WORTH NOTING.

* Voting along party lines in October 1999, the U.S. Senate declined to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty signed by President Clinton in 1996. The thumbs-down comes in the wake of polls conducted by the Mellman Group and Wirthlin Worldwide that found 82 percent of Americans favor ratification of the international agreement to ban nuclear weapons test explosions.

* The United States in November became one of the first countries to ratify the International Labor Organization's Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention. The international treaty aims to protect the estimated 250 million children worldwide who are working in "precarious environments"--including drug trafficking, prostitution, and slavery--and condemns forced, but not voluntary, military recruitment of those under age eighteen.

* A jury in October awarded $125,000 each to two Muslim women who wore religious veils to a supermarket. The jury determined that Officer John Walker was liable for concluding the women's veils violated Virginia's law against wearing masks in public.

* President Clinton in November bar gained away a woman's right to abortion in order to get a deal with congressional Republicans to pay nearly $1 billion in back dues to the United Nations. Despite his stated opposition to such deals since taking office in 1993, Clinton agreed to language attached by New Jersey Republican Representative Christopher Smith that pays two-thirds of the debt to the UN but bans U.S. aid to international family-planning organizations that promote abortion rights.

* Idaho's "partial-birth" law was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in October. Planned Parenthood was among those to challenge the law, saying it was "so broad and vague that it banned virtually all abortion procedures."

* Boeing agreed in November to pay at least $4.5 million to settle a class-action discrimination lawsuit that maintained the company's women and minority employees are paid less than their white male counterparts. Boeing, which received $11 billion in government contracts in 1998 and has more than 200,000 employees, said the money will cover back pay and raises for about 4,400 women and 1,000 minority workers at ten company operations.

* While the Boy Scouts of America continues its legal battle to ban homosexuals, Scouts Canada in November launched what is thought to be the first Scout troop for gays and lesbians aged eighteen to twenty-six. The new troop began as Ottawa announced federal plans to extend full legal rights to same-sex couples and a lesbian couple in Alberta won that province's first same-sex adoption case.

* The Reverend Jimmy Creech in November was unanimously convicted of blatantly disobeying United Methodist Church law and defrocked of his ordination for performing the same-sex union ceremony of two men in April. In March 1998 the Grand Island, Nebraska, pastor was tried and acquitted by a church court for performing the same-sex union of two women.

* Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack signed in October what is thought to be the first executive order to ban discrimination against transgendered people. The order bans discrimination in state employment based on "race, creed, color, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or mental or physical disability."

* The Oklahoma State Textbook Committee voted in November to require all new biology texts to include a disclaimer pushed by anti-evolutionists. It states that evolution is a "controversial theory" that can refer to "the unproven belief that random, undirected forces produced a world of living things."

* Coaches at London High School aren't allowed to lead prayers and pass out scripture to student athletes under a settlement reached in October with the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. The settlement came just one day before the case was scheduled to go to court and also established a system for reporting violations to the U.S. District Court in Columbus, Ohio.

* America Online announced in November that the Entertainment Software Rating Board will rate all of the games carried on its service. The ESRB was established in 1994 by computer and video gamemakers and will assign rating designations from "early childhood" to "adults only."

* Amazon.com announced in November that it will stop selling Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf in Germany, citing German laws prohibiting sales of hate literature. The book written by Hitler in prison before he came to power was number two on Amazon's "uniquely best selling" list in Germany and has prompted legal complaints against online bookstores from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

* Tobacco giant Philip Morris has adopted a new strategy to boost brand loyalty: if you can't beat 'em, greet 'em. After recent devastating defeats in the courtroom and the pocketbook, the world's largest cigarette maker has been "relationship marketing": hitting local bars to conduct face-to-face promotions with the adult smoking public.

* Anthropologist, prolific writer, and 1995 Humanist of the Year Ashley Montagu died in November at the age of ninety-four after a long illness. A controversial figure in the 1950s and 1960s for his pioneering research on issues such as race and gender equality, Montagu drew upon several disciplines, an accessible writing style, and his British dry wit to popularize a lifetime of wide-ranging theories for a U.S. audience.

Marian Hetherly is an editor at the Humanist. Your contributions are welcome.