The Reagan Administration ordered the Soviet, Ukrainian and Byelorussian Missions to the United Nations today to reduce their personnel by more than a third, accusing them of espionage and calling the size of the missions “a threat to national security.” The unexpected announcement, which came in an official statement from the United States Mission to the United Nations, said the permanently assigned staffs would be cut from a total of 275 to 170 by April 1, 1988. The reduction will take place in four stages. By October of this year, when the first phase is to be completed, the three missions will be allowed to have no more than 243 permanent staff members. Calls to the Soviet Mission to the United Nations were not returned. Vladimir A. Sokolovsky, the first secretary at the Byelorussian Mission, said of the announcement, “I have not had time to read it.” The American statement said, “The United States Government has long been concerned about the unreasonably large size of the Soviet U.N. missions.” Calling the Soviet missions larger than the next two largest missions combined, it added: “The current size of the Soviet U.N. missions is not warranted by the staffing needs for official U.N. business. Moreover, it poses a threat to national security.”
American and Soviet officials have completed two days of talks on ways to stop the spread of chemical weapons, Reagan Administration officials said today. The talks, which were held on Wednesday and Thursday in Bern, Switzerland, were positive in tone, the officials said. The meeting represented the first attempt to follow through on a pledge made at the November summit meeting between President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, to initiate discussion of ways to prevent the spread of chemical weapons. “It was the start of a dialogue,” an Administration official said, adding that the talks were “nonpolemical and constructive.” The American representative to the talks was John H. Hawes of the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs. The Soviet representative was Viktor L. Israelyan, the Soviet delegate to the Geneva-based Committee on Disarmament. Administration officials said the meeting dealt with the need for better export controls on substances that can be used to make chemical weapons. A State Department official said the Soviet Union had recently established some export controls over such chemicals. But the United States is seeking additional export controls, another official said. Another topic discussed at Bern involved countries that are most inclined to produce and use chemical weapons, officials said. In the war between Iran and Iraq, each side has accused the other of using such weapons.
President Reagan participates in a meeting to discuss recently completed and future trips to the Soviet Union under the program People to People.
Kurt Waldheim told the World Jewish Congress yesterday that published reports linking him to Nazi wartime misconduct were part of a “unsubstantiated and unfounded” campaign against him. In response, the congress issued a statement accusing Mr. Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General, of continuing “a 40-year pattern of falsification and deception.” In a telex from Vienna to Edgar M. Bronfman, the president of the congress, Mr. Waldheim reiterated his argument that documents that led to the charges had been “deliberately misinterpreted.”
The British authorities refused to allow an Indian guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, into the country today and held him at Heathrow Airport after he arrived in a private jet. The Home Office, which issues visas, said the guru was denied permission to enter Britain “because of his undesirability, in view of his convictions in the United States.” The Home Office said Mr. Rajneesh was arranging to travel on “to somewhere in the West Indies.” Mr. Rajneesh left the United States in November after being convicted of violating United States immigration laws, and he stayed in India and Nepal before going to Greece. He has been having difficulty finding a haven since he left the United States after four years, mostly at a commune, now closed, that he set up in Oregon.
Jean-Claude Duvalier, the ousted Haitian President, arrived today with his family at their new residence in exile, an isolated luxury villa in hills inland from the French Riviera. Local officials said about a dozen people arrived in Grasse, 17 miles southwest of Nice, with Mr. Duvalier after a six-hour drive from Talloires, in the French Alps. They will live in a rented villa owned by a Dutchman. The former Haitian leader, 34 years old, had been confined to Talloires since he fled to France February 7 on a United States plane. The French originally said Mr. Duvalier would be allowed to stay only for a week as he sought permanent haven, but no other nation has agreed to take him. Authorities in Grasse said Mr. Duvalier had been served an order limiting his movements to the Alpes Maritimes department, which stretches along the French Riviera from Cannes to the Italian frontier.
More than two weeks after King Hussein of Jordan ended a joint negotiating effort with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasir Arafat and his senior aides remain split on how the P.L.O. should respond, Palestinian sources said here today. The King, in a speech on February 19, ended a yearlong effort to devise a joint Jordanian-Palestinian approach to Middle East peace and questioned the credibility of the P.L.O. leadership. He subsequently called on Palestinians to choose new leaders to speak for them. The sources said Mr. Arafat and his advisers in the P.L.O. and the guerrilla movement Al Fatah have been meeting in Tunis over the last three days to decide what stand to take.
