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SCMP Reporter

LAST year, Hollywood gave us The People Vs Larry Flynt. Now, Washington is playing host to Larry Flynt vs The People.

 The maverick publisher of Hustler and other colourful pornographic magazines has sent a chill wind across Capitol Hill with a million-dollar challenge to weed out the nation's elected hypocrites.

 The second topic on members of Congress' lips last week - after the pros and cons of an impeachment inquiry of President Bill Clinton - was how many sexual skeletons Mr Flynt was going to drag from the closets along the Capitol's corridors.

 Mr Flynt once again showed himself to be one of the nation's cultural treasures when he paid US$85,000 (HK$658,400) for a full-page ad in the Washington Post offering up to US$1 million to anyone who could prove they had an adulterous affair with a politician or senior official and tell their story to Hustler.

 While many legislators are already laughing the offer off as a cheap gimmick, there also must be a good few who are quietly hoping their skeletons stay locked in the cupboard.

 Assuming members of Congress are representative, in human terms, of the people who elected them to office, that must mean a fairly high percentage of the 535 House members and senators have committed some kind of sexual impropriety that they would hope to keep buried in the past.

 To Mr Flynt, this is as much about free speech as it is about selling a few more units of sleaze. He certainly has great First Amendment credentials, having been paralysed by a sniper's bullet during his 1970s crusade against obscenity laws.

 And it is, also, he told the Washington Post, about the Clinton scandal.

 'I feel the people who are going to be sitting in judgment who have not been truthful about similar activities in their own lives should rescue themselves,' he said.

 'What we are talking about is hypocrisy in its highest form. People always lie about sex - to get sex, during sex, after sex, about sex. I totally disagree that perjury is perjury. Lying about your private life, even under oath, is totally different.'  Not all Congressmen have had a sense of humour failure.

 'I'd like to commit adultery so I could get the $1 million,' said Democrat Alcee Hastings. 'But I'm single and have been single for 27 years.' It is common knowledge that abortion is one of America's hottest political potatoes, but since the Supreme Court's landmark 1973 ruling legalising it, abortion has rarely been a matter for the courts.

 That does not seem to concern a lower court judge in Cleveland, Ohio, who has taken it upon herself to play God and guardian of the law.

 The judge, Patricia Cleary, has sent a 21-year-old Japanese immigrant to jail to prevent her from having an abortion - sparking outrage among civil rights lawyers. Yoriko Kawaguchi, a student at Berkeley in California who is five-months pregnant, would normally have received a probation sentence for pleading guilty to a minor charge of credit card forgery.

 But in an extraordinary ruling, Judge Cleary last week handed Kawaguchi a six-month jail term, citing no other reason than that she was not prepared to allow her to walk free to have a late-stage abortion.

 The fact that abortions are legal up to virtually the last month of pregnancy does not appear to have entered the judge's equation, and she has been unapologetic about her decision.

 Joan Englund of the American Civil Liberties Union, who is helping lawyers trying to appeal the ruling, called Judge Cleary's action 'an egregious abuse of power'.

 Kawaguchi, who has said she will give the baby up for adoption if forced to have it in prison, said of the judge: 'She pretty much played God with my life.' They might as well blame El Nino. It is probably the only plausible solution.

 The racing pigeon community in the eastern US is dumbfounded by the disappearance of more than 3,000 birds, who lost their way during races and never arrived home.

 In no less than three recent races in the area between Virginia and New York, the vast majority of the pigeons never showed up at the finishing line. Their owners believe something must have made them take a wrong turn, but where they ended up is anyone's guess.

 While a handful die or get lost during an average race, it is unheard of for such huge numbers of pigeons to go AWOL.

 Since human beings have little idea how homing pigeons find their way home, solving the mystery could be a problem. One theory is sunspots, which are thought to interfere with the electromagnetic fields that may be the secret of a pigeon's homing device.

 But given such a mass disappearance, suspicions are turning to high cellular phone activity, which also plays havoc with the Earth's electromagnetic balance.

 Some pigeons did survive their ordeal.

 But the few that arrived at the finish - much later than expected - were so exhausted that it is clear they went way out of their way.

 Perhaps the only thing more weird than all this is the question why grown men spend so much time playing with pigeons in the first place. But ours is not to reason why - there are about 15,000 pigeon enthusiasts in America, and until this latest tragedy, they were a pretty happy bunch.



Flynt hustles Capitol Hill