A bomb at La Belle, a West Berlin discotheque used by American military personnel, killed two American servicemen and a Turkish woman. The explosion instantly killed a Turkish woman, Nermin Hannay, and U.S. Army Sergeant Kenneth T. Ford. A second American sergeant, James E. Goins, died from his injuries two months later. 229 people were wounded in the blast, 79 of them Americans, the police said. American and West German officials blamed the attack on what they called state-sponsored international terrorists. Senior American officials in West Berlin said there were clear indications of Libyan responsibility. Libya was accused by the U.S. government of sponsoring the bombing, before U.S. president Ronald Reagan ordered retaliatory strikes on Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya ten days later. The operation was widely seen as an attempt to kill colonel Muammar Gaddafi. However, in the bombing’s aftermath, this claim was met with widespread skepticism. In 1987, Manfred Ganschow, the head of the West German team investigating the bombing, said that there was no evidence pointing towards Libya, a belief which was corroborated by numerous intelligence agencies in Europe at the time, according to a BBC report. Following the reunification of Germany, archives from the Stasi in East Germany were made available, which led to Libyan embassy worker Musbah Eter, who would later be indicted for aiding and abetting attempted murder. In 2001, following a four-year German trial, often described as “murky” and marred by what the court called a “limited willingness” by the American and German governments to share evidence, it was found that the bombing had been “planned by the Libyan Intelligence Service and the Libyan embassy.”
The bombing in West Berlin appeared to be part of a “pattern of indiscriminate violence” against Americans by Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, the Reagan Administration said. While saying the Administration was “not prepared” to firmly link Colonel Qaddafi to the latest terrorist attack, a senior official said the bombing fit “a pattern” of what he said was “a master plan” by the Libyan leader to strike out at Americans. In Paris, an Interior Ministry spokesman said today that France had ordered two Libyan diplomats to leave the country and had expelled four other Arabs in connection with efforts to prevent possible terrorist attacks on American installations in Europe. The senior American official said the Administration believed Colonel Qaddafi had singled out 30 United States installations abroad and additional American diplomats for possible terrorist actions.
A highly potent plastic explosive and a miniature detonation device apparently similar to those used by a Palestinian terrorist group were components of the bomb that exploded Wednesday aboard a Trans World Airlines jet over Greece, investigators said today. Detailed examinations of the airplane and debris by Greek and American bomb specialists this morning produced the first physical evidence that might point to the involvement of a specific terrorist group, T.W.A. officials here said. Sources involved in the investigation said an initial reading of the bomb’s “signature,” the peculiarities of its construction and other pieces of evidence, indicated methods similar to those used by a Palestinian terrorist organization known as May 15. United States and Italian officials say the little-known group has specialized in placing small bombs on planes. The only announced suspect in the case, May Elias Mansur, held a news conference in Tripoli, Lebanon, at which she denounced the bombing as a crime and said she had nothing to do with it, but added that she supported attacks on American installations and would be willing to carry out such attacks. Examination of aircraft debris indicates that about one pound of a powerful and perhaps newly developed plastic explosive was used in the bomb, investigators said. They said the precise type of explosive would be determined by laboratory analyses.
European Economic Community countries are seeking to put pressure on the Reagan Administration to adopt a more generous approach to the third world at development aid talks in Washington next week. Finance ministers of the 12 Common Market countries today called on Western aid-giving nations to donate $12 billion in the next three years to the World Bank’s International Development Agency, which gives interest-free loans to the poorest developing countries. At talks in Paris late last year, the Reagan Administration indicated it favored an International Development Agency budget of only $10.5 billion for the 1987-89 period, partly because of worries over the size of the United States budget deficit. The United States provides 25 percent of the agency’s money. But European governments say they believe the Reagan Administration can be persuaded to change its mind and back a $12 billion budget for the agency if other donors support the higher figure at meetings next week in Washington of committees of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
European finance ministers and central bank officials met at Ootmarsum in the Netherlands but failed to agree on a currency realignment in the European Monetary System. The talks stemmed from France’s desire to devalue the franc in relation to the West German mark and other European currencies. One source said France is demanding that the franc be reduced in value by 8% against the mark.
