The Soviet leader proposed to meet President Reagan anywhere in Europe “in the nearest future” to discuss an end to nuclear testing. Speaking on radio and television, Mikhail S. Gorbachev said that the continued American testing of nuclear weapons was a “pointed challenge” to the Soviet Union. Despite an American test in Nevada a week ago, Mr. Gorbachev affirmed Moscow’s decision to continue its test halt beyond its expiration this Monday for as long as the United States abstains from testing after that date. In Santa Barbara, California, the White House said that a halt of nuclear testing was not in the American interest and that any summit meeting must deal with “the entire range” of issues. Moscow announced a halt of its testing program last July, asking Washington to join in. The Americans refused on the ground that they considered the Russians ahead in the development of nuclear arms and needed tests to improve their own weapons.
In proposing a special meeting with Mr. Reagan, Mr. Gorbachev said it would be a “major stride” toward halting the nuclear arms race. “We attach tremendous significance to the solution of this task, which concerns the destiny of all people. I am ready to meet President Reagan already in the nearest future in London or Rome, or in any other European capital that will agree to receive us, to reach agreement on this issue. And I do not see any insurmountable obstacles — political, technical or any other. What is needed is the necessary political will and understanding of our mutual responsibility. We propose to meet, exchange views on this crucial problem and issue instructions to draft an appropriate agreement.” Mr. Gorbachev did not mention earlier plans to have him visit the United States this year, as agreed to at his meeting with Mr. Reagan in Geneva last November. The Soviet Union has declined to set a date until it sees progress in arms control.
A United States intelligence report issued today says that the Soviet Union may try to make up for declining revenue from oil exports by increasing its arms sales abroad. The report, prepared jointly by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the drop in oil exports to the Western countries last year meant that Moscow had billions of dollars less in hard currency available to buy grain and advanced technology. According to the report, the Soviet Union will probably respond by increasing arms sales. But this strategy could founder because the main arms buyers — the Arab oil-producing countries — face similar economic difficulties brought on by the decline of the world oil price.
The Soviet Union announced plans to boost sagging farm production by loosening food price controls, allowing farmers to sell some produce directly to local stores and giving regional agriculture officials greater autonomy. Other measures include raising wages at state farms and increasing prices the state pays for grain and other crops. The reform package is aimed at meeting what Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev last month called the “top priority task” of feeding the nation’s people.
U.S. officials in Moscow have talked with Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of the late Soviet leader Josef Stalin, and she wants to return to the West, the State Department said. Alliluyeva suddenly returned to the Soviet Union in 1984 after spending 15 years in the United States and two in Britain. The reported conversation was held after the Sunday Times of London said from Moscow that she wants to return to the United States to join her teenage American-born daughter, Olga, who went to the Soviet Union with her mother two years ago in a blaze of publicity but chose recently to be repatriated in a secret deal with Kremlin authorities.
Records by The Beatles officially go on sale in Russia more than two decades after their release in the West.
The Reagan Administration has decided to rush advanced portable Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to rebels in Angola and Afghanistan, informed officials said tonight. The decision was made recently after a long review by an interagency Administration task force and represents a significant shift in policy in providing American-made arms to such insurgent groups, the officials said.
The Justice Department is drafting new procedures that would make it easier for citizens of Poland and other Communist countries to gain asylum in the United States. Reagan Administration officials said the new rules would establish a presumption that aliens fleeing “totalitarian” countries had “a well-founded fear of persecution” and therefore met the statutory standard for obtaining asylum in this country. The procedures, which would make a sharp change in United States policy on asylum, appear to be intended partly to make that policy conform to the Administration’s antagonism toward Communist regimes and partly to respond to pressure from Polish-Americans for changes in American policy on asylum. The proposed policy is evident in a confidential memorandum prepared for the signature of Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d. It says: “Polish nationals who are unwilling to return to Poland due to conditions there and who request or have requested political asylum or refugee status are presumed to be refugees within the meaning” of the law.
