Stupidest headline of the week: "Gates wishes he had smiled for the video," from the 12-8-98 Seattle Times business section...--Geov Parrish

Sen. Slade Gorton, working for you, was reportedly the force behind the recent cutting during this year's federal budget battle of $10 million from the funding of the Justice Department's antitrust office. Gorton is widely assumed by Washington observers--not that it was reported back home, mind you--as having engineered the move as a favor to hometown buddy Bill Gates, who is having his problems with the department these days. Of course, happily, the budget cuts also impair Justice's ability to oppose, say, the Exxon/Mobil merger or any of the numerous pending mega-deal players shaping corporate America. Many of whom also give money to Slade.--G.P.

Another random thought: Is there any evidence at all that petitions circulated over the Internet have ever been effective? Seems to me that if they're ever delivered--and how many chain letters are?--the average secretary, reviewing e-mail at your average officeholder's lair, would simply take note of how easy it is to invent a list of people and places, and just hit the "delete" key. Lots of time, lots of hassle, zero impact. The Internet is great for some types of grass roots organizing. For other types--like petitions, or reaching people not already convinced about your issue--the high-tech gloss lures a lot of activists into wasting each others' time.--G.P.

More news on the global warming front: not only have mean global temperatures increased over the past century, but also "apparent temperatures" have increased, too. Apparent temperature is a measurement of the combined impact of heat and humidity on people. Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Air Resources Laboratory have published a study in the journal Nature that shows that apparent temperatures are rising faster than heat alone, because humidity is rising much faster--which can be expected from overall global warming (more water evaporates and the warmer atmosphere can hold more). Because higher humidity leads to higher nighttime temperatures, people get no relief from heat waves. Higher apparent temperatures are linked to more heat-related deaths, such as the 600 people who died during a heat wave in Chicago in 1995.--M.T.

On Wednesday, Dec. 10, British Home Secretary Jack Straw ruled that former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet could be extradited from the U.K. to stand trial in Spain. While another victory for human rights, this decision sets off another round of appeals in a process that could drag on for two years. The question remains: will the ailing 78-year-old Pinochet even be alive by the time his lawyers exhaust all of his appeals and Chilean exiles see a chance for justice to be done? In the meantime, there are encouraging signs that other folks are using this case as an opportunity to nab mass murders; another promising candidate: Jean Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, the former ruler of Haiti, who's rumored to be living under police protection in the French Riviera.--M.T.

While Chiapas has gotten most of the norteno attention due to those trendy Zapatistas (take note of the Seattle demo on Dec. 22, the one-year anniversary of the Acteal massacre), low-grade civil wars have been rumbling for years in several other Mexican states, too. In one of them, Tabasco--where enormous nonviolent civil protest has been met by paramilitary death squads for the last three years--one of the leading goverenment critics was allegedly disappeared on Dec. 3. Jose Dolores Cordova Hernandez, ex-commissioner of the Ejido Carrillo Puerto in Centla, Tabasco, and a collaborator of Servicio Paz y Justicia (SERPAJ) Tabasco, disappeared according to testimony given by his wife, Veronica May Ocana, to a public official in Centla. The concern, of course, is both that he won't be seen alive again and that it marks a serious escalation in government goon squad tactics. The simmering war in Mexico gets astonishingly little press in the U.S., given not just the usual U.S. complicity in state-backed atrocities (compounded by money and military aid diverted from the ludicrous War on Drugs), but our long border and large population of Mexican nationals. The condition causing the unrest in Mexico--neoliberalism, crushing poverty, and a corrupt one-party dictatorship with elections--are being orchestrated in the plush offices of D.C. and Wall Street. It's only fitting that so many flee here to seek relief from U.S.-imposed misery.--G.P.

At Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in Sydney, Australia, visitors are having too much fun with a wax copy of Bill Clinton. Museum workers have had to sew up the trouser zipper. Said the exhibitor's general manager, Vicky Brown: "The figures are very accessible and people tend to get up close to get their photographs taken. We were finding that every time we went past Bill Clinton the zipper was undone."--M.T.

One last reminder for 1998: Last week, we circulated our one-time-a-year fundraising letter, in which we ask those of you who pay nothing (in print or on the web) to consider pitching in to help ETS! meet expenses. Here's your reminder to please respond. We are a very marginal operation, and we've rung up substantial personal debts to a couple of our volunteers in the process. We simply can't continue to publish unless we spread out the burden a little more evenly. We're also losing some key volunteers (distribution help especially), so now is a great time to get involved. Stop by on Tuesday nights, e-mail us at ets@scn.org, or call at 206-215-1156.