The Vatican strongly backs the poor in their fight against injustice in a long-awaited paper on “Christian Freedom and Liberation.” The “instruction” says the oppressed have the right to revolt — even, “as a last resort” — to use “armed struggle” to “put and end to an obvious and prolonged tyranny. The 59-page “instruction” was issued at a news conference at which Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, its principal author, said its goal was to update Roman Catholic social teaching with an eye more to “ethical” than “political” ends. The document seeks a balance between criticisms of unbridled capitalism and of Marxism.
The Bulgarian Communist Party ended a congress today that marked the country’s adoption of the course Mikhail S. Gorbachev charted for the Soviet Union at the party congress in Moscow. At the end of four days of speeches without debate by representatives of the 2,662 delegates, the Bulgarian congress, which meets every five years, unanimously re-elected Todor Zhivkov as Secretary General, a position he has held since 1954. Mr. Zhivkov, 74 years old, who is also President of Bulgaria, is the longest-serving leader in the Soviet bloc. Elected with Mr. Zhivkov to the ruling Politburo and Central Committee Secretariat were all the principal leaders whom he had named or reconfirmed before the congress. Expectations that a new post might be created to place one of them in the position of “heir apparent” were not realized. The meeting was dominated by the theme of moving Bulgaria into the age of high technology and the consequent restructuring of the completely state-run, highly centralized economy. Communist experts and Western diplomats, however, found few concrete prescriptions on how radical change is to be achieved.
Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born newspaper publisher, offered Friday night to give printing unions his abandoned plant in central London as a way of settling a dispute with them over his move to a computerized site in January, when he dismissed nearly 6,000 workers. Union leaders reacted cautiously today to the unexpected offer, but they did not reject it altogether. “It can certainly be part of a settlement,” said Brenda Dean, general secretary of the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades, the main printers union. “But this offer alone will not end the dispute.”
Western hostages, some of them in poor health, are being held by Muslim fundamentalists at barracks in an eastern Lebanon town, a Christian radio station in Beirut reported. The Voice of Lebanon cited unnamed prisoners, apparently Palestinians or Lebanese, who recently escaped from the barracks in Baalbek, 52 miles east of Beirut, as the source of its information. Independent confirmation was not immediately available. Six Americans and at least four Frenchmen are being held hostage in Lebanon.
Vice President George Bush defended the interests of U.S. oil producers in a meeting in Riyadh with Saudi Oil Minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, in which the two discussed the recent Saudi-induced plunge in world oil prices. Marlin Fitzwater, a spokesman for the vice president, said Bush “described our desire to ensure a strong domestic oil industry as part of fundamental national security interest.” Vice President Bush warned today that if oil prices stayed below $12 a barrel, “substantial financial institutions in this country could be hurt.” Mr. Bush made his comments in an interview with U.S. News and World Report on the eve of his trip to the Middle East. It was the second time in a week the Vice President, who arrived in Saudi Arabia today, seemed to be urging oil producers to do something to halt the sharp drop in oil prices. Mr. Bush is on the first stop of an eight-day tour of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and Yemen.
Sikh extremists shot their way into a courthouse in the Punjab city of Jullundur, killed six policemen and freed three prisoners accused of killing a Hindu editor, authorities said. Police said the terrorists sprayed the area with gunfire for 15 minutes, with sentries too terrified to fire back. A fourth prisoner outside the courtroom did not escape, police said. Four people, including a lawyer, were reported wounded in the attack. The three escaped prisoners had been brought from the Sikhs’ holy city of Amritsar to stand trial for the May, 1984, murder of Hindu newspaper editor Ramesh Chander.
A former Prime Minister who is a leading suspect in an attempt to overthrow the Thai Government last September was allowed to leave Thailand today for a meeting in Japan of former political leaders. The suspect, General Kriangsak Chamanand, who is free on bail while several dozen other accused coup-plotters remain in prison, said he would return to Bangkok after the meeting ends. General Kriangsak, meeting with reporters at the airport before leaving for Tokyo, called for amnesty for all coup suspects. The former Prime Minister said he was going to Japan to attend a meeting of the Inter-Action Council, an international group of former government leaders that he helped found.
