News In Brief

Not bad for a first try

Things didn't look good for a certain British printing company, Martin Mulligan UK Ltd. It was on the edge of bankruptcy, in desperate need of a boost. Enter Adam Hughes, who performed a turnaround wonder ... and who is only a teen. Hughes, you see, joined the firm for a two-week stint that was arranged by his school. During the internship, he redesigned Martin Mulligan's marketing strategy by installing an Internet sales operation. The change, says a company official, is expected to generate more than $1 million. The firm offered Hughes a top position in its new US operation, but Hughes turned it down - to pursue architecture in college.

It didn't look right

Police at Zimbabwe's international airport made a small dent in the war against drugs when they arrested a woman with 14 pounds of marijuana. But this wasn't necessarily the result of any elaborate drug-detection system. No, the woman came under suspicion because her - shall we say - sizable posterior didn't match the rest of her frame. The drugs, police say, were stuffed in her underwear.

Now-familiar 'chad' earns spot as hot word of 2000

Language is never static, which is why yourDictionary.com, a leading language portal on the Internet, compiles some of the year's hottest words. The website asked experts to rank terms that reflect innovations in word choice and usage. Among their picks in two categories were:

Top words

1. Chad

2. Millennium

3. Y2K

4. Sydney Olympics

5. Dotcom

Top Internet-related words

1. Eyeballs: visitor to a website

2. Stickiness: amount of time visitor stays on a website

3. Click-through: clicking on a banner ad on a website

4. Click-and-mortar: hybrid between dotcom and a brick-and-mortar operation

5. Layoffs: what happens when a dotcom fails

(c) Copyright 2001. The Christian Science Publishing Society