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The white ice on top of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, that Hemingway wrote about so lovingly in his book “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” is melting away. A survey has found that 82 percent of the ice field that has existed on Kilimanjaro since 1912 has melted, says Lonnie G. Thompson of Ohio StateUniversity.

“The ice will be gone by 2015 or so,” he says. He mapped the ice cap last year and compared his results with a survey conducted in 1912. Some of the rivers and streams in Tanzania that are fed by the mountain’s snow melt havealready dried up. “A hospital in Tanzania that depended on a river now has to get its water elsewhere,” says Thompson.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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