On:

BBC Newsnight’s allegations that thousands of black voters were denied their right to vote in Florida during the presidental election are being investigated by the US Civil Rights Commission.

BBC reporters claim that information supplied by a company called Database Technologies led to tens of thousands of Floridians being wrongfully removed from the electoral rolls on the grounds that they were felons.

Newsnight says that the list was filled with errors that led to voters–a disproportionate number of them black–being disenfranchised.

The scale of the errors and their skew against blacks is believed to have cost Al Gore thousands of votes, in an election that George W. Bush won by just 537 votes.
read more

On:

After 3 years of digging, a U.S. team of archaeologists has unearthed the tombs of three noblemen from a pre-Incan race of giants. The noblemen were all exceptionally tall for that time, standing about 6 feet tall, compared with the typical peasant stature of less than 5 feet. Alan Cordy-Collins, of the University of San Diego, says that they may have suffered from Marfans syndrome, an inherited form of gigantism.
read more

On:

A two-year study of satellite data has revealed that farmland is becoming damaged by chemical contamination, acidity, salinity and poor drainage over the entire Earth. Just 16 percent of farmland, worldwide, appears to be free of these problems. Modern farming practices, designed to produce highyields, may mean that in the future, we will not be able to produce enough food to feed the world. “Agricultural production is being achieved at the expense of our ability to feed ourselves and future generations,” says AdlaiAmor, a spokesman for the World Resources Institute.
read more

On:

If you were embarrassed by a hypnotist who told you to hop across the room like a rabbit, don’t blame yourself. If you’ve tried hypnosis and just can’t seem to go “under” far enough to remember those elusive UFO experiences, don ‘t you blame yourself, either. It turns out there is a gene for hypnotizability.

The gene was discovered by Dr. Pesach Lichtenberg and Professor Richard Ebstein of Herzog Memorial Hospital in Jerusalem, after studying 51 men and 59 women who had never been hypnotized before (if you’ve been hypnotizedonce, it’s easier to go under the next time). They found that people who had a specific gene were much easier to hypnotize.
read more