The Associated Press
AP Online
02-21-2001
Editorial Roundup
Here are excerpts from editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
The (Canton, Ohio) Repository, Feb. 18:
President Bush wasted no time in demonstrating that he will continue a tough line against Iraqi threats to allied planes in the no-fly zones. It's a good signal to send early in his administration. Is he sending others as well?
American and British planes attacked radar installations and command centers south of Baghdad at the same time Friday that State Department officials were meeting with leaders of Iraqi groups that oppose Saddam Hussein. If it's a coincidence, it's an extraordinary one.
And maybe it's no coincidence that the air strikes occur when Saddam reportedly is making aggressive noises at Israel, threatening retaliation for the recent deaths of Palestinians. Bush is taking a more hands-off approach to the Mideast peace process what there is left of it and perhaps the airstrikes are meant to tell Saddam to keep his hands off Israel as well.
The News-Journal of Daytona Beach, on Dale Earnhardt's death:
It's easy to be swayed by the mythic nature of Dale Earnhardt's life and death...
Polishing the myth eases the pain of losing the man. It distracts from the realization that racing is -- always has been -- a blood sport. Earnhardt was the fourth driver to die in less than nine months, but his death will make the greatest impact.
Maybe better safety equipment -- a head restraint, softer walls, more controllable aerodynamics -- would have saved Earnhardt...
Some -- including Earnhardt -- have said that tragedy is just part of the game...
On the track, Earnhardt was one of the boldest and seemingly least vulnerable. He was one of the last drivers to wear an old-fashioned open-face helmet. He visibly chafed at new safety regulations, saying they were a disservice to fans who wanted to see races the way he wanted to run them -- fearless, tight and just a little dirty.
But if Earnhardt could have seen the reaction to his death -- the broken sobbing of an anonymous fan in a parking lot, or the hollow-eyed grief on his own son's face as he walked out of Halifax Medical Center -- maybe he would have rethought what fans really want.
In Sunday's aftermath, one thing is clear. They didn't want this.
The (Rock Hill, S.C.) Herald on music swapping on the Internet, Feb. 17:
Napster may be on its way out, but America's music industry still has to contend with the unregulated swapping of copyrighted songs on the Internet. ...
As officials with the Freedom Forum noted, the First Amendment guarantees freedom of music, not free music. ...
Napster had, in effect, appealed on the basis that sharing music over the Internet was no different from taping a TV show to watch later or giving a friend a tape of favorite tunes. The court, however, determined that taping a TV show on a VCR or recording a compact disc on a tape to play in the car is limited in scope, largely for personal use and not used for profit.
Numerous other sites exist on the Internet to exchange music. ...
Enforcing any ban on music-swapping will be difficult, especially if companies outside the United States take over the enterprise.
The music industry must adapt and learn to use the new technology to its advantage. That means coming up with a way to distribute music online so that customers are less likely to copy it illegally.
The Albany Times-Union on presidential pardons, Feb. 20:
It's so telling of former President Bill Clinton -- of his administration and himself, and everything about him -- that he's out of office a month now and still grabbing more than his share of the national attention, thanks, again, to one of his more questionable acts.
While President Bush can rather succinctly offer why the United States and Britain needed to bomb Iraq last week, Mr. Clinton goes on and on, 1,700 words in all, on the op-ed page of The New York Times in defense of what still may well be indefensible -- his pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.
Some of what the former president says doesn't constitute new or enlightening ground in a debate that's most noteworthy because it's taking place at all. It's well-established, for instance, that the Constitution gives the sitting president what Mr. Clinton describes as ``broad and unreviewable power'' to issue such pardons.
The (Toledo, OH) Blade, Feb. 16:
The more we hear about the support-check withholding fiasco in Columbus, which now stretches back to 1997, and of Governor Taft's efforts to wiggle out from under it, the more we wonder about the quality of both his leadership and his staff.
In effect, some $8 million owed to dependent children in Ohio has, without public knowledge, been misdirected by the state bureaucracy. This is the sort of bureaucratic performance that belies glib phrases like ``compassionate conservatism.'' The buck stops in the governor's office, though Mr. Taft appears to be trying to shift it to the Department of Job and Family Services, whose director, Jacqui Romer-Sensky, he appointed.
