February 25, 1996 – CBS World News Roundup – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
February 25, 1996 – The Presidential campaign was up and running amok on this day, 20 years ago. Latest word was trouble over at the Dole camp, with word of shakeups and firings. Senator Bob Dole was flagging way behind in polls and hadn’t won a Primary yet. That didn’t seem to bother former speech writer and GOP competitor Pat Buchanan, who advised the GOP establishment to “take a couple Prozac, and calm down”, as the campaigns went storming ahead to Arizona and that state’s primary in the coming days.
In other news – there were unconfirmed reports that Cuba was holding a Brothers To The Rescue pilot, but it wasn’t clear if he was aboard one of the two civilian planes shot down by Cuban MIGs the previous Saturday. Havana accused the U.S. of lying and said it had unequivocal proof the planes were inside Cuban airspace. The UN Security council was considering a request for the U.S. to condemn the Cuban shootdown and order an investigation. The CIA and the State Department were huddling to figure out the next, if any, to take.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world – shock in Israel as a motorist slammed into a crowd of civilians in Jerusalem. The incident was unrelated to a suicide bomb attack which took some 27 lives, only the previous day. An investigation revealed that the motorist, a U.S. resident living in the West Bank was mistaken for a terrorist and shot to death by security forces in the confusion. In another part of Jerusalem, funerals for the 27 bomb victims took place with a long day of grief lying ahead.
And that’s a small portion of what went on in the world, this February 25th in 1996, as reported by The CBS World News Roundup.
