The Central Intelligence Agency has changed its procedures for estimating the yield of large Soviet nuclear tests because it has decided its previous estimates were too high, Reagan Administration officials said today. The officials said the decision to use the new method was made in January by William J. Casey, the Director of Central Intelligence, despite objections by some Defense Department officials. The C.I.A. decision has raised questions about past Administration assertions that the Soviet Union had probably violated the Threshold Test Ban Treaty of 1974, which limits underground tests to no more than 150 kilotons. Before the C.I.A. decision was made, President Reagan ordered a report on how the change would affect Administration concerns about Soviet violations, the Administration officials said. That report has not yet been completed.
Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s call for a special meeting in Europe with President Reagan on nuclear arms testing does not preclude a regular meeting in Washington this year, a senior Soviet official said today. The official, Georgi M. Korniyenko, who is a First Deputy Foreign Minister, said at a news conference: “Mikhail Gorbachev did not mean that this meeting, if it took place, would supplant the one that had been agreed on in Geneva and would be a visit by Mr. Gorbachev to Washington. This remains on the agenda.” Mr. Korniyenko reiterated that the Soviet Union was reluctant to set a date for a Washington meeting until it was clear that there would be progress on arms control. American officials have said the best way to encourage progress is to schedule the meeting.
An Ulster policeman was shot and wounded and the homes of four other officers were attacked with firebombs or gunshots during the second night of Protestant violence in the British province. Belfast police headquarters said the officer was shot by a gunman firing through the window of the officer’s home. His condition was not immediately known. Meantime, a Roman Catholic church in a Belfast suburb was damaged by fire, and gangs of youths roamed the streets setting cars ablaze. The new violence came after British officials had urged Protestants to seek peaceful solutions to disputes over an accord that gives the Irish Republic, a predominantly Catholic nation, a voice in the affairs of the Protestant-dominated province.
Amnesty International accused officials in Bulgaria of imprisoning and relocating hundreds of ethnic Turks and killing opponents of the country’s assimilation campaign. The London-based human rights group said that from December, 1984, to March, 1985, the estimated 900,000 ethnic Turks who make up 10% of Bulgaria’s population were forced to have their names changed, “sometimes at gunpoint.” Amnesty International said it knows of at least 100 opponents of the assimilation campaign who were killed by security forces.
Rioting Greek youths threw firebombs at the political headquarters of Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou’s Socialist party in Athens, seriously injuring a policeman. About 50 of the youths were arrested after this and other incidents in which a bank was set afire and shops and cars were damaged. The clashes started when about 300 youths, described by the police as anarchists, staged a demonstration protesting the wounding of one of their colleagues on Monday.
An appeals court in Rome cleared the way today for a Bulgarian acquitted last week in the papal shooting to leave Rome. The action averted what was seen as the possibility of a diplomatic dispute between Italy and Bulgaria. The Bulgarian, Sergei I. Antonov, was partly absolved on Saturday with two other Bulgarians and three Turks of charges they conspired to assassinate Pope John Paul II. The appeals court ruled there were no grounds to detain him further after his acquittal on Saturday by a Rome court “for lack of proof.” Meanwhile, the magistrate who first detained and then indicted Mr. Antonov, Judge Ilario Martella, said he was still convinced there had been a conspiracy despite the court’s verdict. Judge Martella recalled that under Italian law, absolution “for lack of proof” meant that “evidence exists, but it is not judged sufficient to convict the defendants.’
Amid mounting evidence that Kurt Waldheim concealed his wartime past, Jewish organizations and New York legislators and officials have called on the United Nations to make public a secret file on the former Secretary General. The file, numbered 79/724, according to a list found in the National Archives in Washington, is one of 40,000 files on war criminals, suspects and witnesses compiled by the United Nations War Crimes Commission between 1943 and 1948 and stored in archives on Park Avenue South. In a letter to Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, the heads of four Jewish organizations asked that he “make public to the proper investigative agencies all records concerning Kurt Waldheim’s hidden past.” The letter called Mr. Waldheim, who is running for the Austrian presidency, “a man without honor,” and asked Mr. Perez de Cuellar to “strip the former Nazi of his United Nations benefits and other connections, bonds or honors which affiliate Mr. Waldheim with an organization to which he has no claim.”
