DATELINE–Washington, DC

Federal law-enforcement officers are investigating reports that a man matching the description of the Capitol shooter was seen at a showing of “Saving Private Ryan” on the evening before Friday’s shootings.

FBI and Secret Service investigators have been working to reconstruct the movements of Russell E. Weston Jr. prior to his mid-morning attack on the Capitol last Friday. After two employees at the AMC Union Station theater identified Weston from a driver’s license photograph, officials now believe that Weston could have attended a special showing of the movie “Saving Private Ryan” screened for D.C.-area veterans late Thursday evening. The AMC theater is located only a few blocks north of the Capitol building.

“There were a lot of people who looked like [Weston] at that show, a lot of Vietnam-types,” recalls Tyrell Willets, one of the AMC employees who have reportedly placed the Capitol gunman at the Thursday night screening. According to a July 28th New York Times article, other witnesses reported seeing Weston carrying what appeared to be a small army ammunition satchel. In an encounter early Friday morning across the street from the White House, John Broder, a Washington correspondent from the New York Times, was warned by Weston that “the storm clouds of war were gathering over Washington.”

Given the evidence suggesting Weston’s militaristic affect, FBI forensic psychologist Stan Sobchak believes there may be a causal relationship between the violent shootout at the Capitol that caused the deaths of two Capitol police officers and the realistic violence depicted in the WWII movie “Saving Private Ryan.” There has already been much speculation as to what could have sparked Weston’s shooting spree after years of nonviolent mental illness. According to Sobchak, the possibility that a movie sequence may have triggered Friday’s deadly confrontation is not as far-fetched as it might seem.

“The purpose of this movie’s battle scenes is to transfer the experience of savage combat to the viewer. It’s a kind of realism that disarms the moral faculties and can quite easily lead to a psychotic episode. Frankly, I’d be surprised if there aren’t more such killings before the movie leaves the theater.” Sobchak, who heads a special FBI task force on mental illness and high-profile violent crimes, has worked on similarly infamous cases like John Hinckley’s presidential assassination attempt.

While investigators were quick to qualify Sobchak’s evaluation, elsewhere in the United States several VA hospitals were busy setting up telephone hotlines to offer counseling to veterans who had seen “Saving Private Ryan” during the film’s opening weekend. In an interview with the Associated Press, Deborah Richter, a therapist who runs the Portland Vet Center, stated that she believes the movie’s aesthetic treatment of “the pain, the suffering and the actual killings” of military combat is “the ultimate trigger for post-traumatic experiences.”

The Portland VA Center fielded dozens of calls this weekend from traumatized viewers of “Saving Private Ryan” at a temporary toll-free number. Other institutions are planning to provide similar services during the coming months.

The news that “Saving Private Ryan” is being scrutinized as an extenuating circumstance in Weston’s rampage has left the movie’s maker, Dreamworks SKG, with a potential public relations disaster on its hands. So far, only veterans have reported experiencing shock and disorienting grief after witnessing the grisly re-enactment of the D-Day invasion that begins “Saving Private Ryan.” But in light of the ongoing investigations that link the state-of-the-art WWII film to the Capitol shooting, other audience members may be expected to suffer similar adverse reactions.

At the heart of the debate is the film’s opening sequence which depicts with tremendous panache and great technical mastery the first-hand experience of American soldiers landing on the beaches of Normandy during the D-Day Invasion on June 6, 1944. During the scenes of horror which comprise the movie’s first 30 minutes, body parts are thrown into the air, the camera is spattered with blood, and a special lens captures the movement of bullets before they audibly pierce the bodies of hundreds of men. But unlike previous cinematic depictions, the unprecedented realism of the violence in “Saving Private Ryan” is being lauded by the media as a breakthrough in filmmaking.

But what makes the film so innovative in the business of make-believe may also turn out to be its Achilles heel. There is already speculation that the bloody blurring between film and fact in “Saving Private Ryan” may be the centerpiece of Weston’s defense should he be found competent to stand trial. Elaine Riefendahl, a defense attorney based in Cambridge, Mass., believes there is a good chance that the film could be presented to the jury as a way diminish the penalty against Weston during sentencing.