He seemed aghast when the story broke a few weeks back, saying he knew nothing of the mess until he read about it in the newspapers. Geraldine Jensen, president of the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support (ACES), however, produced a letter she sent on Jan. 19 to Greg Moody, a Taft executive assistant, detailing the problem.
The governor and his staff messed up. The public prefers contrition and correction over buck-passing.
Feb. 20, Star Tribune of Minneapolis:
In exporting capitalism to nations as diverse as China and Poland, Americans have argued that they also are exporting democratic ideals such as the rule of law and respect for human rights. But what if the United States itself sets a bad example?
That's the question raised in a new study published by Human Rights Watch and written by Cornell University professor Lance Compa. In ``Unfair Advantage,'' Compa finds that American corporations routinely break federal labor law and violate the legal rights of their employees -- and that the government does almost nothing to stop them.
Since the 1930s, federal law has guaranteed Americans the right to organize unions and to negotiate working conditions with their employers. Polls show that most people still support the concept. Yet Compa finds that thousands of workers are fired every year for actions as simple as wearing a union lapel pin. Drawing on documents from the National Labor Relations Board, Compa finds that the number of workers discharged for union activity has risen from a few hundred annually in the 1950s to more than 20,000 annually in the 1990s. He interviewed a Florida nursing home worker who was fired during a union campaign, won his case before the labor board, and after five years of litigation won a grand total of $1,798 in back pay and interest.
The Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Tuesday, Feb. 20.
After months of criticism, here and elsewhere, the people who head the DARE program nationwide have admitted their program is a failure. Last week, officials of the program, whose acronym stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, said they are coming up with a revamped program -- one they have been working on for two years.
This raises several question, not the least of which is why DARE's leaders strongly defended it against recent criticisms when they apparently knew at least some of the complaints were true. For two years they have been working quietly on changes based on evidence that DARE wasn't working, yet they were happy to continue accepting taxpayer money from school districts. Not only that, they often impugned the motives of their critics, attacking them as hiding an agenda to legalize drugs.
Recently, studies by the National Academy of Sciences and the surgeon general have shown the program to be flawed. Now the program's critics, including Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson, who last year withdrew support from DARE in the Salt Lake School District, now have gained a good measure of credibility.
Feb. 21. The Elmira Star-Gazette (Elmira, NY) on school safety:
A week ago Wednesday, three students at Southside High School sensed a student in trouble. They didn't know how troubled he was, but they didn't wait to find out.
Instead, they sought help for Jeremy Getman, the student who police say had smuggled enough bombs and weapons into school to injure or kill untold numbers of students and staff. As it turned out, the students' act of alerting Southside authorities averted what could have been a major tragedy.
The students have not been identified by authorities, although students in school and the staff know who they are. Publicizing their names is not nearly as important now as publicizing their sensitivity and quick action. What those students did during that tense time at Southside last Wednesday can never be overstated.
Rather than ignore Getman or fear being perceived as tattletales, the students went for help. It was an act that not only defused a potentially dangerous situation but one that also showed compassion for a disturbed teen. Their quick thinking was the latest in a series of similar situations around the United States recently.
In February alone, two other Southside-like incidents -- one in Fort Collins, Colo., and another in Palm Harbor, Fla. -- occurred when students tipped off authorities to plots by other students to attack or bomb their schools.
From daily Berliner Zeitung, Berlin, Germany, dated Feb. 19, on U.S. airstrikes against Iraq.
The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is no innocent and is certainly a threat to peace -- but not just since yesterday.
And it's not the first time since the Gulf War in 1991 that the Americans and British have attacked Iraqi targets. ...
Because these punishment measures deterred Saddam only in the short term, they already raised questions.
The criticism after this latest action is stronger because it raises the issue of the aims of President George W. Bush as well as concern over peace in the Middle East. ...
Bush's order for strikes comes too late to fix a mistake by his predecessor, Bill Clinton.
After airstrikes in 1998, Clinton failed to force the continuation of U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq.. ...
