OTHER NEWS

KATRINA RESCUER OF 200 SUED FOR NOT RETURNING BOAT

STEVE RITEA, TIMES PICAYUNE, LA - A Broadmoor man who said he rescued
more than 200 residents after commandeering a boat during the flood
after Hurricane Katrina is being sued by the boat's owner for taking it
"without receiving permission." Mark Morice, who by the Wednesday after
the storm said he "couldn't get more than a block or two without people
screaming to me for help," took the boat "out of necessity. . . . I did
it for my neighbors."

Among them was Irving Gordon, a 93-year-old dialysis patient who Morice
carried from his flooded home, placed in the boat and rescued from
distress. "I don't know where we would be today if it weren't for him,"
Molly Gordon, Gordon's wife of 65 years, said Friday.

The lawsuit contends that boat owner John M. Lyons Jr. suffered his own
distress, in the form of "grief, mental anguish, embarrassment and
suffering . . . due to the removal of the boat," as well as its
replacement costs.

E. Ronald Mills, Lyons' Metairie lawyer, who filed the suit in 24th
Judicial District Court in Jefferson Parish earlier this month, on
Friday accused Morice of "hubris." Morice made no attempt to return the
boat, Mills said, and it remains missing.

The Friday after the storm, Morice said, he left the city briefly to
recover from a week of trolling the city's streets, "living in fear and
sleeping with a shotgun." That day, after delivering 15 people to dry
ground on Claiborne Avenue near the Orleans-Jefferson parish line,
Morice said he parked the boat there and left it for other rescuers to
use. Given the sum-of-all-fears atmosphere at the time, returning the
boat "was the farthest thing from my mind," he said.

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-6/
1156572434292430.xml&coll=1

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DECLINE OF THE TIE IN BRITAIN

KATHRYN HUGHES, GUARDIAN, UK - The proportion of men in professional
jobs who buy ties, a report says, has dropped from 70% in 1996 to just
56% today. . . Only 28% of office managers have bought a tie in the past
12 months. It is, however, floppy-collared architects and surveyors who
are the biggest slackers: last year only a paltry 16% of them bothered
to purchase a thin string of fabric to tie around their necks . . .

Ever since 1880, when the jaunty rowers of Oxford's Exeter College
removed the ribbon bands from their hats and tied them round their
necks, the tie has become a virtual microchip of information about where
you come from and, by implication, where you are going. Schools, clubs,
regiments and colleges all signal their specialness with a complicated
pattern of spots and stripes that can only be decoded by those in the
know. By refusing to be tied down in this way, members of what might be
termed the post-industrial professions (financial advisers are also low
on the tie-buying scale) signal that they hail from a world of flattened
hierarchies and democratic interaction.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1864095,00.html

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STUPID AIR CANADA TRICKS

CBC - Some fellow passengers are questioning why an Orthodox Jewish man
was removed from an Air Canada Jazz flight in Montreal last week for
praying. The man was a passenger on a Sept. 1 flight from Montreal to
New York City when the incident happened. The airplane was heading
toward the runway at the Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport
when eyewitnesses said the Orthodox man began to pray. "He was clearly a
Hasidic Jew," said Yves Faguy, a passenger seated nearby. "He had some
sort of cover over his head. He was reading from a book. "He wasn't
exactly praying out loud but he was lurching back and forth," Faguy
added.

The action didn't seem to bother anyone, Faguy said, but a flight
attendant approached the man and told him his praying was making other
passengers nervous. "The attendant actually recognized out loud that he
wasn't a Muslim and that she was sorry for the situation but they had to
ask him to leave," Faguy said. The man, who spoke neither English nor
French, was escorted off the airplane.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2006/09/05/qc-hasidicprayeronplane.html