News stories from Saturday December 11, 1976
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- An innovative federal approach to government-aided housing in the experimental "new communities" program has turned into a financial disaster. The government, one of the potential big losers, backed $229 million in bonds that were sold to raise money for the development of 13 new communities throughout the nation. [New York Times]
- Despite strong congressional opposition on the ground of human rights, the United States intends to vote favorably Tuesday on two World Bank loans to Chile. Gerald Parksy, assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Monetary Affairs, said that the United States will not retreat from its long-standing position that World Bank loans should not be decided on "political" grounds but only on economic merits. [New York Times]
- Chile's right-wing military junta is letting up on its most blatant tactics of repression. The government has not, however, dismantled the pervasive state security apparatus or revived any of the country's traditional democratic institutions. "The regime is stronger than ever and shows no willingness to carry out any kind of liberalization," said a human rights lawyer in Santiago. [New York Times]
- The staunchly conservative president of Spain's Council of State, Antonio Maria de Priol y Urguijo, was abducted from his Madrid office by gunmen suspected to be Basque militants. A motive of the kidnappers may be to hold him as hostage in an attempt to force the government to free Basque political prisoners. [New York Times]
- A "lost world" in Antarctica that has been off from the sun and humankind for millenniums is being probed by a team of scientists who are drilling into the Ross Ice Shelf in the South Pole region. The project, in which 10 nations are participating, is designed to study bottom water and changing sea levels. [New York Times]
- Two rounds of strategy sessions on how to break the deadlock in the Geneva conference on Rhodesia were completed in London by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland of Britain. One of the ideas reportedly discussed as a way of getting around black Rhodesian opposition to white Rhodesians' remaining in key posts in an interim government was to appoint a British executive officer or resident commissioner in place of the council of state proposed earlier. [New York Times]