Even then, carrying on the surveillance could only have been achieved by political means. Clinton capitulated in front of NATO and U.N. disunity on the question of keeping in place inspections and sanctions.
In view of the obstruction, above all from Moscow and Paris, picking up the old policy is going to be difficult.
Feb. 20 The Montreal Gazette, Montreal
Some shareholders in Nortel Networks Corp. were so angry with the stock's crash on Friday that they have launched class-action lawsuits alleging that Nortel head John Roth and some of his managers misled investors about demand for the company's products.
Allegations of insider trading have also surfaced, following the filing in court of documents showing that two senior Nortel Networks executives sold more than $7 million U.S. of company shares in late January. The sale came less than three weeks before the telecommunications giant announced a surprise warning last Thursday about reduced earnings and less than two weeks after the Brampton, Ont.-based company released strong fourth-quarter results and optimistic projections on Jan. 18.
Behind Nortel's spectacular fall from grace as the country's stellar high-tech stock lie a number of nagging questions that need immediate attention.
Why didn't anyone notice the January stock sale? Or the heavy trading and sudden drop in the stock price the day the bad news came out? Or the sudden increase in options trading? That's a lot of unexplained activity.
From Neue Zuercher Zeitung, Zurich, Switzerland (Independent) dated Feb. 17, on Clinton presidency
``America seems to be saying farewell almost reluctantly to the eight-year Clinton era, which the Washington Post, in retrospect, has termed 'ragged,' wild and disorganized. And that was even before the heavy impact of the Clintons' tasteless -- or perhaps typical -- departure from Washington. America is now in a tizzy about the pardoning of wealthy party donors by the Man from Hope -- as if this president, who even stooped to ``renting out'' the Lincoln bedroom, had ever exercised restraint in these matters during his eight years in office. There is little to be made of this.
Clinton always was the man he showed himself to be at his departure. In now pretending surprise and disappointment, Democrats in particular are being politically more than correct. At the moment, though, the new administration and its president appear to be the beneficiaries of all this. By way of contrast, they have had quite a smooth start. Whenever the party controlling the White House changes, the new president faces the task of filling several thousand posts in numerous government departments, and that process is now farther along than it was at the same point eight years ago...''
Just what strategy will be followed by the new American team is quite another matter. About that there is little more than smoke signals on the horizon. The Clinton administration was an expression of its time, the first that could be called a true postwar presidency. Those years marked a turning away from the realities, strategies and attitudes of the cold war, even more than was appreciated at the time. What is coming now will surely push that process further. Just how far is still a matter for considerable speculation.
The Daily Telegraph (London) on Feb. 19
What more does Robert Mugabe have to do to jolt the international community into action? His expulsion of foreign journalists, combined with his repression of the Zimbabwean press, is intended to clear away the last remaining obstacle in the path of totalitarianism.
The Zanu-PF regime has already trampled over the judiciary, traduced property rights, flouted international law and brutalised the democratic opposition. Now, by silencing the media, Mr Mugabe is making clear that he will not tolerate criticism, let alone opposition.
Journalists must guard against a certain deformation professionelle when writing about other journalists. The travails of newspapermen are plainly less monstrous than the wanton murders which accompanied last year's land seizures. But Mr Mugabe's latest move is most worrying because of what it presages. It is not an accident that the expulsions should be ordered now.
The president is plainly ready to resort to new levels of thuggery in order to remain in office at the next election and he does not want any witnesses around.
Feb. 14 Singapore's Straits Times:
``The crushing defeat in two Australian state elections suffered by Mr John Howard's ruling Liberal-National coalition would surprise casual foreign observers, but are actually consistent with the swings of economic rationalism in that corner of the Pacific. Did not Australia have a decade of growth, undimmed by the 1997 Asian collapse? Had not the spontaneity of the Sydney Olympics mirrored the nation's bounce and good fortune? After Ireland and California, Australia at the close of 2000 was the epitome of plenty. But all that had hidden a rapid deteriorastion in the prosperity consensus. On the scale of swing, the discontent should sweep Mr Howard's conservative bloc out of office in the federal election at year's end. He has served two terms, the average rate of longevity in trans-Tasman politics. The backlash seen in the Western Australia and Queensland results was all about widening wealth disparity and class tension.
