[ No headline ]

Clinton has the power to deep-six Whitewater affair

Whitewater is a ghost that haunts President Clinton. Since Republicans are doing everything they can to keep the specter of the failed real estate venture in the public arena, Clinton should try to be the ghostbuster of the Whitewater affair. If he and Hillary Clinton, the first lady, did nothing wrong, then he can help put Whitewater to rest by being as open as possible concerning their involvement in this venture. If Whitewater is so unimportant, then why not reveal anything and everything related to it? If the Clintons are completely open about Whitewater, and if their disclosures back up their assertions they did nothing wrong, then they can make sure the Whitewater affair is - at long last - dead and buried.

- Albuquerque Journal, N.M.

Russian Communists: Let go of the past

The Communist Party's success in Russia's parliamentary elections can hardly fail to cause concern to a world that rejoiced in its downfall only five years ago.

Amid signs the reform process has gone adrift, these results will raise fears that the new Duma (parliament), dominated by Communists and ultranationalists, may now try to block all further moves to a free-market economy.

Even worse is the possibility that Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov stands a chance of winning June's presidential poll. There is little cause for such alarmist forecasts as yet. The Russian parliament lacks any real power to challenge President Boris Yeltsin's administration....

Russia's Communists have yet to distance themselves as clearly from their past as their East European counterparts....

These election results are cause for concern but should not yet give rise to any serious alarm about a return to a path that the world hopes Russia has firmly left in the past.

- South China Morning Post, Hong Kong