Terrifying Turkish Temblors
The earthquake in Turkey takes center stage as the death toll
skyrockets--over 2,100 dead, over 13,000 injured, and over 10,000 missing. The
New York Times ,
which reefered initial quake reports yesterday, goes with a four-column
headline. All the papers lead with the quake except USA Today , which off-leads
it. Instead, USAT goes with the FDA's decision to prohibit over
200,000 people from giving blood in order to preclude a theoretical risk that
transfusions could spread mad cow disease--a story fronted by no other paper.
The ban affects anybody who spent over six cumulative months in England,
Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Channel Islands from
Jan. 1, 1980, to Dec. 31, 1996. The American Red Cross said the restriction
will decrease the blood supply by 2.2 percent per year.
The 45-second temblor struck at 3 a.m. Tuesday in the populous region
surrounding Istanbul. Turkish seismologists said it measured 6.7 on the Richter
scale, but American seismologists said it may have peaked at 7.8. (This is a
bigger difference than it seems: The Richter scale is logarithmic, not linear,
so a 7.8 is more than 10 times as strong as a 6.7. None of the papers explains
this. To learn how the Richter scale works, click here; to
learn what damage will typically result from a given Richter reading, click
here.) Some papers report that the quake may be downgraded to a
7.4. There have been more than 250 aftershocks.
The Los Angeles
Times notes that so many people died in the Turkish city of
Izmut--located 65 miles east of Istanbul and perched over the epicenter--that
the mayor turned the local ice skating rink into a backup morgue. Because it
took government rescue teams nine hours to arrive there, survivors at first
attempted to dig out victims with pickaxes and sledgehammers. (The LAT
and the Washington
Post appear to be the only papers with reporters in Izmut, and it
shows.) Only USAT notes that a Turkish quake in 1939 killed 40,000
people. (Note: USAT calls yesterday's temblor "one of the worst
earthquakes this century," but what does this mean? Do they mean in Turkey or
the world? Do they mean fatalities or the magnitude of the shockwaves?)
The NYT and LAT front the announcement by former Russian
Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov that he will head a center-left coalition
designed to win the December parliamentary elections and put forth a
presidential candidate. The coalition, called Fatherland-All-Russia, was
created two weeks ago by the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov. With Primakov's
support, analysts now expect the coalition to win the parliament--now
controlled by the Communists--and the presidency--now controlled by the
outgoing Boris Yeltsin, who last week chose new Prime Minister Vladimir Putin
as his preferred successor. The Fatherland-All-Russia presidential candidate
will be either Primakov--whom Yeltsin fired as prime minister three months
ago--or Luzhkov.
The Wall Street Journal and the Post report that defense
experts appointed by the Indian government have drafted a proposal outlining
India's nuclear weapons policy. India would never be the first to strike, and
it would retaliate only against a nuclear power that had used nuclear weapons
against it. The proposal also envisions a large nuclear command-and-control
system consisting of land-, sea-, and submarine-based missiles, and it would
limit nuclear strike authority to the prime minister or his designate. Experts
speculated that the announcement of the proposal--which cannot become policy
until after parliamentary elections later this year--was aimed at warning
Pakistan against a first strike and at reassuring the world of India's sense of
nuclear responsibility.
The LAT fronts a story documenting unexpected spin-off drugs from
AIDS research. Many doctors have long criticized the research as
disproportionate to actual suffering--when compared to more common diseases
such as cancer and Alzheimer's, for instance--but the advances in virology,
microbiology, and immunology brought about by the research have now led to
several non-AIDS-related medicines. These drugs--such as a new flu treatment
and a valuable treatment for hepatitis B--have been effective against many
chronic viral diseases, historically among the hardest to cure.
The NYT gives above-the-fold treatment to allegations by the former
counterintelligence director of Los Alamos that the espionage investigation of
Wen Ho Lee is racist. It waits until the seventh paragraph to credit the
Post , which broke this story yesterday. For its part, the
Post does not even mention yesterday's NYT's report on the
theft of $1 billion in international relief to Bosnia.
Correction: On Aug. 12, "Today's Papers" stated that a NYT article
on Warren Beatty's possible presidential bid did not mention the movie
Bulworth . It did. TP regrets the error.
Several months ago,
Slate's "Chatterbox" columnist
wrote about the
extremes to which the WSJ will go to give a story an economic
spin. In this spirit, the lead paragraph of the Journal's earthquake
article merits quoting in full: "A powerful 45-second earthquake cut a swath
through Turkey's industrial heartland, killing thousands of people, shutting
businesses, wrecking major power lines and jolting national confidence just as
the economy showed signs of leaving 1999's recession behind."
