A nine-day congress of the Soviet Communist Party ended today with several additions to the top Kremlin leadership, including Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the longtime envoy in Washington, and the first woman in 25 years. A new Central Committee of 307 full, voting members, a body that meets between congresses, includes 97 newcomers and 22 others promoted from nonvoting, candidate status. The figures reflect vacancies created by deaths, demotions or retirements. There was no evidence of a major overhaul. In concluding remarks, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, lauded what he described as a spirit of candor at the congress and exhorted the 5,000 delegates to “bring home to every Soviet person” the message of “radical transformation in all spheres of life.” He alluded briefly to the absence of progress in arms control and other aspects of Moscow’s relations with Washington since he met with President Reagan in Geneva in November. “Someone there simply fears the existing opportunity for a radical long-term improvement in Soviet-American relations,” he said. “So what are we to do, Comrades? Slam the door? It cannot be ruled out that this is exactly the sort of thing they want us to do.” He said the Soviet Union would not “play up to those who want mankind to get used to the nuclear threat and the arms race.”
The military leaders of eight North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries called off their joint winter maneuvers a week early as the body of a 13th Norwegian ski trooper was recovered a day after an avalanche struck a 31-man patrol. Hopes were fading for finding the bodies of three more Norwegian soldiers buried by the avalanche, near the Arctic port of Narvik in northern Norway. “Anchor Express” was a multimillion-dollar test of NATO’s preparedness for winter warfare involving 20,000 troops.
The future of Spain’s Socialist Government has become suddenly uncertain amid indications that its position may be rejected when Spaniards vote next week in a referendum on membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Government has unexpectedly found itself alone on the issue, aligned against the conservative opposition, the Roman Catholic Church and public neutralist sentiment far deeper than Government officials say they anticipated. Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez acknowledged his own “disquiet” last week. Four independent polls published today projected a solid defeat for NATO membership while the Government’s own poll projected a bare victory.
One of Yugoslavia’s leading newspapers today charged former Secretary General Kurt Waldheim of the United Nations with taking part in Nazi military operations against Yugoslav partisans, but the Foreign Ministry withheld comment. The paper, Vjesnik, said documents found in war archives in the Yugoslav republic of Croatia on Wednesday proved that Mr. Waldheim, as an officer in the German armed forces, had taken part in military operations against partisans. The partisans were Communist forces who, under Tito, fought the Nazi occupiers during World War II and took power in Yugoslavia after the war.
The World Jewish Congress accused Kurt Waldheim, already under fire for hiding his wartime activities, of blocking U.S. access to a vast storehouse of Nazi war criminal records when he was U.N. secretary general. Justice Department officials said they could not see records of the U.N. War Crimes Commission except in special cases but that they did not know if Waldheim was responsible. A U.N. spokesman told Reuters news agency that the commission’s records are not open to the public because they contain unsubstantiated allegations, but he insisted that they could be inspected at the request of any government. A member of the U.N.’s legal office said he is surprised at the charges because U.S. aides have requested and obtained information from the files several times.
Torture remains widespread in the world and may be “the plague of the second half of the 20th Century,” a U.N. report said. The report, compiled by Dutch jurist Peter Kooijmans for the U.N. Human Rights Commission, was based on reports in 33 countries. “Most cases involved people tortured during interrogation while being held incommunicado by security police,” the report said. “Some countries appear to have institutionalized torture.”
The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee voted today to approve a $250 million aid program for Northern Ireland to help support the agreement between Britain and Ireland that gives Ireland a voice in governing the province. The five-year program was approved by voice vote and sent to the House floor, where approval is expected.
The British Government proposed tough measures today to fight a rising crime rate, including life prison terms for carrying guns, seizure of criminal assets to pay victims and elimination of jury trials in some cases. The Criminal Justice bill, to be introduced in the next session of Parliament in November, would also limit pre-emptory challenges of prospective jurors by lawyers and ease restrictions on extradition. Home Secretary Douglas Hurd said the proposed law would build confidence in the criminal justice system and demonstrate greater regard for crime victims. “We welcome the proposals to strengthen the rights of victims, but we oppose what appear to be technical changes that strike at the root of the right to a fair trial,” said Sarah Spencer, general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties.
