WORTH NOTING.

* National Baptist Convention President Henry Lyons was convicted in February 1999 of racketeering and grand theft for swindling millions of dollars through fraudulent business deals that allowed him to finance his lavish lifestyle. Bernice Edwards, once the convention's public relations director, was found not guilty in the scheme.

* The Reverend Gregory Dell was found guilty in March of disobeying Methodist church law by officiating at a "holy union" of two men. It was the first of what is expected to be many tests of the denomination's ban on same-sex ceremonies, which was instituted in 1998 after the acquittal of the Reverend Jimmy Creech for officiating at the union of two women.

* A 194-year-old Louisiana sodomy law got the boot in February by an appeals court that said noncommercial oral and anal sex is protected by the right to privacy provision in the state's constitution. The court reversed the 1996 rape conviction of Mitchell E. Smith, who had been found guilty under the state's "crimes against nature" statute of having the woman perform oral sex on him.

* Research on human embryos was described as "both laudable and forward-thinking" in March by seventy-three scientists, including sixty-seven Nobel Prize winners, who signed a letter in support of financing the controversial research. The letter, published in the journal Science, came in response to plans by the National Institutes of Health to consider financing research with stem cells that originated from human embryos.

* A Canadian judge ruled in March that a thirteen-year-old with cancer must undergo chemotherapy and possibly have his leg amputated despite the religion-based objections of the boy and his parents. Judge Allison Rothery said the boy had been given misinformation by his father and ordered his medical treatment be overseen by Saskatchewan's Social Services Department.

* Oregon introduced a bill in January that would allow criminal charges to be brought against parents whose religious beliefs contribute to the death of their child. The bill comes after the Clackamas County district attorney refused to prosecute the parents of an eleven-year-old boy who died from treatable diabetes.

* The National Center on Homelessness in January named Atlanta, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Tuscon as the five cities with the "meanest streets" in the nation when it comes to criminalizing homelessness. In Tucson, for example, the city considered a plan to privatize the sidewalks and lease them for $1 to businesses in order to keep the homeless off the sidewalks; while San Francisco police issued 16,000 "quality of life" violation tickets between January and November last year and distributed pictures of homeless people to liquor stores.

* With the death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, the nation lost a champion of church-state separation and civil rights. A modest but passionate man, Blackmun is most often remembered for his 1973 opinion in Roe v. Wade, which he defended throughout his life at great personal cost.

Marian Hetherly is an editor at the Humanist.