Lawsuits: One Pact, Two Winners

After three acrimonious years, Republican Presidential Hopeful Paul Laxalt and the McClatchy Newspapers last week finally settled the lawsuits each had brought against the other. So who won? While Laxalt dropped his $250 million claim that the McClatchy-owned Sacramento Bee libeled him in a 1983 story about a Carson City casino-hotel his family once owned, the former Nevada Senator declared that pretrial investigations found no evidence of illegal skimming. And while Bee President-Editor C.K. McClatchy dropped a $6 million countersuit, he maintained that his paper had never reported there had been skimming -- only that IRS agents suspected it. Said he:...