Bosnia on the Brain
U.S. policy in the Balkans leads both the New York Times
and the Washington Post . The train wreck occurring early yesterday
morning in the Arizona desert, which left scores injured, but killed no one, is
the Los
Angeles Times lead.
In light of a major Arizona derailment two years ago that proved to be
vandalism, the LAT reports that the FBI is investigating, but that all
indicators indicate the cause was instead a patch of flooded track.
The WP 's Bosnia story reports that former assistant secretary of
state Richard C. Holbrooke, briefly back in government service for a four-day
mission to the region, met with President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia
yesterday and told him that the Clinton administration is prepared to arrest
Bosnian Serb leader and wanted war criminal Radovan Karadzic "unless he takes
himself out of circulation voluntarily." The Post account emphasizes
U.S. decisiveness--"I was exceedingly blunt about what could happen, and you
can quote me on that," it records Holbrooke as saying. But the NYT
version seems to stress instead Serbian intransigence, reporting that
"Holbrooke acknowledged he was 'skeptical' of a pledge made at the meeting that
Karadzic would be stopped from wielding power behind the scenes in the
Serb-held part of Bosnia" and saying the negotiations ended "without any major
breakthrough."
According to a second Bosnia story on the WP front page, the topic
attracts far more administration attention and effort than the public realizes.
Judging by the president's speeches and his directions to his staff, says the
Post , he "seems to have Bosnia on the brain." The feeling is that the
Dayton accord for resolving the conflict there is perhaps the major Clinton
administration foreign policy achievement, one that is in great danger of
evaporating.
The WP reports that China's leadership seems to be endorsing economic
and political reform for the first time since the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
It says a recent front-page editorial in the Communist People's Daily
proclaimed that "the words 'market economy' have been writ large on the flag of
socialism for the first time" and denounced party members favoring a slowdown
in market reforms.
The NYT runs a front-page story pointing out a little-known
consequence of the increasingly strict U.S. deportation policy for illegal
immigrants convicted of felonies here. The program, intended to lower U.S.
crime and decrease prison crowding, is accelerating the growth of U.S.-style
gang crime throughout El Salvador and other Caribbean countries. So great is
the disruption in El Salvador, says the Times , that death squads have
re-emerged, this time targeting not political enemies, but deportee gang
members. Some police there even think civil war could break out again, now over
public safety issues.
Think the rapid growth of area codes is the inexorable result of the
increasing need for more and more data lines? Well, a Times "Week in
Review" piece points out that another factor is that under current
arrangements, many numbers assigned to "saturated" area codes go unused. Fixing
this could considerably extend the length of time between new area codes for a
given location. Incidentally, one of the matters Holbrooke tended to this
weekend besides crimes against humanity was the allocation of Bosnian area
codes.
You remember, of course, when Dan Quayle was caught trying to get that sixth
grader to spell 'potato' with an 'e' on the end. Well, an AP story in the
WP reveals that the kid was stronger in spelling than in family values.
He dropped out of school and now just five years later, he's an unmarried
father of a 14-month-old.
