Sidelights.(national and international events and popular culture)(Brief Article)

Sixty-four percent of Palestinians support suicide bomb attacks against Israel, according to a poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center.... Forty percent of British Muslims think Osama bin Laden's war against America is justified, according to a London Times poll. The same number believe Britons who fight with the Taliban are justified in doing so. Three fourths of homosexuals and bisexuals feel more accepted by society than they did a few years ago, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll.... Two girls will be listed as "class sweethearts" in a Dover, New Hampshire high school yearbook. Nearly 6 million Poles, making up 40 percent of the Polish work force, want to live and work abroad, states a report published by PricewaterhouseCoopers.... The United Kingdom and Ireland have the highest rates of depression in Europe, declares a British psychiatric journal. Spain has the lowest. A new Maryland law will require gun buyers to watch a two-hour film on gun safety before buying a firearm.

Karen Davis, president of the animal-rights group United Poultry Concerns, wrote that it is "speciesist to think that the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center was a greater tragedy than what millions of chickens endured that day, and what they endure every day because they cannot defend themselves against the concerted human appetites arrayed against them." Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. described corporate pork production as a threat "greater than that in Afghanistan. This is not only a threat to the environment, it is a threat to the American economy and democracy." Representative Lois Capps, California Democrat, has secured $50,000 in federal funds for the Liberty Tattoo Removal Program of San Luis Obispo County. She defended the move by observing that "people with tattoos often find themselves being unfairly stereotyped in a way that makes it difficult to find employment or be promoted to higher, better paying positions." Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of the cartoon "South Park," told a convention of the left-wing People for the American Way that they're "proud Republicans." ...