2
Nation/World
University Daily Kansan
News Briefs
Soviet ship jumper wants to go home
WASHINGTON - A Soviet sailor who jumped ship twice into the Mississippi River near New Orleans does not wish to defect and wants to return to his homeland, the State Department announced yesterday.
U. S. officials who interviewed the sailors, Miroslav Medvid, said he signed a Russian-language document reaffirming repeated statements that he wished to return home, the department said.
The announcement concluded a four-day saga in which Medvid twice jumped from the freighter into the river, only to be returned to the vessel by U.S. Border Patrol agents.
House passes budget
WASHINGTON — The House yesterday approved a bill authorizing a record Pentagon budget for the current fiscal year after some liberal Democrats dropped complaints that had delayed the measure for three months.
The bill, approved by voice vote,
authorizes Defense Department
spending of $302.5 billion in the
fiscal year that started Oct. 1.
The Senate approved the authorization measure 94-5 three months ago, shortly after it emerged from a House-Senate conference committee called to reconsider the versions passed by the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-run Senate.
Bush primes for '88
WASHINGTON — Vice President George Bush, serving notice he is the leading contender for his party's 1988 presidential nomination, yesterday named 456 prominent Republicans to help him campaign for GOP candidates in 1986.
They will formally work for Bush's political action committee. The Fund for the American Future. But the group's early identity serves notice to rivals that Bush has strong backing for the 1988 nomination among party regulars, including many early supporters of Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign.
Wednesday, Oct. 30, 1985
Soviets offer to allow SDI tests
From Kansan wires
From Kansan wires.
WASHINGTON — The Soviet Union has offered to halt construction of a suspicious Siberian radar and to accept small-scale tests of the controversial U.S. "Star Wars" program, Reagan administration officials said yesterday.
State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb said the Soviets proposed linking a halt in construction of the phased-array radar station at Krasnoyarsk, in central Siberia, to abandonment of U.S. plans to modernize early warning radar equipment in Greenland and Britain by 1990.
"The Soviets have raised the possibility of such a trade-off . . in informal discussions and from the
U. S. perspective. Such a trade-off is inequitable." Kalb said.
The Soviet gesture on "Star Wars," however, is considered a positive move in dealing with the main impediment to progress on a new nuclear arms control treaty. Yet, the U.S. Army is developing a high-technology shield against missiles has slowed arms negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland.
Both proposals, through diplomatic channels in Geneva, appear to be part of a concerted public relations campaign by the Soviets in advance of Reagan's Nov. 19-20 summit with Soviet leader Mikhail G. Sorbachev.
The Soviets are resisting cuts in offensive nuclear weapons unless curbs also are applied to the
Administration officials who requested anonymity confirmed the offer, first disclosed by the New York Times, was conveyed several weeks ago by Soviet negotiator Yuli Kvitsinky at the arms control negotiations in geneva, Switzerland. Kalb said the Soviets were aware of the U.S. position on the offer.
Strategic Defense Initiative. But Reagan has refused to submit the program to the give-and-take of the negotiating table.
The officials said it was the first time the Kremlin had offered to stop the project, which in the past Moscow has argued is for space tracking and does not violate the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
One official said the offer showed only that "The old Soviet style of total intransigence is no longer the standard operating procedure."
In a report to Congress on Feb. 1, Reagan charged that the Krasnasyrsk radar station is "a clear violation" of the ABM treaty signed by Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev.
The administration contends the Krasnoyarsk station, the size of a football field, is designed for ballistic missile detection and tracking and violates a treaty provision requiring such systems be located near each superpower capital or on the periphery of the national territory and pointed outward.
Riots mark election eve in S. Africa
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Black radicals set fire to the home of a prominent black moderate yesterday and shot him to death as he fired the burning house in 24 hours of racial violence that also took four other lives.
United Press International
Authorities announced that 32 people were arrested Monday night and yesterday as riot police squads fired birdshot and tear gas to disperse crowds hurling stone and torching buildings in a dozen townships across South Africa.
Inmates find classified files
One of those detained was anti-paparthide Cape Town activist Dr. Ivan Toms, who was taken from his home in a pre-dawn police raid a day after a doctor at the clinic he heads told reporters that police had opened fire on children in a playground,ounding three boys under the age of 8.
In a Kwamashu township near Durban, police said a gang of blacks armed with shotguns set fire to the home of moderate black activist Francis Dlamini and shot him to death as he fled the burning house.
The violence came on the eve of five parliamentary by-elections which could provide an indication of whether white South Africans will support attempts to reform.
