Weekly Telegraph No 558, April 3-9, 2002 - Two items:
1. Madrid says Gibraltar has nothing to fear By Isambard Wilkinson [The issue No 560 - April 17-23, 2002 bears a related article "Heath had secret plan to give up Gibraltar, By Chris Hastings and David Bamber.]
COMMENT: The saga of the Rock continues... !

2. Tanks help save historic plain - By Charles Clover - [Summary: Salisbury Plain holds many miles of ancient landscape, and it now appears that 1,500 previously unrecorded archaeological monuments have been discovered by surveys of the Army's training area on Salisbury Plain. The results are to be published in a book by English Heritage this month. The Field Archaeology of Salisbury Plain Training Area will be available from Telegraph Books direct on (Int) 44 70 1557222.]

Globe & Mail, April 5, 2002: Headline: Sharon defies Bush's call to end 'storms of violence' - so what else is new?!

Globe & Mail, April 6, 2002 - Three items:
1. Welsh trail recalls warrior prince:
[Summary: "A new walking route in Wales has been named after a 15-century warrior prince still revered by Welsh nationalists. The circular, 212-kilometer Glyndwr's way takes its name from Owain Glynddwr, who fought a campaign for an independent Welsh nation The site of his Parliament house can be seen in Machynlleth, Mid Wales, which was once the capital.]

2. Obituary A. Douglas Tushingham By Bill Gladstone, Toronto:
[Summary: ROM archeologist ' a groundbreaker. He is credited with ushering the Royal Ontario Museum into a golden era of field archeology. A. Douglas Tushingham, the ROM's chief archeologist for 27 years, has died at the age of 88. With B.A. from the University of Toronto in 1936, he accepted a scholarship to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and received a bachelor of divinity in 1941. From 1942-45 he crewed on various Canadian navy frigates. After teaching at the Oriental Institute, he worked for the American School of Oriental Research (now the Albright Institute) in Jerusalem, first as a professor, then as director. Over the years, Tushingham participated in many major international digs, including several in Jerusalem and Jericho with British archeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon, yet his greatest moment of glory may have come as a result of a spectacular project that had nothing to do with archeology; cataloguing the crown jewels of Iran. ... The globetrotting archeologist was also a United Church minister who, for two years, taught theology at Queen's university in Kingston, Ontario. His mother was a world championship typist.]

3. Mystery cloaks 3,000-year-old carving: Theories abound over origins of chalk horse in the English countryside - By Ed. Johnson, Uffington, England -
[Summary: Theories are offered, including: That it was dedicated to the Celtic goddess Epona, who represented the triumph of good over evil ... or that it was ordered by King Alfred to celebrate his victory over the pagan Danes in 871. Another is that Hengist, the leader of Anglo-Saxon hordes in the fifth century copied the horse on his standard, and yet another that it represents the dragon killed by St. George. And also the thought that it was produced by a cult worshipping a horse.]

The Weekly Telegraph, No. 560, April 17-23, 2002:4 items:
1. Obituary - Lady Barlow, Monarchist who traced the Labrador's origins and made Newfoundland home. Jacqueline Barlow founded the Monarchist League of Newfoundland in 1975. She helped to secure Canadian cabinet approval for the designation "Royal" to be conferred on the Newfoundland Constabulary. At the 1977 Silver Jubilee she organised a Declaration of Loyalty (a pointed contradiction to the American Declaration of Independence), which was signed by about four-fifths of the 500,000 Newfoundlanders. [The Globe & Mail, May 3, 2002 carries her obituary in an illustrated, six-column article.]

2. Cave croc unearthed in Africa: By David Sharrock Ireland correspondent ... Small and timid, they live in burrows and caves throughout the dry season and periods of drought in a remote region of Mauritania, north-western Africa.

3. End of exile for House of Savoy - Italian MPs voted by a large majority for the return of the banished male line of the country's royal house last week. The House of Savoy was exiled after the second world War for colluding with the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

4. Church hit by 'psycho terror' THE Israeli army broadcast deafening screeches and wails at the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem ... using a crane and loudspeaker, during the recent stand-off.
COMMENT: Sound familiar? Does "Branch Davidian" or "Waco" come to mind?

Globe & Mail, April 8, - Bush's Mideast stand: God's will or opportunity?
A four-column article included an illustration, captioned "What did he learn during Bible study?"
Related: Time Magazine (Can. Ed.) Vol. 159 No. 18, May 6, 2002 carried an insert sub-article on pp. 16-17 - "Lobbying for Israel - The Right's New Crusade"
COMMENT: The "Christian Right" needs to check the name placards worn by the players of the stage of history more carefully. It wouldn't hurt to check the origin of Futurist Theology, either!