Egyptian and Israeli negotiators again failed to reach agreement on the status of Taba, a disputed 700-yard stretch of beach on the Sinai Peninsula. Israel’s delegate to the talks in Cairo, David Kimche, said, “We are not far apart but we have not reached an agreement.” Egyptian spokesman Mahmoud Osman agreed and said there has been no accord on the wording of the issue as it will be submitted to a panel of international arbitrators, or who the arbitrators should be.
The new French Government, in its first major foreign policy decision, announced today that it was withdrawing France’s 45-member observer force from Lebanon. The Foreign Ministry, in a terse statement, said the observers were increasingly unable to fulfill their mission of monitoring cease-fires in Lebanon’s 11-year-old civil war. The French force was deployed in March 1984 along the Green Line, which divides Beirut into the Muslim and Christian sectors, and in the hills east of the capital. French officials said the force was being withdrawn, in agreement with the Lebanese authorities, because Beirut had simply become too dangerous. The withdrawal, announced at a time of rising tension in Lebanon, deepened fears there that large-scale fighting between rival militias might soon erupt. Within hours of the French announcement, Muslim and Christian militiamen resumed their duels across the Green Line. In addition, gun battles raged for the fifth day around the Palestinian districts of Sabra and Shatila in southern Beirut. The Lebanese police said 15 people had been killed and 53 wounded in the clashes between Shiite Muslim militiamen and Palestinian forces.
Terrorism has frightened tourists, along with the fall of the dollar, reports from abroad and around the United States show. Americans’ bookings to Greece, Egypt, Israel and Italy are sharply down, according to tourism officials, along with general declines elsewhere in Europe and the Mediterranean. The trend prompted one official to conclude that Libya had won its war. Two American tourists from Dayton, Ohio, had just gotten out of the Paris metro and were strolling up the Avenue des Champs Élysées on the evening of March 20 when a bomb, later linked to an Arab prisoner group, exploded in a shopping gallery. It killed two passers-by and injured 28 others. Shaken, the two women nevertheless kept their dinner plans at a nearby restaurant on the Champs-Élysées, Restaurant L’Alsace, but watched the racing ambulances and police cars with growing apprehension. “When we touch down in America, I’ll heave a sigh of relief,” said Mrs. Robert Herbruck. “We had planned on coming, so we came. But I wouldn’t go a foot farther than we have.”
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi today named a man known for being tough on crime as the new Governor for Punjab State, where more than 100 people have been killed in the last month in religious strife. Meanwhile, the police were reported to have shot dead two Sikhs, and most New Delhi schools and businesses were closed to protest the killings of 20 people over the weekend. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, hoping to restore some measure of calm, named Sidarth Shankar Ray — a lawyer, former member of Parliament and chief minister of West Bengal state from 1972 to 1977 -to try to defuse resurgent conflict between Sikhs and Hindus.
South Korean authorities announced new restrictions on anti-Government rallies today after a huge rally in Kwangju on Sunday. Opposition party leaders, however, said they would not comply with the sterner rules at their next rally this Saturday. President Chun Doo Hwan was quoted on Korean television tonight as harshly criticizing opposition politicians. “Some politicians will not abide by laws while they are crying out for democracy,” Mr. Chun reportedly said at a Cabinet meeting. “These destructive activities will be dealt with according to law.”
Tokyo police stepped up patrols and imposed roadblocks in an effort to tighten security after a series of rocket attacks by radicals threatening to disrupt the May economic summit meeting of leading industrial nations. The Tokyo metropolitan police department said it is adding 6,000 officers to an already highly visible force of 10,000. Within the last week, small radical factions have claimed responsibility for rockets fired at the U.S. Embassy compound and the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and at police headquarters in Osaka. There were no injuries and little damage.
