Nobel Committee High on Grass
The New York Times
and Los
Angeles Times lead with the radiation leak from an uncontrolled chain
reaction at a uranium processing plant not far from Tokyo that hospitalized
three workers, contaminated dozens more, and forced 300,000 nearby residents to
stay indoors. The Washington Post seems to think that George W. Bush's
criticism of GOP budget proposals that defer tax credits to low-income earners
is more important--it runs that story across five columns at the very top while
tucking the nuke puke underneath. Nobody else fronts Bush. USA Today
goes with the Census Bureau's finding that household earnings reached record
(inflation-adjusted) levels last year--a median of $38,900. The new stats
indicate particularly strong income surges in the South and the suburbs and
among children and Hispanics. The LAT fronts the story, while the
WP and NYT stuff it. Most of the income headlines muddy the real
news point somewhat. The LAT says CENSUS REPORTS BROAD U.S. GAINS IN
INCOME and the NYT (online at least) has RISING INCOMES LIFT 1.1 MILLION
OUT OF POVERTY. The WP , seizing on the 13.5 million poor children cited
in the report, somehow manages to come up with a headline saying in part that
POVERTY CHANGES LITTLE. USAT bigprints it best: POVERTY AT 20-YEAR LOW.
The LAT and WP front and the NYT reefers Gunter Grass'
winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Japanese accident was caused, say the papers, when too much
uranium was poured into a purification tank. (This is not the only simple
mistake leading to a big one in the news today: the papers all cover NASA's
admission that the reason the Mars Orbiter was lost last week was that some
engineers did calculations for the mission using pounds and feet, while others
used the metric system.) The consensus among the papers is that the Japanese
mishap is nowhere near as environmentally threatening as either the meltdown at
Three Mile Island or the far worse Chernobyl catastrophe. However, the
LAT quotes a nuclear safety expert saying that the three most seriously
hurt workers may have received more radiation than their counterparts at
Chernobyl, and maybe as much as the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
The NYT emphasizes that the incident may well have political, as well
as real, fallout, noting that Japanese commentators are already predicting a
strong public opinion backlash against industry and the government, which was
seen by many Japanese as responding to yesterday's events rather slowly.
All the papers report that in response to yesterday's AP story about an
alleged U.S. massacre of Korean civilians in the early days of the Korean war,
fronted by the NYT and LAT , the Pentagon has promised to
undertake a thorough investigation. The WP front-pager on this states
that for five years, the U.S. Army "brushed aside" these very allegations, and
the LAT's front effort calls the military's current stance an "abrupt
about-face."
Only the WP fronts Russia's launching of a major ground offensive
inside Chechnya yesterday (the NYT reefers it). The Russian government
has cloaked the operation in secrecy, saying only that ground fighting is
already underway, and indeed, says the Post , that some Russian troops
had been fighting just inside the Chechen border for two weeks. The Wall Street Journal reports that in a speech today, State's
Strobe Talbott will urge Russia to end "indiscriminate" bombing in Chechnya and
to ease off on roundups of Chechens in Moscow, while offering U.S. help in
combating Russia's growing terrorism problem.
The WP and NYT report inside that despite the likelihood of a
presidential veto, the House yesterday passed a bill that would establish new
criminal penalties for anyone who injures or harms a fetus while committing
another federal offense. The politically loaded aspect of the bill, explain the
papers, is whether or not it establishes a measure of legal standing for
fetuses that could be used to chip away at Roe v. Wade.
The WP reports inside on the Jesse Ventura interview in the newest
Playboy . In the interview, Ventura takes a Nietszchean line on organized
religion, calling it a sham and crutch for the weak, and says the charges
against naval aviators in the Tailhook scandal were "much ado about nothing."
The comments were condemned by the Reform party chairman, but were defended by
the party's Minnesota chairman.
A letter to the WP points out a worthwhile approach to the current
gun imbroglio that's not been mentioned much: the availability of increasingly
effective non-lethal weapons, such as electronic stun devices and chemical
sprays, effective at much greater ranges than earlier versions. The writer is
absolutely right and his observations might have carried more rhetorical impact
if the paper had told readers via an ID line that he is a former government
researcher in this area.
The WP reports on, but hardly seems to notice the irony in, the
Office of Thrift Supervision's decision to budget $50,000 in government funds
so that OTS employees can in the coming months celebrate the office's tenth
anniversary at various outings, including a jazz brunch cruise down the
Potomac. The paper quotes an OTS official saying, "We consider it reasonable
considering what OTS employees have gone through in those 10 years," but never
bothers to tell the reader what those hardships were.