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi ousted the leader of the Muslim-dominated state of Kashmir today and in effect placed it under his control. The move cleared the way for possible new elections in Kashmir, a northern state where there has been increasing violence between Muslims and Hindus. But at the same time, it appeared to create a host of new problems for the Prime Minister, whose political fortunes have recently started to ebb. It was the second time in two years that a Kashmir Chief Minister was ousted by a Prime Minister. The dismissal was seen as a symbol of continuing instability in India’s only Muslim-dominated state, where there is a special sensitivity because of its border with Pakistan.
In South Korea, riot police officers firing tear gas stormed the campus of Seoul National University today to disperse student protesters as American politicians arrived to assess chances for greater democracy in South Korea. Witnesses said the policemen clashed with about 2,000 students demonstrating in support of an opposition campaign for electoral change, including direct presidential elections in 1987. A legislator in the six-member American delegation, Representative Thomas M. Foglietta, Democrat of Pennsylvania, held a news conference at the home of the dissident leader Kim Dae Jung soon after his arrival. Mr. Foglietta said: “We are not trying to force our ways of life to South Koreans. But we want to export the finest American product — democracy.”
The Philippine Government today revoked the passports of former President Ferdinand E. Marcos and the 88 relatives and associates who fled with him to Hawaii. Officials here described the move as intended to block their return to the Philippines. The revocation also means that without permission from Manila, Mr. Marcos and his associates could not leave the United States, where he faces possible court action over real estate and other properties he is believed to hold. In announcing the move, Vice President Salvador H. Laurel, who is also Foreign Minister, said any requests for new passports would be handled on an individual basis. He said the action had been taken at the direction of President Corazon C. Aquino.
A federal judge in Honolulu today rejected arguments by Ferdinand E. Marcos that the United States Customs Service should not make public a list of Philippine currency he and his party brought to Hawaii last month. Within an hour of the ruling, the United States Attorney’s office released an inventory of the currency. It showed that Mr. Marcos and the others in his party had brought more than 30 million Filipino pesos, worth about $1.5 million. George Roberts, the District Director of Customs, said the Marcos party had reported only about 2.4 million pesos to the Customs Service when they filled out customs declarations.
The value of jewelry brought into Hawaii by the family of Ferdinand E. Marcos is estimated at $5 million to $10 million by the United States Customs Service, Reagan Administration officials said today. In New York, a representative of the Filipino commission seeking the return of properties held by the Marcoses said the Administration had a “moral obligation” to release documents and other possessions Mr. Marcos brought to Hawaii. Administration officials said Customs officials were about 90 percent finished with listing the valuables and the many financial, business and personal documents that were aboard the two C-141’s that carried the Marcos family and associates and their baggage and property from Clark Air Base to Hawaii last month. They said that after Customs finished preparing a detailed inventory of of the cargo, Justice Department lawyers would examine the various documents to see if they provided evidence for any criminal investigations involving possible violation of American foreign aid regulations or corrupt practices laws.
President Reagan announces his appointment of Ambassador Habib as his Special Envoy for Central America. A special envoy to Central America was appointed by President Reagan, who said the United States was seeking a “diplomatic solution for Central America.” He announced that he was appointing Philip C. Habib, who had just returned from the Philippines, where he had served as Mr. Reagan’s representative. Mr. Reagan said Mr. Habib would go to El Salvador in the start of an effort to step up negotiations in the region, especially with Nicaragua. Administration oficials made it clear that Mr. Habib’s mission was designed in large part to sway skeptical members of Congress in favor of Mr. Reagan’s $100 million aid package for rebels fighting the Nicaraguan Government. The proposal, which includes $70 million for military assistance, is scheduled to be taken up by the House and the Senate in less than two weeks. “Let there be no misunderstanding,” Mr. Reagan said, standing near Mr. Habib in the White House press room. “Ambassador Habib’s efforts to achieve a diplomatic solution must be accompanied by an increasing level of pressure on the Nicaraguan Communists. What we’re asking Congress for is the tools so that Ambassador Habib can do the job.”