“Given the power of this movie’s fantasy, the defense can argue that even a person without a history of mental illness like Weston’s will leave the theater confused as to whether or not they have just participated in the violence depicted on screen. This is not about copycat murders, it’s about viewers being tricked into believing they are actually a part of the movie.”

Sobchak agrees, warning “In the case of Weston, his schizophrenia flattened the world until there was no distance between himself and stories about the president, the FBI, etc. ‘Private Ryan,’ because it puts people into the action instead of in front of it, has the same effect. There is no room for thought there, only feeling. Bad feelings.”

DATELINE–Stockholm

Scientific conference in Stockholm concludes with dire predictions for cities around the world. Mexico City cited as leading indicator of current trends.

Cities without clean water or edible food. Impassable roads. Infectious airborne diseases that can decimate an urban population in a matter of days. These are some of the stark predictions issued by a conference of scientists, urban planners, and government officials that convened last week in the capital of Sweden to discuss the current state of the modern metropolis.

The conference, titled “Urban Growth and Sustainable Cities for the Coming Millennium,” featured more than 200 workshops and panel discussions led by some of the world’s top academic and political figures on topics like industrial pollution, water management, transportation policy, global warming, and population control.

Although there were some notes of optimism, the overwhelming sentiment at week’s end was one of sober pessimism. While delivering the closing address, Emile-Henri Adams, a physicist at the Institute for Civic Engineering in Toronto, Canada, spoke of an imminent implosion in the modern city system.

Although there were some notes of optimism, the overwhelming sentiment at week’s end was one of sober pessimism. While delivering the closing address, Emile-Henri Adams, a physicist at the Institute for Civic Engineering in Toronto, Canada, spoke of an imminent implosion in the modern city system.

“A city is a complicated network of energy flows,” Mr. Adams asserted. “The growth of most cities alive today is characterized by disproportion. We are looking at bodies too massive to sustain their own existence – imagine an adult human body with certain organs 20 times the size of the average person. Now imagine that gargantuan creature trying to survive with the kidneys of a child. This is the fate of our metropolises: death by toxicity.”

While the conference concluded with predictions for the future, the majority of the week’s discussions focused on crises already facing cities around the world. One such metropolis on the verge of catastrophe is the largest urban center in the western hemisphere: Mexico City.

The capital of Mexico may also be the first city in modern times to collapse under its own weight. More than 18 million people are cordoned off in an 875-square-mile valley ringed by mountains. Every day, 4 million vehicles take to the streets of central Mexico City. The World Health Organization has declared the city’s atmosphere the most polluted in the world, with only “4 to 20 days a year with ’satisfactory’ air.” In addition to serious contamination problems, the city itself is sinking three to four centimeters a year due to overpumping of the underground water supply.

At the best-attended panel of the conference, representatives from the Latin American Society of Civil Engineers (SICLA), the World Bank, the Mexican government, and researchers from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México held forth on Mexico City’s terminal condition. The picture that emerged from the marathon session was one of desperation and alarm.

“What is happening to us today will happen in Calcutta, Beijing, and Los Angeles in the next 50 years,” stated Simon Bollivar, chair of UNAM’s urban planning department. “The environmental disaster is a function of both the city’s historic role in the colonization of the Americas and its position in the borderless global economy dominated by the transnational corporation.”

Many of the delegates present stressed that the particularities of the Mexico City scenario are common to any of the megalopolises that have risen in the 20th century. According to Bollivar, Mexico City is only the first urban center to succumb to a process taking place around the world as urban sprawl is filled in. The scholar went on to urge attendees to reevaluate urbanization in their own countries in light of Mexico’s breakdown.

Luis Tenicanflas, an advisor to Mexico City’s newly elected mayor Cuauhtémoc Càrdenas, offered a holistic view of the challenges facing the administration. “The growth of crime and the endemic corruption in Mexico are simply another component of the pollution produced by cars, factories, and past government policy. In this, we are the modern city developed to its logical end. And we are dying.”

