Correspondents' Correspondence

...But whatever happens in the short run, given the transparent attitude of the Austrian government, the prospects for its assuming a long-term posture that can be considered honorable, not to mention humanitarian, are dim indeed...

...We don't have much choice, you know...

...Despite their lack of experience, persons hired as keypunch operators, gardener-caretakers and tree trimmers, for instance, were working productively within two weeks...

...The answer lies in a slightly tarnished yet still universally revered symbol: $. Despite a significant expansion of China's trade, Hong Kong continues to provide the major portion of Peking's foreign exchange An estimated $600 million per year...

...Asked about the future, local businessmen and outside investors with long-term interests here simply shrug...

...His long feature story, including photographs, appeared September 27, the first day of the Jewish New Year 5734...

...Perhaps hoping to stimulate support because it was experiencing behind-the-scenes pressure, Israel broke its firm policy of not permitting any newspaper or TV stories on Schonau and allowed Terence Smith, the New York Times' Jerusalem correspondent, to visit the transit center...

...In fact, the city was inundated with over 20,000 applicants, several times the available openings...

...Although the final returns have yet to come in from across the country, in Los Angeles the city that administered the nation's largest PEP experiment the program has proved to be enormously beneficial...

...Who can forecast the situation five years from now, not to mention 1997...

...Given the Nixon Administration's determination to hold the line on domestic spending, the program's effectiveness will undoubtedly be subjected to intense questioning when PEP comes up for renewal this fall...

...We'll just have to go it day by day and see what happens...

...For the present, these financial factors outweigh ideological arguments...

...It's only a feeling of pride, really, nothing very tangible or specific," remarks one British official...

...The annual celebration underscores Hong Kong's existence as a borrowed place living on borrowed time...

...At the least, with unemployment still hovering near 5 per cent, a strong case can be made for extending the program another year.mike Ber-nick...

...Founded 24 years ago, the Communist giant to the north is looming ever larger as the key factor in this British colony's future...

...Thus PEP appears to be demonstrating that public employment is a worthwhile means of countering cyclical joblessness...

...And by 1:30 the next morning it appeared that Chancellor Bruno Kreisky had found an unexpected solution to his Soviet Jewish problem...

...The agitators, however, never gained support among Hong Kong's 4 million inhabitants-8 per Gent of whom are Chinese And...

...They symbolize, too, much of the incongruity of Hong Kong, where garish West meets inscrutable East, and a Hilton hotel flying the Union Jack can stand comfortably adjacent to a Bank of China building that boasts neon signs and bright red banners wishing a long life to Chairman Mao...

...The additional workers enabled the city government to increase services in most of its departments as well as to launch a number of new social and construction projects...

...Among other things, PEP personnel were used to fill vacancies in the police department and the library system, to construct two new water systems and two golf courses, to counsel street gangs and start up a consumer affairs bureau as well as recreation programs for the aged and the blind...

...We wouldn't be doing such things if we expected the People's Liberation Army to send troops pouring across the border," observes one veteran policy maker...

...In any event, Hong Kong authorities have sufficient confidence to proceed with mammoth development projects, including a $200-million dam, a $92-million desalinization plant and a $160-million housing program...

...an ex-administrator became a personnel aide at less than half of his previous salary...

...Third, the city had a real need for the additional manpower...

...The various departments placed their PEP employes where they could do the most good and gave them the necessary training in a very short time...

...a former deputy sheriff was hired as a maintenance laborer...

...Second, the city possessed the administrative talent to manage the sudden influx of new personnel efficiently...

...For this reason, some traditionally stiff British upper lips quivered a bit during a siege of Communist-inspired rioting from 1966-68...

...Among other properties operated here by Mao Tse-tung's anticapitalist regime are nine banks, six department stores, two insurance companies, several financial syndicates and publishing firms, plus scores of restaurants and small businesses...

...in retrospect, it also appears that the insurgents were acting without Peking's blessing...

...The immediate future of Schonau is difficult to predict as we go to press on October 3. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir has failed in her effort to totally reverse the situation...

...There remained, too, the 45-minute rides to and from Schonau, in buses convoyed along the autobahn by police cars...

...Arnold Abrams The Case for PEP Los Angelesfor the past two years social scientists in the field of manpower have been eagerly watching the Public Employment Program (PEP), created by Congress in July 1971 as a "stopgap measure" to combat a national unemployment rate that was then running 6.2 per cent...

...As China has emerged from the Cultural Revolution and taken a place in the international community, local Communist ranks have exuded more confidence...

...With its $24.3-million grant, the municipality created more than 3,200 new positions, filling them all in less than six months...

...Well, as a matter of fact, they do own the place...

...Britain still maintains a military garrison here, but the troops are a token force, employed mainly for ceremonial occasions...

...Preliminary reports so far indicate that Los Angeles' experience has been duplicated, to varying degrees, in other localities throughout the nation...

...The rescue operation, in short, continued to be considered troublesome by the host country...

...says one...

...Many of these applicants were willing to take positions of a lower grade than those they had formerly held...

...The following day the Arab guerrillas struck...

...Nobody knows what will happen when the lease runs out, though local observers have noted a growing smugness of late among the city's Communist leaders and supporters...

...The colony consists of a 40-square-mile island, forcibly ceded to the British by a 19th-century treaty that Peking does not formally recognize, as well as some 370 square miles of surrounding Chinese mainland territory, subsequently obtained on a lease that expires on July 1, 1997...

...myron Kolatch Our cover drawing of the Vice President, who is engaged in a survival struggle of his own, is by Gerry Gersten...

...They stand very tall these days, particularly around October 1, and they project a sense of owning the place...

...PEP's success here can be traced to three factors: Next Issue 'The Case Against Academic Tenure' DAVID M. OSH1NSKY Pledging Allegiance to the Flag' RICHARD J. MARGOLIS 'Phase Two of the European Security Talks' MARK HOPKINS First, there was a great desire for work among all sectors of the unemployed...

...Still, there remained the heavily guarded scenes at the airport and railway station, where Jewish Agency workers daily meet the new arrivals from the Soviet Union, who move toward them sometimes tentatively, sometimes exuberantly, their faces radiating a strange mixture of joy and exhaustion...

...The paradox of the world's foremost anti-imperialist power tolerating the continued presence of a British colony on its territory is easily explainable...

...Unlike many Depression-era WPA projects, it was not necessary to create make-work tasks, such as cleaning alleys or picking up paper...

...Dealing in Futures Hong Kongred flags and slogan-bearing banners sprouted along this city's skyline recently to mark an annual rite that many residents do not like to be reminded of: the October 1 anniversary of the People's Republic of China...

...The truth is that this last major relic of a once-vast colonial empire is indefensible, and any time the Chinese choose to reclaim Hong Kong, they can do so, according to a standard quip, by picking up the phone and making a single call...

...For example, aerospace engineers went to work as assistant draftsmen...

...The first Federal effort to provide city and state jobs since the New Deal's Work Projects Administration (WPA), which ended in 1943, PEP was granted $1 billion to put 140,000 unemployed persons to work in the public sector...