Bad Heart of Darkness
USA
Today leads with the manufacturer's withdrawal from the market of a
widely used heart drug. (The story is flagged on the Wall Street Journal front and runs inside at the Washington Post and the New York
Times .) The heart attack death of Nigerian dictator, Sani Abacha, leads
the NYT and is also the top non-local story at the WP . (Abacha
also gets front-page space at the Los Angeles
Times .) The $32 billion bank merger of Wells Fargo and Norwest leads at
the LAT , which also features top of the page pictures of the three
remaining Beatles together in London at the Linda McCartney memorial service.
It was their first joint public appearance since the "rooftop session" at Abbey
Road in 1969.
Other stories getting lots of front and front-section space include: the
federal anti-trust suit brought against Intel for allegedly withholding
technical data from such companies as Digital and Compaq as punishment for not
licensing their technology to the chip maker; the decision of the European
Union--and soon, it's reported, of the U.S. too--to ban new investments in
Serbia and to freeze its foreign assets as a sanction against Serbia for its
latest military actions against Albanians in Kosovo; and the agreement by Honda
and Ford to pay $24.9 million in civil fines to settle Justice Department and
EPA claims that the companies arranged for cars to emit substantially more
pollutants than they are supposed to. There is very little explanation in these
Honda/Ford stories about why the companies did this. USAT and the
WP say Ford did it to improve fuel economy, but don't really get into
Honda's motivation. And the other papers miss the explanatory boat regarding
both companies.
Roche Laboratories pulled its heart drug Posicor off the world market Monday
because of potentially lethal interactions with numerous other medications. The
FDA, says USAT , has received reports of 24 deaths that may be related to
the medication, which is used for chest pain and high blood pressure by about
400,000 patients worldwide--200,000 in the U.S.
The NYT says the death of Nigeria's Abacha, whose five-year reign was marked by his
brutal suppression of political opponents and who had no designated successor,
initially prompted hopes among Nigerian political exiles and some world leaders
that Nigeria, which had a flourishing democracy briefly in the early 1980s,
might restore civilian government. But it was not to be--within hours, the
dictator's defense chief was sworn in as the new leader, and for the moment
anyhow, the democrats and other political prisoners remain behind bars and in
some cases, under death sentences.
The LAT reports that the merger of San Francisco-based Wells Fargo
with Minneapolis-based Norwest will create the nation's seventh largest bank
and the largest one based west of the Mississippi. The story carries warnings
from consumer activists of higher fees and poorer service, but also notes that
the deal could be an economic boost to California, because the combined
operation will be headquartered in San Francisco.
USAT 's news section "cover story," about the NRA's attempt to go
mainstream via Charlton Heston's image, is illustrated by the same loopy
photograph of Heston that the NYT used when it did that story
yesterday.
With everybody else giving President Clinton travel advice these days, the
NYT 's Thomas Friedman can't resist following suit. On your way home from
China, he writes, stop in Iran. His reasoning is pretty simple: "Looked at a
map of South Asia lately? China's got the bomb. India's got the bomb.
Pakistan's got the bomb. Let's see, who's next to Pakistan...Iran."
The NYT and WP report that the Secretary of Defense, William
Cohen, announced yesterday that the Pentagon will investigate allegations made
Sunday by a Time/CNN report that in a 1970 raid on a village in Laos, U.S.
troops and aircraft used nerve gas on suspected American defectors living
there. If the Cohen investigation is for real it will extend to Bobby Garwood,
the last American soldier to come home alive from the Indochina war. The SECDEF
should ask Garwood if he believes he was ever targeted for death by U.S. forces
while at large in the jungle. And here's an interesting question today's
newspaper accounts don't address: Why would there be a commando raid to
kill American defectors instead of bringing them back to be
court-martialed? It might seem that this oddity proves the raids never
happened. But think about it--if the American soldiers were in Laos in 1970,
they were part of Nixon's "secret war," which had a chance to remain secret
only if...they didn't come back from it.
