American and Libyan forces clashed today in and around the disputed waters off the Libyan coast. The Reagan Administration announced that the encounter began in the Gulf of Sidra when Libyan ground batteries fired six missiles at American planes. It said United States Navy aircraft had retaliated by attacking two Libyan patrol boats and a missile site on Libyan soil. It said one Libyan vessel was set afire and was “dead in the water” and the other was “severely damaged.” The damage to the missile site, according to Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, was still being assessed, but he said the installation was “out of action.” Mr. Weinberger said that Navy warplanes had used long-range air-to-surface missiles to strike the Libyan missile site and the two Libyan vessels. Earlier, the Libyan state television and the official Libyan press agency reported that three American jets had been shot down. The White House spokesman, Larry Speakes, said, “We have no reports of any U.S. casualties, and no loss of U.S. aircraft or ships has been reported.”
The incident occurred as a 30-ship Navy task force, led by three aircraft carriers, was conducting maneuvers in the Mediterranean off Libya. The maneuvers began over the weekend. Asked directly today why the United States had chosen this particular time to enter waters claimed by Libya, White House officials would say only that the United States wished to assert its right to navigate in international waters. “The President approved the rules of engagement on March 14 as part of a pattern of asserting U.S. rights to navigate in international waters,” said one senior official. The official said the United States had gone into the Gulf of Sidra eight times since 1981. “We just couldn’t allow Qaddafi to assert a right of sovereignty over international waters,” the official said, referring to the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. Libya claims the entire Gulf of Sidra as its territorial waters, extending as far as 100 miles from the gulf’s southern shore. But the United States and virtually all Western nations recognize only a 12-mile offshore belt as Libyan waters. Mr. Speakes said the fact that the maneuvers were being held now was a reflection of continued United States determination to assert its right of free passage through what it considers international waters. Mr. Speakes and other American officials said the United States maneuvers had not been designed to provoke Colonel Qaddafi.
Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger said today that Navy warplanes used long-range air-to-surface missiles to strike a missile site in Libya and two Libyan naval patrol craft. Mr. Weinberger told reporters at the Pentagon that A-7 attack planes from the aircraft carrier Saratoga hit the missile site with HARM missiles and that Harpoon missiles fired from an A-6 attack plane from the carrier America had hit one Libyan patrol vessel. He said no details of the attack on the second Libyan boat were available. The HARM (High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile) is a supersonic missile about 150 inches long that homes in on the electronic emissions of radar transmitters. Mr. Weinberger said the missiles fired at the missile site at Sidra hit the radar there. The Harpoon, also about 150 inches long, is a subsonic missile that skims along the surface of the sea before pitching up to dive down on its target. The missile site was struck after it had fired Soviet-built SAM-5 missiles at Navy aircraft, Mr. Weinberger said. One of the Libyan patrol vessels was hit because it had approached the American fleet in or near the Gulf of Sidra with “hostile intent,” he said.
Members of Congress today generally expressed support for the action taken by American warplanes against Libyan land and sea targets, but the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee charged that President Reagan had not fully complied with the War Powers Resolution of 1973. The chairman, Representative Dante B. Fascell, said the deployment of American naval forces off the coast of Libya “constituted from the outset a situation where imminent involvement in hostilities was a distinct possibility clearly indicated by the circumstances even prior to today’s development.” While some lawmakers said they needed more information to say for sure whether military action was justified, leading Democrats and Republicans in the House said they agreed with Mr. Reagan’s actions against Libya and its leader, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. “The Administration’s handling of this matter is on the right course. Its actions in protecting America’s armed forces in international waters are justified,” said Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., the Speaker of the House. “Based upon the briefing given me at the White House,” Mr. O’Neill continued, “the American planes attacked by Libya today were on a peaceful mission in international waters. Libya had no right to shoot at our planes.”
The Soviet Union said that it will continue its moratorium on nuclear-weapons testing at least until March 31. The United States conducted a test in Nevada on Saturday, after Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev had said the Soviet Union would refrain from testing until after the next U.S. explosion. However, the government news agency Novosti reported that the Kremlin’s position on testing after the end of this month will depend on the U.S. response to the Soviet proposal of a bilateral test ban.
The new Swedish Prime Minister, Ingvar Carlsson, in his first foreign policy comment since succeeding Olof Palme, today condemned the latest United States nuclear test as “a great disappointment.” One of Mr. Palme’s last actions before he was shot on February 28 was to sign a six-nation appeal calling on the superpowers to suspend nuclear tests until the next summit meeting between President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader.
