Principals Make Out
The Washington Post , Los Angeles
Times and USA Today all lead with the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling that
school districts may not be held responsible for sexual relations between
teachers and students unless school officials know about and fail to stop the
activity. The New York Times
makes the school ruling its off-lead but goes its own way by leading with the
Clinton administration's order of sweeping new protections for Medicare
recipients that will require private health plans treating them to guarantee
access to specialists, the provision of translators when needed and medical
record confidentiality. The order also grants Medicare beneficiaries the right
to obtain information about the financial condition of a private heath plan and
about how its doctors are paid.
USAT notes that the Court's school decision will make it much harder
for student victims of sexual abuse and harassment to win damages. The
LAT adds that this will be true even at schools that fail to establish
sexual harassment policies and fail to give students a way to complain about
abuses. The NYT reports that in his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens
said the decision gives school districts an incentive not to take steps to
protect students. The Times lead editorial says the decision "perversely
deprived" students and their families of an effective legal remedy. The
WP best communicates the scope of the ruling by eschewing in its lead sentence
the generality of "sexual abuse" ( LAT ) and "sexual relations"
( USAT ) in favor of the concreteness of referring to students who are
"sexually taunted, groped or harassed." Everybody points out that the Court
will be ruling soon on the similar question of employer responsibilities
regarding supervisors' sexual harassment of workers in a job setting. But there
is another bit of context missing from all accounts: what responsibilities the
law currently assigns to school districts with regard to other sorts of teacher
misconduct.
In a story that's sure to develop in the days ahead, the WP off-lead
reports that U.N. investigators have evidence that before the Gulf War,
Iraq put nerve gas into missile warheads.
The USAT and NYT fronts report that the painkiller Duract is
off the market after being implicated in the deaths of four patients and in the
liver damage suffered by eight others. The story is also flagged in the WSJ's
front-page news box and runs inside at the WP . The NYT says the
FDA pulled the drug while USAT , the Wall Street Journal and the WP say the drug's
manufacturer took the action. The papers all observe this is the latest in a
string of prescription drug recalls, raising the issue of whether such drugs
are now being allowed to come to market too fast.
The LAT front reports that at a time when South Korea has been taking
a softer line regarding North Korea, a midget North Korean submarine of the
sort often used in spy missions has been captured off the South Korean coast.
The story runs inside at the NYT and WP .
With stories inside, the WP and NYT report that Russia has agreed to sell India two commercial nuclear power
reactors. The State Department has already complained to the Russian
government.
According to the WSJ main "Politics and Policy" piece, one of
President Clinton's chief goals for his upcoming nine-day China trip, the first
by a U.S. president since the Tiananmen Square massacre, is to get Americans
back home to see via the television coverage that a changing modern China can
be their ally and best customer. That coverage, observes the Journal ,
will be beamed by the very Chinese-launched U.S. satellites at the center of
the latest Clinton scandal.
The WP reports that a legal tussle between a Washington, D.C.
bookstore and Kenneth Starr over a subpoena of records of Monica Lewinsky's
purchases there has been avoided: Lewinsky has agreed to provide the information to Starr.
This is not, notes the Post , the first time Lewinsky has cooperated with
the independent counsel. She previously allowed her apartment to be searched
and provided handwriting samples.
According to the Journal 's "Work Week" column, a survey indicates
that more than half of all U.S. doctors feel insecure about their financial
future. On average, the docs surveyed were worth more than half a million
dollars.