A year after the Vietnamese overran guerrilla camps along the Thai-Cambodian border, rebels are increasing their activity in almost every Cambodian province, according to guerrilla leaders and diplomats. Reports reach Thailand of guerrilla strikes, some close to Phnom Penh. Several diplomats suggest that the Vietnamese face problems familiar to United States forces in South Vietnam, who were secure in garrisons but did not control the countryside. No one suggests, however, that Vietnam, which has recently rejected a guerrilla proposal for talks, is likely to end the war soon through negotiation — even if promised a pro-Hanoi regime in Phnom Penh. Nor will the Vietnamese be driven from Cambodia. But controlling the country is difficult for Hanoi, which now maintains about 150,000 troops.
Tens of thousands of people marched peacefully Saturday as the South Korean opposition party continued to draw enthusiastic support for constitutional change. The rally was the fourth in the last few weeks. The crowd shouted its disapproval of the Government on the same day that President Chun Doo Hwan left for a visit to Western Europe. Both the opposition rally and a separate student demonstration remained peaceful, eschewing the violence of a small band of demonstrators last week in Kwangju. In Taegu, the nation’s third-largest city, crowds began to gather outside the Asia Theater, a movie house off the main streets, several hours before the rally was scheduled to begin at 2 PM Saturday. People filled the streets around the theater listening to speeches broadcast over loudspeakers. The police put the crowd at 7,000 people, while opposition leaders estimated it at 100,000. Other observers counted about 15,000 during the speechmaking, a number that reached 30,000 to 50,000 as the crowd marched from the theater to opposition party headquarters.
An aviation fuel storage tank exploded and burned today at Osan Air Base, 37 miles south of Seoul in South korea, and the United States military said initial reports indicated an American and 13 Koreans had died and 12 Koreans had been injured. The explosion occurred during a fuel transfer operation, and the fire was brought under control after several hours. A base spokesman said an investigation was under way to determine the cause of the explosion, but he said there was no indication that sabotage or terrorism was involved.
Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger urged Japan today to take part in the Reagan Administration’s space-based defense research, saying Japan’s “great technological genius” would enhance the program. But Mr. Weinberger avoided any appearance of trying to put pressure on the Japanese to make a quick decision. According to Defense Department officials, he told Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone that “when and how it might participate would be solely up to the Japanese Government.” Mr. Nakasone was quoted by aides as having said he would “study this matter carefully” after hearing from a delegation of 55 Government officials and industry executives now visiting the United States to examine the missile-defense plan. Thus far, Britain and West Germany are the only American allies to join the program, popularly known as “Star Wars.”
A Filipino gang thought to be Communist rebels captured a 10man U.S. military team looking for the wreckage of an American World War II bomber but released them after one day, a U.S. Embassy spokesman said. The spokesman said the Americans were riding in a vehicle after searching for the wreckage of a B-26 in Nueva Vizcaya province, about 100 miles north of Manila, when they were intercepted by the suspected guerrillas. It is believed to be the first time a group of U.S. servicemen had been captured by local Communist rebels.
Former President Ferdinand E. Marcos today called on Filipinos to support the new Manila Government. In an hourlong interview with a Manila radio station, he urged his listeners to unite behind the woman who ousted him, President Corazon C. Aquino, whom he referred to with an odd mixture of respect and familiarity as “Madame Cory Aquino.” Cory is Mrs. Aquino’s nickname. The former President, who fled the presidential palace February 25, apparently made a surprise telephone call to the station’s early-morning program, “Let’s Be Happy,” from his exile in Honolulu. Mr. Marcos was conciliatory and his wife Imelda sobbed as he spoke by telephone from his exile in Honolulu. He said he had no intention of starting a civil war or intervening in the politics of the Philippines “except to help bring about peace and order.”
The chief U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebel group is undergoing a behind-the-scenes shake-up that includes appointment of a Miamibased exiled businessman to coordinate its financial and political operations. Leonardo Somarriba was named secretary general of the United Nicaraguan Opposition last month, but no announcement was made, sources said, because admission of problems could undercut President Reagan’s request for $100 million in aid for the rebels, known as contras.
An earthquake jolted the ancient Incan city of Cuzco in Peru today, killing 5 people, injuring at least 30 and sending panicked residents racing from crumbling homes into the streets, authorities said. The earthquake, registering 5.5 on the Richter scale, struck at about 3:15 P.M. New York time and an aftershock hit 10 minutes later, a spokesman at Peru’s National Geophysical Institute said. Civil defense officials appealed for calm and soldiers patroled the streets of Cuzco to prevent looting in the city of 300,000 people, which is about 350 miles southeast of here. Peru’s official press agency Andina reported five people were killed in Cuzco. At least 30 people were reported to have been injured.