Kurt Waldheim was suspected of being a war criminal on lists maintained by the United Nations and the United States Army, according to a document in the National Archives. The 1948 document said Mr. Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General who is campaigning to become president of Austria, was wanted by Yugoslavia on charges of murder. It does not indicate what evidence, if any, was provided. Allan Ryan, former director of the Office of Special Investigations at the Department of Justice, a unit that hunts war criminals, said today that the names on the list were often based on unverified accusations. Mr. Waldheim, who is a candidate for President of Austria, has denied any involvement in war crimes. In a recent interview, he said he had served with German forces in Yugoslavia as a German-Italian interpreter and had not been involved in assaults on partisans. Mr. Waldheim ignored his army service in Yugoslavia in his published memoirs.
Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal called on Yugoslavia to respond to charges that former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim was listed as a suspected Nazi war criminal wanted by Belgrade for complicity in murder. But Yugoslav Premier Milka Planinc, who is in Austria on a state visit, said Waldheim’s past was a matter purely for Austria. Waldheim, a candidate in the May 4 Austrian presidential election, has denied any Nazi links or participation in war crimes.
Senior United States and Turkish officials said today that their differences were too great to permit agreement on a new defense and economic pact during Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s current visit. In separate news conferences, both sides said they were still interested in maintaining good relations, including the interim use by the United States of more than 15 military installations affected by that accord. But each spokesman held the other side responsible for the present deadlock.
Pope John Paul II is prepared to receive General Wojciech Jaruzelski if the Polish leader visits Italy, the Vatican said today. But the offer has been complicated by the Italian Government’s qualms about receiving General Jaruzelski, Italian and Vatican officials said, since Prime Minister Bettino Craxi wants to avoid giving any appearance of legitimizing Poland’s policies. The willingness of the Polish-born Pope to receive the man who has largely broken the Solidarity movement could have major implications, Vatican officials say. By granting an audience, they said, John Paul would be effectively acknowledging that General Jaruzelski has triumphed, for the moment at least.
British opposition party leaders demanded that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher explain newspaper reports of her dealings in shares in an Australian company. Thatcher’s office has denied any wrongdoing on her part, and she refused to comment after the Mail on Sunday said that she bought and sold shares in Broken Hill Proprietary, a major oil and steel company, in 1983 and 1984. The newspaper said she made a profit equivalent to $3,450 on shares purchased through an aide.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s drive to sell off, or “privatize,” the country’s nationalized industries has been thrown out of gear by a burst of patriotic sentiment that has turned a rugged and deliberately unstylish product of the English Midlands into a symbol of true British grit. That product is the Land-Rover, an aluminum-body, four-wheel-drive vehicle developed from the jeep after World War II. The Land-Rover enjoyed something of a monopoly in former colonial areas of Africa and Asia until Japanese competition and exchange rates unfavorable to the British pound forced a marketing retreat. But now, when it is only marginally profitable, the Prime Minister’s opponents have nearly succeeded in doing for Land-Rover what Mrs. Thatcher did for the Falkland Islands, making a smallish holding stand for Britain’s will to resist foreign aggression in the industrial realm. In this case, the role of aggressor was attributed to General Motors or often, in newspaper headlines and radio bulletins, to simply “the Americans.”
Stockholm police released a second composite photograph in connection with the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. The suspect, considered to be an accomplice, is a blond man about 35 years old. He was reported seen shadowing Palme on two occasions and was spotted again just before the Feb. 28 shooting. A dark-haired, dark-eyed man is suspected of being the killer.
Socialists won the final outstanding seat in the French National Assembly, determined in second-round voting. The election of Albert Pen as deputy from St. Pierre and Miquelon, an island off eastern Canada, gives the Socialists 216 seats in the 577-seat assembly. Conservatives have 291 seats, two more than needed for a majority.
The state-controlled Lebanese radio said today that Israeli forces had shelled Nabatiye, the largest Shiite Moslem town in southern Lebanon, killing 3 civilians and wounding 22. The radio, which called the Israeli artillery attack “a massacre,” said that shells slammed into the marketplace in the center of town at daybreak as crowds gathered for trading at the beginning of the week. The town hall was also hit by the shelling, it added. Several Shiite villages around the town, nine miles north of the Israeli border, were also shelled, the Lebanese radio said. It did not say if casualties had been inflicted there as well. There was no immediate Israeli response to the report. It was not immediately clear what might have prompted the shelling. The Voice of Lebanon, a Christian radio station, said that a few hours before the town was bombarded Moslem guerrillas fired Soviet-made Katyusha rockets into the Christian village of Aishiye, a stronghold of the Israeli-backed militia known as the South Lebanon Army. No casualties were reported there, but the radio said damage was severe.