For two decades Japanese have taken pride in their famous “bullet train,” which gets them from Tokyo to Nagoya, 210 miles away, in less time than the IRT sometimes takes to cover the length of Manhattan. Now, the Japan National Railways thinks it may be time to go faster than that speeding bullet. To some railway officials, it is a basic matter of saving face. In 1981, the French began zipping from Paris to Lyons on their Train a Grande Vitesse, sleek cars that suddenly left Japan’s bullets in the dust, with normal operating speeds of up to 170 miles an hour. The best the Japanese can do on passenger runs is 150 miles an hour. Trainmen here did not take kindly to the notion of Japan as No. 2. And so senior officials at the national railways are pursuing plans to build a superexpress train, capable of going 186 miles an hour on their Tokaido line, a vital stretch between Tokyo and the central Japanese city of Osaka.
Strike leaders at a U.S. naval base near Manila reached a tentative agreement with American officials, but some of the pickets blocking the main entrance to the base refused to accept the accord. The hard-liners are demanding improved wages and pensions. “The leaders agreed to end the strike,” Deputy Labor Minister Carmelo Noriel, who has mediated the 11-day dispute, said on Tuesday. “I am confident they will return to work tomorrow.” But late Tuesday night, strike leaders were still at the barricades arguing with hard-line picketers who were holding out for improved wages and pensions. Philippine soldiers stood by to control possible disorder.
President Corazon C. Aquino retired 20 generals and 19 colonels today. They had been allowed to stay past retirement age by President Ferdinand E. Marcos. She also extended the service of eight generals and three colonels, many of whom had been involved in the military revolt that helped drive Mr. Marcos from power and pave the way for her to take over. Retirement of the senior officers has been a main demand by critics of the military here and in Washington who say the Philippines armed forces has been weakened by favoritism and lack of professionalism.
Rescue teams today recovered the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from a Mexicana Airlines plane that crashed in central Mexico on Monday, killing all 166 people aboard. The two boxes, which were recovered intact from the wreckage on the side of a 9,000-foot-high mountain 100 miles northwest of Mexico City, were flown to Mexico City for analysis, an official of the Mexican civil aviation authority said. Rescue teams worked through the day to remove the bodies of the 158 passengers and eight crew members killed when the airliner struck the mountain, scattering wreckage over a two-mile area. Rescue workers said that parts of the aircraft burned and that many bodies were badly burned or dismembered.
After a long fight against extradition from the United States, a former Mexico City police chief was handed over to Mexican officials tonight to face charges of extortion and illegal arms possession, United States Embassy officials said. An embassy spokesman in Mexico City said the former chief, Arturo Durazo, 68 years old, was transferred to the custody of officials of the Mexican Attorney General’s office tonight in San Diego. “The Mexicans put him on a Mexican Government airplane and he is now in Mexico,” the embassy spokesman said. It was assumed that he would be brought to Mexico City to await trial.
International relief officials based here say they fear that large numbers of Miskito Indian refugees may be preparing to cross the border into Honduras because of renewed fighting inside Nicaragua. Accounts of what is happening in Miskito villages inside Nicaragua are difficult to confirm, but relief officials here report that Indian refugees who have fled into Honduras in recent days say that Nicaraguan Army units have clashed with Miskito Indian rebel patrols and that an unknown number of Indians have been killed or wounded. The fighting is reported to have taken place in the villages of Kum and Bilwaskarma, according to officials of two international relief agencies who work with Miskito Indian refugees. The two villages are used as bases by Miskito Indian guerrillas, according to a Western diplomat here.
The Bolivian Government said today that it had dismissed at least 38,000 striking schoolteachers who refused to accept a minimum monthly wage equivalent to $25. Teachers have been on strike since February, demanding an increase from the equivalent of $15 to $65. The dismissal was authorized last week by President Victor Paz Estenssoro. Bolivia has 75,000 schoolteachers. Noel Orozco, union secretary, said: “If the Government can find 75,000 yogas or fakirs to work as teachers, let them do it. We will not work until we are paid a dignified wage that satisfies our basic minimum needs.”
The former Haitian police chief of Port-au-Prince, Colonel Albert Pierre, who sought asylum here after the ouster of the Duvalier Government, was arrested today and will be held pending a response to Haiti’s request for extradition. Colonel Pierre, who has been accused of murder, torture and other human rights abuses, was flown to Brasilia today from the island of Fernando de Noronha, off Brazil’s northeast coast, where he had been sent by Brazilian authorities upon arriving here in mid-February.