Sudan’s State Security Court sentenced a former leading official, Omar Tayeb, to life in prison and fined him more than $6 million for allegedly helping thousands of Ethiopian Jews pass through Sudan to Israel in 1984 and 1985. Prosecutors charged that Tayeb, a first vice president in the government of deposed President Jaafar Numeiri, conspired with the CIA, the U.S. Air Force and others to fly the Jews out of Sudanese drought-relief camps.
The black nationalist Winnie Mandela today described South African Government officials as terrorists and called for “direct action” against them. Mrs. Mandela, whose husband is the jailed black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela, spoke to about 3,000 mourners in the town of Brandfort for the funeral of a man who residents said was killed by a police informer last week. “We no longer come to the funerals of our young heroes to shed tears,” Mrs. Mandela said. “The time for crying is over. We can no longer waste our tears. The struggle cannot be won unless we take direct action against the Botha regime.” She was referring to President P. W. Botha. For most of the last nine years, Mrs. Mandela has been exiled to Brandfort, in Orange Free State, under the terms of a Government banning order restricting her movements and political activities. The order prohibits her from making public political speeches, but she has defied the restriction.
In an important step toward developing an aerospace plane, a potential successor to the space shuttle, the Government plans to award contracts this month for the first full-scale test engines and structural components. Air Force officials said the contracts, worth from $300 million to $400 million, could be announced next week. The aerospace plane, equipped with scramjet engines that burn their fuel in an airstream that moves at supersonic speeds, is expected to be capable of taking off from a runway and quickly accelerating to speeds 12 or even 25 times the speed of sound. The craft is officially designated the X-31, but because such a plane is expected to be able to travel from New York to Tokyo in two hours, it has been dubbed the Orient Express. With the aid of a built-in rocket, the plane could climb above the atmosphere and into a low orbit of the Earth. Planners for both the military and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration see the aerospace plane as becoming a more versatile, efficient and lower-cost means of delivering people and payloads to space than conventional rockets or the space shuttle.
President Reagan makes a radio address to the Nation on defense establishment reforms. President Reagan today publicly acknowledged that his predecessor, President Carter, had recognized the need to rebuild the nation’s armed forces. At the same time Mr. Reagan, in his weekly radio speech, called on Congress to streamline the way it appropriated money for the Defense Department. The President said he agreed with a Presidential commission that there must be “a better, more efficient way” to handle military spending.
A top Federal official responsible for battling the AIDS epidemic has warned that cases linked to intravenous drug use, once concentrated in two states, are rapidly spreading throughout the nation. He said that swift action must be taken to stem a further spread of the disease by this means and that intravenous drug use is now viewed as a far greater factor in the spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome than had been realized. Directly or indirectly, contaminated needles are the prime source of the fatal disease among heterosexual men and women and newborns. The concern about intravenous drug use has greatly increased for two other reasons as well. First, new statistics show that AIDS has become the leading cause of death in New York prisons, principally because of the use of intravenous drugs before incarceration, and there are indications that similar conditions are developing in prisons elsewhere. Second, recent research indicates that homosexual men have substantially decreased promiscuity since AIDS was discovered in 1981; yet reported cases continue unabated among men in this group, and a suspected key factor is the use by some of intravenous drugs. Dr. James W. Curran, head of the AIDS branch of the Federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, raised these concerns last week at a conference in Tarrytown, N.Y. “What is going to happen in 1990 is that somebody is going to say, why didn’t you tell us about this problem?” Dr. Curran said. “We are talking about a massive problem, one with national and international implications,” he added in a subsequent interview.
In another important development, new studies in Zaire, which has consistently refused to allow medical reporting about the disease, affirm that heterosexual vaginal intercourse is the dominant route of transmission of the disease in central Africa. The Zaire data, considered crucial to the search for the initial causes and the possible cures of this puzzling and menacing disease, also show that transfusions with contaminated blood play a more important role there than in the United States or Europe. AIDS can also be spread by oral or anal intercourse between heterosexuals or homosexuals. Cases of AIDS among drug addicts, their sex partners and children have so far occurred mainly in New York City and northern New Jersey. But cases among intravenous drug users have now been reported in 44 states, and the incidence of AIDS among drug addicts in Europe has risen sharply.
