BY HARRY RING
`'We value your call.." -Phone calls from patrons of the NationsBank chain will be handled on the basis of contribution to the banks bottom line. The top third of patrons will get ID numbers to put their calls through. The non-affluent will, as usual, be left on hold.

Still seems that way - Bre-X Minerals of Canada marketed stock in a Borneo gold mine that was billed as the richest on the planet. But, alas, it was a giant hoax. Sighed a Los Angeles Times reporter: "Until it began to unravel.. the Bre- X story seemed like a capitalist fairy tale come true."

The justice system - Convicted of murder, Joe Spaziano has been on Florida's Death Row since 1976. Two years ago, when the principal witness against him recanted his testimony, Spaziano escaped execution by nine days. Now, a new trial has been ordered. The state supreme court found that Spaziano was convicted almost exclusively on the basis of the testimony of a witness who admits he lied to the police and the jury.

Touchy? - In Jakarta, a magazine cited a survey which showed that only nine percent of Indonesians bought the government story that "subversives" incited a riot in which five people were killed last July. The publisher got 30 months for insulting President Suharto.

It's only poison - Last July and August, seven ruptures occurred in a pipeline from Mountain Pass Mine, a Unocal subsidiary in eastern California. Some 300,000 gallons of waste water, containing radioactive refuse and other toxins, sprayed the surrounding area. The company was given until February to clean it up. But there was disagreement over "details," and the cleanup never started. Currently, the mine has a July 31 deadline.

The `human rights' gang -The New York Review of Books reproduced a Department of Commerce document approving sale to the Saudi police of U.S.-made helmets, handcuffs, and shields used for torture.

`Praise the Lord' - It turns out that the planes sent by evangelist Pat Robertson's "Operation Blessing" to aid refugees in Zaire in 1994 were used almost exclusively for his diamond mines there. In a TV broadcast at the time, he showed snapshots of an airstrip being built "by natives with machetes and mattacks... they were so thrilled to have a little airport." He forgot to mention that the strip was built to bring in mining equipment.

A deadly system - In the next quarter of a century, the cancer rate is expected to double in the "developing" countries, reports the World Health Organization. In the industrialized countries, a 40 percent jump in the cancer rate is expected.

Social disease - Fifteen million U.S. people are afflicted by asthma. Each year, half a million of them are hospitalized and 5,000 die. An extensive study found that allergies to roaches are a major cause, explaining why those who live in the run-down housing of poor, nonwhite communities are hardest hit, children in particular.

On the cultural front - The British Guardian deemed it newsworthy that a four-piece set of Chippendale furniture may fetch as much as 2 million at a Christie's auction. Meanwhile at Christie's, New York, someone coughed up $3.5 million for Andy Warhol's painting of a Campbell's soup can.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home