Of Human Interest: News-lite

A ONE-TEEN ANTI-WAR PROTEST

A teenager in Blue Earth, Minn., won a battle with the city council for plans to stage his own little anti-war demonstration by camping out in a box on the corner of Seventh and Main streets.

The Faribault County Register reports Mark Walker Jr., 16, found a way around the city's curfew for kids under 18 -- exemptions are granted to those exercising their First Amendment rights.

Walker told the council he simply wanted to pass out anti-war literature and sleep in a box filled with data about the financial cost of a war with Iraq.

"I want to make a statement," he told the city council, which voted to allow him to have his say, which was scheduled for last weekend.

MARTHA SEES RED OVER POST PIX

Domestic diva Martha Stewart faces possible criminal charges, she's lost $400 million and her reputation is tarnished from an insider trading scandal -- but the New York Post reports the only news coverage she's complaining about is her picture.

The Post says Stewart complains the photos it has run of her make her normally perky, youthful face look haggard and distraught. She says they are "even more damaging" than anything being written or said about her.

She tells this week's New Yorker magazine being raked over the coals by Jay Leno, David Letterman and Conan O'Brien on a nightly basis isn't nearly as bad because those guys "have a job to do."

She complains, however, the Post runs "the ugliest pictures. And I'm a pretty photogenic person, I mean, and they manage to find the doozies."

DON'T DIS FRENCH FLAG OR ANTHEM

Careful not to insult the national flag or anthem if you're headed to France. The Telegraph newspaper's Paris bureau reports new legislation that has passed Parliament will allow the courts to fine or jail people who, as the paper puts it "defile the tricolour or mock the Marseillaise."

Free speech advocates are having a fit, contending the conservative French government is imposing a new moral order.

The Telegraph writes police say it will be next to impossible to enforce.

Minority socialists barely even registered an objection to the legislation -- fearing by opposing it they might seem to be encouraging insults.

DICKENS MORE THAN JUST NOVELIST

Charles Dickens wasn't just a novelist, but was also a man of the theater. That side of his creative personality is currently being explored and documented in an exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

"Best of Times: The Theater of Charles Dickens," on display through Feb. 15, is a one-gallery show in an intimate setting furnished with Victorian-style showcases full of letters and manuscripts and centered on a fireplace with a crackling gas log fire.

The walls are hung with portraits, colorful posters, and playbills as old as the 1830s and as recent as yesterday. It seems as though Dickens has just stepped out for a pint with members of the Pickwick Club.

Even before the publication of his first novel, "The Pickwick Papers," in 1837 made him one of the most popular authors in England, Dickens had written a play based on his story "The Great Winglebury Duel" that was performed at the St. James's Theater in London. It was just one of many forays into the theater world for the famed author.

(Thanks to UPI's Fred Winship in New York)