News stories from Sunday February 1, 1976

Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:

Members of Congress who recently visited Hanoi said that they were told by North Vietnamese leaders that former President Nixon sent them a memorandum in January 1973 promising $3.25 billion in aid after the signing of the Paris agreement to end the Vietnam war. The North Vietnamese were said to still expect the promise to be kept and are linking its fulfillment to providing more information about American servicemen listed as missing in action during the war. [New York Times] Because of a loophole in the law, millions of dollars in public funds are being spent needlessly for renting medical equipment for sick and disabled beneficiaries of the Medicare program for the elderly. The excess expenditures were confirmed by officials of the Social Security Administration, who said they were unable to stop them. Under the law, Medicare beneficiaries may buy or rent medical equipment prescribed for them, and very often they rent equipment, such as a hospital bed, and pay many times the purchase price. This has led to the excesses. [New York Times] The Marine Corps is in need of basic changes in its organization, deployment and a sharp reduction in its tactical air power, according to a study by the Brookings Institution, an independent nonpartisan research organization. The Corps, the study says, risks becoming an "anachronism increasingly haunted by its limitations." The Marines are also said to have disciplinary problems that mar their elitist image. The 1975 rates of courts-martial, AWOL and desertion exceeded the combined rates of the Army, Navy and Air Force. [New York Times] The Black Muslims' Temple No. 7 in Harlem which was rebuilt after it was destroyed 11 years ago when Malcolm X was assassinated, has been renamed in his honor. Malcolm X, a dissident Muslim, broke with the Nation of Islam in an acrimonious dispute that was believed to have ultimately led to his death. Minister Abdul Farrakhan, national spokesman for Wallace Muhammad, the organization's leader, said the temple was being renamed "in recognition of the great work that Malcolm X did when he was among the Nation of Islam." [New York Times] Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was the subject of a rare personal attack by Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party newspaper. The paper accused him of using untenable logic, offering untruths and defending concoctions in his recent statements to Congress about Soviet policy in Angola. President Ford was chided by Tass, the Soviet press agency, which transmitted in both its English and Russian-language dispatches an assertion that Mr. Ford had "painted a distorted picture of the Angolan situation, the policy of the Soviet Union and Cuba," in an attempt to justify continued American aid to two of the factions fighting in Angola. [New York Times]