Stocking Up
USA Today
leads with the Nasdaq composite index breaking the 3,000 barrier,
a story topping the Wall
Street Journal 's "Business and Finance" box. Most papers note that the
index has risen 50 percent in a year, buoyed by a small group of weighted tech
stocks like Microsoft and Intel. Investors are cautiously optimistic, and
although a Washington Post article says the Federal Reserve is unlikely to raise
interest rates again this year, the other papers note that Wall Street will
wait for October's employment figures (to be released Friday) before reaching a
conclusion. The New York
Times leads with a Justice Department lawsuit against seven utility
companies for pollution violations, a story reefered by
USAT . The government alleges that 32 coal-powered plants
( USAT says 17) in the South and Midwest lack appropriate
pollution-control equipment. Unlike the NYT 's story, the
WSJ 's story mentions prominently the probable cost increases for
consumers. (The Journal asserts, without attribution, that new
pollution controls will cost $100 million per plant; the Times
mentions--at the end of its story--the government's estimate of $3 million to
$4 million per plant.)
The non-local lead at the Los Angeles Times is the State Department's decision to make
the lifting of Serbian sanctions contingent on free elections, rather than on
Slobodan Milosevic's relinquishing power. (The NYT broke this story
yesterday; see yesterday's TP.) The
Post 's non-local lead is a report on the Colombian civil war: The Marxist rebels have
become so well-stocked with Eastern European weapons that the Clinton
administration is requesting an additional $2 billion in aid to the Colombian
government over the next three years (compared to $289 million in FY '99). The
NYT reports inside that the rebels, who began peace talks with
the government on Oct. 24, have started kidnapping journalists with increasing
frequency.
A Seattle workplace massacre is fronted by USAT and reefered by the LAT and
Post . The gunman wore fatigues to a shipyard and shot
four people with a 9mm handgun, killing two. He is still at large. (Note: The
online version of USAT 's story links to: "Discussion: Does media coverage of shooting sprees lead to copycat
crimes?" Furthermore: Does TP 's coverage of media coverage of
shooting sprees lead to copycat crimes?)
USAT and the NYT front the latest radar data from the EgyptAir crash.
After falling suddenly from 33,000 feet to 16,000 feet (and perhaps reaching
the speed of sound), the plane rose like a roller coaster to 24,000 feet and
then dropped again to 10,000 feet, at which point it was "no longer consistent
with a flying airplane," says the National Transportation Safety Board.
The LAT fronts and the NYT reefers (with an above-the-fold photo) stories on the aftermath of
last week's Indian cyclone, which left about 3,000 to 5,000 dead. The two
reporters describe half-naked residents boiling water amid flattened huts, with
bloated bodies--both livestock and human--being picked apart by dogs and crows.
"The winds have plucked off slabs of concrete and left the sidewalks
gap-toothed," the NYT correspondent writes. "Some of the city's dead
have been discovered 20 miles away, carried off in the raging cascades to a
town called Kujang."
The Post fronts, and the LAT and USAT reefer, the
conviction of Aaron McKinney for second-degree murder, kidnapping, and robbery
in the death of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. Although McKinney is eligible for
the death penalty, the lack of a first-degree-murder conviction and Wyoming's
historic reluctance to use the death penalty makes that sentence unlikely.
The LAT runs a fascinating "where-are-they-now?" dispatch from Iran
on the student revolutionaries who stormed the U.S. Embassy 20 years ago today.
Many of these students are now reformists pressing for open, secular
government. And although there will be government-sponsored anti-American
protests today in Tehran, most student remembrances will take the form of muted
calls for "dialogue." "Every revolution at first has special idealistic causes
and aims to change the world," says one of the three students to organize the
takeover. "But in practice, after a while, the revolutionaries will come face
to face with some realities." Now shorn of his revolutionary beard and wearing
rimless Western spectacles, he says that "after 20 years of great difficulties,
including a war imposed on us and poor economy," he and his peers are
"confronting the demand of the people to participate in politics." Meanwhile,
the Post and Times report that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, yesterday denounced pro-U.S. Iranians as "traitors" and "simpletons."
On the Journal 's opinion page, former Reagan administration official
Ken Adelman writes a conventional remembrance of the hostage crisis: President
Carter was weak and Reagan won the day.
Earlier this week the Journal seasoned its editorial page with a
delightful collection of its best "Salt and Pepper" cartoons--a daily
gag-comic begun in 1944. Two of these cartoons distill several generations of
changes in business mores particularly well. In a cartoon from the '50s, a
slightly paunchy middle-aged man, smoking a stogie under an umbrella on the
beach, tells his petite, bikini-clad secretary sitting at his feet with her
typewriter, "Take a postcard, Miss Hobbs." And in a cartoon from the '90s, a
natty, bespectacled young man in an ill-fitting suit says to a professional
woman at a cocktail party, "I'm not one of those nerds who's made a fortune
with some kind of software. I'm just a nerd." From IBM alpha to Microsoft beta
in half a century--we've come a long way, baby.