The Howard government has committed no policy error: It trusted deregulation, privatisation and the reduction of subsidies and handouts to make Australia competitive. It believed in the inherent virtues of globalisation. It was not wrong. But the urban-based Liberal Party, which dominates the coalition, had not taken sufficient account of the dereliction which austerity would expose the rural sector to. This is the Australia that has given the Greens and Ms Pauline Hanson's One Nation a leg up. Labor is profiting by extension, under the country's preferential voting system. The St Vincent de Paul charity reports that one in 10 Australians lives in poverty.
Feb. 17 The Al-Qadissiya daily newspaper in Iraq:
The Arab masses and large segments of public opinion denounced the feeble and silly excuses which the American Pentagon used in their news conference and the different lies and fabrications about what they called ``self defense'' and the protection of their pilots and aircraft from Iraqi air defenses. They are fooling the world's public opinion about Iraq's sovereign right in protecting its air space from the aggressive American and British armed sorties and carrying out their new barbaric crime. It is a crime that will not pass without a deterring and decisive response to the American oppressive aggressors, to teach the new-old American-Zionist administration new lessons in steadfastness and jihad (holy struggle), repulse the aggression, break the back of the aggressor and teach the son of a serpent George Bush a lesson that he will never forget as he exposes his deeply rooted hatred of Iraq and its genius historic leadership and threaten in a base manner that matches the immorality of the George Walker Bush administration that has in its service such Zionists or Zionist-inclined people like new Defense Secretary Rumsfield, his aides and advisers. There are also the criminals Cheney and Colin Powell and others. They still gloat about the unjust 30th aggression in 1991 and repeat the claims of that war in their new aggression through which they absurdly want to put the clock back.
The new American-British-Zionist aggression against Iraq -- the nation, the struggler and the patient -- came as an expression of the anger of the American tyrant over the increased Arab and international support to Iraq's right to the lifting of sanctions and a halt to aggression against it together with its wonderful support and backing to the brave Palestinian Intefadeh.
The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press All Rights Reserved
AP Online
02-21-2001
Editorial Roundup
Here are excerpts from editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
The (Canton, Ohio) Repository, Feb. 18:
President Bush wasted no time in demonstrating that he will continue a tough line against Iraqi threats to allied planes in the no-fly zones. It's a good signal to send early in his administration. Is he sending others as well?
American and British planes attacked radar installations and command centers south of Baghdad at the same time Friday that State Department officials were meeting with leaders of Iraqi groups that oppose Saddam Hussein. If it's a coincidence, it's an extraordinary one.
And maybe it's no coincidence that the air strikes occur when Saddam reportedly is making aggressive noises at Israel, threatening retaliation for the recent deaths of Palestinians. Bush is taking a more hands-off approach to the Mideast peace process what there is left of it and perhaps the airstrikes are meant to tell Saddam to keep his hands off Israel as well.
The News-Journal of Daytona Beach, on Dale Earnhardt's death:
It's easy to be swayed by the mythic nature of Dale Earnhardt's life and death...
Polishing the myth eases the pain of losing the man. It distracts from the realization that racing is -- always has been -- a blood sport. Earnhardt was the fourth driver to die in less than nine months, but his death will make the greatest impact.
Maybe better safety equipment -- a head restraint, softer walls, more controllable aerodynamics -- would have saved Earnhardt...
Some -- including Earnhardt -- have said that tragedy is just part of the game...
On the track, Earnhardt was one of the boldest and seemingly least vulnerable. He was one of the last drivers to wear an old-fashioned open-face helmet. He visibly chafed at new safety regulations, saying they were a disservice to fans who wanted to see races the way he wanted to run them -- fearless, tight and just a little dirty.
But if Earnhardt could have seen the reaction to his death -- the broken sobbing of an anonymous fan in a parking lot, or the hollow-eyed grief on his own son's face as he walked out of Halifax Medical Center -- maybe he would have rethought what fans really want.
In Sunday's aftermath, one thing is clear. They didn't want this.
