Balance sheet.

• Author: Taylor, Jeff A.
• Position: Citings - Mexican truck laws, Internet use, other news - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

* Border Pass. A NAFTA arbitration panel rules in favor of Mexico and against the U.S. in a trucking dispute. As a result, Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona must allow access to Mexican trucks, provided they pass state safety standards.

* Bit Nation. The Net goes unhip as a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that most people now have Net access. Fully 56 percent of the adult population--or 104 million people--now go online for their porn, stock quotes, and bomb recipes.

* Crop Flop. Greenpeace backs away from opposition to field trials of "golden" rice, a vitamin A-enriched grain that could help stop blindness in the Third World.

* Good Sports. Members of a Florida gay and lesbian softball league oppose quotas for straight players. Heteros are now capped at two per team lest they dominate the league. "That's ridiculous. That's like saying all African-Americans are fantastic basketball players," one gay activist notes.

* Click Through. A federal appeals court gives Barnes & Noble's Internet wing the right to keep using Amazon.com's "single-click technology" pending a trial over Amazon's 1999 patent. Jeff Bezos' gang thinks they are the first merchants in history to remember a customer.

* Game Trading. File-trading network Aimster tries to avoid the liabilities of Napster by using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the content owners who wrote it. Users are officially barred--wink-wink--from opening the files they download. Any attempt by anyone to check up on that would violate DMCA bans on encryption hacking.

* Phased and Confused. The Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation calculates that thanks to various phase-outs and credits in the tax code, marginal rates can jump to over 50 percent in some cases. Phase-outs for the Roth IRA, for example, can add up to 12 percentage points to a tax...