Maybe management claims that they are up to 90 per cent of the pre-strike combined circulation of 900,000 copies are exaggerated; maybe home delivery, the backbone of US newspaper sales, is only two- thirds of pre-strike levels. But advertising is returning and subscription cancellations have dropped. And with each edition that appears, the knife of doubt must twist a little deeper in a striker’s soul. Perhaps, as management is starting to hint, they are superfluous.Slowly editorial staff are drifting back, leaving the Newspaper Guild as they do so.

Thus is perishing the closed shop which operated at the Free Press – not exactly what the Guild intended.And then there is the darkest fear of all: that, emboldened by the success of their forced experiment, Knight-Ridder and Gannett will merge the papers editorially, eliminating hundreds of jobs and thinning further the ranks of big US cities with competing daily papers These are tough times for US newspapers. This year alone, hard-nosed owners have pulled the plug on the Baltimore Evening Sun, the Houston Post and, most recently, New York Newsday. Will the News or the Free Press be next?As for the Teamsters and the entire labour movement here, the strike is another small step towards irrelevance. A national strike by Teamster truckdrivers last year flopped. Union membership has dropped to 15 cent of the total workforce, compared to almost 30 per cent in Hoffa’s heyday.So strong was the discontent that Lane Kirkland, the courtly but invisible head of the AFL-CIO, has been forced to resign, leaving America’s main union confederation this autumn facing its first contested leadership election in half a century.So enfeebled is the movement that three of the largest unions swallowed their pride last month and announced plans to merge.

Spokesmen for the United Autoworkers, the United Steelworkers and the Machinists and Aerospace Workers claim the move will give them huge new clout. Once though, the UAW, along with the Teamsters the pillar of organised labour in Detroit, would never have countenanced such indignity. But having seen its membership halve in 15 years, it had little choice.The Teamsters reckoned they had little choice but to strike But in the long run their cause looks unwinnable Even in Detroit the world is changing. “They say this is a union town,” said a Free Press journalist, contemplating the grim expanses of the city. “But you have to wonder, what have the unions done for modern Detroit?”. RUPERT CORNWELL

Washington
Judge Kimba Wood returns to federal court in New York today.

But it is not her legal skills which will be under the city tabloids’ microscopes. The redoubtable jurist who sent the junk bond king, Michael Milken, to the slammer and nearly became Bill Clinton’s attorney general is now the Beauty on the Bench, slinky green-eyed femme fatale in a society divorce case that has the Big Apple by the ears.This has been a tawdry summer in the United States, featuring the likes of Senator Bob Packwood, Susan Smith and, of course, Hugh Grant. But at last sexual harassment, child killing and “lewd conduct” are no longer the order of the day. All have been swept aside by a gloriously old-fashioned scandal, involving no crime – just vast sums of money, luxury apartments, romantic trysts and lots of famous people.It started in the spring, when a blonde Manhattan socialite, Nancy Richardson, sued her Wall Street financier husband, Frank, for divorce and her due share of a $157m (pounds 100m) fortune.