Sidelights.(Brief Article)

The Federal Bureau of Prisons is seeking a "dance instructor" to teach beginning and advanced classes to the Texas inmate population. At Harvard University, transvestite and self-proclaimed "queen" William L. Adams won the title of "Miss Harvard." ... Josh Godbold, a 14-year-old North Carolina eighth-grader, claims he is a victim of sexual discrimination because he wasn't allowed to try out for his school's all-girl softball team. New York University's student-run sadomasochist group WHAP (We Honor All Perverts) tried to sell hazing services to NYU fraternities and sororities. Former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev told Crisis magazine that his "relationship with President Clinton was quite strained, if not downright tense.... I was highly critical of his foreign policy. He is guilty for the fact that the U.S. has wasted those ten years following the end of the Cold War."

Russia's Sovietsky Hotel, built under Joseph Stalin's orders, is prominently using the late dictator's image in its advertising and interior design. The hotel features a red neon hammer and sickle on the outside, and numerous portraits of Stalin and V.I. Lenin on the inside. "Sixty percent of our clients are German, and Stalin attracts them," said hotel manager Valery Maximov. "They often gaze at his portrait, perhaps because he reminds them of the Hitler era, when they were a major power." French driving students may soon have to wait 24 hours before learning the results of their driving tests. Too many candidates are attacking examiners who fail them on the spot. Several U.K. and U.S. scientists have written a report questioning common ideas about global warming. Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, said "The authors challenge the key contradiction at the heart of the Kyoto Protocol, the global climate agreement--that climate is one of the most complex systems known, yet that we can manage it by trying to control a small set of factors, namely greenhouse gas emissions. Scientifically, this is ...