Days later, as the Stockholm conference on urban growth drew to a close, all eyes were still on Mexico City and its reform-minded mayor, Càrdenas. The engineer and career politician whose father nationalized the oil industry as president of Mexico during the 1930s is just beginning his three-year term as mayor of the dying city. Some of his chief proposals include routing out the criminal culture that has paralyzed the city, expanding light train and electric tram lines to alleviate deadly pollution levels, and replenishing the ancient city’s aquifer with stored rain or treated water.

“Cuauhtémoc,” Càrdenas’s first name, is a tribute to the Aztec emperor who witnessed firsthand the apocalypse of that civilization when the Spanish sacked Tenochtitlan in 1521. It was over the ruins and remnants of Tenochtitlan that Mexico City was first built. It is widely speculated that Càrdenas will run for president of Mexico under the PRD party banner in the year 2000.

DATELINE–New York

Sources close to Tina Brown claim that her decision to leave her post as editor-in-chief of the New Yorker magazine for an undisclosed position with Miramax films may be connected to recent troubles at CNN-Time Warner, the New Republic magazine, and the Boston Globe.

Six years ago Brown was lured from her position as chief editor at Vanity Fair to rejuvenate the financially flailing New Yorker. Under her control, the New Yorker won nearly two dozen awards and newsstand sales rose 145 percent. But she has also been criticized for what some call the vulgarization of a venerable American literary institution that has had only four editors in its nearly 75-year history.

Despite longtime support from publisher S.I. Newhouse, Brown reportedly felt stymied in her efforts to develop new revenue streams for the New Yorker, including a planned book publishing division. While details of her deal with Miramax have not yet been made public, Brown told the Wall Street Journal that it will include a new monthly magazine, films, television shows, and a line of books.

Her early departure for Miramax, a subsidiary of Walt Disney Co., is drawing added media attention in light of allegations now being made by sources near Brown. According to rumors, Brown’s forthcoming venture with Miramax was to have drawn upon the talents of an innovative mix of journalistic and literary stars. Now, some of the same rising stars who were slated to join Brown at Miramax have been implicated in a wide-ranging media scandal featuring nonexistent sources and fabricated quotations.

In May of this year, Forbes magazine reported that writer Stephen Glass had largely confabulated a story about computer hackers published in the New Republic. By June, two more incidents of media misconduct had been exposed. The first involved Boston Globe columnist and 1998 Pulitzer Prize finalist Patricia Smith, who admitted to fabricating anecdotes and characters in several of her columns. The second involved the highly publicized retraction of a June 7, 1998, report that aired on the debut episode of a joint CNN-Time magazine news program. In the investigative report, Peter Arnett alleged that U.S. commandos used nerve gas against American defectors during the Vietnam War.

In the wake of these sensational scandals both Glass and Smith were summarily fired for their literary high jinks. Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize 20 years ago for his coverage of the Vietnam War, will keep his job after receiving a severe reprimand from the network. Yet despite their high-profile flubs, all three journalists are still listed on the roster of writers said to be joining Brown at Miramax.

According to Silvia Lottringer, an editorial advisor to the Columbia Journalism Review, “the possibility that such controversial journalists, now infamous for distorting fact with fiction, are still on Brown’s team at Miramax says a lot about the novelty of the product being developed.”

Equally noteworthy are the circumstances under which the hybrid news and entertainment project was conceived. In 1997 Tina Brown and Disney CEO Michael Eisner cohosted a summit called the NEXT Conference at the Disney Institute in Orlando, Fla. During the two-day event notables from the worlds of news, entertainment, and politics gathered to discuss the future of media and the Internet. It was on the return flight to New York that Miramax cochair Harvey Weinstein first approached Brown with the idea of a joint venture to produce a multimedia mélange of fictionalized news and new fictions.

