The Comical Revolution
In an unusual turn, foreign policy leads at all the papers. The New York Times goes with an
exclusive report that $1 billion in public funds and international aid has been
stolen by Muslim, Serbian, and Croatian authorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The
Washington
Post leads with its exclusive interview of the former chief of
counterintelligence at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who says that the
Chinese did not steal nuclear information from any Department of Energy
facility and that the investigation of alleged Chinese spy and former Los
Alamos employee Wen Ho Lee is racist. USA Today goes with the Russian Duma's confirmation of
Vladimir Putin as Russia's new prime minister--an odd choice considering the
confirmation was a fait accompli . (Putin's confirmation was reefered
by the Post .) The Wall Street Journal puts atop its "Worldwide" box a powerful
earthquake in western Turkey, which killed at least 286 people and injured
2,500. The quake--which was reefered by the NYT --was a 7.8, or nearly as
powerful as the 1906 San Francisco quake. The Los Angeles Times goes with a
dispatch from Kosovo describing the de facto ethnic partition forming in the
province. Serbs, fearing widespread revenge killings, have fled to a northern,
French-controlled city named Kosovska Mitrovika. As Albanians and Serbs are
cleansed from north Kosovo and south Kosovo, respectively, they flee to their
own racial ghettos, despite the efforts of NATO-controlled troops.
An American-led anti-fraud group--part of a civilian bureau set up by the
Dayton peace accords--says that most of the $1 billion in stolen aid was
funneled to the three nationalist parties that govern the partitioned state of
Bosnia-Herzegovina. The report, which was leaked to the NYT , says that
the United Nations, the United States Agency for International Development, and
the Dayton-created civilian bureau have each lost tens of millions of dollars.
The missing funds--nearly a fifth of the total aid received by Bosnia since the
end of the war in 1995--were to have gone to infrastructure repair and
municipal services.
Former Los Alamos official Robert S. Vrooman--whom Energy Secretary Bill
Richardson recently targeted for punishment--says Wen Ho Lee is being
scapegoated because of his race. Vrooman--a former CIA operative--says there is
not a "shred of evidence" against Lee, and that China's stolen nuclear secrets
could have come from any of hundreds of government agencies and defense
contractors outside the Energy Department. Vrooman says the Taiwan-born Lee has
been singled out because he attended two physics conferences in China in 1986
and 1988, but that 13 Caucasian officials from Los Alamos who went to the same
conferences have never been investigated. (To read
Sleate
's take
on racism in the China-DNC campaign-finance scandal, check out Robert Wright's
1997 article "Slanted.")
The Post analyzes the finances of Steve Forbes. Forbes, it turns out,
is rich but not very liquid. He has been cutting down on his father's more
lavish expenses--such as his famous "Capitalist Tool" jet--and is even selling
pop's island in Fiji. ( Fortune magazine valued it at $70 million in
1996, but Forbes is selling it for $10 million.) To match George W. Bush's
campaign spending, the article concludes, Forbes may have to sell part of the
family business, liquidate real estate in his home town in New Jersey, or go
heavily into debt.
Most people living outside the farming states--Today's Papers
included--enjoy a good laugh every four years when presidential candidates go
to Iowa and become disciples of farm subsidies. But the politicians' promises
may not be entirely cynical, because the farmers' pain is real. Fresh evidence:
The WSJ's "Work Week" column reports that calls to mental-health clinics
and hotlines in farming areas have soared with the recent decline in commodity
prices. Calls in Spencer, Iowa, for example, have risen 30 percent this year,
and kids are known to get ulcers worrying about their parents' fate. But wait!
"Work Week" also reports that farmer retraining programs at community colleges
are swelling, and state-subsidized retraining can often be had for less money
than a farmer's annual subsidy.
The LAT's "Column One" feature takes note of the latest youth fashion
trend: bra-strap flaunting. Many young women now purchase bras not as underwear
but as fashion accessories--even choosing bras to match their outfit, or
sporting bras with patterns and prints. Some wear headbands made of faux bra
strap. "Even Mennonite girls are wearing it at church functions," sighs the
editor of Apparel Industry magazine. A textile manufacturer pins down
the appeal: "You can peek but not touch. It's sexually baiting but not in a
conscious way. It's just naughty enough to get away with."
The NYT's China correspondent, Seth Faison, notes the appearance in
China of government-sponsored comic books defaming Li Hongzhi, founder of the
banned sect Falun Gong. One comic book, with the subtle title Li Hongzhi:
The Man and His Evil Deeds , proclaims that "[Hongzhi's] illegal doings
seriously disrupted the normal order of society, causing chaos in people's
social and moral principles." Faison notes that the propaganda comics are
reminiscent of those circulated in the 1970s about the Gang of Four--the
leftist Mao advisers arrested after the chairman's death in 1976. The comic
books, Faison says, "drip with so much political venom that they capture the
labored nature of the campaign [against Hongzhi] in a way that verges on
parody."
