WORTH NOTING.

* A federal jury in Portland, Oregon, has ruled that the Nuremberg Files antiabortion website (see the January/February 1999 Humanist) amounts to death threats against abortion providers. More than a dozen defendants were ordered to pay more than $100 million in damages in the decision that could redefine what is considered constitutionally protected speech.

* Women suffer no lasting ill effects from taking birth-control pills, according to the largest study ever on the subject. Published in the British Medical Journal, the study of 46,000 British women found that, ten years after they stopped using the pill, the women's chances of dying from cancer, stroke, and other side effects were the same as women who had never taken the pill.

* Two high-school seniors whose school denied them National Honor Society membership because of their pregnancies must be admitted into the society, according to a federal judge in Covington, Kentucky. The American Civil Liberties Union argued that treating pregnant or parenting students differently from others discriminates against young women.

* In one of the first rulings of its kind, a federal judge has found that a Marble Hill, Missouri, high school violated the free speech rights of one of its students when it suspended him for posting a personal website critical of the school. Judge Rodney Sippel said, "Disliking or being upset by the content of a student's speech is not an acceptable justification for limiting student speech."

* Christianity Today reports that an alumnus of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, received a letter from the fundamentalist school's dean of students saying, "As long as you are living as a homosexual, you, of course, would not be welcome on cam pus and would be arrested for trespassing if you did visit." The ban on gay visitors, however, doesn't apply to the campus art museum, which could lose its tax-exempt status. In 1970, the school lost its tax exemption because of its ban on interracial dating.

* Southern Baptist churches are now offering Sunday school lessons on how homosexuals can "change." The lessons offer readings on "healing" homosexuals, and Christian heterosexuals are asked to help change these "sinners."

* The Michigan Supreme Court has ruled that landlord John Hoffius violated the civil rights of two couples in 1993 when he refused to rent to them because of his belief that they would be "living in sin." The court overturned three lower court rulings in deciding it is illegal to discriminate against couples based on their marital status.

* The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that police who seize someone's property during a search do not have to provide information on how to get it back later. Justice Anthony Kennedy said, "Once the property owner is informed ... the city need not take other steps to inform him of his options."

* The U.S. Department of Agriculture has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by thousands of black farmers who say the department discriminated against them by denying loans and other subsidies. Black farmers who have claimed discrimination are eligible for $50,000 tax-free and to have all their debts to the department--averaging $75,000 to $150,000--forgiven.

* Federal immigration officials say a record 171,000 illegal aliens were deported from the United States in fiscal year 1998. That's a 50 percent jump from 1997 and doesn't count the estimated 1.5 million illegal aliens who were stopped at the border.

* A new Nuclear Waste Policy Act is making its way through Congress, despite being stopped every year since it was first introduced in 1994. This "Mobile Chernobyl" bill would mandate a thirty-plus-year shipping program to transport high-level radioactive waste accumulated at commercial reactors in forty-three states across the country to the nuclear test site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Casks containing the waste would be stored above ground "temporarily" while awaiting permanent disposal.

* Northern Brands, a subsidiary of R. J. Reynolds tobacco company, has been fined $15 million for tax evasion in a scheme to smuggle cigarettes made in Canada into the United States under the pretext they would be exported to eastern Europe. Instead, they were smuggled back into Canada through the Akwesasne Native American reserve near Cornwall, Ontario, helping the company avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes in both the United States and Canada.

* After adjusting for inflation, the median family income in 1997 was $37,005--just about where it was in 1989 and only $1,260 higher than in 1973. The New York Times comments, "Many households in the 1960s added more to their incomes in a single year than their counterparts today have added in 25 years. And they did it with one wage earner, not two or three, working fewer hours than the average jobholder does today."

Marian Hetherly is an editor at the Humanist. Mail your submissions--including your name, address, and phone number--to Worth Noting, the Humanist, PO. Box 1188, Amherst, NY 14226-7188.