Italy acquitted six men of conspiring to assassinate Pope John Paul II, ruling that the evidence against them was ambiguous. The defendants were three Turks and three Bulgarians. Acquittal “for lack of evidence” is a formula under Italian law implying that evidence exists to support both the guilt and innocence of the defendant and that the court is unable to decide. The court in Rome found one of the Turks guilty of storing and delivering the weapon used in the shooting of the Pope in 1981. It convicted a seventh defendant, Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who is serving a life sentence for shooting the Pope, of complicity in smuggling the gun into Italy.
Thirteen bombs exploded Friday night in southern France, and the Corsican National Liberation Front said today that it was responsible. The bombs exploded almost simultaneously in Marseilles, Nice and Aix-en-Provence, slightly wounding one person and damaging banks and other official buildings, the police said. An anonymous caller saying he spoke for the outlawed Corsican separatist guerrilla group told a French news agency today the Corsican National Liberation Front was behind the attacks on “French imperialism.” “The new government should know that a truce will not be possible if political status is not accorded to imprisoned Corsican patriots,” the caller said.
A London woman has made medical history by giving birth to the world’s first test-tube quintuplets delivered by Caesarean section, the Sunday People newspaper said in London. The five boys were born three months prematurely on Wednesday to 33-year-old teacher Linda Jacobssen at University College Hospital, the newspaper said. All five babies were reported in stable condition. The hospital declined to comment on the story.
Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar today presented a draft agreement outlining a solution to the Cyprus problem to Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot representatives. A high-ranking diplomatic source said the draft, which is the result of low-level negotiations held between the Secretary General and the two sides since autumn, proposes setting up a a united Cypriot government containing two autonomous states. If the draft is agreed to by Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders, it would serve as a basis for further negotiations concerning the withdrawal of Turkish troops, the return of refugees to the Turkish portion of the island and the guaranteeing of the peace settlement by other countries. Turkish forces have occupied almost 40 percent of Cyprus since 1974. An earlier text offered to both parties in February 1985 was rejected by the Government of Cyprus.
Although Turkish authorities have recently allowed greater exercise of civil liberties, prisoners in Turkish police stations and prisons continue to be subjected to torture and inhumane cell conditions, a human rights organization has charged. The report, issued last week by the New York-based organization Helsinki Watch, said that despite increased freedom of expression for most individuals, Turkey continues to detain political prisoners and to restrict many publishers and scholars. The organization noted that the military-backed Government of Prime Minister Turgut Ozal had lifted martial law in all but 9 of the country’s 67 provinces and permitted open parliamentary debate and wider press coverage of reported instances of torture.
Integrating the 15,000 Ethiopian Jews who have been brought to Israel in the last eight years is proving, in the view of those who deal with it, to be as difficult an immigration problem as this nation of immigrants has faced. The problems arise from a wide cultural gap, a continuing rabbinical challenge to the Ethiopians’ Jewishness, unemployment and deep sorrow among Ethiopian Jews over those they left behind in their famine-stricken country. Little more than a year ago, a dramatic airlift from the Sudan of about 8,000 Ethiopians brought to international attention the fact that close to 15,000 had been spirited here since 1978. They were met in Israel with an extraordinary outpouring of sympathy. “I don’t think any wave of immigrants has received that much love and warmth,” said Tamar Eshel, who heads the National Council for Ethiopian Jews in Israel. “It was an almost mystic feeling. It had the ingredients of a fairy tale — to bring here the remote tribes of Africa that had maintained Judaism. It’s a messianic thing.” But the excitement has subsided and public attention waned, and the Ethiopians have become one more item on a long list of problems.