President Reagan receives a call from President Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan.
India and the United States agreed today to work out a program of increased American aid for India’s program to curtail the flow of narcotics to the West. The agreement came in a day of meetings between Indian leaders, including Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and American officials led by Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d and John C. Lawn, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Mr. Meese said at a news conference that the United States was also stepping up its efforts to combat anti-Indian terrorist activities and that Indian and American lawyers would meet to “improve” the extradition treaty between the two countries. In an interview, Mr. Meese said that the United States was willing to provide India with technical aid, share intelligence on drug traffickers, increase cooperation in customs enforcement and train Indian narcotics agents and investigators.
The head of the armed forces, who had become a persistent critic of the Government, was ordered into retirement today by Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda. Rumors of an impending military coup immediately began to circulate. The Prime Minister, acting after a week of tension, said today at a news conference that the commander, Gen. Arthit Kamlang-ek, was being retired this summer along with other officers. General Arthit had been seeking an extension of his service. Thailand’s prime minister rejected army demands that the chief of the armed forces be allowed to serve a year beyond retirement age. Prem Tinsulanonda, who is both prime minister and defense minister, said he has signed an order retiring General Arthit Kamlang-ek on August 31, when he turns 61, the mandatory age. Some senior army officers had publicly hinted of a military coup unless Arthit’s service was extended.
Rockets were fired at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and at the Japanese imperial palace, but there were no injuries or damage to buildings, Japanese police officials reported. Police said both missiles aimed at the embassy landed on a road outside the compound. A few minutes later, rockets missed their target at the palace, which is slightly more than a mile away. All the rockets were believed to have been launched by remote control. No person or group immediately took responsibility for the attacks.
The voters of Zushi, 30 miles southwest of Tokyo, have signaled their opposition to a planned American military housing complex for the second time this month. In a referendum Sunday, the results of which were tabulated today, the citizens of Zushi turned back an attempt to recall their Mayor, who was elected in 1984 on the strength of his opposition to the project. Earlier this month they voted to recall the city council, which had supported the housing complex. After the council’s recall, supporters of the project petitioned to recall Kiichiro Tomino. The United States Navy says that the 920-apartment complex is necessary to relieve overcrowding, but local environmentalists contend that it will destroy a wildlife preserve.
President Corazon C. Aquino is expected to abolish the National Assembly and begin exercising “nearly absolute power,” the national television station reported tonight. The plan was described as a temporary step to having voters approve a new constitution and legislature. After considerable internal dispute, Mrs. Aquino’s plan is likely to provide for the drafting of a proposed constitution by committee rather than by an elected convention and for national elections this fall, according to Government officials familiar with the plan. The President’s spokesman, Rene Saguisag, cautioned tonight against speculation about Mrs. Aquino’s decision, which is scheduled to be announced Tuesday. The President, who has kept her own Cabinet guessing and, in fact, furiously debating the shape of a reformed government, could alter existing plans at the last minute, he said.
Leaders of the Philippine Communist insurgency said today that they were prepared to negotiate a cease-fire “on a nationwide scale” with the Government of President Corazon C. Aquino. In the most formal expression of their position to date, the Communist leaders praised Mrs. Aquino warmly and, without elaboration, held forth the prospect that “more than just a cease-fire can be pursued afterwards.” But they rejected her call over the weekend for them to lay down their weapons, and they insisted that their insurgency, which has steadily grown, would not end without the Government first “undertaking fundamental economic and political changes.” The chief spokesman for the Philippine President, Rene Saguisag, reacted cautiously tonight to the Communist statements. “We’ll have to evaluate this development,” he said, but added, “It is a welcome one.”
The World Bank, beginning Tuesday, is expected to approve $1.5 billion in loans to Latin America as part of its effort to help resolve the debt crisis. The loans, all expected to be approved before the end of April, represent the bank’s largest commitment ever to Latin America in such a brief period. The aid includes $1 billion for Mexico, which has been crippled by the collapse of world oil prices. The loan agenda, described by World Bank officials, is a sign that the bank is responding to a call for increased lending by Treasury Secretary James A. Baker 3d. “These loans are a product of what Baker advocated in Seoul,” said a bank spokesman, Peter Riddleberger, referring to a speech Mr. Baker made in South Korea last October at the annual meeting of the World Bank and its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund.