Ten days before crucial parliamentary elections, a controversy has erupted in France over the Government’s efforts to free four French hostages held in Lebanon. A Moslem extremist group said Wednesday that one of the four had been “executed.” There was still no confirmation by the French Government today that the hostage, Michel Seurat, 38 years old, had been killed, although the Islamic Holy War group, which said it had been holding him, reported the killing in a statement made public in Beirut. But there was growing pessimism in Paris today about Mr. Seurat’s fate.
Sikh terrorists ambushed the entourage of a moderate Sikh leader with submachine guns, wounding him and two others before spraying a crowd of bystanders and killing six people. The six gunmen, apparently wearing police uniforms, opened fire on Kabul Singh, acting president of the powerful Sikh Temples’ Management Committee, as he drove through Kapurtha in northern Punjab state. It was the bloodiest attack by suspected extremists seeking an independent Sikh homeland since the moderate Akali Dal party swept to power in state elections last September.
Fifty-one South Korean students who demonstrated for direct presidential elections last month were indicted today on charges of violating laws banning unauthorized rallies, the prosecutor’s office announced. A total of 189 students were arrested in connection with the February 4 demonstration on the campus of Seoul National University. But 138 had been released because they had repented, the prosecutor’s office here said. About 1,000 students from 15 universities took part in the demonstration for constitutional amendments to establish a direct presidential election in place of the present electoral college system, which they say favors the governing party.
A New Zealand harbor master caused a Soviet luxury liner to hit submerged rocks and sink last month when he piloted the ship at full speed through a narrow passage, an official inquiry by the New Zealand government found. All 750 passengers and all but one crew member aboard the Mikhail Lermontov were rescued when the liner sank off New Zealand February 16. Captain Don Jamieson, chief pilot and harbor master of the Marlborough Harbor Board, was blamed. The report credited quick action by the ship’s Soviet captain with preventing loss of life among the passengers.
Former President Ferdinand E. Marcos received most of an $80 million payment 10 years ago for awarding a lucrative contract to build the first nuclear power plant in the Philippines, according to Filipino lawyers, bankers and Government officials. The payment, by the Westinghouse Electric Company, went to a close associate of Mr. Marcos and the bulk of it was later turned over to the former president, the sources said. The power plant has not yet been completed. The episode is described by the officials and others as an example of how Mr. Marcos and his friends were able to amass huge fortunes under his rule. At the same time, the Philippine economy was deteriorating and the country accumulating a foreign debt that now totals about $26 billion.
American officials in the Philippines were aware that Ferdinand E. Marcos was taking currency with him when he left Clark Air Base for Hawaii, Reagan Administration officials said today. The presence of the money was revealed in preliminary inventories and became a source of consternation to the United States even before Mr. Marcos arrived in Hawaii, an official said. Officials also said weapons had been collected from the Marcoses and their party before their departure. An official said the weapons included small arms, such as pistols and rifles.
Jaime Cardinal Sin, the Archbishop of Manila, today defended the actions of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines before Pope John Paul II, who the Cardinal said had expressed concern about excessive political involvement. In an interview after the audience, Cardinal Sin described his 30-minute meeting with the Pope as “very happy” and said he was confident that he had reassured him. “He’s too concerned that we are engaged in too much politics,” the Cardinal said. “I said: ‘This is not political. It is a moral dimension.’ And he smiled,” Cardinal Sin continued, “because he understands. He came from Poland.”
