You Auto Know
Both the Los Angeles Times and New York Times
lead with the first moves of Pakistan's new military leader: his announcement
of a unilateral pull-back of troops from India's border and the establishment
of a combined military-civilian council to run the country. The Washington Post fronts Pakistan but goes instead with the
hard line the White House is taking with Congress on spending (made clear by
staffers on Sunday chat shows), which will include President Clinton's veto
today of a $12.7 billion foreign aid bill and his refusal to sign other key
money bills until Republicans assure the protection of the Social Security
surplus. USA
Today plays Pakistan on Page 8 and leads with the changing taste of car
thieves. According to an insurance industry report out today, while the Honda
Accord and Toyota Camry remain the cars most often stolen, pickups, minivans,
and SUVs are moving up fast. The story also reports that BMWs and Mercedes
Benzes are not prime theft targets (there aren't enough people in the market
for them), and that car theft has been trending down since 1991. Nobody else
fronts the USAT or WP leads.
The WP off-lead is slugged "HIS TERM FADING, A WISTFUL CLINTON
LOOSENS UP," but it doesn't really deliver much about President Clinton's inner
thoughts. With these possible exceptions: 1) Clinton remains concerned about
what he believes is Al Gore's troubled campaign organization, and 2) For
several months after the impeachment trial, an air of sadness hung over Clinton
(or so says one unnamed former adviser).
USAT and the LAT front stories about the latest FBI crime statistics, released yesterday. The
USAT effort emphasizes the drop in the murder rate--6.3 per 100,000
Americans, the lowest since LBJ was president. The LAT stresses the drop
in juvenile crime--although its discussion seems to take a leap since the story
mostly reports on declining numbers of juvenile arrests and hence doesn't
address the possibility that increasing numbers of juveniles are committing
crimes but just aren't getting caught. An inside NYT story goes high
with the drop in gun-related felonies. And the inside WP piece dwells
mostly on the absence of a clear explanation for these decreases, while also
noting two retrograde movements: There hasn't been a significant crime drop
among white suburban and rural teen-agers, and cities between 10,000 and 24,999
have experienced a murder increase.
USAT uses its front-page "cover story" to go long with a flight safety piece:
about how the failure of a radar-based altitude warning system was probably the
cause of four air crashes (total death toll: 246) that federal investigators
have been attributing to pilot error. The story says that the system has failed
widely, including along some of the nation's busiest airport approach
paths.
A WP story makes a powerful case for wondering why the U.S. is
backing a peace accord in Sierra Leone that provides a general amnesty for
rebel war criminals and indeed, will put eight of them in the country's
cabinet. After all, notes the Post , the rebels there routed 2 million
people from their homes--twice as many as in Kosovo--and are ultimately
responsible for the deaths of 20,000. And why, pray tell, is this story on Page
13? Was that story on the Post front about how some commuters actually
like to commute really more important?
In a Wall Street Journal commentary, Sen. Jesse Helms defends
the Senate's defeat of the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. His key
claim: Nuclear arms are coming into the hands of more and more countries not
because of the absence of such a treaty but because of the Clinton
administration's failed nonproliferation policies. "This administration," Helms
writes, "in its shameful effort to curry favor with Silicon Valley executives,
has loosened export controls on supercomputers, putting them in Russian nuclear
weapons factories. The administration has decontrolled satellite launches,
helping China improve its nuclear missile force. The administration has looked
the other way as Russia has been repeatedly caught assisting both Iran and Iraq
in their drive to build weapons of mass destruction."
A WP item mentions in passing that since 1990 Bill Moyers has been
drawing $200,000 a year from an organization trying to change campaign finance
laws, which Moyers describes as having turned politics into "an arms race for
money." Here in a nutshell is the difference between a politician and a
journalist: If a politician tries to get money out of politics, it's a career
risk. If a journalist does, it's a career.
