WORTH NOTING.

* Florida Governor Jeb Bush promised to keep the program going, but the nation's first statewide school voucher system was thrown out of court in March 2000. Circuit Judge L. Ralph Smith ruled that fifty-two children attending private schools in Pensacola under the program can finish the year, but Florida's constitution bars public money from being spent on private education.

* In a five-to-four decision, the U.S. Supreme Court in March ruled that the Federal Drug Administration does not have the jurisdiction to regulate tobacco products. However, two major tobacco companies lost a lawsuit in California that will require them to pay a former smoker with lung cancer $1.7 million in compensatory damages.

* The U.S. Supreme Court in January rejected an appeal by a Rwandan Seventh-day Adventist pastor living in Texas to block his extradition. The decision allowed seventy-five-year-old Elizaphan Ntakirutimana to face the United Nations' war crimes tribunal for his alleged involvement in the 1994 genocide of more than 500,000 Rwandan people, mainly Tutsis, including those who sought refuge in his church and hospital.

* A landmark rape case began in March before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. The tribunal began hearing evidence in the case of three Bosnian Serb commanders--Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac, and Zoran Vukovic--accused of the organized sexual enslavement of Muslim women after the Serb takeover of the town of Foca in 1992.

* The introduction of Islamic Sharia law in three of the northern states of Nigeria in February sparked brutal riots and massacres in which hundreds of predominantly Christian Ibos from the south were killed by local Hausas, who are almost all Muslims. In reprisal, the Ibo population harassed Hausas living among them, climaxing in the southeast town of Aba, where witnesses said more than 300 Hausas were massacred.

* The British House of Lords in December voted not to repeal a nearly 300-year-old law barring Catholics from the throne. The same month, British officials denied the Church of Scientology charitable status, saying it does not provide any public services.

* France's National Ethics Committee, an influential government-sponsored body whose members include conservatives and clergy, released its euthanasia report in March after three years of preparation. Although euthanasia is legally banned in France, the committee admitted in its carefully worded recommendations that assisted suicide might be permissible and that physicians should be shielded from prosecution.

* The Mexican government and Mitsubishi Corporation announced that they are abandoning a plan to build a giant salt plant near one of the last pristine breeding areas for gray whales. The $100 million plant would have been the largest in the world and was the target of a five-year campaign by conservationists who worried about the plant's impact on the annual migration of the once-endangered mammal from Alaska to Mexico's Baja Peninsula.

* A record number of U.S. senators earned a "zero" rating on the 1999 National Environmental Scorecard released in February by the League of Conservation Voters. The league said thirty-seven senators, over one-third of the chamber, failed to cast a single pro-environment vote--the highest number of Senate "zeroes" since it started keeping score on Congress in 1970.

* A December 1999 U.S. Department of Energy report issued to Congress warns that nearly 15,000 pages of declassified U.S. government documents containing nuclear weapons secrets should not have been declassified and placed in the National Archives. CNN reported that the information includes test results and weapons utilization information, including deployment and storage locations.

* The February 22 Washington Post says the U.S. Army's new "containerized chapel" has almost everything troops need to hold religious services for the 71 percent of army personnel who identify themselves as Christian, the 0.4 percent who identify themselves as Muslim, and the 0.3 percent who identify themselves as Jewish. However, the Natick, Massachusetts, army research labs that created the $125,000 portable house of worship said there are no immediate plans to accommodate other beliefs or the 26 percent of army personnel who cite no religious preference.

* The Illinois House of Representatives in March passed the Traffic Stop Data Collection Act, which seeks to end the practice of racial profiling by law enforcement. Already being done in other states, the measure requires Illinois state police to collect two additional items of information and record them on the face of a traffic or warning citation: the race of the person stopped and whether a search was conducted that resulted in no further action.

* The Freedom From Religion Foundation in December filed a lawsuit challenging an item in the Wisconsin state budget that authorizes $210,000 for "assisting local members of the clergy to develop community-wide standards of marriages." However, according to the January/February 2000 Freethought Today, the so-called Marriage Savers law takes away public money from a needy families program and redirects it to promote the philosophy of Marriage Savers--"an exclusively Christian organization ... which works exclusively with clergy to inaugurate Scripture-based premarital" activities.

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