The tentative settlement of the UPS strike leads at USA Today and the New York Times, and tops the Wall Street Journal front-page news digest. (The strike development does not make the Washington Post first-edition front, nor oddly, that of the paper with the most time to handle the late-breaking story, the Los Angeles Times.) The WP leads with the widening probe into the NYC police brutality case, which, the paper reports, produced the arrests of two more cops yesterday and which will now include a federal civil rights investigation. The decision by a New Orleans civil jury in the largest breast implant class action suit to date that Dow Chemical Co. knew that silicone was potentially harmful to humans and conspired to withhold relevant safety data from women gets a lot of front-page play today. (An award of actual damages will require the further showing that actual harm resulted.) But it leads the home paper of the Silicone Valley, the LAT.
In a sort of law of conservation of implants, the LAT front also brings word that the FDA has just approved a new kind of surgical implant for hands that is said to allow quadriplegics to grasp and release objects. USAT has this story on its front page too.
USAT reports the UPS deal is for a five-year contract that increases the base wage for part-timers and expands the number of full-time slots yet maintains the current multi-employer pension plan structure, although, according to the NYT, with some changes that officials wouldn’t describe. The WSJ reports that the Teamsters have also just reached a contract with the unionized workers at its Washington headquarters. The workers, who have been handling UPS strike logistics, had been in difficult negotiations with the Teamsters over wages. The paper says relations remain tense at union headquarters despite the accord.
Both the WP and the NYT report that as a result of the NYC brutality scandal, all 38,000 of the city’s cops will be required over the next six months to spend three or four hours meeting with community critics to discuss police behavior. The NYT reports that the family of the beaten man announced plans to file a $55 million lawsuit against the city. The Times coverage seems particularly well wired inside the investigation–it reveals that one of the men arrested yesterday, Thomas Wiese, denied involvement and moreover originally seemed to cooperate in implicating other cops. The paper states that Wiese claimed to be playing with an abandoned puppy elsewhere in the station house when the attack allegedly took place.
The NYT sports section reports that some teams have complained to the National League that the New York Mets are using video cameras positioned at various points around Shea Stadium to steal their signs. The story states something that is probably not known by many a serious baseball fan–namely, that baseball rules do not address sign-stealing, and that no one has ever been ejected from a game or suspended for engaging in the practice.