Many Haitians are returning home now that the Duvalier family era has ended. The latest arrivals are celebrating, asking questions, offering recipes for change and planning political campaigns. Jean Dominique was in from New York and walked into what used to be Haiti’s most outspoken radio station, now a place covered with dust, unraveled tapes and smashed cabinets. The transmitters were carted off five years ago by the political police. Today, as Haiti is testing life without the Duvalier family, Mr. Dominique is back from exile, ready to start all over, joining many Haitians eager to come home. In recent days, the cautious trickle of exiles returning has become a steady flow, with men and women arriving from Africa, Europe, the United States.
President Reagan meets to discuss the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs’ recent trip to El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica.
An estimated 2,000 demonstrators marched through the capital of San Salvador this morning to mark the anniversary of the slaying of the country’s Roman Catholic Archbishop six years ago. The Archbishop, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was shot through the heart by a gunman while saying mass. Archbishop Romero was an outspoken opponent of the wave of government repression that took thousands of lives in 1980 and his assassin is widely believed to have been a member of a right-wing death squad.
President Jose Azcona Hoyo of Honduras tonight called an urgent meeting of his National Security Council to discuss reports of a Nicaraguan military incursion into Honduran territory. A Government spokesman, Lisandro Quesada, said the Government could not verify the reports, which had been circulated earlier in the day by Reagan Administration officials in Washington. “At this time, we know nothing about these reports,” Mr. Quesada told reporters in Tegucigalpa. “The situation is being investigated by the armed forces.”
Suriname army Captain Etienne Boerenveen is arrested for cocaine smuggling.
Sister Bernard Ncube, a black South African nun leading opposition to the government’s apartheid policy, escaped injury when a gasoline bomb was tossed into her room in a convent near Johannesburg. A convent spokeswoman said that the room occupied by the nun, who heads the Transvaal Federation of Women, was damaged, but no one was injured.
A group of women from 10 anti-apartheid groups said today that the South African police killed 201 children under the age of 18 during racial rioting last year. The women made the allegations at a meeting in Cape Town with Law and Order Minister Louis Le Grange. Also today, an anti-apartheid organization said that black radicals killed three other blacks during an anti-Government strike and that a black dissident nun narrowly escaped death when gasoline was thrown through her convent window. In another development, the police said today that they had arrested 23 people for fatally beating a black policeman Sunday in a ghetto northeast of Johannesburg.
NASA publishes “Strategy for Safely Returning the Space Shuttle to Flight Status.” This was NASA’s comprehensive plan following the Challenger accident, focusing on redesigning the Solid Rocket Motor, restructuring management, enhancing safety organizations, reviewing critical hardware (Criticality 1, 1R, 2, 2R), and improving landing safety. Key elements of this return-to-flight strategy, outlined in the Rogers Commission report, included:
— Solid Rocket Motor Redesign (Rec I): Redesigning the joints and seal configuration to eliminate the failure mode.
— Management and Communication Structure (Rec II & V): Restructuring the shuttle program to empower engineering over schedule pressures and establishing an Office of Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance.
— Criticality Review (Rec III): A comprehensive review of all Criticality 1 and 2 hardware.
— Landing Safety (Rec VI): Implementing carbon brakes, improving tires, and enhancing nose wheel steering for safer landings.
— Crew Escape System (Rec VII): Providing a mechanism for crew escape during controlled gliding flight.
— Flight Rate (Rec VIII): Establishing a realistic flight schedule that matched safety and resources, rather than the previous high-pressure rate.
This strategic plan ensured that all key safety recommendations from the Presidential Commission were addressed before the Shuttle fleet was cleared to fly again.
The budget director does not expect the Republican-controlled Senate to approve a 1987 budget acceptable to the White House, the director said. The budget director, James C. Miller 3d, also said the Administration would not negotiate in an effort to reach a compromise.
Transportation groups and their advocates in Congress are waging an intense battle with the Reagan Administration over the freezing of billions of dollars for transportation projects. Caught in the debate are Federal trust funds for highway construction and rehabilitation, mass transit and improvements of airports and air safety systems such as radar and weather detection networks. The fight stems from increasing unhappiness among a growing number of Federal lawmakers and their constituents over the Administration’s policy of holding back portions of the revenue received from transportation fuel taxes and user fees by the two funds, the Highway Trust Fund and the Airport and Airway Trust Fund. The lawmakers’ concern has been magnified in recent months by the possibility that the Administration will impound even more money as it acts to cut Federal spending to comply with the new budget-balancing law. This comes at a time when the balances in the trust funds are growing.