Demands increased today for a new and deeper inquiry into the 1983 assassination of Benigno S. Aquino Jr., the opposition leader whose death began the chain of events that drove Ferdinand E. Marcos into exile last week. The original trial that ended in acquittals for 26 defendants was denounced by the Marcos Government’s chief prosecutor as so stage-managed by Mr. Marcos that a new trial would not risk double jeopardy. The prosecutor, Manuel Herrerra, disclosed that Mr. Marcos had gathered the judges and prosecutors in a private meeting and instructed them: “Let’s do some play-acting.” “There was already a decision even before the start of the trial,” Mr. Herrera said. “The nullification of the trial is proper,” he declared in a statement in which he said there were “clear indications of failure of justice.”
Two House committees voted today to disapprove President Reagan’s request for $100 million for the Nicaraguan rebels, while a third backed the plan. The votes came as lawmakers from both parties expressed resentment at the Administration’s lobbying tactics and accused it of what some called “Red-baiting” legislators who oppose the Nicaragua policy. In a speech on the Senate floor, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, a Kansas Republican, rebuked the President for casting the issue in Central America as “a simple choice between good freedom fighters and evil Marxists.” Mrs. Kassebaum said, “I find this simplistic reasoning to be highly offensive.” Representative Michael D. Barnes, a Maryland Democrat, said Mr. Reagan and his advisers were committing “the moral equivalent of McCarthyism,” and he added: “Frankly, I don’t believe we have heard such offensive nonsense from our political leaders since the 1950’s.”
President Reagan is pressing for military aid to Nicaraguan rebels despite misgivings among his advisers about the political risks of the effort, and also about the tactics that some key aides have employed, White House officials said today. Officials made it clear that Mr. Reagan has not been directly confronted with the concerns of his aides because they are aware of the President’s deep conviction that Nicaragua is emerging as a second Cuba and poses a danger for Latin America and even the United States. Some officials said that Mr. Reagan’s conviction on this point is so strong that he is reluctant to accept at face value reports that the object of his $100 million aid proposal, the Nicaraguan rebel force, is in disarray. He responds to these reports by saying that the aid proposal — which includes $70 million for ammunition, helicopters, weapons, trucks and other military supplies — can reverse the situation. This year, the rebels are receiving $27 million in “humanitarian” aid from the United States.
President Reagan, discussing his proposal to send aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, said today that members of Congress must choose between supporting his Administration or supporting Communists. Continuing his weeklong campaign for his $100 million aid package in a meeting with House Republican leaders, Mr. Reagan said a great many people were deceived about Communist subversion and hinted that such was true of some in Congress. The assertion came as some members of Congress complained that the Administration was losing votes for the aid because of the shrillness of its campaign and the suggestion by some that Congressional opponents were unpatriotic. Mr. Reagan, asked at the start of the meeting if Democrats were facing a choice between supporting him or the Communists, replied: “It’s what the choice comes down to, whether it is knowingly or not. And I’ve had enough experience with Communist subversion back in my former profession to know that a great many people are deceived, and not aware that what they’re doing is inimical to the interests of the United States.”
South African police reported that seven blacks were killed in riots on the eve of the promised lifting of the country’s partial state of emergency. President Pieter W. Botha said earlier that he would probably end the state of emergency today in 23 districts after what he called a decline of violence. Fire heavily damaged the Johannesburg office of the Release Mandela Committee, which has worked for the release of black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela. Aubrey Mokoena, the group’s publicity secretary, blamed police for the fire. Police denied it and arrested him on an unrelated charge. South Africa has released almost all of those remaining in detention since the imposition of a state of emergency last July, the police said today. A spokesman said that more than 300 people had been released overnight and that “only a few” were being held on other charges. Their release came shortly before the expected lifting of the emergency laws, promised by President P. W. Botha earlier this week.
