Land of milk and mansions - A seven-bedroom, five-bathroom mansion is available in Lethridge, Canada, for Can$1.5 million. Early in the century, pictures of the landmark house were

featured on posters used to lure immigrants to Canada. It was depicted as a typical prairie farmhouse.

Must have sophisticated taste buds - Campbell Soup Co. recalled 62,000 Swanson's Kids Fun Feast Chompin' Chicken Drumlets because some contained pieces of hard plastic. What puzzles us is how did the kids know it wasn't just extra pieces of chicken?

Sexist pigs of the week - In Oslo, a panel of Norwegian judges acquitted a man who beat his girlfriend because, he said, she constantly berated him. The judges said, "The beatings must be seen in the light of [the woman] more or less making a lifestyle out of provoking and irritating the accused so that he lost control."

Free-market medicine - Homicide charges are pending against a Milwaukee-area medical lab in the case of two women who died of cervical cancer after Pap smear tests clearly showing signs of cancer were reported as "normal."

The lab uses a piece-work system, and in these two cases, the technician was doing up to 40,000 smear checks a year, compared to a professionally recommended maximum of 12,000.

Even-handed justice - Charges of threatening two Montreal transit cops were dropped against Stéphane Renaud and the cops were charged with assault. Renaud was beaten by the cops after he crushed a pop can on the floor of a shopping center adjacent to the subway.

The charges were switched after a shopping center security video of the beating was discovered. The outcome? The cops were acquitted.

Your tax $$$ at work - If you're a taxpayer, you helped Seagram take over MCA, the entertainment biggie. To finance the purchase, Seagram sold back to DuPont $8.3 billion worth of stock it owned in that company. This was $760 million less than the market price. In return, DuPont handled the buyback as a "dividend" payment. Under a tax loophole, that saved Seagram about $1.5 billion in federal taxes.

What price insanity? - Kaiser-Hill won a $3.5 billion, five- year contract to supervise a dozen other companies in the ongoing effort to clean up the lethal atomic waste at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado. It will take decades more and a tab of $22.5 billion to finish the cleanup. The feds estimate it will cost $230 billion to get rid of the waste at other weapons facilities.

P.S. - Those radioactive waste cleanup estimates are based on temporary storage. After more than half a century of accumulation, they still don't have a clue as to where to finally put the stuff.

Thought for the week - "Health-care benefits are a major factor that trap people in poverty. They keep you from working your way up the economic ladder." - An Arizona legislator saluting the demise of a bill to expand low-income health care.  
 
 
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