President and Mrs. Reagan today admitted they were hurt, angry and annoyed at apparent descriptions of their roles as parents in the autobiographical novel “Home Front,” by their daughter Patti. They acknowledged their feelings in an interview with Barbara Walters, taped for ABC-TV and shown in advance of the Academy Awards program tonight. “I thought I was a good father,” Mr. Reagan said, adding that being in show business gave him more time to spend with his children than if he had had a 9-to-5 job. “And maybe there were times when I should have been sterner than I was.”
Charging a California biotechnology company with deliberately falsifying key scientific data, the Environmental Protection Agency today suspended its permit to field-test a genetically engineered farm chemical. The enforcement actions are the first ever levied against a biotechnology company, according to the agency. The company, Advanced Genetic Sciences Inc., of Oakland, California, was also charged with two counts of violating provisions of the national pesticide control law and fined $20,000, the maximum. Advanced Genetic Sciences has developed a genetically engineered microbe designed to prevent frost from forming on plants. The microbe worked, the company said, because a single gene had been removed, which altered a molecular cluster on the bacteria’s surface that organized water molecules into ice at low temperatures. The company believes a huge market exists for a product that can prevent frost damage, which costs American farmers hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed today to hear two appeals in which prosecutors seek further relaxation of constitutional restrictions on police searches and seizures. It also declined to consider a challenge to the constitutionality of police roadblocks in which all or most passing motorists are stopped in a search for any drivers who may be drunk. In one of the appeals, which are to be heard this autumn, the Court is to consider whether to allow the use of evidence seized by the police who rely in good faith on a state statute that is later held unconstitutional. Prosecutors in the case, in which three men were charged with possessing a stolen motor vehicle, are appealing a decision by the Illinois Supreme Court barring use in their trial of evidence obtained in a warrantless inspection of a wrecking yard.
Arrests on child molestation and pornography charges have led the Chicago public school authorities to establish more stringent background checks for new teachers. Seven Chicago teachers and one school janitor have been arrested recently on charges of child pornography or of sexually abusing children in their charge. And last week, 11 other men were arrested on child pornography charges in an investigation that grew out of the arrests of two of the teachers. While all of these arrests were taking place, still another arrest of a teacher provided the first notice to school officials that he was a convicted thief awaiting retrial in the murder of his wife.
Factions within the Pentagon and Congress are debating how and when to measure the productivity of military contractors’ employees. The current dispute, the latest of many on this issue, involves the wording of a Defense Department document that tells officials who write and oversee military contracts how to apply an existing regulation on work measurement. A. Ernest Fitzgerald, a management systems deputy in the Air Force office of Financial Management, complained in a letter this month to James P. Wade Jr., the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Logistics, that the latest draft of the document would “emasculate” and “degrade” work measurement methods. By using measurements that spotlight the price of an hour’s work in a weapons factory, Mr. Fitzgerald and others assert, the Government could better estimate and control costs and save billions of dollars annually.
The prosecutor of an accused spy characterized the defendant, Jerry A. Whitworth, as a man whose love of luxury and gadgets led him to join a spy ring headed by John A. Walker Jr. and compromise secret Navy codes. In opening arguments, the prosecutor said Mr. Whitworth had led three lives: one as a trusted sailor, one of espionage and one of spending binges on high-tag luxuries over a few weeks.
Striking flight attendants and Trans World Airlines will resume contract talks Wednesday morning in New York with the aid of a federal mediator in an attempt to resolve their dispute, the National Mediation Board announced in Washington. About 6,000 flight attendants went on strike against TWA on March 7 in a contract dispute, forcing the nation’s fifth-largest airline to cancel many flights temporarily. The union said it has offered TWA a 15% wage cut and other concessions, which management calls not enough.
The over-the-counter drug industry, prompted by the recall of three capsule medications tainted with rat poison, added $700,000 to a reward fund, but a man identifying himself as the tamperer said in a telephone call that the money “isn’t enough. I’ll take more.” The call came to the CBS affiliate WCAU-TV in Philadelphia. The reward fund, established after the 1982 Tylenol poisonings that killed seven people, swelled to $900,000 with the announcement by the Proprietary Association. The trade group acted three days after Contac, Dietac and Teldrin were recalled.
