Mexican Watershed
Everybody leads with the Mexican elections. The Los Angeles
Times, the Washington Post and USA TODAY each put the story at the top right and the
New York Times gives
almost the entire right side of its front page to it. And the top of the
Wall Street Journal "World-Wide" News column notes "Mexican
Stocks Surge." As of press time, it remains unclear exactly what the balance of
power in the legislative branch or in the various states will be between the
three major political parties, but the news is that for the first time in the
country's modern history, there will be a balance of power. USAT quotes
one political scientist as saying, "This was a revolution, the beginning of a
new country." The Times has another saying, "If votes begin to count in
Mexico, then this is a revolution."
The Post has Cambodia on the front above the fold, while the
LAT and NYT put it inside. What happened there is that one of the
country's co-rulers--as established by U.N.-brokered elections in
1993--conducted a coup when the other one was in Paris. The U.S. has delayed
taking sides. The NYT has the State Department spokesman's official
position: "I think the origin of the fighting is sufficiently murky so that we
don't want to shoot arrows at one side or another today." If nothing else, the
episode allows the Post to trot out this foreign correspondent's staple
phrase (found, I believe, on key F7): "the capital appeared calm but tense
tonight." By the way, what does that actually mean?
The Journal 's front page "Work Week" column has two rather
interesting items today. One details that a Missouri federal appeals court has
ruled that a woman demoted while on maternity leave wasn't a victim of
pregnancy discrimination. The story notes that a 1978 federal law bars
discrimination based on "pregnancy, giving birth or a related medical
condition," but that the court ruled that it didn't apply to her case because
caring for a child is a gender-neutral "social role," not a condition related
to childbirth. The other item relates how Karl Mason, a self-described
numerologist and astrologer, and a dozen of his colleagues, have asked the
Broward County, Florida, state attorney to look into why the psychic phone
network where they dispensed visions of the future to callers had stopped
paying their salaries. The county is investigating. But the Journal
wonders why the employees didn't see trouble coming.
