| Early Christmas shopping was up 20 percent from last year, sparking economic jubilation on front pages across the country. "Crowded Stores Buoy Hopes of Retailers," crowed the Los Angeles Times. Not everyone was happy. "Seasonal products and decorations ... are about to clog shop aisles and windows like bad cholesterol," grumbled a USA Today editorial. On the opposite page, an op-ed headline suggested, "Kwanzaa alternative to commercialism."(posted 12/3) |
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| Attorney General Janet Reno rejected a Republican request for an independent counsel to investigate Democratic fund raising. Reno said she had yet to find "specific, credible evidence" implicating a high-ranking government official (i.e., higher than John Huang)--the legal requirement for an outside counsel. Instead, she created a Justice Department criminal task force to look into the matter. Saturday's New York Times criticized Reno, but the Sunday-morning TV pundits opined that the independent-counsel system had already been irretrievably politicized. Republican senators called Reno's decision "suspicious," but, cheered on by the Washington Post, vowed to get at the facts through congressional hearings. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that in a 1993 letter, Indonesian magnate Mochtar Riady urged Clinton to normalize relations with Vietnam. The early spin was that the letter didn't prove a quid pro quo, but was yet another example of documents sat on by the stonewalling Clinton White House. (posted 12/3) |
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Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic cracked down on political opponents after two weeks of escalating public demonstrations. The protests were over Milosevic's annulment of municipal elections that appeared to have been won by opposition parties. Police arrested several protesters, and threatened the rest with unspecified "consequences." The short-term betting favors Milosevic, on the grounds that the working class is too distracted, ignorant, and cowardly to join the opposition. The long-term betting favors a bloody ouster of Milosevic, in the Serbian tradition. Idealists (e.g., Anthony Lewis in the New York Times) accused the Clinton administration of idly standing by while the Communist tyrant oppresses his people. More skeptical news reports indicate that the opposition leaders are no angels. Western diplomats are quoted "privately" saying that Milosevic is easier to reform, because he's trying to undo his reputation as a butcher. (posted 12/3) | | A panel of economists appointed by Congress is expected to propose a new inflation index to replace the Consumer Price Index. The new index will reduce the official inflation rate, thereby trimming annual cost-of-living increases in Social Security and other federal benefits. This increasingly looks like the way Democrats and Republicans will agree to prune entitlements, while sharing the cover of a technical correction. A "Week in Review" piece in the Sunday New York Times observed that if the lower inflation numbers are applied to the economic statistics of the past couple of decades, the perceived stagnation of real wages turns out to have been a healthy increase. (posted 12/3) |
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Deathwatch: Tiny Tim perished, apparently from a heart attack. "He died singing 'Tiptoe Thru' the Tulips,' " reported his widow. The New York Times remembered him as "a romantic in pursuit of a beautiful dream," but noted that his career tailspin had forced him to move back in with his mother. Abortion-clinic killer John Salvi asphyxiated himself in prison; his parents and lawyers portrayed him as the victim of an "inhuman" corrections system. Mother Teresa suffered a near-fatal heart attack, checked into the hospital for the fourth time this year, received an emergency angioplasty, staged a surprising recovery (attributed by doctors to her "spiritual strength"), suffered another setback, then improved slightly, but remained in critical condition with chronic lung and kidney trouble. The Los Angeles Times reported that her followers "were reconciled to the prospect of [her] death."(posted 12/3) | | O.J. Simpson was cross-examined in his civil trial. He failed to explain the cuts on his hand or the blood in his Bronco, and said he had never struck or beaten Nicole Simpson. He further suggested that Nicole might have caused the red marks on her face by picking at pimples, and that she might have split her own lip by falling down. News accounts agreed that Simpson's testimony contradicted Nicole's diary, his own phone records, notes from his interview with a defense consultant, and a photo of him wearing Bruno Magli shoes. (Simpson said the photo was real but the shoes depicted in it were a "fraud.") The New York Times called it "potentially the most damaging day yet of his civil trial." (For S |
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LATE's take, see Harry Shearer's latest dispatch from Camp O.J. by the Sea.) O.J. pundits explained that plaintiffs' attorney Daniel Petrocelli had learned from prosecutors' mistakes in the criminal trial and was correcting them, chiefly by presenting his evidence more quickly and selectively. But the Los Angeles Times' Howard Rosenberg scoffed that pundits had also written off Simpson in the early days of the criminal trial. Moreover, several legal experts called the judge's leniency toward Petrocelli (e.g., allowing him to mention Simpson's failure on a lie-detector test) good grounds for an appeal if Simpson loses. (posted 11/26)| In an interview with Time, Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested that she would like a "formal role" in guiding the implementation of the welfare reforms President Clinton reluctantly signed into law earlier this year. She stipulated that she wasn't proposing anything like her dominant role in the 1993-'94 health-care debate. Television networks and pundits pounced on the story anyway. The three standard lines of analysis were: 1) The first lady would try to tug her husband back to the perilous left; 2) The president and his aides don't want her to take a public role, because she'll become a lightning rod; and 3) Republicans are secretly rooting for her to take a public role, for both the above reasons. (posted 11/26) |