Democratic leaders said the party should focus on unemployment and job training in its search for policies that will spark a Democratic resurgence in national elections in 1986 and 1988. The Democratic Policy Commission, ending a two-day conference in Salt Lake City, was told that economic uncertainty has become a major concern for voters. But local officials urged the party to shun costly programs that will reinforce the Democrats’ image as big spenders. “We can’t fund everything in the world,” said Marlin Schneider, a state legislator from Wisconsin, who added that reducing the federal deficit should be an overriding consideration.
Education Secretary William J. Bennett said drug-free schools are essential to improving education and urged school board members from across the country to “do anything you have to do” to cleanse the nation’s schools of drugs. “As long as students are taking or selling or distributing drugs in your schools, you can probably write them off as far as learning goes,” he told a meeting of the National School Boards Association in Las Vegas.
The Defense Department is tightening its review of charter airlines that carry military people after a study found major shortcomings in the monitoring of the carriers. “The department intends to take aggressive action to assure that air carriers who fly our people are concerned with quality and are fully complying with high standards of air safety,” said James P. Wade, Assistant Secretary of Defense for logistics. Mr. Wade said at a news conference Friday, in which a Pentagon report on military charters was made public, that standards at airlines serving the military were expected to be higher than in the civilian market because military personnel could not choose which aircraft or airline to use.
The present and former chief lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People are trading accusations over the organization’s handling of a major school desegregation case. Thomas I. Atkins, who served as general counsel until 1984, asserted that the association was abandoning its “historic willingness to protect the rights of black people” in agreeing to accept a court ruling that would eliminate a parents’ committee that monitors a school desegregation plan in Detroit. He made the accusation in an affidavit filed with the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati. Mr. Atkins wrote that the position taken by Grover G. Hankins, the association’s present general counsel, “constitutes little less than a collateral attack upon the 1975 remedial orders in this case.”
Seventy-nine law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty last year, an increase of nearly 10% from 1984, the FBI reported. Seventy of the officers killed last year were shot to death, 58 with handguns and 12 with rifles or shotguns. Five officers were run down intentionally by killers driving motor vehicles, three were beaten to death and one was fatally stabbed. The greatest number of killings, 30, occurred when officers were attempting to apprehend or arrest suspects.
Purdue University police in West Lafayette, Indiana, dismantled an anti-apartheid shack and arrested 22 people who refused to end their demonstration, while protesters hastily rebuilt a symbolic shantytown outside the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison 14 hours after it was torn down. At Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, students told about 150 supporters they would continue to occupy shanties there until the school sells its investments in companies that do business with South Africa.
A heavily armed man who held an elderly woman hostage in Chicago after killing his landlord and a police officer surrendered peacefully, ending a 35-hour standoff. John Pasch Jr. walked out of his captive’s North Side apartment into the glare of police floodlights. His 74-year-old hostage was unharmed. Officers said events in Philadelphia last May, when scores of homes were destroyed in the police confrontation with the radical group MOVE, were on their minds when they settled on a strategy of waiting out the gunman.
A U.S. bankruptcy judge in Tampa, Florida, gave People Express Airlines permission to lend Provincetown-Boston Airlines $1 million to keep PBA flying while People Express attempts to purchase the failing carrier. PBA needs the loan to set up routes to Philadelphia, Newark, New Jersey, and Allentown, Pennsylvania, that will feed into People Express routes, PBA lawyer Harley Riedel told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Alexander L. Paskay. People Express, which proposed a takeover of the Naples, Florida-based carrier in January, has lent PBA $2.6 million since January 31.
The United Steelworkers of America broke off contract talks today with the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, a day after union workers at the LTV Steel Company approved cuts in wages and benefits in exchange for stock and a share in future profits. The breakoff in the talks with Bethlehem is for an indefinite period to allow local union presidents to consult with the rank and file on contract issues that are “hanging fire,” said Jim Smith, an aide to Lynn Williams, president of the union. Bethlehem employs about 30,000 members of the union at five major plants in Johnstown, Bethlehem and Steelton, Pennsylvania, Burns Harbor, Indiana, and Sparrows Point, Maryland.
