How Now Dow?
USA
Today and the Washington Post lead with the Dow plunge on jitters about
the spread of the Asian economic crisis. The New York Times
and Los
Angeles Times go with NATO's show-of-force flights over Yugoslavia.
According to USAT and the Post , what touched off the latest
Dow-nturn was the yen's sinking to an eight-year low against the dollar. This
is bad, explain the papers, because it could prolong the Asian slowdown by
making exports from neighboring countries and the U.S. more expensive. But like
all stock market moves, this one is overdetermined: USAT also cites a
continued string of bad quarterly earnings reports. The WP 's story
emphasizes growing governmental concern, quoting Tony Blair's assessment that
the West's economies "will not emerge from this turmoil without being affected
by it," and a senior U.S. official's revelation that communications between
Washington and Tokyo "are getting testier, and there is pessimism here about
whether Japan has any conception about how to stop digging the hole it's in."
The Post explains that the U.S. thinks Japan's banking system needs a
radical revamp to get out from under hundreds of billions of bad loans, but
fears that the Japanese are reluctant to allow the widespread bank failures and
loan foreclosures this would entail. The paper adds that the Chinese press is
making similar criticisms of Japan.
The NYT and LAT report that more than 80 NATO warplanes of
varying mission types were involved in a mission that put 68 fighters over Albania for several hours. The
"primary target" of the exercise, says the Times was Slobodan Milosevic,
the Serbian president of Yugoslavia, meaning that the intent was to make it
clear to him that he has to stop the attacks on Albanians in Kosovo province
and start peace talks with them. The paper reports that Milosevic is meeting
with Boris Yeltsin today and that yesterday, in a preparatory 40 minute phone
call with Bill Clinton, Yeltsin said he would express in the meeting a strong
preference for a diplomatic resolution. While this makes it sound as if Yeltsin
is on board with NATO, a separate NYT story inside reports that in a
Moscow meeting, Russia's defense minister bluntly dressed down the Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs over the timing of the air exercises. The Wall Street Journal reports that members of Congress open
to a vigorous NATO/US military response to Kosovo include Republican Senators
Trent Lott, John McCain and Chuck Hagel.
The Times reports that to maximize the show of force to the Serbians,
Albanian officials had asked the NATO aircraft to come in low, and that some
came in as low as 2,000 feet. The paper doesn't point out that this is getting
towards the flight profile involved in that Marine flight that hit the ski
lift, suggesting that such low flying is not without its applications in this
theater of operations and not necessarily a sign of joyriding.
While the other papers' reports of the day's events in and around Albania
emphasize the details of the air activity, the LAT lead instead focuses
on the reactions of the Yugoslavians, who it depicts as "undeterred." The paper
points out in its top paragraphs that state-owned Yugoslavian television called
the flights "an international scandal," and that Milosevic's forces
nevertheless continued their attacks on villages in the Kosovo area, driving
more refugees into Albania. The other papers also tell of the attacks and the
refugees, but not nearly so high in their dispatches. The WP has a
top-of-the-front photo of a long line of the refugees, many of them children,
following a soldier, the whole scene looking like the Pied Piper of
Hamelin.
Sunbeam's decision to fire CEO "Chainsaw Al" Dunlop over the weekend gets a
lot of front-page coverage, inordinate really, given the relative size of the
company. But the LAT front-page piece offers an explanation: the move
signifies the "demise of the slash-and-burn turnarounds of the 90s."
USAT has the best headline: "Chainsaw Al Gets
Cut."
The NYT and WP both run stories inside reporting that in an
interview with a conservative talk show host, Trent Lott called homosexuality a
sin, like alcoholism, kleptomania and sex addiction.
In a NYT op-ed, literary scholar A.N. Wilson points out the shakiness
of the Southern Baptists' biblical justification for their recently announced
doctrine that wives should "graciously submit" to their husbands. Does this
mean, Wilson wonders, thinking of other Bible passages, that the Southern
Baptists condone slavery, or pool all their property, or abjure money lending
or investment? And does the Southern Baptist Convention embrace pacifism?
The WP 's "Reliable Source" column passes along Al Gore's reaction to
yesterday's NBA fab final: ""I tell you, that Michael Jackson is unbelievable,
isn't he? "
In its recent obituary of a legendary cold war spy, the NYT suggested
that he was the conduit via which the U.S. arranged for Vietnamese generals to
assassinate South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Today, a letter
writer who once interviewed the spy claims that to the dead man's
knowledge, U.S. authorities never approved Diem's assassination. The author of
this anti-conspiratorial missive? Oliver Stone.