Fighting between Shia Muslim militiamen and Palestinian forces in Beirut left at least seven people dead, and two members of the U.N. peacekeeping force, a Ghanaian and a Fiji soldier, died in gunfire in southern Lebanon. Six Shias and a Palestinian, were killed in clashes with Palestinians at the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps. The U.N. deaths occurred in separate clashes at U.N. checkpoints with unidentified gunmen. Shias clashed with Lebanese Christian gunmen and troops loyal to President Amin Gemayel across the Green Line dividing mainly Muslim West Beirut from the city’s Christian eastern sector.
Gunmen identified as Sikh terrorists killed at least 10 people and wounded 15 as they fired submachine guns from a jeep in three villages near the town of Nakodar in Punjab state in northern India, police said. Most of the victims were Hindus. The slayings raised to at least 77 the death toll in 15 days of Sikh-Hindu violence in Punjab, where members of both faiths have become increasingly polarized as militant Sikhs demand greater autonomy for Punjab. The majority of India is Hindu, but Sikhs form a slight majority in Punjab. The wave of attacks has put pressure on the government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to impose direct rule on the state. Policemen said they clashed today in four Punjab cities with Hindus on a daylong general strike to protest the fatal shooting on Friday of as many as 16 Hindus by Sikh extremists in the city of Ludhiana. Round-the-clock curfews were imposed in Pathankot and Hoshiarpur.
In this South Korean city whose very name has become a symbol of resistance to the government, talk of opposition plans for a major rally Sunday is evoking memories of Kwangju’s bloody past. Cabdrivers pull leaflets advertising the rally out of glove compartments. A wizened elderly woman pushing a cart of bean cakes says she wants to attend — if she can sell enough today to take Sunday off. And a store clerk quickly turns away when the subject is mentioned. For their third public rally in favor of quick constitutional revision, opposition politicians could not have chosen a city more laden with symbolism. The hometown of the opposition leader Kim Dae Jung, Kwangju has long been a stronghold of anti-Government feeling. And it is a city whose recent history has been branded into South Korean memories. It was here in May 1980 that Government troops killed anti-Government demonstrators in a series of bloody encounters. How many died is still a matter of dispute — the official death toll was put at less than 200, but opposition leaders here cite figures as high as 2,000. The incident became a rallying cry for Government opponents.
In the heart of Taipei’s shopping district stands a derelict mansion, its gutters rusted, its upper windows open to the weather and its veranda overgrown with weeds. The house at No. 18 Chongshan Beilu, which is Government-owned, has been left to decay since its last occupants moved out seven years ago, as has a bigger building across town, No. 2 Chonghsiao Hsilu. The facade of peeling yellow stucco is badly stained, and garbage accumulates in the yard. Only a caretaker remains, and he tells visitors he knows of no plans to use the building again. The buildings are, respectively, the former residence of the United States Ambassador and the embassy building; both were vacated shortly after the Carter Administration announced in December 1978 that it was recognizing the Communist Government in Peking. The diplomatic switch caused a firestorm of protest among Nationalists, many of whom forecast dire consequences for Taiwan. In fact, the 1980’s have seen the continuance of the economic boom that has made the island one of the most prosperous places in Asia, and the gap between living standards here and the mainland, already large, has grown wider. On the mainland, the Communists have now adopted a development strategy that is similar in many respects to Taiwan’s.
Two men were killed and 20 were injured in Durban, South Africa, in a fierce street battle between rival black political groups at the start of a crucial conference on black strategy to confront South Africa’s apartheid system of racial separation and minority rule. The two dead and most of the injured were members of Inkatha, the predominantly Zulu political movement. Armed with spears and clubs, the Zulus attacked about 300 delegates to a national conference on black education. The delegates, who were prepared for a fight, counterattacked with pipes and stones. They drove the Zulus off after 10 minutes of fighting in which several shots were fired.
The gathering in Durban is regarded by its organizers and by the Government as crucial to the immediate destiny of South Africa’s troubled black townships. Classroom boycotts, which have largely been suspended since January, brought hundreds of thousands of black pupils out of their schools and onto the streets last year, deepening friction with the police and the army. If the boycotts resume, South African analysts say, then the crisis in black townships that has claimed around 1,400 lives since September 1984 is likely to deepen.
