Jaundice

If you want to see a questionable double standard at work, look at the widely disparate American attitudes toward Russia's new president, Vladimir V. Putin, and Chinese President Jiang Zemin. In the United States these days, and particularly among foreign policy elites, Putin is darkly portrayed as the vintage apparatchik, the mysterious ex-KGB man who threatens Russian liberties. Meanwhile, Jiang is often depicted as a closet reformer who may some day slowly move China in the right direction.

Nonny de la Pen~a's "The Jaundiced Eye," a documentary chronicling a terrible miscarriage of justice strung out over a decade, is a real-life family horror story. A father and son in a quaint, Norman Rockwell-like Michigan town are caught between a collision of two emotionally charged forces in American society: a lingering homophobia and a growing concern about child abuse.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) inaugurated the first Thanksgetting Day in American history last Thursday, inviting 200 relatives, staffers, lobbyists, defense contractors, snake handlers and speakers-in-tongues to a $5,000-a-plate "return to sanity" Thanksgetting Day dinner, symbolically held in the executive dining room of MegaCorp Inc., the tobacco, firearm and savings-and-loan conglomerate.

Sen. Huff: Mr. Pangloss, thank you for appearing here this morning. I yield to my colleague, the distinguished . . . Sen. Dudgeon: Sir, at last report "The Wizard of Oz" was responsible for more than 200 Midwestern schoolchildren, from 1939 to the present, running out of storm cellars and right into the eyes of tornadoes and cyclones. Mr. Pangloss: Well, senator, I'd like to-- Dudgeon: I don't care what you'd . . .

To Our Patrons: We are pleased to extend the auction of the effects of the late Mrs. Onassis to include a Garage Sale, consisting of several lots of incalculable personal and historical value just uncovered in a final sweep of attics, basements, lockers and closets. The notice of bidders is drawn to: Lot No. 4268 Two unopened cans of Tab Cola dated between 1963 and 1964, recovered from a cooler stored at the Kennedy family compound at Hyannisport, Mass.

Following are excerpts from what Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) now claims to be his secret "real" diaries, discovered under the mattress yesterday while moving out of his Washington apartment after he resigned from the Senate. Jan. 4 Why won't Miss ---------- leave me alone??? She followed me home again tonight! Invited herself in for a nightcap but didn't want warm milk and crackers and left in a huff when I brought out my National Geographics. Women! Jan.

Newt Gingrich created a storm the other day by saying the United States should recognize Taiwan as a free and independent country . . . . "It came out of a scene in 'Advise and Consent,' toward the end of the novel, where the Russians are bullying the new American President," Mr. Gingrich said in an interview. "And he says, 'Here are the three things I can do.' And he goes through three things, all of them so outside the Russian planning that they were aghast. They said, 'You can't do this.'

Smokers Against Perfume, the activist citizen lobby, stepped up its aggressive anti-perfume crusade today by demanding restaurants provide separate facilities for customers who insist on bringing their personal fetish for rubbing odoriferous musks on their skin into public places. "It's enough to ruin your meal," charged SAP spokesperson Sig (Smokey) Arette.

Doctors in Canada and Europe have used electrically generated shock waves to smash painful and often dangerous inoperable gallstones wedged in the bile duct, a researcher reported. "We are very encouraged by the initial success. We know the technique works and has no immediate side effects. But we don't know what will happen 10 years hence," said Dr. Laszlo Fried, associate professor of radiology at Dalhousie University Medical School in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

You are behind in the polls, Bob Dole, but don't despair. You can still become president of the United States if you follow a few of the simple tips featured in the bestseller, "The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right." You may think this book is only a dating guide, but you would be wrong. The authors claim the dos and don'ts offered in their book prescribe a way to behave in every relationship.