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| Chinese President Jiang Zemin met with President Clinton in the Philippines and agreed to visit America, probably next year. It would be the first state visit since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Clinton aides touted the state-visit agreement as a major step forward, and averred that their man had spoken firmly against China's abuse of human rights. American reporters and analysts concluded, with equal unanimity, that Clinton had accomplished nothing. Reaction was divided on one point: Some accused Clinton of selling out human rights and nuclear-arms reduction (China is a major nuclear proliferator) for free trade, while others accused Clinton of selling out all three principles for a photo op. Editorialists grumbled that Clinton had come off as a wimp and a patsy; Sino-pundits called the shortsighted, conniving American president no match for the farsighted, conniving Chinese. Meanwhile, in its latest attempt to prove its critics right, China threatened trade sanctions against Disney on the grounds that a movie being co-produced by a Disney subsidiary "is intended to glorify the Dalai Lama, so it is an interference in China's internal affairs."(posted 11/26) |
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Three men hijacked an Ethiopian airliner and forced an emergency landing in the ocean that killed nearly two-thirds of the 175 people on board. The story, which played on American front pages for two days, featured several peculiar angles. The hijackers used the plane's safety devices--an ax and a fire extinguisher--as their principal weapons. They demanded that the plane be flown from Africa to Australia, purportedly "to make history," and refused to believe that there wasn't enough fuel on board to get there. Early reports said two of the hijackers were in custody; later reports indicated that police had grabbed the wrong guys. (posted 11/26) | | CIA officer Harold James Nicholson was arrested and charged with spying for Russia. He allegedly sold the identities and profiles of new agents for $120,000. Though the highest-ranking CIA official ever accused of espionage, Nicholson appears to have done less damage than Aldrich Ames. The CIA and FBI touted this arrest as proof that they had fixed the bureaucratic bungling that had allowed Ames to go undetected for six years. But editorialists said Nicholson had made the investigators' job comically easy (he even climbed into a car with diplomatic plates registered to the Russian Embassy) and, even so, hadn't been caught and busted soon enough. Commentators also debated whether the mole's exposure proved Russia was still a duplicitous enemy. The New York Times offered moral indignation; the Washington Post offered cynical nonchalance. (posted 11/22) |
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| Texaco's PR troubles eased, while its legal peril deepened. The company settled a racial-discrimination lawsuit for $176 million, including a raise for every black employee. Reportedly the biggest payment made in such a case, it is hardly a nick in Texaco's annual revenue of more than $30 billion. Black commentators (e.g., DeWayne Wickham of USA Today) praised Texaco's chairman for acting quickly, called the boycott of independent Texaco gas stations misguided, and argued that the crusade against corporate racism should move on to more egregious culprits, such as Avis and Circuit City. Meanwhile, though, the FBI filed charges against former Texaco executive Richard Lundwall, in what many saw as a maneuver to pressure him for new leads in the evidence-destruction criminal case against Texaco. One juicy discovery: Lundwall apparently released the tapes of the now-infamous "jelly bean" meeting to punish Texaco for downsizing him. (posted 11/22) |
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| The federal government decided to allow car owners to disconnect their air bags, which, according to government estimates, are killing one child per month and are on track to kill one child per week as more and more cars feature them. (The deaths are generally caused by the child's impact against the bag, or against the seat on the rebound.) The decision was viewed as a vindication of automakers, who warned of such injuries many years ago; the Wall Street Journal touted the "humbling retreat" of former air-bag evangelist Joan Claybrook. Auto-safety advocates and editorialists insisted that air bags save many more people than they kill, and worried that the backlash will go too far. Everyone agreed that the solution is technology: Automakers favor slower-inflating air bags, while consumer advocates want new gizmos to detect the size of each passenger and adjust the inflation speed accordingly. (posted 11/22) |
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| Straws in the wind: It's been a bad month for Communists, with election defeats in Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Romania, on top of prior losses in Russia and the Czech Republic. Several newspapers reported that marijuana is becoming more potent and more widely available. USA Today says the telecommuting revolution has fizzled, in part because office teamwork is becoming more important. The New York Times reported that HMOs, rationing, and other medical-insurance nightmares conjured up in 1994 by enemies of the Clinton health-care plan are coming to pass anyway. A group of former independent counsels (a k a special prosecutors), including Watergate's Archibald Cox and Iran-Contra's Lawrence Walsh, agreed that independent counsels are being appointed too indiscriminately. Nielsen ratings indicate that young Americans are giving up television in favor of Web surfing and other pastimes; the television networks are challenging Nielsen's data and threatening to create a rival ratings service. (posted 11/26) |
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Photograph of Slobodan Milosevic from Reuters; photograph of Mother Teresa by Kamal Kishore/Reuters; photograph of Red Crescent workers by Antony Njuguna/Reuters
--Compiled by William Saletan and the editors of S LATE.
