Lecture Fees Breaking Records, the Term Dropout Reconsidered

And now the most compelling two minutes in television, the latest from the political grapevine.

Former President Clinton is reportedly on the verge of breaking the all-time American record for a lecture fee. The New York Post reports Mr. Clinton is getting $200,000 for a speech tonight at the Los Angeles University of Judaism. More than 6,000 people are expected to attend, and are said to have paid $180 for the four-part lecture series featuring the ex-President, his former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, his political adviser James Carville and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

A new government report in Canada says the term "high school dropout" should be abandoned in favor of something that it says won't victimize the dropouts and cause self-esteem problems in later life. The report, prepared by the province of Alberta's Department of Learning, is called "Removing Barriers to High School Completion," suggests the term "early school leaver" instead of dropout.

Meanwhile, at European Union Headquarters in Brussels, they're arguing over how many lumps a sauce can contain and still be called a sauce. If it has too many lumps of say, mushrooms, regulators think it should be labeled a vegetable. The present limit is 20 percent lumps, or the stuff is subject to the high tariffs European countries impose on each other's vegetables. But sauce makers claim the public appetite for "sauces with textural interest" make that limit too low.

The Reuters News Agency, which does not permit the use of the word terrorist to describe political extremists who murder civilians did allow the following to appear in a dispatch last week "The United States, which gives Israel about $2 billion a year in weaponry used to kill Palestinians." A Reuters spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal the phrasing was unbalanced and was fixed in later reports. Then, came this in a Reuters analysis on Bush Middle East policy today, "Frustrated, disappointed and angry. Many in the Middle East feel this way about U.S. foreign policy in President Bush's first year in office – unless they happen to be Israeli."