Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
■ A team of international scientists said Friday that Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda did not die of cancer or malnutrition, rejecting the official cause of death but not laying to rest one of the great mysteries of post-coup Chile. While saying what the poet and Communist Party politician did not die of, the forensic experts didn’t say what he did die of or end the debate over whether he was slain by agents of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship shortly after the country’s 1973 military takeover. Panel members said they will continue to identify pathogenic bacteria that might have caused Neruda’s death to determine if a third party was involved. The poet, who was 69 years old and suffering from prostate cancer, died in Chile’s postcoup chaos. The official version was that he died of cachexia, or weakness and wasting of the body from chronic illness — in this case cancer. “The fundamental conclusions are the invalidity of the death certificate when it comes to cachexia as a cause of death,” said Aurelio Luna, one of the panel’s experts. “We still can’t exclude nor affirm the natural or violent cause of Pablo Neruda’s death.” Neruda’s body was exhumed in 2013 to determine the cause of his death but those tests showed no toxic agents or poisons in his bone. His family and driver demanded further investigation. In 2015, Chile’s government said it’s “highly probable that a third party” was responsible for his death.
■ Sunday morning political talk-show host Chris Wallace generally lives in peaceful coexistence with Fox News Channel’s opinion folks, except when he hears some of them echo President Donald Trump’s criticism of the news media. Fake news? He’s fighting back. “It bothers me,” Wallace said in an interview. “If they want to say they like Trump, or that they’re upset with the Democrats, that’s fine. That’s opinion. That’s what they do for a living. I don’t like them bashing the media, because oftentimes what they’re bashing is stuff that we on the news side are doing.” He added, “I just think it’s bad form.” Wallace, who turned 70 earlier this month, just signed a contract extension that commits him to keep questioning politicians for Fox until well past the 2020 election. Wallace moderated his first presidential debate last year and drew generally high marks.