Coup's on First?
The New York Times
and USA Today
lead with the aftermath of Wednesday's defeat of the nuclear test ban
treaty by the Senate. Like yesterday's bold headline ("Evokes Versailles Pact
Defeat"), today's NYT headline also spans four columns and gives a
distinctly pro-White House spin ("Clinton Says 'New Isolationism' Imperils U.S.
Security"). USAT 's headline announces the international "rebuke on
[the] test ban vote" received by the U.S., while the Washington Post and
Los Angeles
Times --which off-lead the story--note merely that "Clinton Fumes at
[the] GOP" ( LAT ) and "Fault[s] GOP Partisanship" ( WP ). The
Post and LAT lead with the military's tightening grip on
Islamabad, a story off-leaded by the NYT and stuffed by
USAT .
All the papers run roundup articles assessing the defeat of the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty in terms of international prestige, foreign policy, President
Clinton's legacy, and the presidential campaign (Gore aired a TV ad on the
issue--his first). President Clinton, all the papers note, appeared angry at a
press conference, resolving to continue America's seven-year-old ban on nuclear
tests and warning that the election of a pro-test president in 2000 could
provoke tests by Russia, China, India, and Pakistan. On the NYT op-ed
page, Senator Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., explains why he abstained from a vote for the first time in his
41-year Senate career: because the Senate didn't debate long enough to allay
his doubts about the treaty, but it was too important to vote down.
Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf consolidated power in Pakistan by imposing martial law,
dismissing the parliament, suspending the constitution, and proclaiming himself
chief executive. The LAT and Wall Street Journal note that although many citizens and some
newspapers welcomed the coup on Wednesday (see "International
Papers"), on Thursday the Pakistani stock market fell 7.4 percent and the
central bank froze foreign capital for a week. Taking advantage of its later
deadline, the LAT reports that the State Department finally recognized
the coup, a decision that legally cuts off U.S. aid (though at $5 million a
year, it's chump change). The NYT gets a nice detail: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif fired Musharraf as he was
flying back to the country and forbade his plane to land; as the plane ran low
on fuel, the army commandeered first the air control tower and then the
country. The Post quotes a "senior [Pakistani] army official" saying, "There
is no doubt in our minds that the world will never accept military rule, but we
are in for the long haul." He adds: "We have decided we must cleanse a
political system that allows corrupt people to decide the destiny of our
people." NYT columnist A. M. Rosenthal--the paper's former South Asia
correspondent--argues that the coup underscores the poverty of America's policy
in the region, which has long favored the efficient Pakistan to the chaotic,
but truly democratic, India.
Two medical stories in the NYT and WP are like day and night.
The Times fronts what it claims is an earth-shattering discovery: A researcher experimenting on
monkeys has determined that their brains add neurons to the cerebral cortex
even in adulthood. Such a finding would uproot decades of conventional wisdom,
which holds that higher mammals add brain cells only in childhood. If the
discovery translates to the human brain (the Times is optimistic), it
will revolutionize our neurobiological understanding of memory--which might
turn out to be a long string of continually produced neurons that record
experience through time like a tape recorder--and promise cures for
degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and stroke-induced
dementia. The Post , however, is skeptical. It runs the story on page A02 and warns that
"it's unknown whether the new cells are even functional. ... What's clear is
that any regenerative potential in the brain would have to be massively
stimulated in some way to be of clinical use."
The LAT fronts and the NYT reefers the latest merger in the
aerospace industry, between Germany's DaimlerChrystler and France's
Aerospatiale Matra. It will become the world's third-largest aerospace firm,
behind Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, and will own an 80 percent stake in Airbus
Industrie, Boeing's main competitor in the commercial passenger-jet market. The
Journal says the merger is a blow to the Pentagon, which had been trying
to forge cross-Atlantic mergers, while the Post points to the increasing privatization of subsidized
European industries like Airbus. The NYT says the merger represents the first time European nations have
integrated large parts of their defense industries--an integration made
necessary, the paper argues, by technical inefficiencies revealed during the
NATO bombing of Kosovo. All the papers note Boeing's announcement of
better-than-expected third-quarter earnings.
The LAT and WP front Microsoft's attempt to have Congress cut
next year's proposed budget for the Justice Department's anti-trust
division--an odd lobbying effort that, even if successful, will not affect the
government's suit against the company. The Post notes that MS also gave an expense-paid junket to several
non-profit groups, who are now pressing the government for the same DOJ
cuts.
The LAT runs a long portrait of Gore's service in Vietnam. True to
character, Gore struggled with his decision for many months in the summer of
1969, seeking the counsel of his father, his friends, and a professor. He was
opposed to the war but worried that if he opted out a friend from Tennessee
would die in his place. With his father seeking re-election to his Senate seat
that fall, Gore Jr. enlisted in the Army and served as a reporter. Army buddies
say he took some risks, but was kept out of harm's way by Army brass and never
saw combat. "When and if I get home from Vietnam," he wrote a friend, "I'm
going to divinity school to atone for my sins." (He did, for a year.) During
his 1988 presidential run, he often implied he saw combat, although he does not
do this anymore.
On the Journal 's editorial page, famed evolutionary theorist Stephen
Jay Gould announces that he has finally found God. "This is church--and nonbelievers cannot know
the spirit," he preaches. Gould, it turns out, worships at the altar of ...
Major League Baseball. A Red Sox victory over the Yankees in the playoffs and
over the Mets in the World Series, he says, would redeem the fallen team's
century of ill treatment by the sinners of New York and "restore the earth's
moral balance just before our great calendrical transition. ... Nothing can
explain the meaning and excitement of all this to nonfans," he says of the
Pentacostal--er, pennant season. "No sensible person would even try. One can
only recall Louis Armstrong's famous statement about the nature of jazz: 'Man,
if you gotta ask, you'll never know.' "