Top space agency officials say they are confident that the space shuttle’s booster rockets can be redesigned and tested within 12 months, paving the way for flights to resume. At the same time, a debate is increasing within the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the aerospace industry over whether a more extensive, time-consuming and costly overhaul of the shuttle system will be necessary later. James E. Kingsbury was appointed last week to direct the agency’s effort to fix the booster rockets after they were identified as the prime suspect in the explosion of the shuttle Challenger that killed the crew of seven. He said in an interview Friday that he thought he could meet NASA’s one-year target: “It’s going to be very tight, but I think we can make it.” But Mr. Kingsbury, the director of science and engineering at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, quickly cautioned that his group “won’t omit anything we need to do because we don’t have the time — if we need more time, we’ll take it.”
Tentative space agency plans call for nine missions in 1987, the same number launched last year. That schedule is based on preliminary estimates of the time required to change the design of the joint where the booster rocket segments meet. In the continuing investigation into the January 28 shuttle explosion, the joint was the only component that the agency has publicly identified as requiring major changes. But privately, engineers familiar with the project say they expect that a number of the more than 700 critical shuttle components under review, about a hundred of which are in the booster rockets, will also require modifications. That review is separate from an inquiry by a Presidential commission into the explosion, which has ex-pressed amazement in recent weeks that the design for the booster joint ever passed NASA scrutiny. “The seal is so poorly designed that it could fail in a number of ways that really defy analysis,” Richard P. Feynman, a Nobel laureate and member of the commission, said in his office at the California Institute of Technology last week. “The obvious question is whether this design and its sloppy structure is an exception, or whether a similar disease affected other parts.” The separate debate over more fundamental changes in the shuttle system has produced suggestions that range from an escape capsule that would make it possible to abort a mission in the vulnerable first two minutes of flight to the use of propulsion systems that would eliminate the solid-fuel boosters.
Asked if the search for the wreckage of the space shuttle Challenger was the biggest salvage operation ever undertaken by the Navy, Captain Charles A. Bartholomew at first recalled the recovery of the hydrogen bomb lost off Spain in 1966 and the search for the Korean Air Lines plane shot down off Siberia in 1983. Then, after a thoughtful pause, he said those operations were focused on much smaller areas, nothing like the 420 square miles being covered by ships and submarines of the Challenger salvage forces. “This is probably the biggest thing we’ve attempted,” he said, adding that the end was still not in sight. Operations were expanded this week to include the search for top-secret electronics equipment from the communications satellite aboard the Challenger when it exploded after liftoff January 28, killing the seven crew members.
President Reagan makes a radio address to the nation on international violence and democratic values. President Reagan contended in a radio address from his ranch Saturday that Nicaraguan rebel forces backed by his Administration had dealt “a resounding defeat” to Communist-backed Nicaraguan government troops that crossed the border into Honduras to attack rebel installations. And in an interview with reporters, White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan said that the successful military performance of the contras, as the rebels are known, should convince skeptical congressmen that they are more than “a ragtag bunch” and worthy of U.S. military assistance. The President’s bid for $100 million in mostly military aid for the contras comes up again in the Democratic-controlled House in mid-April after the Easter recess. The House defeated the proposal by 12 votes earlier this month, a defeat White House officials are hopeful will be overturned in the wake of the Sandinista offensive. Reagan won the Senate’s endorsement Thursday by a vote of 53 to 47.
Plummeting prices will dramatically increase oil imports, possibly outstripping domestic production by 2-to-1 in 1990 and putting the United States at the mercy of any new OPEC embargo, a congressional report warned. The report, written by the Library of Congress, said a drop in the price of oil to $10 a barrel this year-barring any other price change-would lead to a surge in consumption, a cutback in domestic production and an inevitable increase in imports.
