is more important to academic success than “how well-off the family is.”
Patients with heart disease who refuse to quit smoking are nearly twice as likely to die of heart attacks than those who stop smoking, researchers have reported. Despite this finding and similar findings from earlier studies, a majority of smokers with heart disease continue to smoke, said the study, which was published in a special antismoking issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
A Presidential commission sharply criticized the nation’s military establishment and its suppliers today but recommended relatively modest measures to correct the deficiencies. The President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, led by a former Deputy Defense Secretary, David Packard, criticized national security planning and budgeting, military organization and command, procedures for acquiring weapons and the military industry. The bipartisan commission recommended that military budgets be drawn up for two years instead of one and that the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff be strengthened. It also recommended that a third Under Secretary of Defense be appointed and made responsible for acquiring weapons and that military contractors adopt stronger codes of ethics.
Proposals to streamline the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top uniformed military command, brought a barrage of criticism today from retired admirals and generals. In a debate on the issue, Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs from 1970 to 1974, denounced changes proposed in Congress as “a blueprint for disaster.” He said the proposals had been designed in “a semi-conspiracy” by Congressional aides “who have never heard gunfire and never missed a meal.”
The Justice Department announced today that a Philadelphia man accused of persecuting Jews in Poland had been arrested and that deportation proceedings would begin. The man, Sergei Kowalchuk, 65 years old, could be deported to the Soviet Union. The Supreme Court this week let stand a ruling that stripped Mr. Kowalchuk of his citizenship. Justice Department officials said Mr. Kowalchuk, as a volunteer member of the police force organized by the German occupation authorities in the Polish city of Lubomyl, assisted in the persecution of Jews and other citizens. In 1944 he fled with the retreating Nazi forces to Czechoslovakia. He entered the United States in 1950. Mr. Kowalchuk’s attorneys denied that he directly took part in atrocities.
For the first time in the city’s history, New Orleans voters will go to the polls Saturday to choose as Mayor one of two black candidates in a runoff election. The winner will succeed Mayor Ernest N. Dutch Morial, the city’s first black Mayor. Mr. Morial, who is president of the United States Conference of Mayors, emerged from the civil rights movement to break racial barriers in the State Legislature and state judiciary system. Now in his second term and barred by law from serving a third, Mr. Morial twice tried to change the law but was twice rebuffed by the voters, especially whites. The voters rejected a third-term proposal in a referendum last October after turning down an earlier proposal for unlimited terms.
Four police officers and a former officer have been added to the growing list of law-enforcement officers in the Miami area who have been charged with crimes. The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced Thursday the arrest of Sgt. William D. Risk, 39 years old, of Miami; Sgt. Fernando Gandon of North Bay Village; Cpl. George Staphylaris, 43, of Hollywood, and Andrew Mazzaralla, 45, of New York City, a former police lieutenant in North Bay Village. They were charged with selling protection to undercover agents posing as cocaine smugglers. Also Thursday, Miami detectives arrested Officer Raul R. Monroe, 26, on automobile theft charges after he admitted buying for $6,000 a 1985 Porsche that he suspected was stolen. The arrests bring to 11 the number of Miami police officers charged with crimes ranging from possession of cocaine to murder, the police said.
Eastern Airlines and its flight attendants reached a tentative agreement today, averting a strike. “It’s the best possible agreement given the absolute insanity of the last year and especially the last two weeks,” said Robert Callahan, president of the local Transport Workers Union. “I think we came out with a contract that’s fair to employees and to everybody,” Eastern’s president, Joseph Leonard, said after 16 hours of tense negotiations.
In the 1960’s the Hough neighborhood in Cleveland’s eastern sector attracted national attention for the severity of its riots and the extent of its poverty, crime and decay. Now, however, almost two decades after the urban riots, at a spot where the fires and bloodshed were most intense, a 183-unit complex of town houses and garden apartments, with baby-blue siding, swimming pool and tennis courts, is nearing completion for rent in the private market to moderate-income families. The project, Lexington Village, is one of many signs of what Clevelanders call the renaissance of an old industrial city that had long been in steep decline. Yet poverty and decay continue to spread, as the Council for Economic Opportunity for Greater Cleveland pointed out in a study released recently, and Mayor George V. Voinovich says, “opposing forces are pulling the city in different directions, resulting in a number of conflicting and often puzzling trends.” Because his efforts to revive the city have been so heavily dependent on Federal aid, the Republican Mayor has become increasingly outspoken against the policies of his national party. Nevertheless, he has maintained important contacts in Washington and is said to have acquired for Cleveland more Federal funds per capita than any other major city since President Reagan entered the White House.
San Francisco scrambled today to save its famed Chinese New Year’s parade, set for March 8, after insurance companies refused to write a liability insurance policy for it. The 33-year-old parade, sponsored by leaders of the city’s large Chinese community, draws nearly 500,000 spectators each year as it winds through a 16-block area of Chinatown. Unless the city can find insurance, officials said, other events such as the St. Patrick’s Day parade on March 16 also face possible cancellation.
Suspension of 7 major league players for cocaine use was announced by Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth. In baseball’s sternest disciplinary move since the Black Sox were banished for life, Commissioner Ueberroth gives 7 players who were admitted drug users a choice of a year’s suspension without pay or heavy fines and career-long drug testing, along with 100 hours of drug-related community service. Joaquin Andujar, Jeffrey Leonard, Enos Cabell, Keith Hernandez, Dave Parker, Dale Berra, and Lonnie Smith will be fined 10 percent of their annual salaries, while 14 other players will receive lesser penalties for their involvement with illegal drugs. Most of the suspensions are a result of testimony at the Pittsburgh trial.
Investors continued to swarm into the stock market yesterday after Thursday’s record-breaking session, and prices closed mostly higher although a select group of blue-chip stocks that included I.B.M. came under heavy selling pressure. Almost 192 million shares changed hands yesterday, the fourth-busiest session in Wall Street history, and more than 824 million shares were traded for the week. The weekly volume was the second highest on record, trailing only the week ended last December 13, when 827 million shares were traded. Unlike most other market indicators, the Dow Jones industrial average was unable to push forward one day after shattering the 1,700 barrier. It closed down 4.93 points, at 1,709.06.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1709.06 (-4.93)
Born:
Kingsley Ben-Adir, English actor (“Bob Marley: One Love”), in London, England, United Kingdom.
Alex Tanas, Canadian pop-reggae drummer (Magic! -“Rude”), in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Died:
Olof Palme, 59, Prime Minister of Sweden (1969-1976, 1982-1986), assassinated while walking home from the cinema with his wife.
Laura Z. Hobson, 85, American TV writer and panelist (“I’ve Got a Secret”).
History Diaries 