Clint Eastwood was the hero
of the French press this week. Celebrating the release in France of his
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , Libération devoted no less
than its first four pages to him Wednesday, while Le Monde ran an article and an
interview the next day headlined "Clint Eastwood, Free Man." Both papers
portrayed him as a rare independent spirit in Hollywood. Libération
filled its front page with a scowling Clint under the headline "The Eastwood
Case."
Amid the deepening Kosovo
crisis, 19-year-old Aldona Elezi was crowned Miss Albania in Tirana this week
in the country's first national beauty contest since 1995, the Albanian Daily News
reported Wednesday. The runner-up, Johana Gega, recently celebrated her
14 th birthday. The new Miss Albania received $15,000 (Albanian
policemen and schoolteachers typically earn $60 to $70 a month) and said she
wants to become an actress.
Amid
general condemnation of Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic over the repression
in Kosovo, the conservative Le Figaro of Paris struck a discordant note with a column
defending his right to "maintain order" in the province and attacking the
economic sanctions decided upon by the Contact Group countries in London this
week. Commentator Patrick Besson wrote that the new sanctions were the
equivalent of "pushing under water the head of someone who is already
drowning," and asked, "This international community, is it you? Is it me? If
not, who is it?"
In an op-ed article Wednesday in the Financial Times, columnist Edward
Mortimer said that "Saddam and Slobo, the presidents of Iraq and Yugoslavia,
are the true architects of the new world order": "It is largely in reaction to
them that, by a series of improvisations, the vaunted 'international community'
has defined itself." They have obliged the United States--which, after winning
the Cold War, would have happily left the rest of the world to its own
devices--to continue with "the tiresome business of threatening and using
force, deploying troops in faraway places, and cobbling together coalitions."
And they had presented the rest of the world with constant dilemmas: "to demand
more U.S. leadership or less, to tag along behind the coalition or to risk
being labelled accomplices of evil."
The legend
of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's triumph in Baghdad underwent further
embellishment Wednesday when Le Monde devoted a whole page to a detailed
account of the negotiations, attributing a crucial role to Annan's Lanceros de
Cohiba cigars. It said that after a sticky first half-hour with the Iraqi
president, Annan took two cigars from his pocket and offered him one. Saddam
looked him straight in the eye, hesitated for "long" seconds, and then said, "I
only smoke with people in whom I have confidence." A moment later, he accepted
the cigar.
The Times of London Wednesday published a front-page
photograph of J. Paul Getty Jr. in top hat and tails outside Buckingham Palace,
where he had been invested with a knighthood by the queen. The newly created
Sir Paul, son of the late Texas oil billionaire, recently became a British
citizen, and he told the newspaper that he felt "very proud to be British" when
he heard "God Save the Queen" being played. "It's my national anthem now," he
said. In an editorial, the Times said that after giving away about $320
million to British cultural and other institutions over the past 15 years,
Getty had "imperceptibly become an English institution himself." It concluded,
"This eccentric knight is a model billionaire."
The Times also
announced that its Independent National Directors, a body established when
Rupert Murdoch bought the paper to ensure he didn't interfere in its editorial
policies, had rejected allegations that he had suppressed criticism of the
Chinese regime. But Murdoch came under attack from U.S.-based Chinese dissident
Wei Jingsheng, who told the Daily Telegraph in an interview Wednesday that Murdoch didn't
need to kowtow to China to protect his business interests there. "He has at his
disposal a wide-ranging publicity and propaganda organ," Wei said. "The Chinese
Communist Party should be afraid of him, and not the other way round." The next
day Wei was reported as having called British foreign secretary Robin Cook
"two-faced" and a "coward" for failing to join him in a photo call and
allegedly keeping him away from the press. Despite foreign office denials, the
Daily
Telegraph in an editorial Thursday said Cook "showed every
sign of being browbeaten by the Chinese leadership and dazzled by the potential
of its market. So much for an ethical foreign policy."
Leading Thursday with the
news of its acquisition by Tony O'Reilly, former chairman of H.J. Heinz Co. and
owner of the Irish Independent Newspapers group, the daily Independent of London
said it was adopting, for the first time in Britain, an
American-style editorial system, with an "editor" in charge of news and an
"editor-in-chief" in charge of comment. One of the board members of a new
parent company, Independent Newspapers UK, is Ben Bradlee, former executive
editor of the Washington Post (Chris Patten, former governor of Hong Kong and
Murdoch nemesis, is also a member). Bradlee said he believed the system would
work in Britain. "The principle is well established in the US and I believe it
makes for very healthy journalism," he said.
