From The Weekly Telegraph No. 420, of August 11-17, 1999:
Obituary: "Malachi Martin.In New York, aged 78. Ecclesiastical thriller writer and former Jesuit priest."
COMMENT: Two of Malachi Martin's more widely read works are "The Keys Of This Blood" and "The Jesuits."

From The Weekly Telegraph No. 424 of September 8-14, 1999:
'CIA killed New Zealand premier'
NORMAN KIRK, the former Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand, was assasinated by the CIA 25 years ago because he refused to let America have a nuclear submarine base in the country, Bob Harvey, the current president of the party, claimed last week in the Dominion newspaper.

The Weekly Telegraph No. 424 of September 8-14, 1999
carries a write-up by ALAN JUDD, of a biography "The Private Life of Kim Philby: The Moscow Years", by Rufina Philby, with Hayden Peake and Mikhail Lyubimov. Little Brown. 18.99 pounds, 449 pp written by Rufina Philby, whom Kim Philby, the notorious Russian Spy married in his later life, in Russia.

From the Toronto Globe and Mail, 7 October, 1999
- Under the demeaning heading "Alfred the nerd?" this item appeared: Last month, archeologists in Britain unearthed what they believe may be the pelvis of Alfred the Great (849-899), from a parking lot in Winchester. The only thing that most people remember about this early English hero is the legend about how he was scolded for absent-mindedly neglecting a swineherd's cakes and letting them burn while concentrating on his job. That story comes from a biography written by "one of the adroitest spin-doctors of the Dark Ages: the Welsh monk Asser," says the Guardian. "[The monk] is thought to have invented the error over the burned cakes to help humanize the king's boring doggedness."
COMMENT: Whether or not Alfred allowed the cakes to burn, his reputation did not arise from that anecdote alone. He is not called "The Great" for nothing. At the age of 21, his victory over the Danes was commemorated at Ashdown on the Birkshire Hills by the cutting of turf to disclose the hillside chalk in the form of the famous white horse. He later established the "Fyrd", a "home-guard army", and built the founding nucleus of the Royal Navy. He sent afield explorers, one of whom reported the midnight sun above the Arctic Circle. He established the boundaries of counties and parishes throughout the kingdom, rebuilt churches, monasteries and schools, and recruited scholars and teachers from abroad. He translated into Anglo-Saxon for his Anglo-Saxon subjects the Laws of Ancient Israel given to Moses (including the one which told them that "ye were strangers in the land of Egypt") and established the rights of British Common Law! "Boring doggedness" indeed!
Incidentally by what route, do you suppose, came that biographer, the Welsh monk "Asser", to hold the name of that Israelitish Tribe?

From the Toronto Globe and Mail, 9 October, 1999 [Editorial]:
Muddling through metric: The United States sends a $125-million (U.S.) probe to Mars and it fails just as it arrives. The reason: One group of NASA engineers thought a key calculation was in English measure, while another assumed it was metric. Gadzooks, you want to exclaim. American rocket scientists can send several men to the moon, but can't accept the measurement system all the rest of the planet uses. Your instinct to blame the faux pas on too many American kids watching too much television or too many crotch grabs in the World Wrestling Federation is derailed by the fact that much of the English-speaking world has had a hard time with le Systeme Internationale (SI). This country boldly announced we were going entirely metric in 1970's. For a while it seemed that was happening. Pounds were banished from grocery scales and signs. Journalists started translating a house a mile away as a house 1.6 kilometres away. And then we started back-sliding. Ask kids - even those weaned on metric education - how much they weigh and they will tell you in pounds. They are also likely to tell you how tall they are in feet and inches. What they can't do is show you with their finger how big an inch is or have an instinctive sense of poundage. The same is true when it comes to grams. We know that when pate prices are given in 100-gram units, it is because the shopkeeper knows the pound price would be astronomical. The British still delineate driving distances in miles and resist selling pints of beers in anything less than pint-sized measures. The reason for the English-speaking world's recalcitrance is obvious. The old system worked. Most common English measures - barrels much to the contrary - got standardized in the last century. "A pint's a pound the world round," goes an old refrain. So, the English world wasn't like pre-Revolutionary France - home of SI - with its 12 different pounds, 13 different feet and 23 different bushels. Besides, why change when metric measures calculate some things in too fine a way. How much less intellectually tortured it is to tell someone a half an inch of rain fell than 12.7 millimetres.
Still, we're left with the fact that the rest of world has decided that sometimes clumsy metric measures - measures that everyone, everywhere comprehends - are better than homey English units. What is to be done? Sensible inconsistency is the mark of a rational human. Where precision really matters - Mars probes, brain surgery incisions - let the entire world become rigorously metric. Elsewhere, why not let us English-speakers muddle on in our quaint but comfortable pound-foot-inch ways?
COMMENT: We always thought the entire English system was preferable for those of us conscious of our Israel roots, as it is apparently a Biblical system.

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