The (Rock Hill, S.C.) Herald on music swapping on the Internet, Feb. 17:
Napster may be on its way out, but America's music industry still has to contend with the unregulated swapping of copyrighted songs on the Internet. ...
As officials with the Freedom Forum noted, the First Amendment guarantees freedom of music, not free music. ...
Napster had, in effect, appealed on the basis that sharing music over the Internet was no different from taping a TV show to watch later or giving a friend a tape of favorite tunes. The court, however, determined that taping a TV show on a VCR or recording a compact disc on a tape to play in the car is limited in scope, largely for personal use and not used for profit.
Numerous other sites exist on the Internet to exchange music. ...
Enforcing any ban on music-swapping will be difficult, especially if companies outside the United States take over the enterprise.
The music industry must adapt and learn to use the new technology to its advantage. That means coming up with a way to distribute music online so that customers are less likely to copy it illegally.
The Albany Times-Union on presidential pardons, Feb. 20:
It's so telling of former President Bill Clinton -- of his administration and himself, and everything about him -- that he's out of office a month now and still grabbing more than his share of the national attention, thanks, again, to one of his more questionable acts.
While President Bush can rather succinctly offer why the United States and Britain needed to bomb Iraq last week, Mr. Clinton goes on and on, 1,700 words in all, on the op-ed page of The New York Times in defense of what still may well be indefensible -- his pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.
Some of what the former president says doesn't constitute new or enlightening ground in a debate that's most noteworthy because it's taking place at all. It's well-established, for instance, that the Constitution gives the sitting president what Mr. Clinton describes as ``broad and unreviewable power'' to issue such pardons.
The (Toledo, OH) Blade, Feb. 16:
The more we hear about the support-check withholding fiasco in Columbus, which now stretches back to 1997, and of Governor Taft's efforts to wiggle out from under it, the more we wonder about the quality of both his leadership and his staff.
In effect, some $8 million owed to dependent children in Ohio has, without public knowledge, been misdirected by the state bureaucracy. This is the sort of bureaucratic performance that belies glib phrases like ``compassionate conservatism.'' The buck stops in the governor's office, though Mr. Taft appears to be trying to shift it to the Department of Job and Family Services, whose director, Jacqui Romer-Sensky, he appointed.
He seemed aghast when the story broke a few weeks back, saying he knew nothing of the mess until he read about it in the newspapers. Geraldine Jensen, president of the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support (ACES), however, produced a letter she sent on Jan. 19 to Greg Moody, a Taft executive assistant, detailing the problem.
The governor and his staff messed up. The public prefers contrition and correction over buck-passing.
Feb. 20, Star Tribune of Minneapolis:
In exporting capitalism to nations as diverse as China and Poland, Americans have argued that they also are exporting democratic ideals such as the rule of law and respect for human rights. But what if the United States itself sets a bad example?
That's the question raised in a new study published by Human Rights Watch and written by Cornell University professor Lance Compa. In ``Unfair Advantage,'' Compa finds that American corporations routinely break federal labor law and violate the legal rights of their employees -- and that the government does almost nothing to stop them.
Since the 1930s, federal law has guaranteed Americans the right to organize unions and to negotiate working conditions with their employers. Polls show that most people still support the concept. Yet Compa finds that thousands of workers are fired every year for actions as simple as wearing a union lapel pin. Drawing on documents from the National Labor Relations Board, Compa finds that the number of workers discharged for union activity has risen from a few hundred annually in the 1950s to more than 20,000 annually in the 1990s. He interviewed a Florida nursing home worker who was fired during a union campaign, won his case before the labor board, and after five years of litigation won a grand total of $1,798 in back pay and interest.
The Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Tuesday, Feb. 20.
After months of criticism, here and elsewhere, the people who head the DARE program nationwide have admitted their program is a failure. Last week, officials of the program, whose acronym stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, said they are coming up with a revamped program -- one they have been working on for two years.
This raises several question, not the least of which is why DARE's leaders strongly defended it against recent criticisms when they apparently knew at least some of the complaints were true. For two years they have been working quietly on changes based on evidence that DARE wasn't working, yet they were happy to continue accepting taxpayer money from school districts. Not only that, they often impugned the motives of their critics, attacking them as hiding an agenda to legalize drugs.
