Short Takes

> Along with its surprisingly accurate long-range weather predictions and other distinctive features, the 156-year-old Farmers' Almanac has always carried a batch of snappy sayings that put down women. ("She's a human dynamo--charging everything." "Many a gal has made it to the top because her dress didn't.") This year, however, the ladies get a slightly better shake. Acting on a letter from a Maryland woman who complained about male chauvinism. Editor Ray Geiger has included in the 1973 edition a two-page article stressing women's intellectual equality and right to equal opportunities. Admits Geiger: "The belief that 'it's a man's world' quite evidently becomes less valid with every passing day and year." But old habits change slowly, and the new Almanac (circ. 4.5 million) still sports its share of sexist one-liners like "My wife leads a double life--hers and mine."

> United Press International's foreign correspondents have often observed acidly to colleagues that UPI really stands for "underpaid internationally." The chronic complaint of low pay and long hours has caused four veteran American UPI staffers to precipitate a strike in the news agency's London bureau. The four make between $185 and $205 a week, not bad by British standards but far below the minimum of $272 that UPI must pay journeymen in New York. They joined Britain's National Union of Journalists in a bid for shorter work hours, and when the N.U.J. called a walkout to support them, UPI fired 28 British staffers in the London office. With that, the union staged a full-scale strike and ordered all 17 UPI clients in Britain not to use any of the agency's copy or pictures. The deadlock continued at week's end, with UPI moving copy out of London by facsimile instead of teletype and using senior nonstriking staffers to report British news.

> TIME Correspondent Samuel Iker could not believe his eyes when he saw "his" dispatch on Sargent Shriver's recent visit to Houston, a copy of which was routinely relayed back to him from TIME'S New York headquarters. The first three paragraphs had been mysteriously amended to include such Shriver-serving phrases as "Shriver reminded his warm, attentive audience..." Retracing the path of the material, Iker recalled that he had originally entrusted it to a campaign aide for delivery to Western Union. When Iker protested to Shriver staffers, they checked into the matter and discovered that a middle-aged woman volunteer for McGovern had wielded a partisan pencil on Iker's file before she delivered it for transmission. She was promptly dismissed. "She was overzealous and naive," said the candidate's Washington press chief, Roger Twohey, "and terribly misguided as to what would help us."

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