Scientific American Vol. 286 No. 5, May, 2002, under Ask The Experts: What is the origin of zero?...
Robert Kaplan, author of The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of zero, offers this answer: "The first evidence we have of zero is from the Sumerian culture in Mesopotamia, some 5,000 years ago. The Sumerians inserted a slanted double wedge between cuneiform symbols for numbers to indicate the absence of a number in a specific place (as we would write 102, the '0' indicating no digit in the tens column).
The symbol changed over time as positional, or place-sensitive, notation, for which zero was crucial, made its way to the Babylonian empire and from there to India, most likely via the Greeks (in whose own culture zero made a late and only occasional appearance; the Romans had no trace of it at all). Arab merchants brought the zero they encountered in India to the West. After many adventures and much opposition, the symbol we use took hold and the concept flourished. Zero acquired much more than a positional meaning and has played a crucial role in our mathematizing of the world."

Globe & Mail, April 13, 2002 Women wrote the hymns, men called the tune By Valentine Cunningham:
'There is a green hill far away/ Without a city wall/Where the dear Lord was crucified/Who died to save us all.' Easter time in the English-speaking world, is now inseparable from the words of that hymn, so simply put, so memorably phrased. They are the words of one of Victorian Britain's huge army of hymn-writing women - Cecil Frances Alexander, wife of the Bishop of Derry and Raphoe in Ireland.
She made Christmas hers, too, with Once in Royal David's City. An English Christmas wouldn't be the same without Alexander. Nor, for that matter, without Christina Rossetti and her In the Bleak Midwinter. And what would harvest festivals sound like without Jane Montgomery Campbell's translation from German, We Plough the Fields and Scatter?
The classic, cannonical English hymnbook is packed with the songs of women, especially Victorian ones. English congregations didn't always sing hymns. The practice was brought over from Germany in the 18th Century by the Wesleys. Methodism, the religion of the heart, was, as they say, born in congregational song. Charles Wesley supplied thousands of verses for Methodism's great movement of evangelical religious emotionalism. But very quickly, women took over the hymn-writing job and not just for Methodists and their Low-Church Anglican colleagues, but right across the Christian scene. The Victorian church was a field alive with the songs of women. It's a female inflection that continues to this day. Think of a hymn, and as likely as not it will have words by a Victorian woman. All things Bright and Beautiful - that's another one of Alexander's. Now Thank We All Our God and Praise to the Lord the Almighty the King of Creation - they are translations from German by Manchester poet Catherine Winkworth, who brought nearly 400 German hymns into English. Nearer, My God, to Thee, the hymn that achieved world fame for allegedly being played as the Titanic went down, is by Robert Browning's very good friend, the radical London Unitarian Sarah Flower Adams. In Heavenly Love Abiding is by a Welsh Quaker turned Anglican, Anna Laetitia Waring. Just as I Am Without One Plea is by evangelical Anglican Charlotte Elliott. And so on.
And where would the repertoire of classic English language hymnody be without these, or without Frances Ridley Havergal's Take My Life and Let It Be, I Am Trusting Thee Lord Jesus, and Master Speak, Thy Servant Heareth? What indeed would English and, of course, U.S. Protestant services, sound like without that most memorable handful of the American Fanny Crosby's 8,000 hymns: To God Be the Glory, Great Things He Hath Done, Pass Me Not O Gentle Saviour, Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross, Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine? Without Crosby, there would be no Billy Graham.
Into a religious world managed by men, these women subversively interposed words, feelings, experiences manifestly from the female sphere. This was the subaltern majority in the pew taking over, as it were, the pulpits from which they were excluded. They wrote as women, as wives, mothers, sisters, from places a male church confined them to: Sunday school, orphanages, girls' schools, bazaars for the missionaries.
COMMENT: The article, of which the above is but the half, continues with a commentary on the probable psychological wellsprings of such personalized dedication of female churchgoers who were excluded from the pulpits in that era.