United Press International
DALLAS — Personnel files, maps and classified material were left inside Defense Department furniture shipped for repair to a federal prison in the Southwest, inmates report.
Several packages — including a technical order concerning F-15 engine parts and a "material deficiency" paper marked "classified" — were retrieved by inmates and sent to United Press International.
The inmate said several other packets of sensitive material were sent to the Defense Department, which never responded. That material, he said, included classified "imagery exploitation" surveillance reports from White Sands Missile Range and manuals showing a warplane with movable wings, similar to the B-1 bomber.
"It was more than a month ago we started finding these documents," said a prison industries worker at La Tuna Penitentiary near El Paso, Texas. "They were in 30, maybe 40 desks, filing cabinets and safes."
The material was found in desks shipped to the prison for repairs from installations throughout the Southwest, including White Sands Missile Range, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Fort Bliss and Kelly Air Force Base.
Documents obtained by UPI include a "Category II material deficiency report" marked classified and directed to officials at Kelly, McClellan, Langley and Bergstrom Air Force bases in the United States, and Colgne Air Base in West Germany. Another was a technical order on parts for the F-15, one of the nation's most sophisticated warplanes.
"It's not right the government should throw around its secrets this way," said the inmate, who has asked not to be identified by name. "There are people in here who hate their country. We have illegal aliens from Nicaragua, Bulgaria, from Poland, from Russia at this facility. A real spy would have a field day."
"I may be convicted of a felony, but I'm an American first," said the inmate, a former paralegal serving a 10-year sentence for illegal mail possession.
The FBI confirmed that it investigated the case after the inmate contacted the Secret Service.
Documents came from the department's bureau of intelligence and research. Some of the material was classified as top secret, and included the "secretary's morning summary" and intelligence analyses.
Mideast leaders to patch up peace plans
United Press International
AMMAN, Jordan — Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat said yesterday that he and King Hussein agreed to bolster their troubled joint Middle East peace initiative and he accused the United States of trying to derail the plan.
Arafat and Hussein, who announced their joint peace effort on Feb. 11, met for three hours Monday night to
discuss recent incidents that have strained their relationship.
"We spoke frankly about all the problems that recently faced our joint moves" and agreed on better "coordination and cooperation" in the peace effort. Arafat said.
In Jerusalem yesterday, a newspaper yesterday said Prime Minister Shimon Peres had proposed a joint Israel-Jordanian administration of the Israeli-occupied West Bank to aid Middle East peace eft.
forts. Peres' office called the report incorrect.
The respected Haaretz newspaper cited a senior government source as saying the plan calls for an interim period of Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank under a joint Israeli-Jordanian administration.
The West Bank, captured by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and home to 800,000 Palestinians and about 40,000 Jewish settlers, is now administered solely by Israel.
Juan hits Gulf Coast once more
From Kansan wires
The death toll stood at four in the storm, a minimal hurricane with 85-mph winds when it first came into being. The storm was missing from oil industry supply boats.
NEW ORLEANS — Hurricane Juan slapped Louisiana with a second punch yesterday, trapping three men in an overturned offshore oil rig and flooding additional thousands from their homes before diminishing to a tropical storm.
About 180 people had been rescued from rigs and boats in the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent waters over three days, the Coast Guard said.
By 3 p.m. CST, however, Juan's winds diminished to 6 mph, and the National Weather Service downgraded it to a tropical storm. At 5 p.m., the poorly defined center of Juan was estimated to be near latitude 30.4 north, longitude 92.1 west, near Lafayette. La.
Floodwaters spilled out of Lake Pontchartrain yesterday, causing more than 3,000 people to evacuate homes in St. Charles, St. James and John the Baptist parishes west of New Orleans to shelters on higher ground.
"I've never seen it flood like this and I was born and raised here," said Olla Rou of New Sarpy "This is much worse than Hurricane Betsy."
Five men aboard the 100-foot boat Gary Ellen, blown adrift in 20-foot seas when its tow line snapped, were found yesterday afternoon, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Keith Spangler.
One oil rig sank out in the Gulf. Another went adrift and was blown into a second rig Monday, forcing 82 of the ship to capsule life boats; one man drowned.
The storm hit the coast Monday,
then backed off for its second assault.
It toppled Gulf oil installations, knocked down trees and power lines and dumped heavy rains from Texas to Alabama. Flooding was made worse as surges pushed water backwards in canals and rivers.
"There's no place for the water to go," said Don Gary, Civil Defense assistant director in Houma. "We're just水logged.