Swiss Miss
The Los Angeles Times leads
with Russia's air-dropped leaflet warning to the residents of Chechnya's
capital, Grozny: Leave or die. Everybody else except USA Today fronts the ultimatum, and it
tops the Wall Street
Journal 's front-page news box. The New York
Times goes with Monday's announcement that the Supreme Court will
review its 33-year-old Miranda decision, the national requirement that
police inform criminal suspects of their basic constitutional rights, including
the right to remain silent, before questioning them. The story is stuffed at
USAT , off-leads at the LAT , and is fronted below the fold at the Washington Post ,
which goes instead with an independent investigating panel's findings that
nearly 54,000 dormant Swiss bank accounts, in the aggregate worth as much as
$1.3 billion, contain funds linkable to Holocaust victims, many more accounts
worth much more money than the banks ever previously acknowledged. The
investigators found no clear evidence of a conspiracy by Swiss banks to steal
money from victims of the Nazis, but they also cite their "deceitful actions."
No one else fronts the story. The USAT lead is that
U.S. airlines are canceling domestic flights at a pace that will likely lead to
the highest annual percentage of scratches in the last five years. While the
story cites maintenance and labor strife as contributing causes, it quotes one
airline spokesman as saying that 90 percent of cancellations can be blamed on
bad weather and air traffic control problems. The airline with the lowest
cancellation rate: at only 1 percent, it's Southwest.
The LAT says the Russians
are giving Grozny's 5,000 soldiers and 40,000 civilians (the other papers give
slightly varying numbers) until Saturday to leave Thereafter, those who remain
will be declared terrorists, subject to massive shelling and bombing. The
WP says there's little doubt that the Russians can
follow through on their threat. The papers report that in response, President
Clinton has urged Russia not to follow through, saying that the country will
"pay a heavy price" otherwise, without really specifying further.
The NYT ably explains
what's at issue in the new Supreme Court Miranda
case: whether with the original ruling, the Warren Court was establishing a
rule of constitutional law or merely expressing its own preference for a method
of enforcing the constitutional right against compelled self-incrimination. If
the latter, then Congress could overrule the method, which would mean that a
little-noticed alternative interpretation of how to protect suspects against
self-incrimination buried in a bill passed in 1968 is in fact the law of the
land. The NYT runs both an editorial and an op-ed
piece urging the Court's validation of Miranda .
The WP and USAT both off-lead the guilty verdict returned yesterday by a
federal jury in Miami, against SabreTech Inc. for mishandling hazardous
materials linked to the 1996 crash of a ValuJet plane into the Florida
Everglades that killed all 110 people on board. This is the first such finding
in connection with a U.S. air accident. (Two SabreTech employees were acquitted
in the case already.) SabreTech's parent company now faces fines and
restitution payouts. State murder and manslaughter charges are next.
The LAT uses its later
close time to file a front-pager on the Republican candidates' debate last
night in Arizona. This was the first time in the GOP ramp-up that the aspirants
could question each other, but, the paper notes, the discussion remained
"mostly amicable and genteel." The paper highlights Sen. Orrin Hatch's
observation to George W. Bush that with only five years as a governor, he needs
more experience before becoming president--such as first being the vice
president for eight years in a Hatch administration.
The business sections in both Times report that the newly created Exxon Mobil Corp. has revoked a
prior Mobil policy and will no longer provide health-care coverage to the
partners of new gay hires or to the new partners of current gay employees.
Several gay rights organizations are responding with outrage.
USAT 's front-page "cover
story" makes the observation that while companies continue to work on the Y2K
problem, they face considerable non -Y2K computer
glitches. The paper reports these commonplace troubles cost $100 billion
annually in lost productivity.
Dept. of Corrections :
Today's Papers erred in saying yesterday that a Monday LAT story had no information about the legal immunity enjoyed by
members of Congress. It did in fact say they are shielded from libel or slander
lawsuits based on remarks made in congressional debate and in official
reports.
The WP reports that at the
opening of Janet Reno's first media briefing in weeks, she told the assembled
reporters that they keep her on her toes and that "the First Amendment is
reflected best around this table." Then, says the Post , Reno proceeded to give a "no comment" answer 17 times. You
need a spreadsheet to keep track of all the grotesqueries in another
Post item. "Reliable Source" quotes Vernon Jordan's
Gridiron Club gala comment about Hillary Clinton's Senate prospects: "I'm
praying, of course, that Hillary will win. If she doesn't--Lord, I'll have to
call Revlon again."