From National Council for Geographic Education vol. 30 No. 4, April 2002 Perspective - p. 17 - Under the heading "How Long Will Litter Last" we found an item which the ecologically minded may want to clip out:
Bulletins boards at many of the National Park sites display a compelling list showing the life expectancy of commonplace litter that people often leave behind as a result of their visits....:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Years
Aluminum cans and tabs 80-100
Cigarette butts 1-5
Glass bottles 1,000,000
Leather up to 50
Nylon fabric 30-40
Orange and banana peels up to 2
Plastic bags 10-20
Plastic bottles indefinitely
Plastic coated paper 5
Plastic film containers 20-30
Plastic six-pack holders 100
Tin cans 50
Wool socks 1-5

Globe & Mail April 19, 2002, The Weekly Telegraph No. 561, April 24-30 & No. 562, May 1-7, 2002:
Obituary - Thor Heyerdahl - Anthropologist who crossed the pacific on the Kon-Tiki to demonstrate links between Peru and Polynesia. THOR HEYERDAHL, the Norwegian anthropologist who has died in Italy aged 87, was propelled to fame by his remarkable crossing of the Pacific Ocean aboard a balsa-log raft, the Kon-Tiki, in 1947. His researches had convinced him that ethnological traits common to Polynesia and South America were the result of pre-historic trans-oceanic migration. He became an outspoken campaigner on environmental issues, eventually became special adviser to the UN on the subject.

Globe & Mail April 19, 2002: Relatives of dead hear Sept. 11 airplane tape:
Plainsboro, N.J. With grief counsellors on hand, relatives of those who died aboard United Airlines flight 93 heard a cockpit recording yesterday that included "yelling and screaming" just before the hijacked plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field Sept. 11.
Thomas Burnett, whose son Tom was among the four people who used cellphones to call out before they were killed, said he heard the cries as he and about 100 other relatives listened to the chilling tape.
The listening session, held behind closed doors, marked the first time the Government let relatives of any U.S. plane crash hear cockpit tapes. AP

From Majesty Vol. 23 No. 4, April, 2002 - Notebook: In The Picture - FILM FOOTAGE lost for 40 years shows that Edward VIII had a two-year romance with an Oxford University student.
The cine film was taken of the King, then Prince of Wales, while he and Winifred Alexander were studying at the university. She died of Hodginson's disease in 1930. Miss Alexander's sister-in-law Marjorie was responsible for the recording, which was found in the attic of her home following her death.
Since its discovery in 1996 a media company has been restoring the film and will release it on video this summer.

Globe & Mail, April 24, 2002:
1. Israel's atomic adventure - A top-secret mission by the young Shimon Peres put Israel on the road to building the bomb, a fascinating new documentary reveals. By Michael Posner - Toronto.
Jewish film festivals - topics Elvis Presley's Jewish roots; the Jews of Kaifeng; a Nazi skinhead who was born a Jews; a Catholic priest who was born - and wants to die - a Jew; an African-American Jew who sings gospel and preaches; and Kinky Friedman, a country-rocker Texan and self-described Jewboy.
But as intriguing as such films sometimes are, they tend to lack the visceral punch of those connected with the Holocaust, Jewish history and politics.
One film that successfully manages to combine all three is Michael Karpin's Bomb in the Basement - Israel's Nuclear Option, a 97 minute documentary that chronicles the country's strenuous efforts to build an atomic bomb. In the shadow of the Holocaust, David Ben Gurion decided to build a bomb. 1954 France was sympathetic and assisted. Enriched Uranium 235 was shipped to Dimona - the isolated Negev site Ben Gurion chose. DeGaulle sought to check the assistance. Nevertheless, according to the documentary the Dimona plant now turns out two or three bombs a year, and the country is said to have amassed a stockpile of some 200 warheads.

2. Globe & Mail, April 24, 2002: Get ready for pilotless airplanes: If you're a white-knuckle flier, you probably won't go near an airplane 30 years from now if the May issue of Wired is correct. The high-tech magazine asked 17 experts in various disciplines to make bets on future trends and events. According to Microsoft's chief of training, Craig Mundie, and Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of the Google on-line search engine, pilotless airplanes will be routine by 2030.

[A FOLLOW-UP COMMENT: (This information arrived too late to be included in the May Prophetic Expositor):
We are informed by a 9-page e-mail which originates from "Carol A. Valentine SkyWriter@public-action.com" and which was forwarded to us by intermediaries, that "The Northrop Grumman Global Hawk, is a robotized American military jet that has a wingspan of a Boeing 737. The excerpts below were taken from an article entitled 'Robot plane flies Pacific unmanned,' which appeared in the April 24, 2001 edition of Britain's International Television News." It explains that:
- "A robot plane has made aviation history by becoming the first unmanned aircraft to fly across the Pacific Ocean. 'The American high-altitude Global Hawk spy plane flew across the ocean to Australia, defence officials confirmed.'" The article tells us that it "flew from Edwards Air Force Base in California and landed late on Monday at the Royal Australian Air Force base at Edinburgh, in South Australia state. . ."
We have already seen the destruction of a Serbian TV Studio on a particular floor of a city building by a missile guided by totally-remote-controlled flight in the Kosovo conflict, so we should not be surprised at this report, but we then wonder at the reasons for the above report placing the technology in the future if such flights were made many months before, and thus prior to the destruction of the twin-towers in New York!]