An unmanned Soviet spacecraft plunged through the atmosphere of Halley’s comet this morning and sent back the first pictures showing the icy core, formed as the Solar System was evolving 4.6 billion years ago. The first view of the comet’s nucleus was transmitted shortly before 10:20 A.M. (2:20 A.M., Eastern standard time) as the Vega 1 spacecraft closed to within 5,500 miles of the core. The image showed two small areas of concentrated brightness, raising the intriguing possibility that Halley’s comet may have two nuclei. The computer-enhanced television images, taken with a variety of filters, showed roughly oval areas of differing light intensities. The color coding showed the outer areas of least intensity in violet, then moved through yellow and into red, the area most closely surrounding the nucleus.
The Republican-controlled Senate Budget Committee today rejected President Reagan’s proposed 1987 budget on a vote of 16 to 6. The committee has rejected the President’s budget in other years, and many members have already publicly attacked this year’s version, so the vote came as no surprise. But it pointed up the deep differences between the White House and the Senate over budget priorities. It came the day after the committee began to work on its own budget plan for the 1987 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. The new budget-balancing law mandates a ceiling on the 1987 deficit at $144 billion. Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the committee chairman, said he was aiming to finish by the end of next week.
The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously passed a Pentagon reorganization bill that Chairman Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) hailed as potentially “the most significant piece of defense organization legislation in the nation’s history.” At the center of the measure is a strengthening of the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making him the principal military adviser to the President. The measure also would strengthen the authority of the unified commanders, the top officers for directing any military action around the world.
A congressional investigation raised new concerns about the nation’s air traffic control system, concluding there are too few experienced people for the job and recommending the government impose air traffic restrictions. The report by the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, was based on an extensive survey of the controller work force and found that poor worker morale and fatigue remain a problem 4 ½ years after President Reagan fired 11,400 controllers following an illegal strike.
President Reagan receives the public report on the findings of the Vice President’s Task Force on Combating Terrorism.
Vice President Bush said today that the government’s policy on combating terrorism would remain one in which there was a willingness to retaliate, but not to “wantonly destroy human life.” His comments came as he made public an expurgated version of a report on terrorism that had been presented to President Reagan by an interagency task force of which the Vice President was chairman. The full report, containing about two dozen recommendations, was given to Mr. Reagan in December. Mr. Bush said parts of it were now being made public to show what the Government was doing “to come to grips with the insidious threat of terrorism.” Among the recommendations are suggestions that Congress make the murder of an American citizen abroad a Federal crime punishable by the death penalty, the establishment of an intelligence unit specializing in terrorism, and increased efforts to infiltrate terrorist groups. In the key recommendation, the task force said that a set of standards should be established to judge whether a military response was called for in retaliation against acts of terrorism. Among the criteria to be considered, it said, are the potential injury to innocent civilians and the ability to identify specific targets.
President Reagan places a call to James C. Fletcher, Distinguished Public Service Professor of Engineering and Technology, University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Fletcher will be named to a second tour of duty as head of the national space agency, President Reagan announced. The announcement was made several hours after Dr. Fletcher, in a telephone interview, reiterated that he did not want the assignment and would take it only if no other suitable candidate could be found.
Teamsters are so tightly controlled by organized crime that the government should consider removing officers of the union and placing it under court supervision, according to the President’s Commission on Organized Crime. The panel said that leaders of the teamsters, the nation’s largest union, “have been firmly under the influence of organized crime since the 1950’s” and the federal government has been unable or unwilling to combat the infiltration effectively. “The systematic use of trusteeships by the courts may be necessary to prevent organized crime from continuing to do business as usual,” the report says in conclusion. The report, however, falls short of calling for outright government action against the teamsters’ national leadership. Teamsters’ Chief Is Accused The commission’s report accused the teamsters’ president, Jackie Presser, of having an “extensive record of organized crime associations.”
Mayor W. Wilson Goode was not to blame for the decision that led directly to the death of five children last May in the confrontation with the radical group Move, the chairman of a special inquiry said today. But he said the Mayor had been negligent and irresponsible throughout the crisis. The chairman, William H. Brown 3d, said Fire Commissioner William C. Richmond and Police Commissioner Gregore J. Sambor were primarily responsible for the deaths because they decided to allow a fire to burn unimpeded for nearly an hour. The panel called for a grand jury to investigate the incident and any possible perjury. “There is no doubt in my mind that certainly the lives of those children would have been saved and I believe the lives of a number of other individuals in that home would have been saved had the fire been fought,” Mr. Brown said.
