BY HARRY RING
There you go - An elite 18-member Mexican team responsible
for intercepting drug-running planes was busted for smuggling
cocaine across the border with Guatemala. Reportedly, some of
the team members were trained by U.S. Customs.
That's capitalism - Transco, the British gas company, wants to reduce the odorant added to gas to warn people of a leak. This will increase the danger of undetected leaks, but, Transco responds, it will reduce the number of emergency calls. The company is in the process of slicing its payroll.
Not just a U.S. thing - In England women workers are paid 80 percent of the average wage of men. And with nursery care available to but one in nine children under the age of eight, 45 percent of women workers are part-timers, compared to 8 percent of men.
He's catching on - Oil shark Roger Tamraz told a Senate panel he had coughed up $300,000 to the Democratic National Committee to get into a presidential coffee klatch. He wants White House support for a plan to build an oil pipeline in Central Asia, but all he got was coffee.
"I think next time I'll give $600,000," he judiciously declared.
And who watches the watchmen? - The bureaucratic gang that runs the so-called Communist Party of China proudly reported that in a five-year "anticorruption" campaign 37,492 members were punished for criminal acts, and 121,500 were expelled for corruption.
Young Socialists, anyone? - In Tampa and West Palm Beach, Florida, new youth curfews are being implemented. West Palm Beach minors are barred from downtown areas after 10 p.m. weekdays and 11 p.m. on weekends. In Tampa, city authorities are proposing that youth must be in school or at home between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. And in the Miami area, officials considered an ordinance to make it illegal for minors to carry a cell phone or pager without written parental consent.
He's budgeted the other $2 billion - "To really rich people, I say, `Keep any money that you have any reasonable idea what to do with and give money away that you have no idea what you're going to do with." - Cable mogul Ted Turner on his plan to give $1 billion, an estimated third of his personal fortune, to the United Nations.
That was a CIA agent, stupid - The newly released pages from John Lennon's FBI dossier include a 1972 informer's report on a meeting of people planning a demonstration at the Republican convention. It stated that the Beatles star would participate providing the action was peaceful. The memo also advised that the host of the meeting had a parrot which, at appropriate moments, chirped, "Right on!"