President Reagan, confronted with an emerging debate within his Administration over efforts to free an American news correspondent held in a Moscow prison, may break his silence on the matter. A senior Administration official said the White House is considering issuing a presidential statement as early as today on the detention of Nicholas Daniloff, a U.S. News & World Report correspondent, to increase pressure on the Soviet Union. Since Daniloff was seized August 30, Reagan — on vacation at his ranch northwest of Santa Barbara — has made no official comment.
Administration officials said today that they were drawing up a set of graduated measures against the Soviet Union — including a personal statement by President Reagan — to be used if an American reporter held in Moscow on suspicion of espionage is not freed promptly. Washington is said to be considering reducing Soviet personnel stationed in the United States, limiting negotiations to key issues like arms control, delaying the issuance of export licenses for some goods and urging groups to boycott meetings with Russians. For the moment, all scheduled negotiations are going ahead, officials said, including a second round of arms control talks opening here Friday. The negotiations are aimed at finding common ground that might make a summit meeting possible later this year.
American officials said today that they hoped the Soviet Union would respond to President Reagan’s arms control proposals in a meeting opening Friday. The officials also said they hoped there would be replies to three questions that were put to Soviet officials in writing in the first round of the talks last month in Moscow. The special arms control talks, which are being conducted outside of the regular discussions in Geneva, are part of an effort to see whether there is common ground on any issues in preparation for a possible summit meeting later this year.
The Soviet Union shot down a South Korean airliner at a time when American intelligence had a vast array of listening devices directed at that area of East Asia, including installations in Japan unknown to the Japanese Government, according to a new book. The book, “The Target Is Destroyed,” says intercepted communications gathered by these listening devices were not available to intelligence officials until hours and days after the attack on September 1, 1983, too late to save the lives of the 269 people aboard the airliner. The plane had strayed hundreds of miles off course and into Soviet airspace, where it flew over sensitive military installations. The book, by Seymour M. Hersh, is based on two years of research and includes interviews in the United States, the Soviet Union and Japan. Soviet officials are quoted as saying they spoke with Mr. Hersh because they wanted him to prove that the plane’s off-course flight path was part of an intelligence mission for the United States. Mr. Hersh says he found no evidence that the plane was part of any American intelligence operation.
The captains of a Soviet passenger liner and a freighter that collided in the Black Sea on Sunday night, killing nearly 400 people, have been arrested, a Soviet official said today. The official, Albert I. Vlasov, who is a first deputy chief of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department, said in a briefing, the second on the accident, that the two men were in custody and that, after an investigation, “we will submit the case to a court and the court will mete out punishment.” Pravda, the party daily, said the captain of the passenger liner, Vadim G. Markov, and the captain of the freighter, Viktor I. Tkachenko, had violated navigational safety rules. The passenger ship, the Admiral Nakhimov, sank seven minutes after the collision, which occurred at 11:15 PM Sunday, Mr. Vlasov said. Soviet officials said previously that the ship sank within 15 minutes.
Poland’s Roman Catholic Church has abandoned its four-year campaign to raise a fund of dollars to aid private farmers, citing Government efforts to dominate the project. The announcement of the church decision on Wednesday came as the Government sought to enlist the authority of the church in the wake of a limited release of political prisoners. The idea of the fund to aid farmers was backed by Pope John Paul, and it was known to be the pet project of the Polish Primate, Jozef Cardinal Glemp. The Government expressed its regrets at the collapse, and Kazimierz Grzesiak, a Deputy Minister of Agriculture, insisted that the Government had conducted talks in good faith.
Three French soldiers serving with the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon were killed today in the explosion of a roadside bomb, a spokesman for the force announced. The spokesman for the nine-nation group, known as the United Nations Interim Force, or Unifil, said the explosion occurred as the Frenchmen were jogging on the outskirts of the Moslem Shiite village of Joya (Jouaiya), eight miles east of the port of Tyre. In Paris, a Foreign Ministry spokesman condemned the killings as “cowardly” and said the incident “confirms one more time the insecure conditions in which Unifil soldiers are operating every day.” At the United Nations, France’s chief delegate requested an emergency meeting of the Security Council. Two United Nations officials were expected to fly to the Middle East shortly to assess Unifil’s situation, a spokesman said. United Nations sources in Lebanon said they believed the attack was the work of pro-Iranian Shiite fundamentalists, mostly members of the Party of God, who are engaged in what is seen as a campaign to compel Unifil to leave Lebanon.
Iran released a Soviet freighter today after forcing it to an Iranian port and searching it for goods that might aid Iraq’s war effort, shipping executives said. Iranian warships also briefly stopped a second Soviet freighter, the Tutov, but allowed it to continue its trip to an undisclosed Persian Gulf port Wednesday, the executives said.
Vietnam gave the United States “substantial lists” identifying children fathered by American soldiers — estimated to number 15,000 and considered by Hanoi to be Washington’s responsibility. A U.S. Embassy spokesman said the lists of Amerasians and other groups eligible for resettlement to the United States were given to Bruce Beardsley, head of the Bangkok office of the U.N.-sponsored Orderly Departure Program. The program was established in 1979 and to date has facilitated the resettlement of more than 45,000 Vietnamese and 4,000 Amerasians.
Japan is studying ways to encourage elderly Japanese citizens to move overseas in retirement communities. Officials say more spacious housing and a less frantic pace of living are easier to find outside the country.
President Corazon C. Aquino, defending her approach to combating the Communist insurgency in the Philippines, said today that she would not submit to the sort of pressure from Washington on this and other issues that she said her predecessor, Ferdinand E. Marcos, had been subjected to. She also said she would not respond to anonymous criticisms such as those leveled on Sunday by unidentified Reagan Administration officials, who said she should get tougher with the Communists and other insurgents. Mrs. Aquino said the criticism did not appear to have come from President Reagan, but from individuals who might not want her to succeed. She learned of the criticism from an article in The New York Times on Monday.
Thirteen hours of heavy rain left four people dead and 500 homeless in Monterrey, Mexico, the Red Cross reported. Officials declared a state of emergency in the northern industrial city, which has a metropolitan area population of 2.8 million. “The situation is very grave,” said Red Cross Commander Andres Castillo Perez, with flood waters more than four feet deep in some areas. Castillo said four men were swept to their deaths when a normally dry drainage channel overflowed. Monterrey is usually so arid that in recent years poor people had built tiny, concrete-block houses on the floor and banks of the channel.
The Nicaraguan government, in response to opposition demands, agreed to allow uncensored debate on a proposed constitution that would give the president power to revoke the citizenship of anti-government rebels. A revised draft of the document written by a Sandinista-dominated parliamentary committee would also give the president the power to declare war, apparently without approval of Nicaragua’s National Assembly. Parliamentary debate over the revised version of the constitution will resume next week. The government said the constitutional issues could be debated in the news media without censorship.
A Chilean Marxist coalition’s call for a nationwide general strike to protest 13 years of military rule had little effect because the Christian Democrats, Chile’s main political opposition, refused to support it. Armored police vehicles sprayed tear gas and water jets to break up student demonstrations marking September 4 — Chile’s traditional election day before General Augusto Pinochet seized power in a 1973 coup. Authorities said one man was shot to death by a military patrol, and police reported 100 arrests in cities throughout the nation.
A 21-year-old man was killed in the seaside town of Vina del Mar, Chile today, and about 100 demonstrators were arrested in Santiago on the first day of a two-day work stoppage called by the Communist Party and other leftist groups. Truckloads of soldiers roamed the streets in anticipation of violence. The Christian Democratic Party and other parties in the centrist opposition declined to take part, and the level of participation appeared to be lower than in a strike two months ago. Strike organizers acknowledged at a news conference that support had been minimal. German Correa, a Communist spokesman, attributed it to the lack of Christian Democratic backing.
Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, told other leaders of the Nonaligned Movement in Harare, Zimbabwe today that they had proved helpless against the West. He raised the possibility that Libya might leave the organization. His hourlong speech at a summit meeting of countries professing nonalignment was greeted with sporadic laughter, applause and, more often, stony silence. Speaking in Arabic through an interpreter, he said that if “United States arrogance” was not deterred, he would deploy an international army around the world in order to “spread fire under the feet of America.” The Libyan leader criticized as “puppets and spies” those members of the Nonaligned Movement that have relations with the United States, Israel and Britain, specifically denouncing Egypt, Zaire, Cameroon and Ivory Coast. The Egyptian delegation was reported to have called Colonel Qaddafi “immature,” while Zaire, Cameroon and the Ivory Coast said in a joint statement that they had nothing but scorn and contempt for his criticism.
The Japanese Government warned South Africa today that it might impose new punitive sanctions unless Pretoria moved quickly to change its apartheid policies. Japanese officials declined to specify what punitive actions were contemplated, stopping short of saying even in general terms whether they were likely to be economic measures. Nevertheless, Japan, which is South Africa’s largest trading partner after the United States, was reported today to have specific sanctions in mind. According to the respected financial daily, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the Government was debating whether to cut off purchases of coal and iron ore that last year formed a considerable share of Japan’s $1 billion in imports from South Africa.
The black township of Soweto was seized by chaos and violence today as thousands of militant blacks sought to defy a Government curb on a mass funeral for blacks killed in clashes last week. Reports by witnesses from the township of more than two million near Johannesburg told of daylong turmoil as blacks tried to congregate at a stadium, at churches and at cemeteries to hold funerals for victims of the violence last week. Residents said angry youths threw up barricades in the township’s dusty streets, stoned buses and cars and intimidated those who tried to leave the township by bus or train despite a work boycott called for the day. By day’s end, sources said, several of the victims had been buried in separate and sometimes abrupt ceremonies, but all attempts at a mass funeral had been broken up.
President Reagan today extended for one year a series of limited sanctions against South Africa and held out the possibility of further moves aimed at its Government. In a message to Congress, Mr. Reagan said “additional measures” would be considered after consultations with allies. The sanctions ordered by Mr. Reagan are far less stringent than those overwhelmingly endorsed recently by the House and Senate. White House officials said Mr. Reagan’s move today was a “holding action” in the face of the powerful pro-sanction pressure from Capitol Hill and the Administration was, in fact, on a collision course. “We have told Congress our views on the legislation that they have under consideration and we’re taking what we think are the appropriate and proper steps in order to continue to have some impact on change in South Africa,” said Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman.
Desmond Tutu became the Archbishop of Cape Town in a ceremony at St. George’s Cathedral. His enthronement will make the cleric the first black to head the Anglican Church in southern Africa.
The fiscal 1987 deficit will be at least $4 billion higher than the government’s estimate of $163.4 billion released last month, the General Accounting Office told a House committee. The investigative agency said that the Administration was underestimating spending by about $11 billion, and that the economy may be weaker than previously estimated. To meet the $144-billion deficit limit of the Gramm-Rudman law, “further budget reductions or revenue increases will likely be required” beyond those already planned, the GAO said.
President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, will make a nationally broadcast address against the use of illegal drugs, the White House announced today. The White House spokesman, Larry Speakes, said the speech, of 15 to 30 minutes, would be delivered by the Reagans on September 14 as they sit together in the living quarters of the White House. It will mark the start of an Administration campaign against illegal narcotics this fall, including legislative proposals and recommendations for increased Federal spending that could total $100 million to $200 million, White House officials said. The officials said the decision to involve the Reagans in such a visible manner signaled a recognition that public and political interest in the drug issue was growing. They insisted, however, that potential political gain for Republicans was not a factor.
The President and First Lady enjoy a horseback ride around the grounds at Rancho del Cielo.
With pomp and wit and an eloquent speech by the Prince of Wales, Harvard University formally began its 350th anniversary celebration today on the grounds where the first American college students met more than three centuries ago. Prince Charles of Britain, resplendent in a silk academic gown heavily embroidered with gold, warned the audience of 16,000 people that the Western world was in danger of letting technology triumph over man. “I would suggest that we have been gradually losing sight of the Greek philosophers’ ideal, which was to produce a balance between the several subjects which catered for a boy’s moral, intellectual, emotional and physical needs,” Prince Charles said. “We may have forgotten that when all is said and done a good man, as the Greeks would say, is a nobler work than a good technologist.”
Rapid demographic changes promise to have an impact on Congressional and state elections this year and on the Presidential election in 1988. Republicans say the changes would work in their favor and allow continuation of the coalition put together by President Reagan.
Nevada’s electorate could decide whether Senator Paul Laxalt, Nevada’s most powerful politician, pursues the Presidency in 1988. Mr. Laxalt has said he may seek the Republican nomination, but many politicians say he may reconsider if the candidate he chose to run for his seat loses in November.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell appears on the verge of outflanking the law, the courts and Virginia church tradition by threatening to move his church from Lynchburg, Virginia, to Atlanta unless he gains a tax exemption for his enterprises in Lynchburg. Officials in Lynchburg have agreed on a plan to make Mr. Falwell’s organization exempt from property taxes to prevent the move.
A ranking Louisiana state legislator and the chairman of the State Pardon Board were indicted today on charges of accepting a $130,000 bribe to pardon a convicted murderer. The legislator, Joseph Delpit, a Democrat from Baton Rouge who is Speaker pro tem, and Howard Marsellus Jr., the chairman of the Pardons Board, were charged with one count each of public bribery and conspiracy to commit public bribery.
The United States will ask Canada, Taiwan and Sweden to reduce their steel exports, U.S. Trade Representative Clayton K. Yeutter said. He said that steel being imported from the three nations threatens to undermine the Reagan Administration’s program for reducing the foreign share of the U.S. market — from about 25% to about 18.5% — in five years. The effort is based on separate restraint agreements with 18 major steel-exporting nations. Canada, Sweden and Taiwan were not asked to participate because they had insignificant shares of the U.S. market when the plan was introduced in 1984.
The United States is ready to conduct the first space-based experiment involving the advanced technology that would be used to defend against ballistic missiles, Government officials said today. In the test, one space vehicle will try to track and intercept another. A Delta rocket is to loft the two craft into space. One of the craft will serve as an orbiting target. The other will go into a “closely related orbit,” a Pentagon report said. It is then to guide itself toward the target and will try to crash into it, officials said. The Pentagon would not reveal the test’s launching time but said that reporters would be informed a few hours before the launching takes place. Reagan Administration officials said this policy was an effort to hinder any attempt by the Soviet Union to gather intelligence about the test. But officials said that the launching could take place as soon as Friday.
Deployment of the Navy’s most advanced missile for aerial combat is being delayed by persistent production difficulties, Navy officials said Wednesday. The most recent difficulties in quality control at plants manufacturing the Phoenix air-to-air missile came to light in June when an inspection team examined a finished missile at the Tucson, Arizona, plant where Hughes Aircraft, a subsidiary of the General Motors Corporation, builds the missile, the Navy said. Nearly 2,700 defects were discovered in the missile. While most were deemed minor, the Navy says it is taking steps to redesign components and change production techniques before the newest version of the Phoenix, the AIM-54C missile, is sent to sea for use on planes that fly from aircraft carriers.
Researchers reported that powerful anti-cancer drugs along with breast cancer surgery can delay relapse and increase survival rates over surgery alone. The Harvard School of Public Health, pooling data from nearly 10,000 patients, found that relapse-free survival rates of operable breast cancer were 12.5% better at three years when chemotherapy was given in addition to surgery. The American Cancer Society estimates that 123,000 new cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed in the nation this year.
The Supreme Court today blocked the scheduled execution of Willie Watson Jr., the convicted killer of a Tulane University medical student. The Justices ordered the Louisiana authorities to spare Mr. Watson’s life until the Court, in a separate case, studied an issue Mr. Watson has raised in his appeal. Mr.. Watson’s lawyers contend that Louisiana’s death penalty law is racially discriminatory. They argue that the killers of whites are more likely to receive a death sentence than the killers of blacks. Mr.. Watson was sentenced to death for the 1981 kidnapping, rape and murder of 25-year-old Kathy Newman in New Orleans. Ms. Newman was white.
Martin Marietta Corp. announced that Federal Express Corp. has signed a launch reservation agreement to orbit a communications satellite on a Titan 3 rocket in 1989, in what Administration officials immediately hailed as the birth of the nation’s commercial rocket industry. President Reagan gave U.S. rocket makers the go-ahead to start launching commercial satellites when he announced on August 15 that most such launches would no longer be accepted for the space shuttle. “This is proof that the private sector is ready to take on the challenge of providing transportation to space on a commercial basis,” said Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole.
The space agency today announced a new round of layoffs at Cape Canaveral, where major activity in past months has come to a virtual halt because of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. “There’s going to be a lot of mourning tonight, and I’m going to mourn with them,” Thomas Utsman, acting director of the Kennedy Space Center, said after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced that more than 1,100 shuttle workers will be laid off because of the loss of the shuttle Challenger. Utsman said Lockheed Space Operations Co. will lay off 834 employees, McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Co. 133, and EG&G 141. The day before, Martin Marietta said that it will lay off perhaps 800 employees from a shuttle fuel tank plant in Louisiana. Utsman said technicians and quality-control people, not the engineering force, were affected by the layoffs. He said NASA hopes to rehire many of those who are laid off a year from now.