The Senate voted 95 to 2 to confirm Richard E. Lyng as agriculture secretary. Only Senators William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin) and Donald W. Riegle Jr. (D-Michigan) voted against Lyng, a California agribusinessman nominated by President Reagan to succeed John R. Block. Block resigned last month after five years on the job. Lyng, 67, was Block’s No. 2 official in the first four years of the Reagan Administration before resigning to start his own agriculture consulting and lobbying firm. Lyng was Reagan’s director of agriculture in California from 1967 to 1969.
Rep. Joseph P. Addabbo (D-New York), who returned to Congress in December after successfully fighting a serious kidney ailment, collapsed while attending a luncheon honoring one of his House colleagues. Addabbo, 60, was taken to Washington’s Georgetown University Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition in the intensive care unit, according to hospital spokesman Tim Sites. “It was some sort of cardiac abnormality,” said Sites, “but of what kind has not been determined yet.”
A new study has confirmed the health benefits of exercise by demonstrating that Harvard College men who worked out regularly were healthier and lived longer than those who chose sedentary lives. The lifestyles and health of 16,936 Harvard College alumni ages 35 to 74 who entered the school between 1916 and 1950 were examined in an 18-year study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which emphasized the importance of exercise.
Two former pilots for Arrow Air told Congress today that the charter airline did minimal maintenance and pushed pilots to the point they would fall asleep in the cockpit. An Arrow Air DC-8 crashed at Gander, Newfoundland, killing 248 United States servicemen in December. Officials of the airline denied the pilots’ accusations and insisted that safety, not profits or time schedules, was their top priority. The hearing before the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee was the first of two on Capitol Hill into the airline’s operations. A second was held before a House panel. Daniel Hood, who flew for Arrow from 1983 to 1985, said the airline’s attitude was “one of performing only marginal maintenance.”
The Democratic Party’s Executive Committee, over the objection of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, endorsed changes in their delegate selection rules for the 1988 presidential campaign. The changes, which must be approved by the full Democratic National Committee when it meets in Washington on Saturday, lowered the percentage of the vote candidates must receive in order to qualify for being awarded delegates from 20% to 15%. Jackson argued that the threshold should be lowered to no higher than 10%.
A high school freshman stood up in class in Dolton, Illinois, pulled a 357-caliber Magnum pistol out of a gym bag and shot a math teacher who had suggested his suspension earlier in the year, authorities said. The teacher, Norma Cooper, 52, was in fair condition with a shoulder wound at Ingalls Memorial Hospital in Harvey, a south Chicago suburb. The boy, 14, who lives in Harvey, was charged in a juvenile petition with attempted murder, unlawful use of a weapon and aggravated battery, said Dolton Police Chief George Pfotenhauer.
The Pentagon is cutting costs by discharging about 35,000 enlisted men and women 30 to 60 days ahead of schedule and reducing the number of assignment transfers, spokesmen for the four services said. The spokesmen, in response to a query, also said the military services planned to cut costs by extending some tours of duty and reducing the number of permanent changes of station, or transfers, that have become routine in military life. The Defense Department is required to make a $5.1 billion reduction in spending by Sept. 30 under the new deficit-reducing measure. Under that law, the first cuts began last Saturday.
The United States Supreme Court late today postponed the execution scheduled for Friday of Aubrey Dennis Adams, convicted of killing a child in Florida. By a vote of 7 to 2 the justices ordered Mr. Adams kept alive until the Court considers a formal appeal filed in his behalf, or until March 25, whichever comes first. The Court took the unusual step of reviving an emergency request filed in Mr. Adams’s behalf that it had denied February 28. Mr. Adams was sentenced to die in the state’s electric chair for the 1978 strangling of an 8-year-old Ocala girl. Governor Bob Graham had signed the third death warrant Thursday. Two earlier warrants expired after Mr. Adams won stays.
