November 10, 1990

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was hailed in Germany today on the anniversary of the breach of the Berlin wall for helping make German unity possible. But the Soviet leader's reduced status was underscored when he appealed to the Germans to be tolerant of the Soviet troops still stationed on their soil. At a news conference, Mr. Gorbachev also gave a strong reaffirmation of solidarity with the West against Iraq. "The joint action in the United Nations Security Council condemned the aggressor," he said. "We have taken decisive measures, and all efforts to shake this unity are doomed."

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said today that the Pentagon was no longer planning to rotate troops through Saudi Arabia and that the American forces already in the Persian Gulf area or headed there would remain for the duration of the crisis. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the forces in the gulf, and other military leaders had been planning to set up a program for rotating troops in Saudi Arabia every six to eight months. But Mr. Cheney and other Pentagon officials indicated today that those plans have been dropped.

In defiance of a Federal judge, Cable News Network tonight broadcast what it said was a tape-recorded conversation between Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, the deposed Panamanian leader, and a member of his legal team. When he was told that the network planned to play the tape, Federal District Judge William M. Hoeveler in Miami threatened to fine the network for violating his order. "I will hold you in contempt," the judge said at a meeting tonight in his chambers with lawyers in the case. Daylong Swirl of Activity In his order on Thursday, Judge Hoeveler said General Noriega might not be able to receive a fair trial on drug-trafficking charges if the tapes were broadcast. CNN is appealing the order, calling it an unconstitutional prior restraint of its right to broadcast news.

Torn between loyalty to his subject and to his discipline, the editor of the papers of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reluctantly acknowledged yesterday that substantial parts of Dr. King's doctoral dissertation and other academic papers from his student years appeared to have been plagiarized. The historian, Clayborne Carson, a professor of history at Stanford University who was chosen in 1985 by Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, to head the King Papers Project, said that analysis of the papers by researchers working on the project had uncovered concepts, sentences and longer passages taken from other sources without attribution throughout Dr. King's writings as a theology student.

The Energy Department has begun testing an $86 million plutonium processing center in South Carolina that is scheduled to begin operating in June and would be the first entirely new plant to produce nuclear weapons materials since 1960. Although Congress appropriated the money for the new plant, the Energy Department has been building it at the Savannah River nuclear weapons plant for seven years without public hearings or a formal review of the potential effect on the environment. Such steps are required by Federal environmental law, say two national environmental groups, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Agency Has Pledged Openness "The Energy Department has pledged for several years to be completely open and honest about what they're doing and how they're doing it," said Stephen Schwartz, a lobbyist in Washington for Greenpeace. "And here, by chance, we've uncovered a major new processing facility that is being built and about to go into operation without any ability on the part of the public to scrutinize it."