Twenty-one bombs exploded in Santiago, Chile during a night of clashes between policemen and left-wing demonstrators, the police said today. Twenty people were reported wounded, four by gunfire. Five of the bombs brought down electricity pylons, blacking out cities in 6 of the country’s 13 regions. Among the wounded were seven policemen. One was stabbed in the back and the other was struck in the face by a cobblestone that smashed through the protective grille and windshield of his van as it drove to disturbances in the shantytown of Lo Hermida.
The vast and impoverished country of Sudan today began its first multiparty elections since 1968. The elections come nearly one year after the military overthrow of President Gaafar al-Nimeiry, who ruled Africa’s largest country for nearly 16 years and suppressed political opposition in his one-party state. As many as 30 political parties are fielding candidates for 301 seats in a National Assembly, which will choose a government and write a constitution. Politicians and Western diplomats predict that most of the seats will go to the two major parties that dominated Sudanese politics before Mr. Nimeiry’s rule. Officials said the voting will take 12 days because the sparsely populated country has primitive communications and few roads.
President Reagan has approved sweeping changes for the Pentagon, including strengthening the role of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and creating a post to oversee the development and production of weapons, White House officials said today. The changes were recommended by a blue-ribbon commission Mr. Reagan created amid reports of fraud and waste within the Defense Department and a continuing debate over the department’s command apparatus. White House officials in Washington said Mr. Reagan’s decision would be announced here Wednesday or Thursday, even as he faces an uphill fight in Congress for his Pentagon budget, which includes an increase of 8 percent on top of an increase to make up for inflation. The officials said Mr. Reagan’s decision reflected his commitment to curbing waste and abuse within the Pentagon and to weeding out inefficiency. Knowledgeable White House officials said Mr. Reagan would make some changes through an executive order while others would need Congressional action. Mr. Reagan’s endorsement of the major recommendations came despite Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger’s objections to creating such a panel. Mr. Weinberger called the commission unnecessary when it was formed last June with David Packard, Deputy Defense Secretary in the Nixon Administration, as chairman.
President Reagan places a call to former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.
President Reagan addresses the American Business Conference.
White House officials have decided on a Congressional strategy of no compromise on tax increases or on stepped-up military spending, Reagan Administration officials said today. The officials also said that, upon the return of Congress from Easter recess next Tuesday, the White House would concentrate on seeking to gather enough support in the House to send $100 million to the guerrillas trying to depose the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. The issue is expected to be taken up by the House on April 15. The decision to press Congress for growing military spending and to accept no tax increases, made at a 90-minute meeting here today, signaled a potentially serious clash with Congress over the next few weeks, and possibly months.
The President’s Commission on Organized Crime ended its business today with a final report charging that organized crime was a pervasive threat and could reap more than $100 billion in the United States this year. The commission’s last day was marked by dispute when half of its 18 members joined in a highly critical assessment of the panel’s management, calling its experience a “saga of missed opportunities.” In a statement that was part of the final report, they seemed to question the reliability of some of the panel’s findings in its two-and-a-half-year existence. The commission’s chairman, Judge Irving R. Kaufman of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, said he expected the dissent and issued a statement praising the panel’s work. Other commission members joined him, saying that the panel, which spent nearly $5 million, had increased the public’s knowledge of organized crime.
The Supreme Court ruled today the police may not interrogate a defendant who asks at his arraignment that a lawyer be appointed to represent him, unless the lawyer is present or the defendant talks spontaneously. The 6-to-3 decision, upholding the Michigan Supreme Court’s reversal of two murder convictions, extended slightly the restraints on police interrogation imposed by the Court’s 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona and a subsequent case. Today’s ruling, written by Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, was somewhat unusual in a time when the Court has tended to limit protection of defendants’ procedural rights rather than extend them. The three dissenters and Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who voted with the majority but denounced its reasoning, said the Court was making it unnecessarily difficult for the police to get criminals to confess their crimes.