New evidence of the AIDS virus in women could help explain how the disease can be spread among heterosexuals, scientists say. The evidence was obtained from studies of 21 women, all of whom had multiple sexual partners or sexual relations with either bisexual men or intravenous drug users. Two groups of scientists from San Francisco and Boston reported in the March 8 issue of The Lancet that they had found the AIDS virus in vaginal and cervical secretions in the 21 women. It was the first time the virus had been found in female genital secretions and it provides a missing link in the epidemiology of AIDS.
Texans remembered the Alamo 150 years after 188 intrepid defenders of Texas lost their lives at the hands of the Mexican Army under Santa Anna. The Texans gathered on their most hallowed ground to honor Colonel William Barret Travis, Colonel Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and all the other heroes whose deaths have become a national symbol of valor and sacrifice in the name of liberty.
After losing all appeals, American rock singer David Crosby begins serving 5-year sentence for drug and weapons convictions in Texas state prison.
Georgia O’Keeffe, the undisputed doyenne of American painting and a leader, with her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, of a crucial phase in the development and dissemination of American modernism, died yesterday at St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was 98 years old, and had lived in Santa Fe since 1984, when she moved from her longtime home and studio in Abiquiu, New Mexico. As an artist, as a reclusive but overwhelming personality and as a woman in what was for a long time a man’s world, Georgia O’Keeffe was a key figure in the American 20th century. As much as anyone since Mary Cassatt, she raised the awareness of the American public to the fact that a woman could be the equal of any man in her chosen field. As an interpreter and manipulator of natural forms, as a strong and individual colorist and as the lyric poet of her beloved New Mexico landscape, she left her mark on the history of American art and made it possible for other women to explore a new gamut of symbolic and ambiguous imagery. Miss O’Keeffe was strong-willed, hard-working and whimsical. She would wrap herself in a blanket and wait, shivering, in the cold dark for a sunrise to paint; would climb a ladder to see the stars from a roof, and hop around in her stockings on an enormous canvas to add final touches before all the paint dried.
Soaring stock prices over the last five months are making millions of Americans wealthier — at least on paper. In an extraordinary burst, the volume of all publicly traded securities has jumped more than $450 billion and added zip to the economy as many investors have begun to spend more freely than before.
The decision by West Germany to lower its interest rates helped stock prices rise sharply yesterday, snapping a slump on Wall Street that lasted nearly a week. The German reduction led the financial community to conclude that the Federal Reserve Board might shortly match the move. That would be positive for the stock market.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1696.6 (+9.94)
Born:
Francisco Cervelli, Venezuelan MLB catcher (World Series Champions-Yankees, 2009; New York Yankees, Pittsburgh Pirates, Atlanta Braves, Miami Heat), in Valencia, Venezuela.
Jake Arrieta, MLB pitcher (World Series Champions-Cubs, 2016; Baltimore Orioles, Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies, San Diego Padres), in Farmington, Missouri.
Ross Detwiler, MLB pitcher (Washington Nationals, Texas Rangers, Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians, Oakland A’s, Seattle Mariners, Chicago White Sox, Miami Heat, San Diego Padres, Cincinnati Reds), in St. Louis Cardinals.
Eli Marienthal, American actor (“The Iron Giant”, “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen”), in Santa Monica, California.
Chris Mueller, NHL centre (Nashville Predators, Dallas Stars, New York Rangers), in West Seneca, New York.
Died:
Georgia O’Keeffe, 98, American sculptor and painter (“Cow’s Skull”, “Flowers”).
István Pelle, 78, Hungarian gymnast (Olympic gold pommel horse & floor exercise, 1932).
Adolph Caesar, 52, American actor (“Club Paradise”, “Soldier’s Story”), of a heart attack.
History Diaries 