FLAT EARTH

Smoker fumes over her Miami vice

A WARM breeze, infused with a hint of smoke, wafts across North Miami, carrying a ruling from the US Supreme Court. It's OK, the Supremes inform city officials, to ask job applicants to sign affidavits saying they have not used tobacco in the past year.

The city's policy had really got up Arlene Kurtz's nose. A smoker for 30 years and an unsuccessful applicant for a clerk-typist position, she sued, arguing that the no-smoking rule had nothing to do with job performance and intruded into lawful private behaviour. The city retorted that each smoker costs it an extra $4,611 (nearly pounds 3,000) a year.

The Supremes (smokers, 3; non-smokers, 6) let stand a Florida ruling that North Miami's interest in reducing costs from smoking-related illnesses was rational and did not infringe on privacy or liberty. But to Ms Kurtz's lawyers, where there's no smoke, there's fire.

''A government employer,'' they fumed, "could regulate when its employees or prospective employees go to bed at night, how much beer they drink on weekends, what they eat for breakfast, what kind of cars they drive, where they take their vacations and what hobbies they engage in.''

Ms Kurtz might consider a job at Miami International Airport. After officials opted for diplomacy over clean air and allowed a group of German dignitaries to light up, the ban on smoking in the international terminal - where cultures clash even more than they do in North Miami - was relaxed.

Wandawoman

WHEN China gains control of Hong Kong in July 1997, will it follow the lead of Argentina's Radical Party? In the town of Wanda, on the Paraguayan border, a councillor who lost her seat was made a street sweeper, complete with a sign around her neck reading: ''Former Peronist Town Councillor''. The Radicals say they didn't do it out of malice; it's just that sweeping was the only job the woman was capable of doing. ''She doesn't even know how to type,'' the new mayor complained.

Governor Chris Patten no doubt will find a job in 18 months. The Chinese, however, already seem to have Argentine-style career plans in mind for him. They recently provided a clue, denouncing him, curiously, as ''a tango dancer''.

Steering group

ISRAELI MPs are driving on the slow road to reform - and from first accounts it's a bumpy path. The legislators' rowdy behaviour in the Knesset, it seems, extends to the highways and byways of the land of milk and honey.

Twelve of the MPs got a crash course in road manners last week, a mandatory requirement for those with two recent traffic violations. The idea is that the deputies learn to set an example for the rest of the country rather than undermine the government's safe-driving campaign.

More than 18,000 Israelis, including one member of the Kneset, have been killed in road accidents - more than have died in all the wars with their Arab neighbours.

So how did they do? After the class settled down and stopped acting, as their instructor put it, ''like kids in kindergarten'', the TV cameras left - and so did two of the MPs.