Recently, studies by the National Academy of Sciences and the surgeon general have shown the program to be flawed. Now the program's critics, including Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson, who last year withdrew support from DARE in the Salt Lake School District, now have gained a good measure of credibility.
Feb. 21. The Elmira Star-Gazette (Elmira, NY) on school safety:
A week ago Wednesday, three students at Southside High School sensed a student in trouble. They didn't know how troubled he was, but they didn't wait to find out.
Instead, they sought help for Jeremy Getman, the student who police say had smuggled enough bombs and weapons into school to injure or kill untold numbers of students and staff. As it turned out, the students' act of alerting Southside authorities averted what could have been a major tragedy.
The students have not been identified by authorities, although students in school and the staff know who they are. Publicizing their names is not nearly as important now as publicizing their sensitivity and quick action. What those students did during that tense time at Southside last Wednesday can never be overstated.
Rather than ignore Getman or fear being perceived as tattletales, the students went for help. It was an act that not only defused a potentially dangerous situation but one that also showed compassion for a disturbed teen. Their quick thinking was the latest in a series of similar situations around the United States recently.
In February alone, two other Southside-like incidents -- one in Fort Collins, Colo., and another in Palm Harbor, Fla. -- occurred when students tipped off authorities to plots by other students to attack or bomb their schools.
From daily Berliner Zeitung, Berlin, Germany, dated Feb. 19, on U.S. airstrikes against Iraq.
The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is no innocent and is certainly a threat to peace -- but not just since yesterday.
And it's not the first time since the Gulf War in 1991 that the Americans and British have attacked Iraqi targets. ...
Because these punishment measures deterred Saddam only in the short term, they already raised questions.
The criticism after this latest action is stronger because it raises the issue of the aims of President George W. Bush as well as concern over peace in the Middle East. ...
Bush's order for strikes comes too late to fix a mistake by his predecessor, Bill Clinton.
After airstrikes in 1998, Clinton failed to force the continuation of U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq.. ...
Even then, carrying on the surveillance could only have been achieved by political means. Clinton capitulated in front of NATO and U.N. disunity on the question of keeping in place inspections and sanctions.
In view of the obstruction, above all from Moscow and Paris, picking up the old policy is going to be difficult.
Feb. 20 The Montreal Gazette, Montreal
Some shareholders in Nortel Networks Corp. were so angry with the stock's crash on Friday that they have launched class-action lawsuits alleging that Nortel head John Roth and some of his managers misled investors about demand for the company's products.
Allegations of insider trading have also surfaced, following the filing in court of documents showing that two senior Nortel Networks executives sold more than $7 million U.S. of company shares in late January. The sale came less than three weeks before the telecommunications giant announced a surprise warning last Thursday about reduced earnings and less than two weeks after the Brampton, Ont.-based company released strong fourth-quarter results and optimistic projections on Jan. 18.
Behind Nortel's spectacular fall from grace as the country's stellar high-tech stock lie a number of nagging questions that need immediate attention.
Why didn't anyone notice the January stock sale? Or the heavy trading and sudden drop in the stock price the day the bad news came out? Or the sudden increase in options trading? That's a lot of unexplained activity.
From Neue Zuercher Zeitung, Zurich, Switzerland (Independent) dated Feb. 17, on Clinton presidency
``America seems to be saying farewell almost reluctantly to the eight-year Clinton era, which the Washington Post, in retrospect, has termed 'ragged,' wild and disorganized. And that was even before the heavy impact of the Clintons' tasteless -- or perhaps typical -- departure from Washington. America is now in a tizzy about the pardoning of wealthy party donors by the Man from Hope -- as if this president, who even stooped to ``renting out'' the Lincoln bedroom, had ever exercised restraint in these matters during his eight years in office. There is little to be made of this.
Clinton always was the man he showed himself to be at his departure. In now pretending surprise and disappointment, Democrats in particular are being politically more than correct. At the moment, though, the new administration and its president appear to be the beneficiaries of all this. By way of contrast, they have had quite a smooth start. Whenever the party controlling the White House changes, the new president faces the task of filling several thousand posts in numerous government departments, and that process is now farther along than it was at the same point eight years ago...''
