Some Democrats should score easy wins. Houston's Lee Brown is ahead for a second term. And despite high public dissatisfaction, San Francisco's Willie Brown is a likely winner because voters like his opponents even less. After two decades, banks, insurers, and brokerages are about to get the green light to merge. A financial modernization bill won the agreement of congressional conferees and President Clinton, who had threatened to veto it over privacy and community reinvestment issues.
Critics still hope for a veto.
They say the bill weakens safeguards against discrimination and redlining and fails to give consumers control over their confidential records. The unpopular media win again in court Many targets of news media investigations, realizing the difficulty of prevailing in libel suits, have gone after news-gathering methods. The Food Lion grocery chain charged that ABC News employees lied to get jobs and then used hidden cameras to film the packaging of old meat. Defense contractors cited on China sales Probes of Chinese technology thefts from the United States are coming to a head. Defense contractor McDonnell Douglas faces charges it knew sophisticated machine tools it sold to China were headed to the military rather than a civilian project.