The December 4, 1984 was a Tuesday under the star sign of ♐. It was the 338 day of the year. President of the United States was Ronald Reagan.
If you were born on this day, you are 40 years old. Your last birthday was on the Wednesday, December 4, 2024, 333 days ago. Your next birthday is on Thursday, December 4, 2025, in 31 days. You have lived for 14,943 days, or about 358,643 hours, or about 21,518,590 minutes, or about 1,291,115,400 seconds.
4th of December 1984 News
News as it appeared on the front page of the New York Times on December 4, 1984
EFFECT OF MOBIL NEWS BOYCOTT
Date: 05 December 1984
By Alex S. Jones
Alex Jones
While it is not unusual for corporations to withdraw their advertising from publications to protest news coverage, it is rare that a corporate fit of pique moves a corporation to declare a news boycott as well. But this is what the Mobil Corporation has done, canceling advertising and refusing to provide information about corporate developments to The Wall Street Journal, the daily business newspaper owned by Dow Jones & Company. Mobil's action, which the company said ''comes about after five years of problems,'' was greeted by spokesmen for news organizations and other large corporations with confusion about Mobil's objectives. Could Be Self-Defeating These spokesmen asserted that such a news boycott was usually ineffective because important news would be covered even without a company's cooperation, and could be self- defeating in that the company loses its opportunity to tell its story or correct factual errors.
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PHYLLIS GEORGE HIRED BY CBS NEWS
Date: 04 December 1984
By Sally Bedell Smith
Sally Smith
After more than a month of negotiations, CBS News announced yesterday that Phyllis George, a CBS sportscaster and former Miss America, will become co-anchor of ''The CBS Morning News'' with Bill Kurtis on Jan. 14. Miss George, who tried out as co- anchor for three weeks in October, was selected instead of Jane Wallace or Meredith Vieira, two CBS News correspondents who have frequently filled in on the show since the departure of Diane Sawyer for CBS's ''60 Minutes'' magazine show in August. The choice of Miss George brings CBS News - a perennial third in the morning news ratings - closer to the approach of ABC, which has David Hartman, a former actor, as the host of its top-rated ''Good Morning America,'' and NBC, which has a former sportscaster, Bryant Gumbel, as co- host of its ''Today'' show. CBS's preference for a co-anchor without journalistic experience has provoked some criticism among veterans of CBS News. ''I am heartbroken,'' said Richard Salant, who served as president of CBS News for 16 years in the 1960's and 70's and is currently writing a book on broadcast journalism. ''Quite a number of people at CBS share the view that it's the last straw on the question of where the hell are we being made to go these days.''
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A CENTRIST IN GRENADA
Date: 05 December 1984
By Joseph B. Treaster
Joseph
In the more than four and a half years that leftist revolutionaries ran Grenada, little was heard from Herbert A. Blaize, who was sworn in today as Prime Minister after his centrist, coalition party swept to victory in the elections Monday. Talking with reporters the other day, the 66-year-old lawyer and former civil servant said that when the revolutionaries dissolved Parliament he went home to his district and carried on with his legal practice. Supporters say it is unfair to expect that as a former head of Government in the 1960's and a Member of Parliament for 22 years, Mr. Blaize might have tried to get the leftists to live up to their initial promises of holding elections. ''There was nothing he could do,'' said one middle-class woman who has known Mr. Blaize for more than 20 years. ''People who criticized the revo were thrown in jail.''
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Mugging a Network
Date: 05 December 1984
For an impermissible two weeks, the Federal Communications Commission has been threatening the licenses of the American Broadcasting Companies because the network, as it acknowledged on the air, may have erred in reporting an assassination plot by the Central Intelligence Agency. The C.I.A.'s lunge for the jugular in filing this complaint might be forgiven as an occupational reflex. But the F.C.C. lacks even that excuse. Indeed, it plans to hold a dagger to the network's throat for months while it ''examines'' a case it should never have accepted. This amounts to a Government plot to commit intimidation.
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Documents Show U.S. Test of Germs in Public
Date: 04 December 1984
UPI
Upi
Army agents secretly sprayed passengers at Washington's National Airport and a city bus terminal with harmless bacteria to test how a smallpox epidemic might be started by enemy forces, documents made public today reveal. The experiments, which may have also included bus terminals in Chicago and San Francisco, were carried out in 1964 and 1965, according to a heavily censored document obtained by the Church of Scientology under the Freedom of Information Act and released today.
