Secrets and Spies
The Los Angeles
Times , USA
Today , and the New
York Times lead with follow-ups on the Los Angeles day-care shootings.
The Washington
Post goes with anonymously sourced reports of Chinese military
plotting against Taiwan, a story fronted by the NYT . The Wall Street Journal places atop its "Worldwide" box the
Energy Department's decision to seek punishment in a botched nuclear-espionage
investigation, a story fronted by USAT and the NYT . All the
papers front countdown stories to Saturday's Iowa straw poll.
Follow-up to the Los Angeles shooting takes different forms. In the
LAT , a four-column headline reveals that suspect Buford Furrow had
considered unloading his weapons at three prominent local Jewish sites: the
Museum of Tolerance, the Skirball Cultural Center, and the University of
Judaism. (The Post also mentions that he scouted three locations.) But
after finding security there too tight, he stumbled upon the North Valley
Jewish Community Center. USAT's follow-up focuses on proposals by
Attorney General Janet Reno for more federal gun regulation. The story fails to
define clearly what Reno actually proposed (it summarizes one of her proposals
as simply, "federal limits on handgun purchases") and never mentions what laws
are on the books already. The NYT details how schools are taking
elaborate precautions against shootings, despite federal reports that
gun-carrying and violence in schools have actually declined this year.
Simulated shootings in schools in Florida and Pennsylvania, for instance, have
featured SWAT teams, helicopters, ersatz pipe bombs, and drama students
sporting fake wounds. The director of a superintendents' lobby group sums up
the mood nicely when he tells the NYT : "Everyone feels the need to do
something, even though no one agrees on what that should be."
The NYT and WP report that Chinese Embassy officials and
visiting military advisers and scholars have hinted that the Chinese government
is considering a blockade of some small Taiwan-controlled islands, a small air
battle, or perhaps an incursion into Taiwanese waters to punish the nation for
its recent talk of independence. Both stories, sourced to "experts" and
"Clinton administration officials," assert that the threat is unlikely but
nonetheless real. The Post says any action would likely occur after an
October Clinton-Jiang Zemin summit in New Zealand. "We have some time to play
with, but we're not out of the woods," an unnamed U.S. source intones
ominously.
The WSJ and USAT report Energy Secretary Bill Richardson's
recommendation that three Los Alamos officials be punished for their failure to
properly investigate espionage allegations against fired employee Wen Ho Lee.
(Since Los Alamos is run by the University of California, Richardson can only
recommend disciplinary action.) The officials, fingered by the agency's
inspector general, were not named, but a "department source" tells
USAT that one of them is former lab director (now senior fellow)
Siegfried Hecker. The WSJ's "Washington Wire" reports that Richardson
will make amends with several DOE whistle-blowers in the espionage scandal who
had been punished rather than rewarded for speaking up. "There was a total
breakdown of the system and there's plenty of blame to go around," Richardson
said.
The NYT publishes a below-the-fold headline that almost reads like
a satirical teaser in The
Onion : "In Intense but Little-Noticed Fight, Allies Have Bombed Iraq
All Year." It seems that over the last eight months, American and British
pilots have fired on more than triple the number of targets attacked in last
December's highly publicized Iraqi attack and have flown two-thirds as many
missions as NATO pilots flew against Yugoslavia in 78 days. This is a curious
story: It is hard news reported almost as if it were a trend, and it is pegged
partly to its own absence in the very newspaper in which it now appears.
An LAT "Column One" story describes how the spouse of nearly every
2000 presidential candidate was pulled along reluctantly, albeit willingly:
"Gore is Mrs. Gung-Ho; McCain is Mrs. Stay-At-Home; Quayle is Mrs.
Experience-With-Gritted-Teeth; Bush is Mrs. Traditional-Yet-Cautious; and
Bradley is Ms. Modern-But-Naïve-About-Politics." And the one male spouse? "Dole
is Mr. Foot-In-The-Mouth."