The United Steelworkers of America is attempting to reach early agreements with five companies before bargaining with the industry leader, the United States Steel Corporation. With union contracts at the six companies expiring August 1, experts say two major questions seem to exist. One is whether the union can win ratification of concessions most analysts say are needed to help revive the industry. The other is what will be the posture of United States Steel, which, unlike the five other companies, has refused to enter into early bargaining and join the steelworkers in the union’s campaign to persuade the public and the government the nation must take bold actions to revive the industry.
Union leaders said they welcome federal intervention in the rail strike that has disrupted commuter service in eastern Massachusetts for two weeks. The National Mediation Board summoned both sides to a meeting this Tuesday in Washington in an attempt to settle a strike by Maine Central Railroad workers that spilled into Massachusetts.
Federal prosecutors say they are waging an unparalleled campaign against municipal corruption in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington and other major cities around the country. In the last few years their efforts have led to scores of indictments and convictions of city officials who have been tied to a broad assortment of crimes, including bribery, theft, perjury and conspiracy. The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation say the recent prosecutions are a result of tougher laws, smarter use of informers and improved techniques of electronic surveillance. Even more important, they say, was a decision several years ago to put a new emphasis on rooting out municipal corruption. A pair of investigations in New York, one led by Federal prosecutors and one in which they are aiding city officials, resulted last week in charges against three former city officials, including Stanley M. Friedman, the Bronx Democratic leader who once served as Deputy Mayor.
About 25 Vanderbilt University students protesting the school’s $50-million investment in companies that do business in South Africa cheered as the first nail was driven in a shanty built on university property. University officials approved the 12-by-10-foot shanty but said they were concerned that other students might try to pull down the structure of rusty corrugated metal, cardboard and 2-by-4s. A similar shantytown at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, was damaged when students attacked it with sledgehammers.
Police arrested 48 protesters, including two priests, who stormed an Upland, Pennsylvania, abortion clinic on a self-described “rescue mission.” Two sheriff’s deputies and four other persons were injured, authorities said, after some of a group of about 150 demonstrators climbed a fire escape to invade the Reproductive Health and Counseling Center. The clinic has been the target of repeated protests and in 1984 won a court injunction against further demonstrations.
Two firefighters were injured as hundreds of exhausted volunteers and foresters battled more than 250 forest fires in West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, authorities said. More than 50 new fires were reported in West Virginia, in addition to 18,000 acres already burned. Across the western border, Kentucky officials reported more than 80 new fires. Two National Guard helicopters helped about 350 firefighters battle the flames. In Tennessee, where a firefighter died Friday, aircraft carrying water were used to contend with an estimated 125 fires that burned more than 2,000 acres. The most serious injury involved a West Virginia firefighter who had a live ember fall into his eye.
Governor Toney Anaya has formally declared New Mexico a “state of sanctuary” for Central American refugees and says he hopes the action will start a “snowball effect” among political leaders around the country. The proclamation makes New Mexico the first state to declare itself a haven for such refugees, Governor Anaya said. A number of cities in the United States have made similar declarations, including Los Angeles, Sacramento and New Mexico’s capital, Santa Fe. The proclamation, which the Governor issued Friday, does not call for specific action by New Mexicans but is meant to discourage cooperation with efforts by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to arrest refugees, according to an aide to Mr. Anaya.
Jefferson Avenue, one of the main streets on Detroit’s east side, runs through the middle of a brooding old automobile plant, one of the last survivors of the city’s once booming industrial economy. The outlook for that factory, the Chrysler Corporation’s Jefferson Assembly Plant, and the 4,900 workers who make Plymouth Reliant and Dodge Aries cars in it is uncertain at best. Chrysler has said it will end production of the Aries and Reliant models in 1987 and that it has no plans to make any future models in the plant, parts of which are almost 80 years old and predate the corporation itself. The age of the buildings, the old-fashioned, multistory layout and the need to run an assembly line over a city street have made the facility obsolete, Chrysler officials say. But the plant is an important political symbol for Mayor Coleman A. Young, who has made economic development a central theme of his fourth term in office, and is also an important source of high-wage jobs.
