-Caveat Lector-
>From Slate.Com
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international papers
Hillary in Florence
By Alexander Chancellor
Hillary Clinton was the personality who most interested the Italian
newspapers at Sunday's "Third Way" summit conference in Florence,
where the leaders of the United States, Brazil, and various
European countries vainly sought a common political platform for
the world's parties of the center-left. They were not very kind
about her. La Repubblica of Rome said Monday that she failed to
make a widely anticipated speech because she has made so many
gaffes lately and that her decision to sit in on the conference as
a nonparticipant resulted in a special program for the leaders'
wives being canceled "at the last moment with zero warning and zero
courtesy."
Corriere della Sera of Milan said Clinton was upstaged by the
pregnant Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
"It was to have been Hillary's triumph, her consecration as the
superstar of the first ladies, her takeoff point for the New York
seat in the United States Senate," the paper said. "Instead,
Hillary's star was obscured twice yesterday: first on the
Florentine stage by Cherie Blair, who with her pregnancy became the
protagonist of the Third Way conference, and second in the New York
electoral college where a Democratic member of the city council,
Ronnie Eldridge, declared in a loud voice what many think but have
till now only murmured--that the first lady should withdraw her
candidacy."
Corriere also ran a story about visits by Hillary and Chelsea
Clinton and Madeleine Albright to a market of Italian luxury goods
held in the foyer of Florence's Excelsior Hotel. The headline was
"Miss Albright cannot resist Florentine jewels." It said the
secretary of state much admired a white linen tablecloth but
rejected it on learning its price was about $2,500. She then bought
three purses and a candle before arriving at the jewelry stand.
"They gave her a discount, but the most powerful woman in the world
knows how to value the weight and the worth of things," the paper
said. "Before signing for the purchase of a choker, she weighed it
against the bracelet she was wearing on her wrist: It is three
times as heavy as the choker."
On the substance of the summit, Corriere noted in an editorial "the
profoundly different realities" of the United States and Britain on
the one hand and continental Europe on the other. The arduous
search for common policies to reconcile the "solidaristic" social
values of the left-wing parties of the continent with the rules of
the free market will continue long after Florence, the paper said.
While Corriere reported President Bill Clinton urging everyone to
imitate the American model, La Repubblica highlighted a speech by
France's socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, a Third Way
skeptic, in which he denounced U.S. retention of the death penalty.
"We must be irreproachable in raising the problem of human rights
in developing countries by defending them with great rigor in our
own," Jospin said. "And for this I would like to see the death
penalty disappear in all democracies."
One issue preoccupying the British press Monday was where Tony and
Cherie Blair's forthcoming baby was conceived--was it in Tuscany or
in France during their summer vacation? Fending off questions about
this in an interview with La Repubblica, Tony Blair admitted that
he thought it would be a "British baby." Fevered study of the
diaries of the prime minister and his wife led most British papers
to conclude that their fourth child, due next May when Cherie will
be three months short of 46 years old, must have been conceived
while the couple were staying with Queen Elizabeth II at Balmoral,
her Scottish castle. The tabloid Daily Mirror even published a
photograph Monday of the bedroom in which it claimed the conception
had taken place.
Far the biggest story in Britain, however, was the disgrace of
millionaire novelist Lord Jeffrey Archer, who was forced to resign
at the weekend as the chosen Conservative Party candidate for mayor
of London after being exposed in the Mirror for using a false alibi
in a libel action 12 years ago. Archer won about $750,000 in
damages against tabloid newspaper the Daily Star after it alleged
that he had consorted with a prostitute. Archer now faces possible
criminal charges after admitting to getting a friend to lie that
they had dined together in a restaurant on one of the evenings in
question. In editorials Monday, almost all newspapers sharply
criticized Conservative Party leader William Hague for supporting
Archer's candidacy and praising his probity despite the novelist's
controversial past and warnings that he had further skeletons in
his closet.
As China's successful launch into orbit of its Shenzhou spacecraft
received saturation coverage in the state-controlled Chinese press,
a Chinese military expert told the China Business Times that the
test had major military implications. Song Yichang said that the
same low-power propulsion technology used to adjust a spacecraft's
orbit in flight could also be used to alter the path of offensive
missiles, thus enabling China to overcome U.S. anti-missile
defenses.
On the 36th anniversary of the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy, the National Post of Canada ran a commentary by Corbin
Andrews saying that three other men who died on Nov. 22, 1963--C.S.
Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and French composer Francis Poulenc--"made
contributions to our century that far outweigh Kennedy's." The
writer said, "His legacy holds power only because it is symbolic of
America's lost innocence. His assassination marks the point when
the bubble burst and we finally realized there could never be a
heaven on Earth. Of course, Lewis and Huxley had been telling us
that all along."
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