USA Today and the Washington Post lead with fresh details from Friday’s Peruvian air force shootdown of a small aircraft carrying missionaries, two of whom–a mother and her infant daughter–were killed. Both stories say that a Peruvian interceptor opened fire over the objections of CIA personnel aboard a nearby U.S. surveillance plane. The Los Angeles Times leads (and everybody else but USAT fronts) with the conclusion of the Summit of the Americas, with President Bush and other western hemisphere leaders declaring their commitment to increasing free trade (with a super-NAFTA pact by 2005) and leveraging it into cooperation on a number of non-economic fronts including fighting AIDS and drug use, and promoting human rights and democracy. The New York Times fronts both Peru and trade, but leads with a Pentagon advisory group’s conclusion that the Army’s new mobile artillery system should be canceled on the grounds that it’s ill-suited to post-Cold War military needs. The story has one Army officer complaining that such Pentagon review panels include a disproportionate number of Air Force advocates. The story’s headline doesn’t mention, and the body copy waits until the middle to mention, that the panel also gave a thumbs-down to some Navy and Air Force programs.
The Peru coverage says that the U.S. surveillance crew had no role in the shoot-down decision because the U.S. is not in the Peruvian chain of command. A Peruvian aboard the U.S. craft directed a fighter to begin a phased intercept-to-shootdown procedure, which is supposed to include such non-lethal steps as verifying the tail number and firing warning shots. But, according to the coverage, it’s not clear if warning shots were ever fired. The Post emphasizes that the U.S. personnel thought the Peruvians were moving to shootdown far too quickly. The paper says the U.S crew did not talk to the fighter but did radio their concerns to the U.S. Embassy in Lima, Peru. The coverage says the Peruvian aboard the U.S. craft did try to raise the unknown flier on three different frequencies, in Spanish, but got no reply. The Post says there is U.S. videotape and audiotape of the episode, but American officials weren’t prepared to release them. The LAT Peru fronter has the same basic facts as everybody else, but runs a headline distinctly tougher on the CIA: “CIA MISIDENTIFIED PLANE DOWNED IN PERU AS POSSIBLE DRUG RUNNER,” and near the top says the incident was “a stark reminder of the series of targeting errors by the CIA that led a U.S. bomber to mistakenly strike the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 Kosovo conflict in Yugoslavia.”
The WP reports inside, that as part of an attempt by “beleaguered” Bush administration officials to “put their greenest feet forward” on the Sunday chat shows, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christie Whitman said that the Dick Cheney-led energy task force she sits on will not explicitly endorse drilling in Alaska’s Artic National Wildlife Refuge. The Wall Street Journal says that with that comment Whitman became embroiled in another administration environmental “miscue,” and reports that later in the day Whitman “reversed herself,” adding that her spokeswoman says Whitman “doesn’t remember saying it at all.”
The papers report inside that Sunday night in Istanbul a group of armed black-clad men took over a luxury hotel, apparently to protest the Russian military presence in Chechnya. In response hundreds of Turkish cops and soldiers have surrounded the building.
The NYT goes inside with a new revelation from a former Chinese Communist higher-up that tends to confirm details of the government’s 1989 crushing of student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square recently published in The Tiananmen Papers. The new document was written by a one-time top party official while he was in prison, and was, says the Times, smuggled out by an unidentified official still in the government. The paper also reports that the March issue of Hong Kong magazine includes a scathing article by a former Chinese top editor and government official praising the The Tiananmen Papers for exposing the “conspiracy” behind the “monstrous crime.”
A USAT “Life” section story reports that one professor has identified a new reason why blacks are inordinately placed in special ed classes: the “stroll walk” or “cultural movement” (Tom Wolfe called it the “pimp roll”) so many black boys adopt. Her research involved teachers evaluating videos of a black and a white boy (virtually identically dressed) modeling that walk as well as a standard one. Her findings: The teachers generally rated the boys using the stroll lower in achievement, more in need of special ed, and higher in aggression regardless of their race. The teachers were mostly women and mostly white, although the story points out that prior research suggests teachers tend to misread cultural differences as cognitive or behavioral ones regardless of their own ethnic backgrounds.
The LAT fronts the trend, found mainly in the Los Angeles area, of dot-com castoffs taking jobs in the porno industry. The story says that programming casualties from the likes of Etoys and ArtistDirect are hiring on (sans stock options and at much lower salaries) with Hustler’s Web site and other similar operations. One guy in the story now “spends eight hours a day digitally covering up female nipples” for a site’s front page. Even though the story says “porn is becoming increasingly acceptable,” he wouldn’t let his last name be used because “My mom would kill me if she knew.”