Globe & Mail, April 25, 2002: Heading: Deadly American mistake no surprise to residents of Kandahar By Mark MacKinnon, KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN
To many Afghans, the saga of the four Canadian soldiers who died in a training exercise near Kandahar sounds all too familiar. They've been through the sequence many times before: the Americans drop bombs, the Americans kill the wrong people, the Americans apologize and the Americans promise an investigation.
The investigations rarely lead anywhere and many Afghans have grown deeply cynical about their "liberators." The list of so-called friendly fire incidents involving Afghans during the past six months is long.
The first was the mistaken bombing of the Red Cross/Red Crescent headquarters in Kabul during the early phases of the air war to root out the Taliban regime. Since then, errant bombs and missiles have hit Afghan forces working with the U.S.-led coalition several times, including a mistaken attack in Kandahar in December that lightly wounded the country's interim leader, Hamid Karzai. In late December, U.S. planes hit a convoy near Khost, killing dozens of Afghans, including tribal leaders on their way to Mr. Karzai's inauguration in Kabul. Even more infamous is the attack in Orozgun province on Jan. 23, which left at least 16 Afghans dead, and which the Americans have since admitted was a special-forces operation gone awry.
So when news rippled through Kandahar that four Canadians had been killed by another errant American missile, residents only shook their heads.
"it's not good. The Americans, they do whatever they want, kill whoever they want and it doesn't matter," said rickshaw driver Taimoor, who like many Afghans uses only one name.
Some have a warning for Canadians expecting to find out what really happened last week when an F-16 dropped a 250-kilogram bomb on Canadians conducting a training exercise. "Do not believe them. The Americans always say they will investigate, but never do," said Gul Ahmen, who sells Polaroid photographs in Kandhar.
Such cynicism is perhaps understandable. The number of Afghans killed during the U.S. "war on terrorism" has yet to be tallied, but it ranges from several hundred into the thousands.
The Orozgun incident stands out in the minds of many here. In January, a U.S. special-forces team descended on two compounds in the town of Hazar Qadam, believing they had discovered a cell of Taliban fighters. Instead, they attacked allies of Mr. Karzai. At least 16 Afghans were killed in the raid - some of them, according to witnesses, killed execution-style or shot in their beds as they slept. More than 25 were taken prisoner. A few weeks later, after journalists visited the site, the Pentagon admitted the Americans had hit the wrong people.

From the Spring 2002 issue of The Andrean, published by Saint Andrew's College (Aurora, Ontario), there is an article on Dr. Graham's Homes, from which we extract the following:
"Dr. Graham's Homes was the brainchild and labour of love of The Very Reverend Dr. John Graham, a Scots Presbyterian missionary who was so distressed by the appalling sight of starving children on Calcutta streets in the late 1800s that, in 1900, he began devoting a lifetime of service to their care. That year he founded a small private school that he named after Scotland's patron saint, St. Andrew, for the purpose of housing, feeding and educating these underprivileged and often tragic children. He began by building a small cottage on a hillside near Kalimpong, India, taking in six small boys. For shelter, food clothing and care.
The charismatic Dr. Graham had a gift for fundraising, and 100 years later the organization, now named in his honour, boasts 1,000 students - half of them rescued from poverty - and a highly-organized worldwide network of support. ... Dr. Graham's Homes - "Homes" refers to the residence houses at the school - operates in a beautiful, Himalayan setting at 6,000 feet in Kalimpong, West Bengal, India. Kalimpong is perhaps better known as the starting point for many Everest expeditions. Half of the Homes' students are paid boarders, while the other half are orphans or homeless children literally plucked from the streets of Calcutta... .

The National Ballet of Canada has created a new work "The Contract" which reflects the life and times of the ministry of Aimee Semple McPherson, the sensational early 20th-century evangelist.

The Weekly Telegraph No. 562, May 1-7, 2002: Three items:
1. "Archbishop Carey defends English patriotism in a St. George's Day lecture" headed one item. This was joined by another: "Flags and roses for St George's Day, in which James McDermott, 32, a scaffolder from east London, said that police asked him to remove his St George's flag from his lorry, because it might "incite racist sentiment". He said: "I don't see why Scottish, