The United States has refined an arms proposal it made to the Soviet Union at the Iceland summit meeting and has developed a detailed plan for reducing long-range nuclear weapons, Administration officials said today. They said the latest proposal would allow the Russians to keep a slightly larger ballistic missile force than the limits proposed by the Americans in Iceland. But while authorizing this concession in the Geneva talks, the new American plan would continue to impose a set of sub-limits with a view to restructuring the Soviet Union’s force of land-based missiles, the mainstay of its nuclear arsenal. The American efforts to dictate what sort of land-based missiles force the Soviet Union may have was opposed by the Russians in Iceland and remains a sticking point. At a news conference in Reykjavik on October 12, after the meeting with President Reagan, Mikhail S. Gorbachev said he had proposed a straightforward across-the-board cut of 50 percent on all strategic, or long-range, weapons over five years, and he voiced impatience with a complicated array of additional limits — “a lot of arithmetic,” as he put it. “When we began to discuss the issue with the President,” he said, “we were again offered in response everything that had figured in the Geneva talks -all those limits and sub-limits, in short, a lot of arithmetic. All it does is obfuscate the real issue.”
For the first time in memory, a Soviet research team is conducting an opinion poll among Americans. The purpose is to elicit views about the role of Soviet studies in the United States. Traditionally, the Kremlin has dismissed American scholarship on the Soviet Union as ill-intentioned or as intelligence-gathering. But in recent years, Soviet scholars have been showing interest in work done in the United States, and this trend appears to be gaining favor under the flexible policies of Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
Hidden microphones and other surveillance equipment have been found in the Swedish Embassy in Moscow 14 years after they were planted, the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm reported. The ministry said the equipment was discovered during reconstruction work at the compound last week. It is believed to have been installed when the mission was built in 1972 by Soviet laborers working under Swedish guidance. “The unpermitted installations could not have taken place without the knowledge of Soviet authorities,” the ministry said in a statement. Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson described the Soviet behavior as intolerable.
Commando units from the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries regularly penetrate Western Europe to familiarize themselves with the terrain and reconnoiter strategic military targets, according to West German military intelligence. Disguised as truck drivers, sailors and tourists, the units move freely around Western Europe, staking out and taking photographs of bridges, military headquarters, ammunition and fuel depots and telephone centers that would become targets in a period of tension preceding war. “It is astonishing that they still do this when more detente and trust are being demanded,” said Peter Kurt Wurzbach, state secretary in the Defense Ministry, in an interview on the so-called special-purpose forces. “This is being done in a time that is not one of war.”
The Sandoz fire and chemical spill, a major environmental disaster caused by a fire and its subsequent extinguishing at Sandoz agrochemical storehouse in the Schweizerhalle industrial complex, Basel-Landschaft, Switzerland, on 1 November 1986, released toxic agrochemicals into the air and resulted in tons of pollutants entering the Rhine river, turning it red. The chemicals caused a massive mortality of wildlife downstream, killing, among other animals, a large proportion of the European eel population in the Rhine, although the situation subsequently recovered within a couple of years. Among the major resulting water pollutants were dinitro-ortho-cresol, the organophosphate chemicals propetamphos, parathion, disulfoton, thiometon, etrimphos and fenitrothion, as well as the organochlorine metoxuron. The cause of the blaze was never established. In 2000, Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior U.S. intelligence official, stated that the Soviet KGB had ordered the East German Stasi to sabotage the chemical factory. According to him, the operation’s objective was to distract attention from the Chernobyl disaster six months earlier in the Soviet Union. The Swiss authorities were considering opening investigations again. No evidence of this presumed sabotage has ever surfaced. As a consequence of the incident Sandoz extended its health, safety and environment activities and introduced new procedures for risk and emergency management, including auditing.
The I.R.A.’s political arm is debating whether to stop boycotting the Irish Republic’s Parliament. Supporters of the strategy shift hope Sinn Fein could become a bargaining force after the next elections.
Two bombs exploded minutes apart in Paris, ripping through the French immigration office and a charter airline involved in the recent expulsions of 101 Malians, authorities said. The blasts caused heavy damage but no injuries. The leftist Direct Action terror group claimed responsibility, saying it set off the bombs on behalf of the Malians, who were expelled October 10 under a new law that gives police sweeping powers to deport undesirable immigrants without need of a court order. The Malians were forced to leave because they were either living in the country illegally or were suspected of drug trafficking. Direct Action has claimed responsibility for eight bombings in Paris and its suburbs this year.
The movement to set up Jewish settlements on the occupied West Bank has undergone a radical change. The movement began after 1967 as a drive by religious and far-right nationalist Jews to resettle the biblical heartland of Israel by erecting tent settlements wherever they could. It has become a migration of young couples in search of nothing more complicated than a house with a yard and a two-car garage. ‘Outdated’ Advice From Shultz A minority of the settlers still fit the original mold of Orthodox Jews wearing knitted yarmulkes and toting rifles. But the majority have a very different look. They are secular, white-collar professionals and Government employees who carry briefcases rather than M-16’s and choose their settlements based not on a biblical map but on commuting times to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
In a shift in strategy, the Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasir Arafat has decided to give armed struggle against Israel priority over the peace process, P.L.O. spokesmen say. The change was reflected in a grenade attack last month in Jerusalem and in statements by P.L.O. spokesmen that the violence will be stepped up. One person was killed and 69 were wounded when Soviet-made grenades were thrown at Israeli Army recruits and their relatives near the Wailing Wall in East Jerusalem. The P.L.O. was quick to take responsibility, and its spokesmen in Cairo, Baghdad and Tunis said one of its units had carried out the action.
[Ed: L.M.A.O. Like the P.L.O. has EVER really wanted peace…]
The centerpiece of Jordan’s King Hussein’s new strategy for the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, a five-year development plan costing $150 million to $240 million a year, has a major flaw: it has no money. Faced with an impasse in Middle East peace efforts, according to Arab, Israeli and Western sources here and in Jerusalem, the King has turned to a strategy designed to keep the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank living there, rather than having expanded Israeli settlements and economic hardship drive them across the Jordan River into his kingdom. The fear, the King and other Jordanian officials acknowledged, is that a further influx of Palestinians could destabilize the country and overthrow the Hashemite monarchy. Palestinian refugees who fled here in waves in 1948 and 1967 already make up over half of the population of Jordan.
Two dozen U.S. Embassy staff members and their dependents were believed involved in the recent evacuation of the already scaled-down mission in Beirut, Lebanese Foreign Ministry sources said. The sources said U.S. military helicopters had flown 24 non-essential staff members and families to Cyprus from the embassy in Christian East Beirut since last Wednesday. U.S. Ambassador John Kelly remains in Lebanon.
Terry Waite, a special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, says he is cautiously optimistic that some of the American and French hostages being held in Lebanon might be freed, a spokesman for the Archbishop said today. Mr. Waite’s visit, the first since a flurry of visits late last year, has given rise to intense speculation that he is acting as a go-between in negotiations between the United States Government and Muslim militants holding several Americans captive. The BBC in London quoted a spokesman for the Archbishop today as saying Mr. Waite had telephoned from Cyprus after arriving from Beirut and said he expected to be going back to the Middle East today and Sunday. Lebanese police sources said Mr. Waite arrived secretly in West Beirut last Wednesday. Earlier reports said he arrived Friday. He was believed to have made contact with the group holding three of the six kidnapped Americans before crossing into Christian-controlled East Beirut on Friday morning, they said.
Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, ousted this week as Saudi Oil Minister after a quarter-century in that post, said today that “everything is just fine” and that he was reflecting on his future. “I am reflecting at the moment,” Sheik Yamani, who was dismissed Thursday, said in a telephone interview from his home in Riyadh. “Give me about a week and, God willing, then I will tell you my plans.” There had been reports this month at the Geneva conference of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries that Sheik Yamani was ill. There were also persistent reports in recent months that he had fallen into disfavor with the royal family of Saudi Arabia. Sheik Yamani said today that he had been ill with food poisoning near the end of the 17-day conference.
Iran said today that Sheik Yamani’s dismissal would increase OPEC’s role in the international oil market. “A very bright and favorable picture can be drawn of the prospects of the oil market,” the Iranian press agency said.
When Bharat Electronics Ltd., an Indian state manufacturing company, wanted to buy ITT Corporation’s technology for military night vision, the deal took two years to piece together. It wasn’t that the technology, a second-generation image intensifying tube, was inordinately sensitive. But the paperwork was complex, and the procedures worked out under a two-year-old understanding between the two nations were new to both sides. Even after paper approval has been obtained, said K. G. Narayanan, director of the Indian Government’s aeronautical development establishment, “You always hit a snag.”
The Indian Government is urging a district court in Bhopal to restrain the Union Carbide Corporation from selling any more of its assets, saying such sales could reduce any eventual settlement for victims of the 1984 gas tragedy. A. N. Mathur, advocate general of Madhya Pradesh state, where Bhopal is situated, said Thursday that the sale of nine Union Carbide divisions, including the profitable consumer-products division, and future sales were a challenge to the court. “If appropriate orders are not passed, any decree which might ultimately be obtained would have been rendered an ineffective paper decree,” Mr. Mathur said in a statement before Judge G. S. Patel. He said the distribution of a dividend of $1 billion to the corporation’s stockholders as a result of the sale of the consumer products division had reduced Union Carbide’s capacity to meet “the decree that may be passed” in a suit asking for compensation.
Vietnam plans to return the remains of three U.S. servicemen killed during the Vietnam War sometime in the next several weeks and will investigate 19 new reports of other American remains, a U.S. military official said. Lieutenant Colonel Joe Harvey, head of the Joint Casualty Resolution Center in Hawaii, said on returning from Hanoi after three days of talks that U.S. and Vietnamese officials also discussed the joint excavation of a downed American warplane, but reached no agreement. He said that more MIA case material was presented to the Vietnamese and reports of live Americans in Vietnam were discussed but that there were no major developments.
South Korean students protesting the arrests of 1,200 anti-government demonstrators hurled firebombs at hundreds of riot police, who retaliated with tear gas. There were no immediate reports of injuries. The protests at Yonsei University in Seoul were triggered by the arrests of 1,200 students at Konkuk University on Friday, when police assaulted five buildings to end a four-day occupation by students calling for the ouster of President Chun Doo Hwan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Students at 19 other schools in Seoul and provincial cities also demonstrated today in support of Konkuk students.
The Philippine Communist New People’s Army today offered the Aquino Government a plan for a 100-day cease-fire starting December 10. The Communists’ plan, announced this afternoon by the guerrillas’ political organization, the National Democratic Front, proposed that negotiations to end the 17-year insurgency be started a month after a cease-fire has been agreed upon. The cease-fire, which would last through next March, would extend through a plebiscite on a new constitution planned for January and the first anniversary of Mrs. Aquino’s assumption of power in February.
A member of a panel seeking recovery of the assets of Ferdinand E. Marcos said today that Mr. Marcos had transferred $100 million in Philippine Government funds to private Swiss bank accounts during his last 90 days in office. The official, Mary Concepcion Bautista, said the discovery was made by Jovito Salonga, chairman of the panel, the Presidential Commission on Good Government, during a trip to Europe and the United States. Mr. Salonga reported to the commission on Tuesday that he had obtained documents showing how Mr. Marcos forwarded the money to banks in Switzerland through unidentified American banks, Miss Bautista said in an interview.
President Daniel Ortega Saavedra said today that Government forces had been involved in “five days of uninterrupted combat” near the northern border with Honduras. He said 21 Government soldiers had been killed and 16 others seriously wounded. He put rebel casualties at 80 dead and 120 wounded. There had been reports in Honduras of increasing combat in the area around the border crossing of Los Manos. “The mercenary forces were not able to pass,” President Ortega said during a speech in Jinotega Province that was broadcast over the radio, “and they shall not pass.” Also today, the Government published a communique saying that 21 soldiers were killed in the crash of a Soviet-made MI-17 transport helicopter near the Honduran border Thursday. It was not clear if these were the 21 referred to by Mr. Ortega. In the communique, the Defense Ministry said the copter crashed accidentally. But rebels have taken responsibility for shooting it down. The official announcement said there had been two survivors, one of them the pilot.
Defending a captured American before a people’s tribunal in Nicaragua is not a challenge many lawyers would relish. The defendant in the case, Eugene Hasenfus, who was aboard an arms-laden plane when it was shot down October 5, has admitted being involved in shipping guns to American-backed rebels. Given the political climate in Nicaragua and the nature of the tribunal, not to mention the weight of the evidence, a guilty verdict is considered certain. But Nicaraguan law permits defendants before a people’s tribunal to employ defense counsel, and the Nicaraguan lawyer who has taken on the Hasenfus case is a veteran politician with long ties to the United States Embassy in Managua.
The failure of Uruguay’s political parties to agree on whether to try former military rulers for human-rights abuses has thrown the country into what political leaders call the worst political crisis since the return of democracy 18 months ago. The Parliament, at the end of September, defeated a total amnesty proposed by President Julio Maria Sanguinetti. Then, early this month, it rejected a proposal by the National Party, the largest opposition group, to limit trials to 38 specific cases. In theory, this leaves civilian courts free to prosecute cases on an individual basis, once the Supreme Court settles a jurisdictional challenge. But there is a widespread feeling that any military officers charged would refuse to answer summonses from civilian courts, thus opening the way to a confrontation between military and civilian authority, or between the President and the Parliament.
Relief officials and African diplomats at the United Nations have expressed concern that the closing this week of the United Nations agency that oversaw famine programs in Africa could hamper relief and rehabilitation efforts on that continent. The agency, the Office of Emergency Operations in Africa, was acknowledged to be one of the most successful United Nations agencies and one of the few that had cut through the red tape of international development efforts. The office was founded as a temporary agency in 1984 to direct and keep track of more than $4 billion in famine aid sent to stricken African countries.
Chadian rebel leader Goukouni Oueddei was seriously wounded when he resisted arrest by Libyan soldiers last week, his spokesman in Paris announced. The soldiers, acting on orders of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, opened fire on Goukouni and several of his aides when they resisted the arrest order. Goukouni was wounded and four of his bodyguards were killed in the exchange. The extent of Goukouni’s injuries was not immediately known. Goukouni’s forces have been fighting in northern Chad to topple Chadian President Hissen Habre with Libyan backing, but Goukouni recently offered to start peace talks with Habre.
Groups of Muslims stoned policemen who used whips to break up a protest meeting in downtown Cape Town, South Africa today, and the police fired tear gas at mourners at a funeral in a segregated black township outside the city, the Government said. It was the first known instance of downtown upheaval in the southern port since major unrest seized the city and its suburbs a year ago. In Nyanga township, close to the Crossroads squatter camp, hundreds of blacks defied Government restrictions on the funeral of Rose Mpetha, the wife of the jailed activist Oscar Mpetha. On Friday, the authorities refused permission for Mr. Mpetha to attend his wife’s funeral. Mr. Mpetha, 77 years old, is a diabetic who has been confined to a wheelchair since the amputation of a leg.
Seeking to break the deadlock in a campaign that has involved enormous expenditures but little passion, the nation’s politicians, including President Reagan, implored their partisans yesterday to cast ballots Tuesday. With politicians agreeing that how the parties fare is likely to be decided less by last-minute shifts in support than by who actually goes to the polls, many candidates spent the final weekend preaching to the converted. Voter turnout is expected to drop, possibly sharply, from the levels of four years ago in the last mid-term elections. After a campaign in which harsh television commercials so dominated the discourse that candidates spent much of their time discussing one another’s advertising, some candidates in the crucial battle for control of the United States Senate pulled their attacking commercials off the air, or reduced their frequency. These advertisements were replaced by soothing positive messages aimed at giving voters something to vote for, rather than somebody to vote against.. In particularly close races, however, negative advertising was scheduled to continue through Election Day.
Democratic and Republican officials said today that they had made elaborate preparations to assure that all votes are counted, and counted equally, on Election Day. Republicans say they fear that Democrats are planning to “vote tombstones” and otherwise engage in widespread vote fraud, while Democrats say they expect the Republicans to try to intimidate black and other minority voters in predominantly Democratic precincts. Both parties are relying on prompt legal action. “An honest election can best be assured by a legal team prepared to act both through the county organization and from centralized points about the state,” said John P. Frank, general counsel to the Arizona Democratic party, in a memorandum to the Democratic National Committee.
In California, President Reagan today sought to generate a high Republican voter turnout on Tuesday, appealing to conservative supporters to protect the party’s political gains. Mr. Reagan coupled the personal plea with a stinging attack on Senator Alan Cranston, Democrat of California, using the combative campaign oratory that has marked his campaigning for Republican candidates over the last 18 months. At the same time, Mr. Reagan used his weekly radio address, which he delivered before arriving here, to again offer an optimistic assessment of the Iceland summit meeting with the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Delivering a positive pre-election message on relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, Mr. Reagan said the prospects for strengthening peace between the two countries “have become better than at any time in the last 40 years.”
President Reagan participates in a political rally for Congressman Zschau of California.
The President and First Lady leave Los Angeles for Rancho del Cielo.
President Reagan vetoed legislation that would have established minimum energy-efficiency standards for home appliances, arguing that it would force consumers to pay an extra $1.4 billion in higher costs. In a memorandum of disapproval, Reagan complained that the measure “intrudes unduly on the free market, limits the freedom of choice available to consumers who would be denied the opportunity to purchase lower-cost appliances and constitutes a substantial intrusion into traditional state responsibilities and prerogatives.” He added that by eliminating lower-priced appliances, “the bill would hit low-income consumers particularly hard.”
The Department of Health and Human Services is drafting a report that urges President Reagan to consider expanding Medicare to cover a larger portion of the costs of long, severe illnesses. The confidential report, being prepared under the supervision of Dr. Otis R. Bowen, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, also proposes that Federal and state agencies encourage or perhaps require employers to provide health insurance coverage for more of the costs of “catastrophic illness.” Medicare finances health care for 31 million people who are elderly or disabled; employers provide health insurance for 85.7 million workers and 44.6 million of their dependents. Mr. Reagan called for the study in his State of the Union Message in February. Dr. Bowen is to submit a report to the White House soon after the elections Tuesday.
John McCain may represent Arizona in the Senate. The Republican Representative has easily fended off his opponent, Richard Kimball, and seems poised to emerge as a significant figure in national politics.
Florida’s office seekers are spending most of their time and money in the south and central portions of the state. But Bob Martinez, a Republican who leads the race for Governor, is also visiting the north.
Detroit officials said a 6 PM to 6 AM curfew for persons under 18 may be ordered again next year to fight “Devil’s Night” after a city-wide mobilization this year appeared to have dampened the city’s annual Halloween arson spree. Along with the three-day curfew, Mayor Coleman Young assigned 11,000 police and civilians to arson patrols. There apparently were more “Devil’s Night” fires Thursday than the night before Halloween a year earlier — 226 this year compared to 206 — but Young said there were “less fires in houses and considerably more in garbage cans, dumpsters and vehicles.”
More than 20 years after ElRoy Harworth’s C-130 cargo plane was shot down in Vietnam, the remains of the Air Force senior master sergeant were buried in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, his home town. Harworth’s remains were among those identified by the Defense Department from a group of 21 returned to the United States last April by the Vietnamese government. The Rev. Tom Palomaki, addressing about 400 people, said the time of uncertainty for the Harworth family was over. Six Air Force pallbearers presented the American flag to Harworth’s widow, Pat. She was accompanied by her two sons in dress military uniforms, Troy, who never saw his father, and Scott, who was just a tot when his father’s plane crashed over North Vietnam on May 31, 1966.
Dissident Kiowa Indians who had taken over tribal headquarters near Carnegie, Oklahoma, left after a two-day protest when an election they opposed was canceled, federal and tribal officials said. The vote to select a new tribal chairman was called off because of faulty ballots, said a tribe member from temporary headquarters. Herschel Sahmaunt, who had been elected chairman in June but later was ruled ineligible to serve, left the tribal compound with about 50 followers who had camped with him there since Thursday. Officials said no decision had been made whether to file charges.
A tentative agreement on wages has been reached, averting a strike by 5,000 employees at The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner and The San Jose Mercury News. Talks on other issues continued for hours after the settlement was announced at 11 PM Friday. Details were not disclosed. A strike had been threatened for 4:59 PM Friday but the deadline was suspended and the clock subsequently stopped after Mayor Dianne Feinstein intervened. “It’s a terrible time for a newspaper strike, with the elections only a few days away,” she said. The Thanksgiving holiday is also one of the most lucrative advertising periods for newspapers.
The state of Colorado and Union Carbide Co. have submitted to a judge a $40-million plan to clean up a uranium processing site at Uravan, Colorado, that produced radium for early experiments by Marie Curie and for the first atomic bomb. More recently, it produced fuel for nuclear reactors. The 15-year plan calls for burying 12 million tons of radioactive dirt and refuse in clay-lined pits, which would then be covered with a layer of crushed granite and clay, effectively sealing the pits.
James Spencer, sworn in Friday as Virginia’s first black Federal judge, told well-wishers he hoped to “contribute something of value to the flow of human events.” “I am aware I am the first black Federal judge in Virginia, and I leave it at that,” the 37-year-old said after taking the oath of office from Federal District Judge Robert Merhige Jr.
A Minnesota college student was trapped and killed when the ceiling of an abandoned cave collapsed after he and four other broke into the cavern. The authorities said five students from St. Olaf College had tunneled into the cave, which was sealed eight years ago.
Relatives of Donna Howard, a Washington rodeo trick rider, spent 11 years trying to refute a coroner’s report that she was killed when she was kicked in the head by a horse. On Friday, a jury in Yakima County Superior Court found her former husband, Noyes Howard, 56 years old, guilty of first-degree murder.
A majority of American Catholic laity would like their church to adopt more flexible policies on sexual morality to reflect trends in the modern world, the Gallup Poll found. In the latest survey, 57% of Roman Catholics said their church should change its official position while 36% believe the church should adhere to its present policies on sexual morals. The survey was conducted shortly after the Vatican revoked the license of Father Charles Curran, a Roman Catholic priest and university professor of theology, because his teachings on homosexuality, abortion, conception and other moral issues were at variance with Catholic dogma.
For decades there has been no dancing in the schools of the rural community of Purdy in southwestern Missouri. Now a possible legal challenge from students determined to have their prom in their high school has divided the town’s 1,000 residents. It had become an annual ritual, of sorts: students seeking a change in the policy, the Purdy School Board saying no. But last spring students and their parents sought help from the American Civil Liberties Union, which agreed to take the case to court if necessary. Students, their families and attorneys are pitted against school board members, as well as members of the clergy who argued in a letter to the board that dancing led to alcohol abuse, drug use and illicit sex. The debate has pitted neighbor against neighbor and inspired letters to the local newspaper.
American colleges are “troubled”. A report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has called for major changes in undergraduate education.
Scholars judged Appalachia’s future as bleak despite government investment there. The occasion was the 25th anniversary of the writing of Harry M. Caudill’s muckraking “Night Comes to the Cumberlands.”
Chinook and coho salmon are returning to the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River system in numbers unparalleled in decades, officials say. “The Columbia River is unbelievable,” Bill Wilkerson, director of the Washington Department of Fisheries, said Thursday. The return is in sharp contrast to conditions just four years ago, when some Federal and state officials were expressing fear that declines in some salmon runs could lead to the extinction of the fish.
Breeders’ Cup Horse Racing, Santa Anita Racetrack; winners: Brave Raj, Capote, Lady’s Secret, Last Tycoon, Manila, Skywalker, Smile.
MLB player Kirby Puckett (24) weds Tonya Hudson (20).
Born:
Penn Badgley, American actor (Dan Humphrey in “Gossip Girl”), in Baltimore, Maryland.
Rhiner Cruz, Dominican MLB pitcher (Houston Astros, Toronto Blue Jays), in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Died:
Sippie Wallace [Beulah Belle Thomas], 88, American blues singer (“Women Be Wise”).
