Countdown

The United Nations Population Fund declares that on October 12, 1999, there will be exactly six billion people on Earth. Or maybe sooner. Or later. “You can’t say exactly when,” admits PopFund spokeswoman Corrie Shanahan, but in order to get some press hoopla out of the milestone, they decided to choose a specific date. “It’s not entirely arbitrary,” Shanahan insists. It’s based on worldwide census data, some of which is 10 years old, to which they added anticipated births and subtracted anticipated deaths, which should equal six billion sometime soon. (AP) ...Save a life, ruin a statistic.