Just what strategy will be followed by the new American team is quite another matter. About that there is little more than smoke signals on the horizon. The Clinton administration was an expression of its time, the first that could be called a true postwar presidency. Those years marked a turning away from the realities, strategies and attitudes of the cold war, even more than was appreciated at the time. What is coming now will surely push that process further. Just how far is still a matter for considerable speculation.
The Daily Telegraph (London) on Feb. 19
What more does Robert Mugabe have to do to jolt the international community into action? His expulsion of foreign journalists, combined with his repression of the Zimbabwean press, is intended to clear away the last remaining obstacle in the path of totalitarianism.
The Zanu-PF regime has already trampled over the judiciary, traduced property rights, flouted international law and brutalised the democratic opposition. Now, by silencing the media, Mr Mugabe is making clear that he will not tolerate criticism, let alone opposition.
Journalists must guard against a certain deformation professionelle when writing about other journalists. The travails of newspapermen are plainly less monstrous than the wanton murders which accompanied last year's land seizures. But Mr Mugabe's latest move is most worrying because of what it presages. It is not an accident that the expulsions should be ordered now.
The president is plainly ready to resort to new levels of thuggery in order to remain in office at the next election and he does not want any witnesses around.
Feb. 14 Singapore's Straits Times:
``The crushing defeat in two Australian state elections suffered by Mr John Howard's ruling Liberal-National coalition would surprise casual foreign observers, but are actually consistent with the swings of economic rationalism in that corner of the Pacific. Did not Australia have a decade of growth, undimmed by the 1997 Asian collapse? Had not the spontaneity of the Sydney Olympics mirrored the nation's bounce and good fortune? After Ireland and California, Australia at the close of 2000 was the epitome of plenty. But all that had hidden a rapid deteriorastion in the prosperity consensus. On the scale of swing, the discontent should sweep Mr Howard's conservative bloc out of office in the federal election at year's end. He has served two terms, the average rate of longevity in trans-Tasman politics. The backlash seen in the Western Australia and Queensland results was all about widening wealth disparity and class tension.
The Howard government has committed no policy error: It trusted deregulation, privatisation and the reduction of subsidies and handouts to make Australia competitive. It believed in the inherent virtues of globalisation. It was not wrong. But the urban-based Liberal Party, which dominates the coalition, had not taken sufficient account of the dereliction which austerity would expose the rural sector to. This is the Australia that has given the Greens and Ms Pauline Hanson's One Nation a leg up. Labor is profiting by extension, under the country's preferential voting system. The St Vincent de Paul charity reports that one in 10 Australians lives in poverty.
Feb. 17 The Al-Qadissiya daily newspaper in Iraq:
The Arab masses and large segments of public opinion denounced the feeble and silly excuses which the American Pentagon used in their news conference and the different lies and fabrications about what they called ``self defense'' and the protection of their pilots and aircraft from Iraqi air defenses. They are fooling the world's public opinion about Iraq's sovereign right in protecting its air space from the aggressive American and British armed sorties and carrying out their new barbaric crime. It is a crime that will not pass without a deterring and decisive response to the American oppressive aggressors, to teach the new-old American-Zionist administration new lessons in steadfastness and jihad (holy struggle), repulse the aggression, break the back of the aggressor and teach the son of a serpent George Bush a lesson that he will never forget as he exposes his deeply rooted hatred of Iraq and its genius historic leadership and threaten in a base manner that matches the immorality of the George Walker Bush administration that has in its service such Zionists or Zionist-inclined people like new Defense Secretary Rumsfield, his aides and advisers. There are also the criminals Cheney and Colin Powell and others. They still gloat about the unjust 30th aggression in 1991 and repeat the claims of that war in their new aggression through which they absurdly want to put the clock back.
The new American-British-Zionist aggression against Iraq -- the nation, the struggler and the patient -- came as an expression of the anger of the American tyrant over the increased Arab and international support to Iraq's right to the lifting of sanctions and a halt to aggression against it together with its wonderful support and backing to the brave Palestinian Intefadeh.
The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press All Rights Reserved