San Francisco Fire Department officials said today that seven people were missing and presumed dead as a result of an explosion and fire that devastated a block-long industrial complex here. Twenty-two people were injured by the blast and five-alarm fire Friday, which leveled most of the Bayview Industrial Park in the Hunters Point section of San Francisco. Two of the injured were listed in critical condition this afternoon. “First, there was a humongous explosion,” said Richard Sandoval, who works at the complex, a tannery until it was converted six years ago into a warren of warehouses and dozens of small shops and quarters for small businesses. Then, said Pat Desha, whose husband, Kalani, was hospitalized for injuries suffered in the explosion, “the walls, the ceiling — everything just collapsed and it was dark.”
Nine adult members of the Black Hebrew Israelites were arrested in New York City and charged with coercing and endangering minors who police said were put on the streets to beg. Five children were removed from two Yahweh Temple homes in Queens, in response to reports of “systematic abuse and exploitation of children” by adults in the sect, Tom McCarthy of the Queens district attorney’s office said. He said six of the adults also face felonious-assault charges.
Five United States Naval Academy midshipmen, four men and a woman, have been forced to resign over sexual misconduct in Bancroft Hall, the school’s coeducational dormitory. A sixth midshipman was found guilty of misconduct by an administrative panel but was allowed to remain because he convinced officials that he had been pressured into taking part in the incident December 15. Lieutenant Commander Stephen Clawson, an academy spokesman, declined to disclose the midshipmen’s names or the nature of the incident. He said the academy considered the sexual activity a “serious” breach of the code of military conduct, but acknowledged that it “would not have been sexual misconduct if it had been off-campus.” “The Naval Academy code states that sexual misconduct includes touching, intercourse or other actions which reasonably would excite or satisfy the sexual desire of the actor,” he said.
Four large circular depressions in the earth will represent Allison Krause, Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller and William Schroeder, the Kent State University students who were shot to death by National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970. On Friday university officials unveiled a model for the memorial, which will include nine smaller impressions to represent students wounded in the demonstration against the invasion of Cambodia. In 1970, after two days of student protests against the invasion, Governor James A. Rhodes ordered the guardsmen to the Kent campus. On May 4, the students confronted the guardsmen, who opened fire. The university president, Michael Schwartz, said, “With this announcement today, Kent State University formally acknowledges its own history and its place in recent American history.” The model was submitted by the architectural team of Ian Taberner of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Michael Fahey of New York, and selected from among 698 entries.
A senior Los Angeles County prosecutor, convicted of sexually abusing his two daughters, has disappeared, and the authorities are investigating to determine whether he was aided in his flight by colleagues in the District Attorney’s office. The prosecutor, Harvey W. Harper, who has since been dismissed, disappeared Jan. 28 shortly before a jury returned verdicts of guilty on five of the six counts against him. Sgt. Larry Stimach, who is in charge of the San Bernardino Sheriff Department’s investigation into the disappearance, asserted that Mr. Harper had been “aided by others.” Sergeant Stimach said this aid possibly came from three or four current or former prosecutors in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office.
A Massachusetts judge has reversed a Boston law requiring downtown developers to give to a fund designed to aid the city’s poorer residential communities. The judge, Mel Greenberg of Superior Court, ruled Friday, in a suit filed by a developer, Jerome L. Rappaport, that the city did not have the authority to put such a law into effect.
Dr. Felix M. Balasco, a Rhode Island cardiologist who the authorities say implanted pacemakers in 29 people who did not need them has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for Medicare fraud, extortion and conspiracy. He was also fined $70,000 Friday by Federal District Judge Raymond J. Pettine, who said the doctor’s motive was a “rapacious appetite for money.”
Peter Ueberroth proposes a drug testing program in which Major League players would be tested for drugs no more than 4 times a year from March to October. Cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and morphine would be included, but not amphetamines. There would be no penalty for first-time positive testing.
140th Grand National: Richard Dunwoody aboard 9-year-old 15-2 second favorite West Tip wins by 2 lengths from Young Driver.
Record for a throw-and-return boomerang toss is set (121m).
Born:
Steve Clevenger, MLB catcher and first baseman (Chicago Cubs, Baltimore Orioles, Seattle Mariners), in Baltimore, Maryland.
Erica Rhodes, American actress (“Plague Town”), in Newton, Massachusetts.
Died:
Manly Wade Wellman, 82, sci-fi author (Devil’s Planet).
History Diaries 