Maui has long been regarded as one of the most beautiful of the eight main Hawaiian islands, a corner of Polynesia that managed to remain aloof from the forces of growth that drastically changed Oahu and the capital of Honolulu after statehood came in 1959. But now Maui, too, is changing under the pressure of urbanization, and quickly. There are still long stretches of unspoiled coastline, lonely beaches and breathtaking vistas of pineapple and sugar cane fields so lush under the tropical sun that they seem to burst with an inner luminescence. Here in Lahaina there are charming architectural legacies that take visitors back to the 19th century, when the town was King Kamehameha the Great’s capital and later a whaling port bustling with New England seamen who began an invasion from the outside world that would fundamentally change the Hawaiian Islands. But nowadays there are so many cars, trucks and buses on roads here that traffic is often backed up, bumper to bumper, for a mile or more. Lahaina, which a few years ago seemed the quintessential Somerset Maugham South Seas hamlet, is filled with shops that sell T-shirts, gold chains and souvenirs to tourists who arrive at the rate of 25,000 a day.
Three children burned to death in a Montgomery, Alabama brick apartment building 500 feet from a fire station today. James Fulmer, a fire captain, said the blaze in a housing project was brought under control nine minutes after it erupted at 3:07 AM, but he said it was too late to save the children.
Officials said today that there was no evidence supporting an anonymous caller’s assertion that some capsules of the aspirin substitute Encaprin had been poisoned. The Walgreen Company, which operates drugstores, and the Kroger Company, a supermarket chain, removed the medication from shelves after the caller said Thursday that he had contaminated five capsules in Walgreen stores. “There is no evidence that any tampering has occurred,” said Patrick Hayes, a spokesman for the Procter & Gamble Company, which makes the medication.
In an effort to curb the spread of AIDS among intravenous drug users in New York City, state and city health officials plan to offer free blood tests and counseling at four storefront centers in neighborhoods with large numbers of drug addicts. The clinics, to be opened this summer, will be the first of their kind in the city and will be modeled after similar programs run by the state in Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo and Rochester and in Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk Counties, according to a spokesman for the State Health Department, Peter Slocum. Mr. Slocum said the $2 million needed to finance the program in New York City would come from a $10 million allocation for AIDS-related programs in the state budget recently agreed to by Governor Cuomo and state legislative leaders.
Alaska’s Augustine volcano erupted again after a night of inactivity, but winds carried most of the new ash out to sea. Meanwhile, ash from earlier eruptions on the island, 175 miles from Anchorage, continued to foul the air over Anchorage and nearby Kenai. Public-health officials warned of danger to persons with respiratory ailments, and hundreds of holiday travelers were stranded as many airlines remained grounded rather than risk aircraft damage from flying through the corrosive debris.
Louisiana State’s dream of a miracle season crumbled in the face of overwhelming talent this afternoon as Louisville overcame an 8-point halftime deficit and raced to an 88–77 victory in the national tournament semifinal at Reunion Arena. Louisville’s 16th consecutive victory gave it a 31–7 record and put the Cardinals into Monday night’s national championship game against Duke (37–2), which eliminated Kansas in the second game of today’s doubleheader. It will be the second time in 15 seasons under Coach Denny Crum that Louisville has been in the championship game. The Cardinals won the title in 1980, defeating U.C.L.A. Billy Thompson, the 6-foot-7-inch forward and inspirational leader, sparked the ferocious second-half comeback with pinpoint shooting and smothering defense against John Williams, L.S.U.’s outstanding sophomore forward.
Died:
Harry Ritz [Joachim], 78, American vaudevillian, actor and comedian (Ritz Brothers — The Gorilla;, Hi’ya, Chum; Straight, Place and Show, solo cameo — Silent Movie).
History Diaries 