In its largest enforcement action ever, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will seek $1.4 million in fines against the Union Carbide Corporation for what it called management’s willful disregard for health and safety at its Institute, W.Va., plant. “We will impose the full penalties of the law on those who blatantly or repeatedly violate safeguards necessary to protect American workers,” Labor Secretary Bill Brock said today. Union Carbide said its attorneys would vigorously contest the proposed sanction. At a news conference, Mr. Brock, said, “We were just surprised to find constant, willful, overt violations on such a widespread basis.” Mr. Brock, sounding angry, said workers were “customarily” asked to detect the presence of highly toxic phosgene gas by sniffing the air after alarms indicated a leak. Phosgene, a dye and pesticide that causes lungs to swell, often resulting in death, was used as a weapon in World War I. “They used to use canaries for that,” Mr. Brock said. Altogether, the agency accused Union Carbide of 221 violations of 55 Federal safety and health laws. The proposed fine of $1,377,700 is the largest ever sought by the safety agency, a division of the Department of Labor. In 1979 a proposed fine of $786,000 was assessed against the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company of Virginia. That penalty was reduced to $96,580.
World oil prices dip below $10 a barrel. Falling oil prices must be stabilized to protect American security, according to Vice President Bush. Mr. Bush, outlining a four-nation trip to the Middle East that starts Thursday, said he would tell Saudi Arabia that the protection of American security interests requires action to stabilize the falling price of oil. Voicing a similar theme, Energy Secretary John S. Herrington painted a grim picture of “depression” in American oilfields. “They need to be aware,” Mr. Herrington said of the Saudis, “of the dire straits the American oil and gas producers are in” and the related industries and banks as well. “That is the crux of the message that we need to tell the world about.” The Vice President, addressing a group of reporters, said that he would “be selling very hard” to persuade the Saudis “of our own domestic interest and thus the interest of our national security.” Mr. Bush declared, “I think it is essential that we talk about stability and that we not just have a continued free fall like a parachutist jumping out without a parachute.”
Shortages of technicians to repair and maintain equipment for controlling air traffic are so acute that preserving the quality of air operations “will soon be impossible,” Federal Aviation Administration documents say. Technician “staffing has diminished to a critical level,” officials of the agency warned in the documents, which were dated March 20 but were obtained today.
Federal agents, highway patrolmen and sheriff’s deputies guarded two tiny polygamist settlements on the Arizona-Utah border from a threatened attack by machinegun-wielding religious zealots. Roadblocks and air searches began after a letter warned of “blood atonement” against the communities of Hilldale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, which practice plural marriage, a tenet rejected by the Mormon Church at the turn of the century. Authorities said the letter, written by Leo Evoniuk, threatened violence against 2,000 followers of a rival polygamist leader, LeRoy Johnson, 98.
The federal government began closing arguments today in the trial of 11 church workers who provided sanctuary to illegal aliens by asserting the case should be viewed as routine smuggling and nothing more. The Assistant United States Attorney, Donald M. Reno, said jurors should base their decision solely on the issue of whether the church members were involved in “aiding and abetting” the illegal immigration of Central American refugees into the United States. The Government has said the defendants were involved in an “alien smuggling conspiracy of major dimensions.” Lawyers for the 11 church workers, including two Roman Catholic priests, a nun and a Protestant minister, have said their clients acted out of religious and humanitarian concerns in accordance with Federal immigration laws. They also contend the prosecution failed to show there was any smuggling conspiracy.
Convicts at the Kirkland Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, overpowered a guard and went on a rampage, setting fires that caused heavy damage to buildings in the 1,000-inmate facility, officials said. The riot erupted about 7:30 PM, and SWAT teams were called to reinforce about 100 guards at the prison. By midnight most of the convicts were under control, according to prison officials, who did not know what caused the incident.
Joseph Lombardo, the last of five reputed organized crime leaders convicted in January of using influence over Teamsters Union officials to skim $2 million from Las Vegas casinos, was sentenced to 16 years in prison. The 58-year-old reputed mob hit man known as “Joey the Clown” also was fined the maximum $80,000 and ordered to make restitution of $30,750.50 to the Nevada Gaming Control Board for taxes the state should have received on the skimmed unreported gambling profits and to pay $32,659.48 in court costs.
