News stories from Monday May 31, 1976

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

The White House announced that President Ford was planning an economic meeting with six other nations this summer and it was reported that the meeting was likely to take place after the last state primaries on June 8 and before the mid-August Republican National Convention. The six nations are those that participated with the United States in the economic meeting at Rambouillet, France, last November, and Canada. [New York Times] On the eve of primaries in South Dakota, Montana and Rhode Island, Jimmy Carter, Senator Frank Church and Gov. Jerry Brown concentrating their campaigning in Rhode Island. The three rival Democrats swept through the state and at one time they and their entourages were elbowing one another as they arrived together, followed by supporters, at a hotel in Cranston, where they participated in a Memorial Day parade. [New York Times] Martha Mitchell, the outspoken estranged wife of John Mitchell, who was Attorney General in the Nixon Administration, died at Memorial Sloane-Kettering Cancer Center in New York of multiple myeloma, a rare malignancy of the bone marrow. She was 57 years old. Her husband was one of four Nixon administration officials convicted in 1975 on all counts in the Watergate cover-up trial. It was not unusual for Mrs. Mitchell to telephone a reporter late at night to tell what was on her mind. She had maintained that "somebody" was trying to make her husband "the goat" in the Watergate scandal. None of her family was present at her death. [New York Times] If present birth trends continue, according to a new Census Bureau report, about 17 percent of the country's population will be 65 or older by the year 2030, compared with 10.5 percent now. The report indicates that as the country's elderly population grows and women continue to outlive men, there will be more educated, widowed older women than ever before. Women, the report found, are outliving men by an average of almost eight years. [New York Times] Reports that Rockefeller University in New York has found a way to culture the most lethal form of malaria parasite -- using human blood as the growth medium -- have raised hopes at the World Health Organization in Geneva that the long-sought malaria vaccine may be near. The Rockefeller University discovery, by Dr. William Trager, is said to be similar to the discovery by John Enders of a way to culture polio viruses In monkey kidney tissue, which led to the development of polio vaccine. [New York Times] Syria said that it had intervened in northern Lebanon to stop the fighting around beleaguered Christian villages near the Syrian border that had been heavily shelled for several days. It was reported that the fighting had ended. Radio Damascus said that Syrian "delegates" went there in response to requests by local residents. Meanwhile, leftist Lebanese and Palestinian sources in Beirut charged that Syria had increased the number of its troops in Lebanon over the weekend, but the reports could not be confirmed. [New York Times] Six months after Surinam was declared independent of the Netherlands, the north-eastern South American country is trying desperately to woo back the one-third of its population -- 160,000 people -- that had been among Surinam's most skilled, educated and wealthy. They had fled rather than face independence. Their loss has been felt economically at home. To induce them to return, the Dutch government has offered Surinam $1.5 billion in development aid over the next decade. But neither entreaties from their homeland nor the promise of aid from the Dutch has had any effect. [New York Times]