Survivors of the Holocaust, urging the world to remember the horrors that befell them, joined with government officials yesterday to dedicate the site for a new museum in Battery Park City that is to serve as a memorial to the Holocaust and to the destroyed Jewish culture of Europe. “Only those who were there will know what it meant to be there,” said the writer Elie Wiesel, a survivor. “And yet we must communicate that knowledge any way we can through the language of memory. May this museum become a vehicle for that language.”
Radioactivity in drinking water poses a serious health threat across the country, the Environmental Protection Agency said. Naturally occurring radon, radium and uranium are causing as many as 730 cancer deaths a year, officials said.
Food retailers believe that by the mid-1990’s most beef in the United States will be produced without chemicals or hormones. Retailers say hundreds of farmers are changing their production practices to take advantage of the trend.
It may have been a preview of the World Series, the way some people were saying, or it may have just been an exhibition game for charity, the way it was billed. Whatever it was, the Mets got their first glimpse of Fenway Park tonight, survived their first encounter with the Great Wall, and finished the performance with World Series flair by rallying for six runs in the eighth inning to beat the Boston Red Sox, 7–3. The game was played for the Jimmy Fund in Boston and for sandlot baseball in New York. It drew a sellout crowd of 33,057. Only one ball reached the Green Monster in left field, and none went over it. But the Mets still left a kind of message for people who saw the game as a forerunner of things to come.
Major League Baseball:
Hank Greenberg, the Jewish boy from the Bronx who grew up to become a Hall of Fame slugger, died today at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was 75 years old.
The Kansas City Royals shut out the Chicago White Sox, 1–0. Mark Gubicza and Steve Farr combined on a three-hitter and Lonnie Smith singled home an unearned run in the eighth inning to spark Kansas City.
Joe Carter hits his second grand slam of the year as he garners 4 hits, and Cory Snyder clubs two 3-run homers as the Indians club the host Brewers 15–4. Snyder, a rookie, homered in the first inning after a sacrifice fly by Brett Butler against Tim Leary, 9–12. Snyder hit his 20th homer of the season in the eighth off Dan Plesac following an RBI single by Pat Tabler. The Tribe will score 30 more runs in their next two games in the series.
Frustration peaked in the clubhouse of the San Francisco Giants tonight. The manager was upset at his team. Very upset. Expletives deleted. “We’re going to start playing a little (blank) different starting Friday (blank) night,” manager Roger Craig vowed after he gave his struggling team an old-fashioned, X-rated tongue lashing following a 4–2 loss at Montreal. Craig’s emotional volcano burst once the Giants fell behind 4–0 and wasted a decent pitching performance by Mike LaCoss, now 9–11, but the loser in eight straight games and winless since July 13 when the Giants were in first place. Not even back-to-back solo home runs by Candy Maldonado and Chili Davis would allow the team to escape the wrath of Roger. Too little, too late was too weak an excuse. San Francisco hitters were 0 for 10 with runners in scoring position Thursday night. In the fifth inning, after starter Bryn Smith, 10–8, had retired 12 batters in a row, the Giants had runners on first and second with no outs then the bases loaded with one out yet didn’t score.
Chicago White Sox 0, Kansas City Royals 1
Cleveland Indians 15, Milwaukee Brewers 4
San Francisco Giants 2, Montreal Expos 4
Oil and technology stocks came to life yesterday, spurring the Dow Jones industrial average to a record close, and producing the strongest trading volume in six months. With its oil components having a particularly strong influence, the Dow rose 38.38 points, to 1,919.71, coasting past the 1,909.03 record set on July 2. Investors, apparently becoming more and more convinced that oil prices will not slide back to the depressed levels of earlier in the summer, snapped up energy issues. And hints that the nation’s economy might be strengthening helped the shares of technology and other concerns sensitive to economic growth.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1919.71 (+38.38)
Born:
Jordan Schafer, MLB centerfielder (Atlanta Braves, Houston Astros, Minnesota Twins), in Hammond, Indiana.
Michael Stutes, MLB pitcher (Philadelphia Phillies), in Metairie, Louisiana.
Died:
Hank Greenberg, 75, MLB Hall of Fame first baseman (5 × MLB All-Star; World Series 1935, 45; AL MVP 1935, 40; Detroit Tigers), of cancer.
History Diaries 