It's not the table from the news module causing the problem, because I even tried putting plain paragraph text into the left column, and the content still jagged the same way.
BTW, I'm wasn't trying to get help for my website, I was attempting to help debug the supplied template because it's a very good effort. Might have to do that "long column" trick to get it working completely.
Gav, I was talking about the news snippet in the left column, not a news page. I don't see that in the 3k link.
Good webreference article by the way.