From The Weekly Telegraph No. 453 of March 29 - April 4, 2000:
OBITUARY: Edward Knipling has died at age 90.
COMMENT: Some relatively unknown people deserve to be more widely recognized for having made very beneficial contributions to the well-being of mankind, and we might be interested to know of their contribution to us all. Such, it appears, was the life of Dr. Edward Knipling. He "came up with the idea of controlling pests by sterilisation, a technique that was used to eradicate deadly screwworm flies from the United States, Mexico and Africa." Laying their eggs in cuts in the flesh of livestock, these flies can kill a full-grown steer in 10 days. Observing that the female fly only mates once, he reasoned that if the natural population could be flooded with sterile male flies, within a few generations the screwworm could be eradicated. Learning that fruit flies had been rendered sterile by X-rays, he asked a colleague at the USDA to try the method on screwworms. In 1958, and aircraft hangar at Sebring was converted into a giant "fly factory" and an obsolete cobalt-60 machine was obtained from the Atomic Energy Commission to sterilise the flies. Over 18 months 3.75 billion sterilised flies - 50 million a week - were dropped by a fleet of 20 aeroplanes over the infected area. In 1962 an even larger programme was launched. With control of the pest, farmers were saved hundreds of millions of dollars in costs.

We trust, however, that alien-minds will not succeed in adapting the same theory to eradicate Israel's Children!

From The Weekly Telegraph No. 455 of April 12 - 18, 2000:
'Multi-faith Coronation' for Charles, By Rachel Sylvester, Political Staff
THE PRINCE of Wales could be crowned King in a multi-faith inauguration service rather than the 1,000-year-old Coronation ceremony, under proposals to tackle "religious discrimination" being considered by the Government. A report commissioned by Jack Straw claims that the establishment of the church of England causes "religious disadvantage" to other faiths.
The Coronation oath, conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which the monarch swears to uphold the Protestant faith, may no longer be appropriate in modern Britain, it says.
The sovereign's role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England and "Defender of the Faith" should also be reviewed.
The paper, an interim report on religious discrimination, puts disestablishment of the Church of England on the government's agenda for the first time.
Tony Blair has always shied away from the issue, but he has become increasingly interested in the relationship between Christianity and other faiths.
The Government would almost certainly resist severing the link altogether but senior figures think other religions should have a greater role in national life.
The Church of England is itself considering ways to be more "inclusive". The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey, is reported to be expecting the Church one day to be disestablished.
The Home Office report, by Prof Paul Weller and a team at Derby University, says the next Coronation will be be the next focus of controversy which the Government should tackle urgently.
Senior clergymen believe the next Coronation cannot take the same form as the last ceremony, in 1953, when the Queen pledged to "preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England.
The Prince of Wales has made clear that he wants to be the "defender of faith" rather than the "defender of the faith", in order to reflect the number of religions practiced in Britain.
The Home Office paper criticises the "historically rooted religious disadvantage" to other faiths and Christian denominations caused by the establishment of the Church of England. This includes the fact that Roman Catholics are not allowed to succeed to the Throne and that the monarch has to swear an oath of allegiance to the Protestant Church, it says.
The ban on the monarch marrying a Roman Catholic and on Roman Catholic priests sitting in the Commons are also highlighted.

WEEKLY TELEGRAPH EDITORIAL (on the above item):
Crowning glories
FOR MORE than a thousand years, English monarchs have been annointed by archbishops. In Scotland, too, kings have traditionally derived their authority from the religious act of their installation no less than their birth. The centrepiece of the Coronation - the unction itself - is drawn from the Old Testament, and is perhaps the most sacred moment in a monarch's life. When the Queen was crowned in 1953, this part of the ceremony was hidden from the cameras.
An interim report on religious discrimination commissioned by the Home Secretary has suggested that the Coronation be replaced by a "multi-faith inauguration". There is something truly awesome about the presumption of the anti-discrimination industry.
The idea that our country should abandon altogether one of its most hallowed traditions at the behest of a few politically correct busybodies displays, if nothing else, admirable self-confidence. For, on top of the ceremonial change, there would be serious political consequences. Junking the Coronation itself would call into question the status of the Church of England. While we remain unpersuaded by the case for disestablishment, we accept that there is a legitimate argument for smuggling it through as part of a rebranded "inauguration" service.
Where there is scope for change is in some of the flanking parts of the ceremony. No two Coronations are exactly alike. The pageantry of 1953, for example, was designed as much with an eye on the revolutionary presence of television as on the basis of precedent. The United Kingdom has changed since the Queen's accession. Building a formal acclamation by other religious leaders into the day's events strikes us as a fitting way to reflect the reciprocal loyalty between our minority faiths and their sovereign.
The world has seen Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu monarchies, each with its distinctive accession rituals (and a Jewish monarchy, too, albeit longer ago). There is no reason why Britain's religious minorities, perhaps drawing on their past customs, should not develop their own rites to acknowledge their fealty to a new British monarch. To incorporate such rites around an unchaged core service would reflect the special identity of British Muslims, British Hindus and so on. It would also, in our view, make for a splendid ceremony.

