Balance Sheet.

• Author: Taylor, Jeff A.
• Position: News Briefs - Brief Article

* Grossed In. Canada's graphic anti-smoking campaign featuring full color snaps of diseased body parts on tobacco products, becomes a collector's item among Canuck teens. If there is one thing more powerful than nicotine, it's the gross-out. Still, Sen. Dick Durbin (D.-Ill.) misses the point and introduces a bill to do the same in the U.S.

* Guide Wires. America Online and Time Warner announce plans to open the conglomerate's cable lines to a variety of Internet providers. Backers of so-called "open access"-mainly the competing Bell companies-had argued that only government could compel such a thing to occur.

* Brian Candy. Spanish researchers find that THC in marijuana might fight brain tumors. Scientists shot cannabinoids directly into mouse brain cancers only to see the tumors shrink while normal cells thrived. Human trials are planned soon.

* Open Doors. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan tell Congress that more foreign workers are needed to help keep the economy going. Uncle Alan backs a bill to increase from 65,000 to 195,000 the number of high-tech workers who could emigrate to the United States each year. "The benefits of bringing in people to do the work here, rather than doing the work elsewhere, to me, should be pretty self-evident," he says.

* Tax Tips. Less than one in 300 tax returns will be audited for tax year 1999, compared to one in 67 in 1981. Adverse publicity and new taxpayer rights laws make the IRS auditors gun-shy. Auditors can now be fired outright for abusing taxpayers, a novel concept.

* Gun Snobby. A Louisiana judge...