News stories from Saturday March 6, 1976

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

The Florida primary elections on Tuesday have become tests of survival and momentum for Ronald Reagan, the Republican challenger, and Jimmy Carter, one of the leading Democratic candidates. Mr. Carter seems more likely to succeed than Mr. Reagan, who as support increased in Florida for President Ford, has become an underdog in a state that he considered a prime source of strength a few weeks ago. The voting is expected to be very close. Political observers believe that Mr. Ford will defeat Mr. Reagan by a small margin, and that Mr. Carter will run close to, if not ahead of, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama. Senator Henry Jackson was expected to pick up votes, but not enough to pull him out of third place. [New York Times] The staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will recommend legislation requiring that the National Security Agency obtain a court-ordered warrant before it may electronically eavesdrop on an American citizen, sources familiar with the committee's final report said. The proposal was one of several intended to control the agency's extensive computerized electronic surveillance capabilities. The report also proposes that if the N.S.A. picks up private communications of an American citizen "incidentally" in its eavesdropping, it must get permission from a federal court to distribute the information or keep it in its files. [New York Times] As rents rise, rent controls have spread up and down the East Coast and have even reached Alaska. In Washington and Boston, which both have controls, the issue is as controversial as it has been for years in New York. Rent controls have also been adopted in recent years in Baltimore and Miami Beach and, with great rapidity, in about 110 New Jersey communities. [New York Times] Increasing numbers of students who are unable to write coherently or do simple arithmetic are entering colleges and universities, which find that they have to offer remedial work in the basic skills, upsetting budgets and administrations. At Ohio State University, placement tests given to freshmen, all of whom entered the open-admissions university on a first-come, first-served basis, found that 26 percent could not do high school mathematics and 30 percent could not write on an acceptable college level. [New York Times] On Jan. 3, Sgt. Robert Henson, a senior drill instructor in the Marine Corps, aimed his rifle and shot Pvt. Harry Hiscock in the hand. It was another case of abuse that has been made public since six Marine recruits drowned on a night march at Parris Island, Ga., 20 years ago. Training records, private talks with Marines and testimony at Sergeant Henson's court-martial show that abuse of recruits by drill instructors continues to be common, and punishment of violators is mild. Last year, nearly 150 of the 600 drill instructors at Parris Island were accused of abusing recruits. [New York Times] South Vietnam has developed a long-range plan for a more privately oriented economy than North Vietnam's, South Vietnam's Foreign Minister, Mrs. Nguyen Thl Binh, said in an interview in Moscow, where she had attended the 25th Communist Party Congress. Mrs. Binh, who is a key figure in Saigon's Provisional Revolutionary Government, explained that even after the reunification of North and South Vietnam, the South Vietnam economy would be arranged in a five-tier system to allow considerable private enterprise to exist alongside a form of limited socialism. Her remarks were among the clearest indication that reunification would not mean the homogenization of the two Vietnams, at least in the near future. South Vietnam has severe economic problems and the country is in need of international aid, Mrs. Binh said, including substantial help from the United States, which she said, has an obligation to help the country's recovery. [New York Times] Dr. Elliott Gabellah, the leader of what is generally regarded as the majority group of the black nationalist movement in Rhodesia, said the present negotiations between Prime Minister Ian Smith and the head of the other national faction, Joshua Nkomo, "is a waste of time that will produce negative results." Mr. Smith and Mr. Nkomo of the African National Council have been conferring about black demands for majority rule in Rhodesia where they outnumber whites 20 to 1. Mr. Gabellah is vice president of the faction of the African National Council headed by Bishop Abel Muzorewa of the United Methodist Church, who is in self-imposed exile in Mozambique. [New York Times] The Spanish government approved a bill providing for freedom of political association. The bill's details were not made public, but they were understood to exclude the Communists and other so-called violent or totalitarian extremist groups from the right to form a legal party and to compete in elections. This was the second of two reform measures taken by the government. The first measure widened the right of assembly, a particularly sore point among the Spanish people after repression by the police of several efforts by industrial workers to demonstrate. [New York Times]