News stories from Sunday January 25, 1976

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

President Ford will probably visit the Middle East after mid-April as part of an American diplomatic effort to keep Israel and key Arab states interested in pursuing a negotiated settlement. The administration intends to develop a new policy on how to proceed in the Middle East as well, reporters returning from Europe to Washington with Secretary of State Kissinger were told aboard the plane. A special effort will be made to convince Israeli and Arab leaders that progress can be made despite the elections next fall in the United States. Many Israelis seem to want to wait until after the elections before committing themselves to a new diplomatic course. [New York Times] Gov. George Wallace of Alabama won a sizable victory in Democratic caucuses in Mississippi over Jimmy Carter, the former Governor of Georgia, and three other rivals. He also vindicated his strategists, who have insisted for months that they have mastered the intricacies of caucus politics, which baffled them in 1972. Mr. Wallace appeared to have won more than 45 percent of the delegates to county conventions. [New York Times] The final report of the House Select Committee on Intelligence said Senator Henry Jackson secretly advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 1973 on how to protect itself from a Senate investigation into the C.I.A.'s relations with the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation in Chile. The report quotes a C.I.A. memorandum that said "Senator Jackson repeatedly made the comment that in his view the C.I.A. oversight committee [of which he was then a member] had the responsibility to protect the C.I A. from the investigation." When he was told about the report, Senator Jackson said the author of the memorandum took "literary license" about his position but he said that he recalled advising C.I.A. officials on "procedural matters" in its response to the investigation. [New York Times] It is estimated by the medical profession that 16,000 licensed physicians, or 5 percent of the 320,000 practicing physicians in this country, are unfit to practice medicine. The incompetent doctor had been regarded by the profession as a rare aberration, but new unfit doctors are being regarded as a serious problem. Evidence that the problem of unfitness was more serious than the most medical authorities had suspected has been provided by authoritative national medical organizations, including the American College of Surgeons. [New York Times] The federal intelligence agencies, as they are now constituted, operate in such secret ways that they are "beyond the scrutiny" of Congress, the House Select Committee on Intelligence has decided after a year-long investigation. Its report concluding the investigation discloses a number of irregularities, including an apparent violation by the Central Intelligence Agency of a 1967 presidential order prohibiting it from providing secret financial assistance to any of the nation's educational institutions. [New York Times] The narrow Mediterranean coast road between Beirut and Saadiyat in Lebanon was jammed bumper to bumper with looters. Men, women and children swarmed through the ruins of the Christian settlement of Damur, whose residents had fled or died in the worst battle of Lebanon's civil war. In Saadiyat, where the Damur survivors had gone, the palatial home of Camille Chamoun, a Christian leader, was looted and burned. [New York Times] South African troops were withdrawing from frontline positions across the center of Angola, an official of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola said. They were said to be leaving behind military and communications equipment for use by the National Union troops, whom the South Africans had aided. The official said the withdrawal reportedly was being made to encourage a similar retreat by the Cuban military units leading the forces of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. [New York Times]