Sunday Buffet
What's news today? Depends on which of the majors you pick up. They each
have a different top story and they each ignore or bury inside what their
competitors lead with. The Los Angeles Times leads with the revelation that the
Department of Justice has granted immunity from prosecution to a top research
scientist who helped Brown and Williamson create a tobacco strain with an
especially high level of nicotine. The move means that despite the proposed
$360 billion litigation settlement deal, the feds are still proceeding with a
criminal probe into the tobacco industry. The paper reports that grand juries
have been convened in Washington, New York and Brooklyn to look into possible
wrongdoing by cigarette companies and their trade associations, and that the
FBI has mounted a special tobacco task force. What's really weird is you just
know some of those agents are taking breaks from sifting through company
documents and interviewing industry whistleblowers to go have a smoke.
The New York Times
leads with the news that eight months after vowing to overhaul its citizenship
program, the INS is "still struggling to put new procedures in place to prevent
immigrants with criminal records from becoming citizens." Meanwhile,
applications for citizenship are on the rise, so the waiting time for
immigrants to hear back has doubled to more than a year. It doesn't help that
over a third of the agency's field offices are not linked to its computer
database.
The Washington Post leads with the report that in a speech
yesterday, President Clinton held open the possibility that he will order U.S.
troops to remain in Bosnia in some peacekeeping capacity even after the current
NATO mission of which they are a part is terminated next year. Defending U.S.
participation in the effort thus far, Clinton said, "It's been much less
expensive and much less hazardous to America than a resumption of full-scale
war would be."
A little further down on the page, the WP has Bob Woodward saying
that before Sen. Fred Thompson opened his hearings with the charge that China
had funneled money into U.S. election campaigns, his "statement was cleared.by
the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency."
The top left-hand piece in the NYT recounts the struggle of tiny
(pop. 5,000) Montoursville, Pennsylvania to put the pieces back together after
sixteen of its young people and five adults were killed a year ago aboard TWA
Flight 800. Initially, the high school that most of the victims attended tried
to avoid dwelling on the tragedy via such measures as removing from circulation
any textbooks with their signatures in them. But school authorities eventually
accommodated the desires of surviving students to be protected less and used a
showcase in the school lobby for weeklong displays about each crash victim.
President Clinton made his Bosnia remarks in Copenhagen, and the WP
quotes some of the toast he made at a dinner there hosted by Denmark's royal
family. Clinton "noted that Attorney General Janet Reno is a Rasmussen on her
father's side, and former treasury secretary Lloyd Bentsen is the son of a
Dane." Now there's a close cultural connection. Much better to just admit, "I
got my management style from Hamlet."