Gerber Products Co. decided to drop its $150-million lawsuit claiming that Maryland Governor Harry Hughes acted irresponsibly by banning the sale of the company’s strained peaches during a recent glass contamination scare. Gerber filed the suit February 24, the day after Hughes ordered the product off store shelves. Hughes lifted the ban March 14 after federal tests showed that glass shards found in baby food “do not appear to be the result of any defects in the manufacturing process.”
An Ohio state law requiring physicians to notify parents of unmarried minors seeking abortions went into effect as a federal judge in Cleveland refused to issue a temporary restraining order. “We expect it to be a very confusing and hectic week for abortion clinics in Ohio,” said Mark Levy, acting director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. The legislation requires physicians to give at least 24 hours’ notice to the parents or legal guardian of an unmarried minor seeking an abortion.
Clarence M. Pendleton Jr., an outspoken black conservative who lives in San Diego, has turned his part-time post as chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights into a nearly full-time job that paid him $67,344 last year, although that amounts to less than half his income from outside ventures. That is among the findings in an unreleased General Accounting Office report that found widespread mismanagement at the commission. The report is to be made public at a House hearing today.
As a bricklayers’ walkout threatened to delay completion of homes in the Philadelphia neighborhood destroyed last May in the police confrontation with the radical group Move, a woman who was among the few people who have returned said she was pleased with her house. More than 10 months after the explosion and fire that destroyed 61 row houses and killed 11 people, most of the replacement houses are still unfinished. From the doorway of the new home she moved into this weekend, Gloria Tobois said: “It is a beautiful house. It is a very nice house. It’s a strong house. I’m glad to be back home.” Each house cost the city more than $110,000 to construct; the market value of the old houses was about $25,000. Charles Morton, the business manager of Bricklayers Union Local 64, said the union told 14 workers to leave the project today after failing to reach a settlement with the contractor on the pension and welfare fund. The union says it is still owed $22,000 from December 1. The general contractor, the G&V Construction Company, refused to comment.
Home buying is surging amid the latest declines in interest rates, according to real estate experts and economists. In some New York City suburbs, real estate agents say, the search for homes amid a scarce supply is prompting many competing prospective buyers to make increasingly high bids.
The U.S. Air Force detonated 1,750 tons of conventional explosives today to test how a hardened missile silo would withstand an attack. The blast rattled windows in Phoenix, 160 miles from the silo in Wellton, a town in southwest Arizona. Maj. Barry Glickman, a spokesman for the ballistic missile division at Norton Air Force Base, near San Bernardino, California, declined to discuss the results of the test. The test was the sixth in a series meant to investigate how to increase the protectiveness of the silos that house intercontinental missiles, Major Glickman said. The testing is scheduled to continue into 1987, Air Force officials have said.
Americans puffed an average of 3,378 cigarettes in 1985, about 169 packs of 20 cigarettes each, a 2% decline from 1984 and the lowest per capita use since World War II, the Agriculture Department said. The per capita figures include all Americans, 18 and older, smokers and nonsmokers alike. According to USDA records, that was the lowest per capita rate since 1944, when an average of 3,039 cigarettes were smoked. The per capita rate shot up to 3,449 in 1945 as wartime restrictions were eased. The peak was 4,345 cigarettes in 1963.
Preliminary tests on mice suggest that the oil that creates the pungent odor in garlic and onions may help prevent cancer, a Houston scientist reported. “People have believed over centuries and thousands of years that the odors from onions and garlic can protect you,” said Michael J. Wargovich of the M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute. Early results of a study currently under way using mice indicate that garlic inhibits the growth of tumors, Wargovich told an American Cancer Society seminar in Daytona Beach, Florida.
58th Academy Awards: “Out of Africa”, William Hurt & Geraldine Page win.
Men’s International Professional Tennis Council announces Jimmy Connors’ 10 week suspension and $20,000 fine for storming off the court after defaulting against Ivan Lendl at Boca Raton, Florida in February.
Blue-chip stocks recovered from the substantial losses of Friday but over all, more issues fell than rose. The Dow Jones industrials climbed 14.37, to 1,782.93. Volume dropped sharply.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1782.93 (+14.37)
Died:
Sarah Cunningham, 67, American actress (“Nurse Andrews” — “Trapper John, M.D.”), of a heart attack while attending the Oscar ceremony.
History Diaries 