On a Wing and a Prayer
The New York Times
and Los Angeles
Times lead with the U.S.-China trade agreement (the NYT
goes with a three-row, three-column headline)--a story off-leaded by the Washington Post and
fronted (below the fold) by USA Today . The papers run packages of stories covering
all the angles--the diplomatic intrigue, the technical details, etc.--of the
breakthrough accord, which effectively lets China into the World Trade
Organization. One detail: China will let U.S. firms buy stakes in Chinese
telecom companies, but only up to 50 percent ("The forces of darkness in the
Chinese telecom bureaucracies are going to have to slink under the rocks
again," the LAT quotes one exultant pro-trade lobbyist). President Clinton must
now shepherd the pact through Congress; passage is likely but not certain. (To
read Moneybox's take on what the WTO accord means for the Internet--and what
the Internet might mean for China--click here.)
USAT and the Post lead with the National Transportation Safety
Board's announcement that EgyptAir 990's cockpit voice recorder indicates foul
play, a story fronted (above the fold) by the NYT and the LAT .
The NTSB did not give any specifics about the contents of the cockpit voice
recorder, but the papers publish leaked details: Just before EgyptAir's
autopilot is turned off, the cockpit door apparently opens and shuts several
times and then a pilot utters what appears to be an Islamic prayer--whether as
an expression of alarm or of suicide is unknown. Seconds later the plane goes
into what appears to be a pilot-induced dive, and soon it appears that another
pilot has re-entered the cockpit and is working at "cross purposes" with the
first. Eventually, someone apparently shuts off the engines. (The Post
story implies that this sequence of events is certain rather than merely
apparent.) The NYT and Post say that Arabic translators did
not notice the religious utterance at first, but the Post says that
when Egyptian-dialect specialists were brought in, they spotted it right away.
All the papers report the NTSB's announcement that it might surrender the
investigation to the FBI. The NYT says that the NTSB offered to step
down yesterday but that the FBI demurred; USAT and the LAT
quote anonymous sources predicting that the transfer will happen today. The
Post says that the NTSB tightened security at its headquarters.
Conspiracy theories abounded in the 1996 crash of TWA 800, the Post
notes, partly because the FBI effectively took control of the investigation and
ran it secretively.
The Post fronts an anonymously sourced report that the U.N. Security
Council is near agreement on a resolution that would suspend the nine-year-old
sanctions against Iraq in exchange for its compliance with international arms
inspections. The proposal would require the Security Council to reaffirm the
suspension policy every 100 days, and any member would, as usual, have a
unilateral veto.
The NYT fronts a long feature on the backlash against ATM fees, which took
form most concretely in last week's ATM-fee prohibition by the San Francisco
and Santa Monica city councils. (In response, California's two largest
banks--Wells Fargo and Bank of America--denied ATM access to non-customers.)
But the NYT fails to report that yesterday a U.S. district court
issued a preliminary injunction against the fee prohibitions--a story off-leaded by the LAT (this same LAT story
runs inside the Post in abbreviated form).
On the Wall Street
Journal opinion page, think-tank scholar Bruce Bartlett mocks would-be
presidential candidate Donald Trump's proposal to eliminate the federal debt by
imposing a one-time, 14.25 percent tax on the net wealth of every American with
over $10 million. To pay off our $5.7 trillion debt at a 14.25 percent rate,
you'd need a tax base of $40 trillion. This, Bartlett notes, is approximately
the net worth of every American (including the businesses they own) and every
nonprofit organization in the country. Even if the 14.25 percent tax was
applied universally--as the numbers would seem to require in order to raise
$5.7 trillion--this would mean taxing university endowments, foundations,
churches, and even the smallest bank accounts. It would force the sale of
trillions of dollars of stock, as owners either paid the tax or hid their
assets. And in the end, Bartlett writes, Congress would likely replace the $229
billion in annual interest payments with new spending.
The NYT , LAT , Post , and Journal report that Al Gore
received an interrogation by Microsoft employees upon visiting the company's
headquarters. Peppered with hostile questions, Gore defended the Justice
Department's lawsuit and insisted that the nation's antitrust laws represent a
"basic American value." "Throughout the session," the Post notes,
"Gore attempted to defuse tension by making jokes, mentioning obscure
scientific theories and repeatedly announcing his Web site address." Only the
LAT and Journal report that Gore nonetheless received a
standing ovation when he left. Afterwards, Gore dropped in on Today's Papers.
Well, that's not entirely correct, but he did stop by the offices of
Slate
--where his daughter Karenna worked several
years ago--to write a diary of his day at Microsoft. To read it, click here.
(The vice president, it should be noted, missed his deadline.)
From the NYT 's EgyptAir story:
Transportation investigators also stressed that they had not yet
synchronized the voice tape with the flight data recorder tape, which would
record events occurring on the airplane and could put the statements in
context. For instance, a prayer being said after the plane began plummeting so
fast that passengers were rendered weightless would not be suspicious.
From the Post 's EgyptAir story:
The key to understanding the sequence of events was that the safety board
laboratory was able to correlate the exact timing on the cockpit voice recorder
and the flight data recorder. They therefore knew exactly when the troubling
words were uttered and when the door was opened, in relation to the plane's
dive.
