Merger Attempt Denied
USA Today leads with the arrival in East
Timor of 2,000 peacekeeping troops, which is also the top non-local story at
the Los Angeles Times . The
Washington
Post off-leads this development, but goes instead with continuing
post-Floyd power outages up and down the East Coast. The New York
Times gives plenty of pagefront property to the storm's aftermath in
North Carolina and New Jersey but leads with what is emerging as perhaps the
largest source of Medicare fraud: not doctors and hospitals but illicit schemes
by the companies hired by the government to administer claims. The
Times says eight such companies have paid more than
$275 million to the government (since when? the story isn't that clear) to
settle fraud and other charges relating to Medicare payouts. One complaint: The
story relies on the phrase "Medicare contractors" in the early going, holding
off until the ninth paragraph before using any actual names of offending
companies: "Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Colorado and New Mexico Blue Cross
and Blue Shield."
The coverage reports that although the (mostly
Australian) peacekeeping troops found calm at the airstrip where they touched
down, the Australian general in overall command said his forces would respond
"robustly" to any armed resistance. The NYT and
WP quote the general praising the cooperation of the
Indonesian forces, and the LAT goes so far as to say
their reaction was a "cordial welcome." All this in contrast to the stark scene
evident everywhere in East Timor, what the LAT calls
"the most vicious and thorough scorched-earth exercise that Southeast Asia has
seen since World War II." (For a primer on Timor, click
here.) The plan is, the papers report, for the peacekeeping troops to make
possible a large-scale humanitarian aid effort very shortly.
The USAT front-page "cover
story" on the Timor terror says that a team there to observe the independence
referendum made a tape, from a radio scanner, of communications between
Indonesian special forces and the marauding anti-independence militias. One
quote alleged to be on tape says of the observers: "Those white people should
be put in the river."
The LAT fronts the buildup of
30,000 Russian troops along the Chechen border and reports that Russian Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin told a national TV audience that the region is a
criminal state. Putin said his country's air attacks against Chechnya would
continue. The LAT says the mood in Russia is similar
to the height of the war with Chechnya, with one exception: now there doesn't
appear to be any Russian anti-war sentiment.
The Wall Street Journal
and NYT report that today Microsoft will announce a
new alliance with Ford under which Microsoft's Carpoint auto shopping Web site
will be able to provide increased information online about Fords--such as
particulars about new car inventory or used-car service records--to potential
buyers. (Laws currently prevent car sales from being consummated online--a
franchise dealer must still be involved.) The Times
says Microsoft hopes to reach similar arrangements with other car
manufacturers. It's good that Carpoint users who might buy Fords as a result of
Carpoint research are put on notice up front that there is some connection
between the two, which brings us to that NYT
bombshell last Saturday revealing that Microsoft paid for a California
institute's newspaper ads supporting the company's position in its antitrust
tussle with the government: If, as Microsoft insists, there was nothing wrong
with helping to disseminate the institute's ads, then why didn't the company
simply announce the help at the time?
The WSJ and the
WP report that a rising corporate Internet star was
arrested last Thursday night at the Santa Monica Pier for attempting to use the
Web to arrange a sexual encounter with an underage girl, who was actually an
undercover FBI agent. The Journal piece says the man
worked for Infoseek, while the Post says he works
for Disney.
The WP reports the results of
a survey among NewsHour With Jim Lehrer viewers about what the next
election should be about. Of the 8,400 total ballots cast, 12.1 percent picked
campaign finance. Issue 2 was health, at 7.1 percent.
Guess he didn't write
Fargo . Yesterday's NYT
Magazine , another of those millennial issues, contained an
annotated photo cum pensee cum fashion spread wherein actor William H. Macy
"revisit[s] major milestones from midcentury America." At one point Macy
reveals: "When I was a child in the 50s, we had these school exercises where
we'd stick our heads under our desks to protect ourselves from the bomb. How
utterly naïve we were."
The WP reports that Bell
Atlantic Video recently conducted a poll of pay per view viewers. Among the
results: Accountants were the most likely to watch PPV movies in the nude.
Doctors came in second. Where was the FBI on that one?
