News In Brief

PROVIDE YOUR OWN BRUSH

Parents teach their children to refuse offers of candy from strangers. But what if the offer is a tube of toothpaste? In the Atlanta suburb of Smyrna, Ga., accepting should be OK ... because the giver is a reputable dentist, Dr. Ted Aspes. It seems in 1975 he pledged such a giveaway to every child in town - and there may be as many as 10,000 - if any of his patients won the National Spelling Bee, a Rhodes Scholarship, World Series ring, the Heisman Trophy, golf's Masters Tournament, or a Tony, Grammy, or Academy Award. Last Sunday night, former patient Julia Roberts won an Oscar for Best Actress.

GUESS WE FAILED YOU, HUH?

Just as the US will do this weekend, Germany switched back to Daylight Saving Time last Sunday morning. Only, for quite a few folks there it was basically the same old same-old. They're subscribers to the wake-up service offered by Deutsche Telekom. But the giant communications utility called them an hour late because its own clock apparently wasn't set ahead.

Naturally, US is No. 1 in Web households, right? Wrong

Denmark has the highest proportion of households wired to the Internet - 54 percent - of the nations included in a new survey of Web use by international tracker NetValue. Denmark also has the greatest concentration of e-mail users, at 73.4 percent. By contrast, China and Spain lagged far behind, with less than 18 percent of wired households. In the area of gender equality, the US ranked No. 1, with male surfers at 52 percent, to 48 percent for females. The survey also showed the most popular websites are portals, with Yahoo.com and msn.com among the top domains in the countries studied. Countries where Web use is the most common and the percent of connected households in each:

Denmark 54.0%

US 50.9

Singapore 47.4

Taiwan 40.0

South Korea 37.3

- Reuters

(c) Copyright 2001. The Christian Science Monitor