From the same issue of The Weekly Telegraph: We note the coloured photos of Mr. James Shallcross, called from his job of inspecting rivets under nearby Blackfriars Bridge to climb the fifty-foot wooden Buckingham Palace flagpole, in order to free the huge Union Jack from its wind-blown entanglement, draped over and snagged on the crown and its cross which sit atop the pole. There seems something strangely symbolic in all this!

From The SCOTS MAGAZINE, April, 2000, in a full-page article "Speaking Scots", under the heading "HOGS AND HOGGING", we learn something which might be of interest to those with a Scottish background who seek to follow Biblical Food Laws. It seems that, while the word "Hog" is applied to swine in England, and most other parts of the world, it can be mis-interpreted when used in Scotland. After some preliminary introductory passages, which define the animal concerned as usage in Scotland directs, we find this: "A curious wee matter here of virtually the same word denoting different animals either side of the Border, the hog being a pig or swine in England, but here, a sheep. Specifically the hog or hogget was a yearling sheep yet to be clipped, and the term hogget was used in the butchery trade despite fastidious folk disdaining mutton for lamb." Farther down the article, we find that "... the first fleece was also a hogg, and hogging became a general term for clipping...". We just thought all you English folk would like to know!

From the Toronto Globe and Mail of 15 April, 2000 - (EDITORIAL)
Under the heading Zimbabwe's best future: no more scapegoats, and the sub-heading "Its easy to blame others when a politician won't blame himself", the editorial begins: "The politics of scapegoated expropriation is playing itself out again in Africa." and it continues with a quote by Chenjerai (Hitler) Hunzvi, the leader of the war veterans of Zimbabwe: "We are going to share the farms. We are all equal. We all have to share equally...".

Unfortunately, this is an attitude which totally ignores or else misconstrues certain basic truths, one of which is that people are not all equally endowed with either common sense, experience, perception, knowledge or ability to provide wise leadership.
If it be supposed that every person can function equally successfully, when substituted for every other person in any office in society, (the "Egalitarian" theory) those holding that attitude are due for a very rude awakening. Hierarchy is built into populations by nature, through patriarchal relationship if by no other means, and truth has a way of teaching experience to such egalitarian exponents through very sharp lessons of disaster and chaos.
It is doubtless for this reason that God chose Abraham through whom to bring blessings to other nations, and chose Israel as a national development down through history, to manifest responsibility and authority with God's Laws at its core, and thus to usher others into the Kingdom of God upon the earth.
Prayer that the Almighty would have mercy upon His Own seems quite urgently in order, that His Kingdom might soon be activated upon earth as it is presently functioning in heaven.

From The Weekly Telegraph No. 456 of April 19-25, 2000:
Letters to the Editor [Under the sub-heading "Faith and the new Coronation oath" we find four letters, the contents of which you might like to keep in view, when discussing the press towards change in the oath:]

1. Sir - The consensus of the leaders of the religious communities to whom I gave a paper on "Church, state and religious minorities" in 1995 was that there was no pressure for disestablishment of the Church of England from the minority communities [issue 455].
There was a demand that the Church use its large number of bishops in the House of Lords for the benefit of all religious people in the kingdom.
A common fear was that disestablishment would bring European-style secularism, with all its anti-religiousness, to the disadvantage of all followers of any religion.
A quick trawl of my contacts suggests that their views remain essentially the same, although there is some annoyance that the Church still does not seem to want to know about the minorities' concerns.
Muslims want the Coronation service and oath to stand. This is, in effect, a commitment by the monarch before the Almighty to rule according to His Law. It is not necessary for us to participate.
Although that might be colourful, would it not be seen as compromising an otherwise Anglican Christian ceremony - or, in Scotland, a Presbyterian one?
Everyone in the monarch's realms and jurisdiction is deemed to owe allegiance to her (or him) personally. Although I myself took the Oath of Allegiance some years ago and consider myself still bound by it, if an oath is to be required from the "faith communities" as a whole, might that not blow up the controversy that has caused some Labour MPs to refuse?
DAOUD ROSSER-OWEN
Amir
Association of British Muslims
London W8

2. Sir - As a practicing adherent of Judaism, I desire no more than to live in a country where religion is meaningful and provides the moral infrastructure for the life of its inhabitants. The stronger the influence of the dominant religion on society the easier it is to maintain one's own religious preferences.
I do not see any merit in watering down the dominant religion to take account of my own or anyone else's. If I would want to live in a country where Judaism was the dominant way of life I could relocate to Israel, and Muslims and Sikhs could make similar choices.
YEHUDA BRODIE, Manchester

3. Sir - I am a non-Anglican Christian, but I do not feel in the least bit disadvantaged that our Queen took solemn vows to support the Reformed Faith by law established. Indeed, I could wish that she had been allowed by successive administrations to take her sacred obligations more seriously.
My prayer is that the C of E will remain the established Church, our Monarch the Defender of the reformed Faith, and our land the free society that it has so long been.
Rev. John PARKER, York

4. Sir - It is no slur upon, nor disrespect to, other beliefs to say they have no part in the crowning of a British monarch. Queen Victoria had millions of subjects who adhered both to the Crown and to their local religion. The fact that so many religions are now concentrated in this very small island should not make any difference to the solemn separate nature of the Crown and its continuity in the Coronation.
JAMES LEWIS, London SW1

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