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COST O WINNING A HOUSE SEAT ROSE IN '84, BUT AT A SLOWER RATE
Date: 04 December 1984
By Adam Clymer
Adam Clymer
The cost of winning a seat in the House of Representatives rose again in 1984, but only by about half as much as it has in recent elections, according to an analysis of campaign spending reports. This year's winners will have spent an average of about $325,000 when all reports are filed, up about 23 percent from the average spending in 1982, according to an analysis done for The New York Times by Sunshine News Services, a company that studies campaign spending. The 1982 averages were 47 percent above those of 1980, which were 40 percent above 1978's. Political analysts offered several explanations for the slowdown of campaign inflation, an effect that was not found in this year's very expensive Senate races. They cited the small number of serious challengers to incumbents, the decline in the overall rate of inflation and the fact that there had been fewer technological advances in campaigning, which drive up costs, than there had been in recent elections.
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REPORTS CITE LACK OF COORDINATION DURING U.S. INVASION OF GRENADA
Date: 04 December 1984
By Bill Keller
Bill Keller
The United States invasion of Grenada a year ago was hampered by disjointed planning and poor coordination among the different American military contingents, according to internal reports by two officers who commanded Navy air squadrons during the invasion. The two squadron commanders, whose job was to provide air cover for Army and Marine Corps ground forces, said that Navy aviators had not met beforehand with Army officers to discuss the attack, and that once the landing began the air and ground forces had difficulty working together. Their reports of Nov. 17, 1983, on the operation were disclosed today by the private newsletter Defense Week. They appeared to confirm criticisms made by some outside military analysts citing advance intelligence reports that underestimated the Cuban defending force, Army ground commanders who did not pinpoint targets for pilots, lapses of security in use of two-way radios and shortages of some types of ammunition.
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2 SENATORS PRESS REAGAN ON ARMS
Date: 04 December 1984
By Bernard Gwertzman , Special To the New York Times
Bernard Gwertzman
Two conservative Republican Senators warned today that they might vote against the deployment of 100 MX land-based missiles if President Reagan did not stop abiding by provisions of the 1979 strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union. Senators Steven D. Symms of Idaho and John P. East of North Carolina gave the warning in a letter to Mr. Reagan, which they made public. Congressional conservatives have been pressing the Administration to renounce arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union on the ground that Moscow has been charged with violating them. New Talks Set for January The issue is sensitive for the Administration because Mr. Reagan, who has accused the Russians of cheating, is seeking new arms- control accords with the Soviet Union. Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko are to open arms-control talks early next month in Geneva.
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JAPAN MAY EASE CURB ON ARMS SPENDING
Date: 04 December 1984
By Clyde Haberman
Clyde Haberman
The Japanese Government, frequently criticized for its military policies, is debating whether to abandon a fundamental principle that tightly limits military spending. Pressure is growing within the governing Liberal Democratic Party to drop an eight-year-old understanding that Japan's military budget should amount to no more than 1 percent of its gross national product. A recommendation to that effect was made over the weekend by a Liberal Democratic study group. Within the next few days, an advisory panel to Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone is expected to propose that the military budget ceiling, first adopted by the party in 1976, be changed to a more ambiguous ''about 1 percent'' of the G.N.P. A certain urgency has entered the debate because Mr. Nakasone's Cabinet has only until the end of December to prepare a budget plan for the fiscal year beginning April 1. Military spending is already within a hairbreadth of the 1 percent mark, and it would almost certainly be pushed over the limit if the increase is similar to those provided in recent budgets.
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Drop Dead, Again ''My heart will not break,'' says Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, if New Yorkers lose the right to deduct billions in state and local taxes from their taxable incomes. His remark was not as callous as it sounds; he was talking about upper-income taxpayers. But the policy he proposes is callous. Indeed, it would be far more devastating than Washington's refusal to help during the 1975 fiscal crisis, which prompted the famous Daily News headline ''Ford to City: Drop Dead.''
Date: 04 December 1984
Mr. Regan and some other political figures, including Manhattan's Representative Charles Rangel, see the deduction as a tax break for the rich. To end it would not affect poor people who do not use it and would, presumably, raise enough revenue that they might actually pay less in taxes. Technically that's right. But look again. It's plain that the big losers would be the poor people who live in high-tax states like New York, California and Massachusetts.
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