Media analysts have already described the partnership between Brown and Miramax as capitalizing on the potential for “synergy” between a news-gathering agency and an entertainment company. According to a report by Janny Scott and Geraldine Fabrikant published on July 9, 1998, by the New York Times, such a collaboration would allow Brown to “dig up the kind of articles that might then be turned into movies and television specials that Miramax, which is owned by Walt Disney Co., would have the capacity to help package, circulate, and promote.”

DATELINE–Washington, D.C.

A consumer group is petitioning the government to reconsider fast-track funding for Viagra research. The protests come only days after Congress passed a rider to the appropriations bill that would earmark $200 million for the study of cardiac ailments caused by long-term use of Sildenafil citrate, the drug popularly known as Viagra™.

Health in the Public Interest, a Washington, DC-based group, held a press conference late last week to publicize what it calls a “flagrant double-standard” in government funding policy. “Why are the supposed victims of the Viagra craze due better and faster treatment than women with breast cancer or the growing number of people living with AIDS,” asked HPI’s spokesperson Margaret Campbell.

By all accounts, initial sales of Viagra™, which is now being marketed by Pfizer as an anti-impotence drug, were off the charts in both the United States and European markets. Although the pharmaceutical benefits men who feel sexually inadequate because of the aging process, Viagra™ was featured as a miracle cure on the cover of America’s two largest news magazines in the same week. The drug has even received highly-publicized endorsements from such celebrities as Senator Bob Dole and his wife, prospective republican presidential candidate, Elizabeth Dole.

Although previous incidents of Viagra™-related deaths have been reported with little fanfare, the official story on the male wonder drug may be changing.

A report being published later this week by the New Mexico Journal of Medicine links the high blood pressure medicine to permanent heart damage when used as a treatment for impotence in men. The researchers based their claim on a study involving a test group of 42-78 year old white males. The study was designed to look into the clinical future of Viagra as it becomes more widely used as a recreational drug. According to the protocol, none of the test subjects suffered from chronic impotence but all did express interest in improving their sexual performance.

Surprisingly, the study projected that nearly two-thirds of men who use Viagra for recreational purposes will suffer some degree of heart damage. For some, this condition may result in dangerously low blood pressure and for others cardiac arrest.

Dr. Mark Areliusich, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center in Baltimore, Md., also warns there may be hidden costs to middle-aged men caught up in the Viagra fad. “Sildenafil will produce enhanced erectile response by inhibiting the phosphodiesterase 5 (PDE5) enzyme, but it also rapidly decreases blood pressure,” says Areliusich. “If you increase the dosage or frequency of Viagra intake for the purpose of greater erectile stimulation, you also increase the risk of very serious heart injury.”

Similar warnings may have prompted Congress to move quickly on the $200 million spending plan that would allocate public funds to a Viagra™ response study. The passage of the legislation marks the first time that such a large sum has been appropriated for medical spending without the benefit of public hearings. In fact, the Congressional bill may become a lightning rod for both conservative and liberal critics of Viagra™.

In New York City, where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has waged a two year campaign on the sex industry, Viagra™ has been targeted by the vice squad of the New York Police Department. After a two month sting operation, the NYPD has closed down dozens of white collar festivities where Viagra™ was the drug of choice. After one such bust, the New York Post ran as its headline “Coppers: Viagra Het Poppers.”

Volunteers from the Virginia-based Falls Church Women’s Health Center have organized two teach-in’s at local area high schools to discuss “The Role of Women in the Age of Viagra™.” According to Aimee Isaacson-Levin, FCWHC outreach coordinator, “Viagra brings pleasure on demand to men. Are women at all a part of this equation? Is growing old a problem that needs a chemical solution?”

Even the gay community has a bone to pick with Viagra™ for what they call a media bias on sex-related issues. In a letter to the editor of Newsweek, AIDS activist Angela Melendez calls the press hypocritical on the subject. “After years of struggle to bring gay and lesbian sexual relationships out of back rooms and into the streets,” says Melendez, “it’s appalling to witness the ease with which the male sexual organ can become the focus of the entire media universe.”