Measurable levels of uranium and fluoride have been found outside the boundaries of the Kerr-McGee uranium processing plant in Gore, Oklahoma, where a worker was killed in a spill of a toxic acid in January, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported. It advised that food grown in the area should be tested for possible contamination and plant workers who were exposed to the airborne plume of toxic gas be monitored for lung and kidney problems for up to two years.
Republican Illinois Governor James R. Thompson said he would veto any legislation tailored to help Adlai E. Stevenson III make an independent bid for governor and avoid running on a ticket with supporters of extremist Lyndon LaRouche. Stevenson, a Democrat who lost a bitter 1982 race against Thompson, has said he will challenge in court, or ask the Legislature to change the state election law requiring independent candidates to file nominating petitions with the State Board of Elections by December 5.
The Hawaii Senate has approved a bill that allows judges to consider the aloha spirit — defined as kindness expressed with tenderness, unity expressed with harmony and humility expressed with modesty — in sentencing criminals. The bill says state officials, including the governor, may “give consideration” to the aloha spirit in exercising power on behalf of the people. The bill goes back to the House.
Wisconsin dairy farmers face an uncertain future. Chronic overproduction, low prices and a new drug that could further increase milk supplies may force half of the state’s 41,000 dairy farmers out of business by the early 1990’s, economists say. Ten thousand of them have submitted applications for a new Government program to pay them to slaughter their entire herds and leave the business for at least five years.
The Berkeley, California police arrested 61 anti-apartheid protesters at the University of California today and removed a symbolic shantytown built in front of the chancellor’s office. John Cummings, the campus’s assistant chancellor, told demonstrators the 13 shanties were a fire hazard. The shanties, built of plywood, cloth and cardboard boxes, were intended to represent the homes of blacks in South African townships. Later about 300 people participated in a rally against President Reagan’s proposal to build a shield against Soviet missiles.
In screening military recruits for an antibody associated with the disease AIDS, the Pentagon has found that older recruits are more likely to be affected and that a tiny percentage of women are testing positive. Statistics compiled from the new screening program show the highest incidence rates for positive tests are occurring among recruits from states along the West Coast and the East Coast from New York southward. The lowest rates are being reported for recruits from New England and the Mountain and upper Middle Western states.
New fires flared yesterday as crews battled blazes in tinder-dry forests across the Southeast, where thousands of acres have been charred for a week under rainless skies and unseasonable warmth. Bruce Jewell, spokesman for the regional office of the United States Forest Service in Atlanta, said: “Every day it gets a little drier, with the fires burning with a little more intensity. It hasn’t taken any spectacular leap, just a slow gradual buildup.” Hundreds of fires have broken out in Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio. Outbreaks of grass and brush fires were reported in parts of Michigan, New Jersey and Missouri as well as Pennsylvania, where 1986 already is a worse year for wildfires than 1985. Gov. Richard F. Celeste of Ohio ordered a ban on open trash fires in the state’s southern areas. Mr. Jewell said, “Everything in the South except Florida has a very high fire danger.”
In a purge of its pitching staff, Atlanta releases veterans Pascual Perez, Len Barker, Terry Forster, and Rick Camp.
Stock prices plunged yesterday, with prices hurt by sell programs that began after Prime Computer projected a 25 percent drop in first-quarter earnings. The Dow Jones industrial average was off about 35 points in late afternoon and ended with a drop of 28.50 points at 1,790.11. The decline was the biggest since March 21, when the Dow fell 35.68, to 1,768.56.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1790.11 (-28.5)
Born:
Ireen Wüst, Dutch women’s speed skater (Olympic gold medals, 3,000m, 2006, 2014; 1500m, 2010, 2014; team 2014), in Goirle, Netherlands.
Brad Jones, NFL linebacker (Green Bay Packers, Philadelphia Eagles), in Lansing, Michigan.
Marek Schwarz, Czech NHL goaltender (St. Louis Blues), in Mlada Boleslav, Czechoslovakia.
Hillary Scott, American singer and songwriter (Lady A), in Nashville, Tennessee.
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