BY HARRY RING
Guilty, innocent, whatever -According to the Supreme Court, a person convicted on one charge and acquitted on another can be sentenced for as long a term as if convicted on both charges. Opined the top court: "It's impossible to know why a jury found a defendant not guilty on a certain charge."

How tolerant can you get? -In the Iowa Farmer Today, psychologist Val Farmer chides folks for anti-immigrant prejudices, explaining: "To survive in America, immigrants need time to learn to be individualistic, goal oriented - to adopt conventional family relationships. They don't have to get rid of that which is valuable from their own culture."

They're icing the current staff? - A CIA help-wanted ad says the spook agency is looking for candidates "with spirit, personality, intelligence, and integrity."

History note - Newly released documents confirm that Winston Churchill, British prime minister during World War II and secretary of war in WWI, was a great poison gas fan. In 1919, he declared, "I am strongly in favor of using poisonous gas against uncivilized tribes." A year later, Kurdish freedom fighters were subjected to British gas bombings.

Frequent flyer points to Pearly Gate - A church in northern Spain discarded the traditional collection plate in favor of an after-mass credit-card machine.

The antigun war - Jeffrey Parks, 10, was expelled from a Seattle school after being caught packing a toy pistol about an inch long. (It came out of his pocket while fishing for his lunch money.) After his parents appealed the decision, school officials revoked the expulsion, reducing the weapons violation charge - a criminal offense - to a rules infraction.

The civilizers - In England, Geoffrey Thomas, 25, a prison inmate with terminal cancer, was chained to a hospice bed for three days. A court order got him unchained three hours before he died. There was no problem of escape, the hospice director declared. Thomas "needed help to sit up in bed." The prison service's top dog said the incident would be probed and if anything was done wrong, the family would get an apology.

Neither is capitalism - "Germany isn't working," declared a London Daily Telegraph headline. The paper cited a German government report that a 10.8 percent jobless rate is likely to worsen in coming months. It said German economists warn that 1997 "will be the worst year for jobs since the Great Depression."

We keep chuckling - Miami cops, whose brutality has touched off several rebellions in the impoverished, Black Overtown area, were petulant about going door-to-door asking folks to return any money they may have scooped up during a cash spill from an overturned Brink's Security truck. Nobody forked over any, and some laughed heartily. Declared one resident, "This couldn't happen to a more deserving neighborhood."  
 
 
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