Year 2000

Just the image of Joseph Benti anchoring a news program elicits good feelings, but to watch Benti host a series on social issues and the future is almost too good to be true. As the replacement co-host (with Val Zavala) for Eric Burns on the new season of KCET's "By the Year 2000," Benti is his sartorial best, his elegant manner completely intact from his heyday on the old KNXT. "By the Year 2000" (airing Fridays at 9 p.m. on Channel 28, usually repeating on Saturdays at 5 p.m.

By the year 2000, there will be 6.2 billion people on Earth, and an average of 4 1/2 people will be born every second, the Census Bureau estimated Sunday. In a new profile of world population figures, the bureau said that from 1990 to 2000, developing countries will add 828 million people to the world's population--more than three times the current U.S. population. The population at the end of the millennium is expected to be 27% larger than in 1985.

A possible preview of the millennium bug is set to strike Thursday when computers will reach an unusual date that could cause some programs to malfunction. Thursday is the ninth day of the ninth month of the 99th year of the century--a date that is recorded on some computers as 9/9/99. Year 2000 experts have long warned about this date, since it was sometimes used in the early days of computer programming, back in the 1960s, to mark the end of a data file.

The task of teaching all of the computers in the nation's largest county government how to deal with the year 2000 will cost nearly $97 million, according to a report made public Friday. Like computers all over the world, the ones that help run Los Angeles County depend on software that won't know what year it is in 2000. And that could mean massive computer crashes. Around the world, business and government are expecting to pay billions of dollars in salaries and software to fix the problem.

Will tough new anti-pollution regulations really make Southern California air quality better by the year 2000? How will the changes affect you personally? Mary D. Nichols, senior attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council: I think it is quite certain that we will have fewer days when we violate the first-stage emergency episode level.

International Monitoring, a technology consulting group based in Britain, has ranked nations around the world according to their preparedness for Y2K. The firm sought third-party verification of each government's reports on cleansing computers and embedded circuits of the Year 2000 bug, and it based its ratings on the risk of disruptions in a given country's power, telecoms, finance and transportation infrastructures. IM predicts 10% of Y2K failures will occur on Jan.

Evangelicals, a growing force in Christianity, open a global conference next week to refine strategies for spreading the faith, some aiming for it to be offered to everyone by AD 2000. That widely asserted target sometimes is considered more as a stimulus than a potentially accomplishable task. But the fervor for working at it is mounting in many church quarters. "The Countdown Has Begun" goes the title on a book of interdenominational planning discussions held early this year in Singapore.

Orange County is generally well-prepared to handle the looming year 2000 computer crisis, but progress is uneven and local government agencies are expected to spend at least $15 million preparing for it, grand jurors concluded in a report released Friday. "The grand jury found certain allegations of progress were optimistic, milestones allegedly achieved were not actually achieved, and testing was underemphasized," the report concluded.

The year 2000 problem in computer software may turn out to be a mere blip on Jan. 1, 2000, or it may be a social and economic cataclysm--no one knows for sure. But we do know that even now, about 550 days before that date of reckoning, the "millennium bug" is having an impact on politics and may soon begin to shake up society in general.

Even if the Seahawks do not move to Southern California, Pasadena might be awarded another Super Bowl as early as 1999, NFL officials said Tuesday. Because of a united effort by Pasadena officials and the Los Angeles' Sports and Entertainment Commission, the league considers the Rose Bowl and Miami's Joe Robbie Stadium the top candidates to substitute for San Francisco's Candlestick Park for the 1999 Super Bowl.