Senior leaders of anti-Sandinista rebel groups based in Costa Rica say they want to form a united Nicaraguan opposition. But they say that so far neither Congress nor the Reagan Administration has supported their efforts. The rebel officials, interviewed here this week, say that although they support President Reagan’s efforts to give military aid to the Nicaraguan Democratic Force guerrillas based in Honduras, they believe military force alone stands no chance of toppling the Nicaraguan Government.
The Ecuadorean armed forces commander took refuge in an air force base tonight after refusing President Leon Febres Cordero’s order to resign for insubordination. In a declaration televised from the port city of Guayaquil, the President said the chief of the joint command and air force head, Lieutenant General Frank Vargas Pazos, had been dismissed because he asked that the Defense Minister and the head of the army be dismissed. The president said the commander’s declaration was “an act of insubordination by an officer of the armed forces.” There were reports of gunfire inside the Defense Ministry and air force planes swooping low over the capital, but no one was reported injured. General Vargas Pazos rejected the President’s order and took refuge in an air force base in Manta, according to radio and television reports.
Chadian troops killed 864 rebels in fighting in the north of the country two days ago, Foreign Minister Gouara Lassou said today. He told the Ndjamena radio today that the Government forces were still pursuing remnants of the rebel force 40 miles north of Kalait, a town that the Libyan-backed supporters of former President Goukouni Oueddei had attacked for the second time in two weeks. Mr. Lassou said that the rebels suffered 456 wounded and that the Government forces suffered 18 dead and 64 wounded.
South Africa’s emergency decree was rescinded and the Government announced the release of what it said were the last 327 of almost 8,000 people detained since last July 21, when the state of emergency was declared. The police may still detain people without charge and search their premises, but the security legislation that enables them to do so is said by police officers to require more bureaucratic procedures than the emergency decree. The security legislation also permits some access by lawyers to certain detainees, while the state of emergency decree did not permit contact with legal representatives.
South Africa expelled 3 CBS newsmen after the network broadcast videotape footage this week of a mass funeral in a township near Johannesburg from which television cameras were formally banned. The expulsion order, effective Tuesday, was by far the most drastic action against a foreign news organization in years and was viewed here as certain to be interpreted as a warning to others that they might also be expelled by the authorities. The expulsion coincided with the formal lifting of restrictions on television coverage of South Africa’s unrest imposed in a seven-month emergency decree. [ In New York, CBS issued a protest, saying it was studying the expulsion order and intended “to utilize all appropriate avenues of appeal.” ] Those ordered to leave the country by Tuesday were Allen Pizzey, a reporter and Canadian national ordinarily based in Athens; William Mutschmann, an American who is manager of the CBS bureau here, and Wim de Vos, a cameraman and Dutch national who has lived in South Africa for 11 years.
Preliminary analysis of the data from the Soviet Union’s Vega 1 spacecraft indicates that the nucleus of Halley’s comet may be a slightly elongated body wrapped in a cocoon of dust perhaps a kilometer thick, scientists participating in the mission said today. In addition, the comet appears to have at least one region of violent dust movement, which Vega 1 passed through. The spacecraft emerged from the encounter with about 45 percent of its solar power panels damaged, according to Soviet officials. Part of a French-Soviet experiment placed in an unprotected area of the craft was effectively destroyed by the dust, according to French scientists.
Space agency officials today disclosed a series of problems with a booster rocket before the launching of the shuttle Challenger, more details of what then happened just before the spaceship’s explosion, and some new hypotheses on what caused the disaster. The new theories hold that ice or bad seals between the joints of a booster rocket might have contributed to the explosion of the Challenger, which killed all seven crew members. At a public hearing held at the Kennedy Space Center here, the new hypotheses were greeted with some skepticism by members of the Presidential commission investigating the accident. The panel has so far seemed sympathetic to the testimony of contractor engineers who said it was too cold on the morning of January 28 for the proper operation of the critical booster seals.
