Super-Power chiefs to meet alone first

Press, 13 November 1985, Page 8

Super-Power chiefs to meet alone first

NZPA-Reuter Washington

The President of the United States, Mr Ronald Reagan, and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, will begin their Geneva summit meeting next week in a private session with only a translator present, the American television network, A.8.C., reports. Quoting an unidentified senior Administration official, A.B.C. News said that the two leaders would use their private morning meeting on November 19 to discuss fundamental differences between the superpowers.

Mr Gorbachev had agreed to discuss the United States strategic defence initiative anti-missile shield proposal during the session ana Mr

Reagan might raise human rights and Soviet emigration issues.

Advisers would join the leaders for the afternoon session to discuss arms control.

If Messrs Reagan and Gorbachev felt they had made progress in the private session they might have more of them.

On November 20, the final day of the two-day meeting, the two sides would discuss regional issues in the morning and bilateral disagreements in the afternoon, A.B.C. said. American officials did not expect the conference to produce any important agreements, but they had said there was a good chance the two sides would agree to hold more summit

meetings. • A new word has entered the Russian language — “sammit’ Spelt with an “a” to make it easier for Soviet people to pronounce, the word appeared in a Russian-lan-guage report by the official news agency, Tass, yesterday on the Geneva summit meeting. Foreign Russian-speakers and Soviet office workers could not recall seeing the word before, though the word “miting,” pronounced as in English meeting, already exists to describe a meeting at a factory or Communist Party cell. Previously, the official Russian-language press used “meeting at the highest level” to describe the summit conference.