East-West Buildup: Habitat for Humanity, a group...

East-West Buildup: Habitat for Humanity, a group that builds housing for the poor, hopes to recruit electrician Lech Walesa and carpenter Jimmy Carter to work on a project in Poland to renovate office buildings into apartments. Habitat spokesman Clive Rainey said in Americus, Ga., that he wants the two to work on the same project.

Lawyer Jokes: Imprisoned evangelist Jim Bakker, serving 45 years in a federal prison in Minnesota for defrauding his flock, called his attorney, Jim Toms of Hendersonville, N.C., last week to share some humor. “He asked me if I knew what they call 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea,” Toms said. “Then he told me the answer--’A good start.’ That shows he at least is in good spirits.”

Gift Book: A previously unknown manuscript by the late Orson Welles will be auctioned March 22 at Swann Galleries in New York. The illustrated book, for sale by Welles’ daughter, Rebecca, was her gift for Christmas, 1956, when she was 11 and lived with her mother, Rita Hayworth. Welles wrote “The Bravades,” an account of a French medieval pageant, as a way “to keep in touch and tell me how much he loved me,” Rebecca says. “The gift was that much more precious because I didn’t spend much time with him.”

No Change: A nephew of U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen is trying to persuade a Houston transsexual convicted of murder to step down from a runoff election for party chairman and let him accept the post. Leslie Elaine Perez won 27% of the ballots for the Harris County post Tuesday, running second to Ken Bentsen Jr., who won 42%. Perez, 52, a real estate investor, was convicted under the name of Leslie Douglas Ashley in the 1961 death of an insurance salesman and was paroled in 1971. Ashley then underwent a sex-change operation. Bentsen met with Perez on Wednesday. She said she would not withdraw.