Intelsat, the international nonprofit satellite organization, wants to switch the launching of the first of its new communications satellites from NASA’s space shuttle to a European Ariane 4 rocket, an Intelsat spokesman said today. The spokesman said Intelsat, the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, planned to honor its contracts to launch three of the Intelsat VI satellites aboard the space shuttle and two on Ariane rockets, but wanted to change the order of the launchings. The satellite cooperative, which has 110 member nations, had hoped to launch the first Intelsat VI satellite aboard a National Aeronautics and Space Administration shuttle in November 1987, said the spokesman, Tony Trujillo, Intelsat’s senior executive for public and media relations.
The Federal Reserve cut the rate it charges financial institutions by half a percentage point, to 7 percent. The reduction sent the rate to its lowest level in almost eight years and set off a half-point cut in the prime rate, to 9 percent, by banks nationwide. Economists and bankers said the drop in the rates would have a powerful impact on individuals and business, as well as on debtor nations. For consumers, the benefits were expected to show up immediately in automobile and home improvement loans. Lower interest rates will also put downward pressure on mortgages. But the lower rates are expected to translate into poorer returns on such personal investments as money market funds and government securities.
The nation’s unemployment rate soared six-tenths of a percentage point in February, the biggest monthly rise in almost six years, the Labor Department reported today. The increase pushed the jobless rate back up to the 7.2 percent level that prevailed through the first seven months of last year, wiping out the improvement posted since July. The rate in New York City leaped 1.1 points, to 8.4 percent. It was the third consecutive year that the February figure for the city rose by more than a point. The official federal employment figures include military personnel. A companion rate, which excludes the military, also rose six-tenths of a point in February, to 7.3 percent.
Lane Kirkland, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said today that it was the fault of law-enforcement officials, not labor leaders, if some unions had been infiltrated by organized crime. Mr. Kirkland’s comment came in a response to the President’s Commission on Organized Crime, whose report to the White House Thursday criticized the labor federation as not taking strong enough action against union officials suspected of corruption. Mr. Kirkland said: “If the labor movement is afflicted by racketeers, that points to a grievous failure by the law-enforcement authorities. Certainly, the Justice Department has been provided a full measure of money and power, more than adequate to do its job.”
Despite warnings that they could upset the balance in their party’s Presidential nominating process, Southern Democrats said today that they would press ahead with plans to organize a single primary for the region as a way of strengthening their political hand in 1988. As the Democratic National Committee prepared to make some minor changes in its nominating rules, members of its Southern caucus reaffirmed their support for a regional primary, an event that could threaten the stability of the nomination process the party rules are designed to assure. “When your dog bites you four or five times,” said Dick Lodge, the Democratic state chairman in Tennessee, “it’s time to get a new dog. We’ve been bitten and it’s time for the South to get a new dog.”
Trans World Airlines canceled half its domestic and international flights yesterday and consolidated many others as striking flight attendants walked picket lines at more than 30 airports around the country. Negotiations between the company, the fifth-largest airline in the United States, and the Independent Federation of Flight Attendants, which represents about 6,000 T.W.A. employees, broke down Thursday night when the two sides failed to agree on wage concessions and changes in work rules sought by the airline. The line is experiencing heavy financial losses. No new talks have been scheduled. The company immediately hired 1,500 newly trained flight attendants it had standing by in the event of a strike. The airline also planned to shift 1,500 employees, ranging from reservation clerks to accountants, to flight attendants. They had been trained to fill in.
A missing children’s panel proposed a nationwide revision of state and local laws that discourage the police detention of runaway, neglected and other missing children. The Advisory Board on Missing Children declared in a report prepared for the Attorney General that children “do not have a right to freedom from custody” even if they have not committed a crime. The Reagan Administration has favored most of the board’s proposals, and its findings were endorsed by the Attorney General.
A county judge today struck down an intoxication charge against Anne McGill Burford, former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, after her attorneys said “she might have been obstreperous” but was not drunk in a jailhouse incident here. Mrs. Burford was charged with drunkenness in public last September 21 after she appeared at the Arlington County Jail demanding to see her husband, Robert, who had just been arrested on a drunken driving charge. Mr. Burford, director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, is scheduled for trial April 2. Judge Eleanor Dobson of General District Court dropped the charge after one of Mrs. Burford’s attorneys, Lou Koutoulakos, told the court that his client’s argumentativeness was prompted by her concern for her husband and her instincts as an attorney. “She was acting like an attorney,” Mr. Koutoulakos said, “and attorneys can sometimes be a pain.” Mrs. Burford resigned from the environmmental agency in 1983 amid allegations of mismanagement.
