Alaskan Pork Chops
The New York
Times and the Los
Angeles Times lead with President Clinton's berating, at a conference in
Istanbul, of Russian President Boris Yeltsin over the Russian military's
assault on Chechnya--a story fronted (below the fold) by the Washington Post .
USA Today
leads with the U.S. Army's decision to boost enlistment benefits.
It nearly doubled the signing bonus for some recruits--from $12,000 to
$20,000--and decreased the minimum enlistment period needed to receive a bonus
from three years to two. Total benefits can now reach $85,000. No other paper
carries this story. The Post leads with the House's 296-135 passage of a final budget
bill, seven weeks into the fiscal year--a story off-leaded by the NYT and reefered by the LAT .
The Senate continued to bicker over pork, and both houses renewed an
emergency-spending bill for another two weeks. The House bill increases
spending on health and education, pays U.S. debts to the United Nations, and
restores $12 billion worth of cuts to Medicare. The Wall Street Journal notes
high up that spending will increase by tens of billions of dollars from last
year and will break appropriations caps set by the 1997 balanced budged
agreement.
At a 54-member meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, Yeltsin decried the "sermonizing" by the West over his attack on the
rebellious province of Chechnya. Although speaking immediately after Yeltsin,
Clinton noted the heavy civilian casualties inflicted by the Russian army and
made an analogy: If Yeltsin had been jailed (instead of elected president)
after standing on a tank in defiance of the 1991 Soviet coup, Clinton argued,
"I would hope that every leader of every country around this table would have
stood up for you and for freedom in Russia, and not said, 'Well, that is an
internal Russian affair that we cannot be part of.' " Many other leaders at the
summit spoke in support of Clinton, and Yeltsin agreed to an external review by
OSCE's chairman. Most papers do not make much of Yeltsin's leaving the
conference a day early, but the news summary in the Journal 's
"Woldwide" box claims that the Russian president "walked out" of the conference
(the corresponding Associated Press story on the Journal 's Web site
makes no such characterization). The papers do not mention a possible political
motive for Clinton: George W. Bush is expected to launch a similar attack
against Yeltsin's Chechnya campaign in a foreign-policy speech today, a
position that the Clinton administration has now triangulated.
The Post reports that Chinese diagrams of a miniaturized nuclear
warhead--the W88, designed by America--contain a telltale measurement error
that can be traced back to several weapons manufacterers in the U.S. The
anonymously sourced, front-page story reports that these manufacturers include
Sandia National Laboratories, Lockheed Martin, and the Navy--but probably not
Los Alamos National Labratory, where an employee, Wen Ho Lee, had been targeted
by a much-criticized espionage investigation.
An inside NYT story says that CIA documents declassified yesterday reveal that in the
late '80s and early '90s the CIA was more aware of impending Soviet collapse
than previously thought. Although it continued to stress the likelihood of a
hard-line revolt against perestroika, it did conclude that Mikhail Gorbachev's
reformist inclinations were sincere.
The Journal says that an anonymous FBI source has retracted an
earlier assertion that the co-pilot suspected of sabotaging EgyptAir 990 said,
"I have made my decision now," before uttering the widely reported phrase, "I
put my faith in God's hands." (The first phrase has been mentioned by some, but
not all, of the newspapers for several days now. Suspecting that this first
phrase was spurious, Today's Papers now regrets not having mentioned this
anomaly.) This is not, the Journal notes, a petty detail: If the
co-pilot had actually said, "I have made my decision now," that would seem to
rule out the Egyptian government's theory that the co-pilot's "second" phrase,
"I put my faith in God's hands," was a reaction to an as-yet-undiscovered
mechanical problem. USAT , which ran both phrases in a top-front
pull-quote yesterday, does not make a similar retraction; in fact, it
repeats both phrases in an inside story today. Meanwhile, an
anonymous source tells the NYT , in a story run inside, that a
re-examination of the flight data recorder shows the plane to be "rock steady,"
with no hint of mechanical failure, before its fatal dive.
The LAT fronts an appraisal of California's pork in the new House budget
bill: $3.5 million to dredge Marina del Rey harbor, $600,000 to remove burros
from the desert, $50,000 for a mural in Twentynine Palms, $100,000 to build an
international trade center in Tulare County, and $50 million to reinforce
levees on the lower Los Angeles River and relieve nearby residents of a federal
mandate to buy flood insurance. The NYT profiles the goodies secured by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska,
including $15 million for the University of Alaska to study the aurora
borealis, $100,000 to conduct a census of walruses, $4 million to help stranded
sea lions, and $13 million to build a parking ramp for a C-130 at Fort
Richardson. Stevens' pork is so legendary, says the NYT , that a recent
episode of the NBC sitcom West Wing features two legislative aides
joking about a $2 million outlay to monitor Alaskan skies for volcanic ash--an
appropriation that, unlike the rest of the sitcom, is not fictional.
