Of Human Interest: News-lite

ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE

You wouldn't think of a rural Kentucky prison as the best place to mount a production of a Shakespeare play, but according to the Christian Science Monitor, that's just what inmates at the Luther Lucket Correctional Complex in LaGrange, Ky., have done -- and "Titus Andronicus" is playing to rave reviews.

Some 23 inmates have taken on the daunting task of producing, staging and acting in the play. One of the actors tells the newspaper that doing the play gave him a sense of deja vu. He says that taking part in the death scene of the play was "almost a reenactment of the crime I committed."

The project, Shakespeare Behind Bars, is the brainchild of Curt Tofteland, whose usual job is as director of the not-behind-bars Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. At the prison shows, instead of going through a ticket booth, friends and family pass through a vehicle checkpoint, two metal detectors and four locking doors. So far it's been standing room only.

(Thanks to UPI Feature Reporter Dennis Daily)

TONGA BEING CONSIDERED FOR SPACEPORT

The rocket science company InterOrbital Systems is looking for a site to build a private spaceport that could launch tourists into orbit at a cost of $2 million each, and it's considering the remote South Pacific island of Tonga, according to an MSNBC report.

The company is focusing on Tonga in part because it requires a launch pad that will give vehicles a trajectory over the southern ocean. By 2004, they expect to put up two pilots and two tourists into polar low Earth orbit for as long as a week, according to chief executive Randa Milliron.

The $2 million price tag will include a training period to prepare "for all aspects of your Orbital Vacation, including centrifuge time to accustom you to the expected launch G-forces," the company said on its Web site.

If the enterprise is launched, it will be a big change for Tongan economy, which is currently based on exports of agricultural and fish products, tourism, international aid, and remittances from Tongans living abroad.

(Thanks to Jim Kling, UPI Science News)

HOT SHOTS

A pair of saddle pistols owned by successively the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington, and Andrew Jackson were sold last Friday in an auction at Christie's gallery for $1,986,000.

The firearms were included in an auction of Americana also highlighted by the sale of three silver beakers made by American patriot and silversmith Paul Revere in 1753, the earliest known examples of his work.

The 18-inch pistols, made in France, were in the possession of Lafayette when he arrived in South Carolina in 1777 to join Washington's Continental Army in its war for independence from Great Britain. Before returning to France briefly in 1778, Lafayette gave the pistols to Washington.

The pistols remained in the Washington family after the first president's death in 1799 and were eventually inherited by William Robinson, the widower of a granddaughter of Washington's half-brother, Augustine Washington. Robinson sent them to Andrew Jackson as a gift on the occasion of an 1824 celebration in Washington, D.C., of the anniversary of Jackson's victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.

Jackson -- who had served under Washington for three years during the Revolution -- in turn bequeathed the pistols to Lafayette's son, George Washington Lafayette, to whom they were sent in 1846. In 1958, the Lafayette family sold the pistols to a French collector whose estate sold them at auction in Paris in 1983 for $37,715. Since then, the pistols have belonged to three unidentified American collectors -- the last of which purchased them privately last August for about $1 million.

Christie's did not identify the winning bidder.

TALK SILENCED

Talk Magazine has run out of words. The periodical announced Friday that it was suspending publication, effective with the February issue, which is currently on newsstands.

Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, launched the magazine in September 1999 with a lavish celebrity-filled party on Liberty Island, with financing from Miramax, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, and the Hearst Corporation. There was strong ad response to its first four issues -- which were sold as a package -- and circulation was about 650,000.

However, magazine officials said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had led to an advertising shortfall -- and a reported $50 million in losses.

REASONS TO CELEBRATE THIS WEEK:

MONDAY: Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday is celebrated today as a federal holiday.

This is National Hugging Day.

It's also Squirrel Appreciation Day.

TUESDAY: This is Answer Your Cat's Question Day. (Web site: wellcat.com)

Today is also Celebration of Life Day, National Speak Up and Succeed Da and Rid the World of Fad Diets and Gimmicks Day.

And it's Ukrainian Day in Ukraine.

WEDNESDAY: This is National Compliment Day (Web site: complimentday.com)

It's also National School Nurse Day and Snowplow Mailbox Hockey Day.

And Bulgaria celebrates Babin Den, also known as Day of the Midwives or Grandmother's Day, today.

THURSDAY: Today is Women's Healthy Weight Day. (Web site: healthyweight.net)