When the Gerber Products Company learned February 11 that a woman had reported finding glass in a jar of its baby food in Schenectady, New York, company officials treated it as a routine consumer complaint. Tests at a Gerber laboratory soon showed there was no glass in the jar and the supermarket had lost the shard the woman turned in. Gerber concluded that nothing had gone wrong on its production line. But the complaint marked the beginning of a mystery that has puzzled company executives, parents and health officials in more than 30 states where customers say they found glass in 47 jars of baby food. The incidents have created a crisis for Gerber, coming as they did just after cyanide-laced capsules were found in two boxes of Extra-Strength Tylenol in the New York area and one woman died.
A Nashville resident who died of cyanide poisoning with a nearly empty container of Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules under his bed committed suicide, a medical examiner ruled today. “The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,” said Dr. Charles Harlan, the Davidson County medical examiner, adding that the ruling in the case of Timothy R. Green of Nashville was based on his “financial problems” and the fact that he had bought the cyanide himself. Mr. Green, a 32-year-old evangelist, guitar repairman and part-time jewelry salesman, purchased a bottle of cyanide on February 22, the day before his death, the police said, telling the chemical supplier from whom he bought the cyanide that he intended to use it to clean jewelry. Mr. Green’s death came two weeks after Diane Elsroth, 23, of Peekskill, New York, died after ingesting a cyanide-laced Tylenol capsule.
A Vietnam veteran who took part Tuesday morning in a murder and suicide pact that led to five deaths was psychologically disabled, the authorities in Lebanon, New Hampshire said today. The veteran, 43-year-old Michael F. Dean, and the woman with whom he lived, Caroline Hull, 32, mailed at least eight letters to the local news media and relatives describing how they had decided to kill themselves and her three children.
Health officials today allowed San Francisco State University to reopen a classroom where a test tube broke, spilling a culture of the bacterium that causes bubonic plague. Health inspectors decided that the procedures taken by the school after Wednesday’s accident were correct. Bonnie Okonek, a biology lecturer, dropped the test tube as she and Patricia Foye, a student, were clearing Room 644 in Hensill Hall after a medical microbiology class in which the teacher had used the Yersinia pestis bacterium in a demonstration. Bubonic plague, a disease that devastated Europe in the 14th century, is curable with antibiotics.
Without fanfare or ceremony, the historic Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia closed its doors today after its last two guests checked out. Last month the owner, Rubin and Associates, announced that it would close the 562-room hotel and embark on a $40 million project to renovate the 82-year-old “grande dame” of Broad Street into a multiuse building with office and retail space.
Jacob K. Javits, who began life in a Lower East Side tenement and, as a United States Senator for 24 years, became one of the most respected and influential political figures in the nation, died of a heart attack yesterday in Palm Beach, Florida. He was 81 years old and lived in Manhattan. Mr. Javits was on vacation in Florida when he suffered cardiac arrest in the late afternoon, according to Lily Javits, the widow of Mr. Javits’s brother, Benjamin. The former Senator was taken by ambulance to Good Samaritan Hospital in West Palm Beach, where he was pronounced dead at 5:29 PM. His wife, Marion, arrived at the hospital shortly after his death. Javits has suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) since 1979.
Wayne Gretzky breaks own NHL season record with 136th assist.
Wall Street had been expecting a cut in the discount rate for so long that, when the Federal Reserve Board actually made the move yesterday, stock prices gained only slightly. With many investors “selling on the news,” as they say on Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average was able to gain only 3.23, to 1,699.83. Once again the blue-chip indicator weakened when it climbed above the 1,700 level. The 30-stock index was also hurt by continued softness in I.B.M., which fell 3/4, to 146.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1699.83 (+3.23)
Born:
Mona Fastvold, Norwegian actress, producer and screenwriter (“The Brutalist”, “The Testament of Ann Lee”), in Oslo, Norway.
Died:
Jacob K. Javits, 81, American politician (Senator-R-New York, 1957–1981), in Palm Beach, Florida of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS; “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”).
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