News stories from Sunday August 29, 1976
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- In a change of administration policy, President Ford proposed that Congress spend $1.5 billion over the next decade to expand the national parks. On his way back to Washington from Vail, Colo., the President stopped at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, where he worked as a park ranger 40 years ago. At the Old Faithful geyser, Mr. Ford outlined to 6,000 ecologists and tourists a park acquisition and development program that he called a "Bicentennial birthday present" to future generations. [New York Times]
- Federal action is needed to correct "abysmal" Medicaid administration at all levels of government, according to a Senate report on the 10-year-old Medicaid program. The report said there was widespread abuse. by both providers of health services and recipients and estimated that one-quarter to a half of the $15 billion a year being spent on Medicaid was being wasted through fraud, poor medical care, and the dispensing of services to ineligible persons. The report was based on a four-month investigation of Medicaid operations in New York City, Newark, Passaic and Paterson, N. J., Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif. [New York Times]
- Senator Frank Moss, Democrat of Utah, went to East Harlem masquerading as a patient and helped to document what his Senate committee says was widespread waste and mismanagement in New York City's huge Medicaid program. Senator Moss, chairman of the Subcommittee on Long-Term Care, got a Medicaid card and visited the East Harlem Medical Center at 145 East 116th Street. His experience contributed to the subcommittee's report, which said that fraudulent practices and use by ineligible persons of the New York Medicaid program had wasted millions of dollars. [New York Times]
- Crime is a growing problem in the suburbs and many suburbanites are finding that they have not escaped it by moving from the city. A survey of many communities around 12 major cities has found that burglaries and other felonies are increasing. Of the 12 areas, only Milwaukee seemed to be relatively crime-free. Some homeowners have organized neighborhood surveillance teams in which neighbors keep a house watch for one another. An accountant in a San Francisco suburb, whose house was burglarized three times in eight days, set up a picture-taking program to which 150 neighbors subscribe, When anyone knocks or rings the doorbell a photograph of the caller is automatically taken. The picture taking has been a "very, very powerful deterrent" to break-ins, the accountant said. [New York Times]
- Taiwan is developing the capacity to manufacture an atomic bomb one day as a result of a new program there to reprocess spent nuclear reactor fuel into plutonium, officials in Washington said. Taiwan is purchasing four nuclear power plants from the United States that are expected to provide one-third of Taiwan's electrical power. [New York Times]
- Israel's heavily guarded borders are calmer and more open than at any time since the end of the 1973 Middle East war. The relatively tranquil situation, which Israeli officials caution against regarding as permanent, is largely a result of disunity among Arab nations, most notably in Lebanon. Defense Minister Shimon Peres told graduates of the Israeli Command Staff College recently that "Our defenses have never been stronger. We are in a position to offer a policy of goodwill and restraint." [New York Times]
- A controversial French Bishop who was suspended by the Vatican last month for opposing Roman Catholic Church reforms celebrated a traditional Latin mass before 6,000 followers in a sports arena in Lille in direct defiance of Pope Paul VI. The service seemed to become a political rally as Bishop Marcel Lefebvre also delivered an address to cheers and thunderous applause in which he condemned leftists, Communists and liberal Catholics and attacked ecumenism and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. In Italy, the Pope devoted his entire Sunday address to the Bishop's case. [New York Times]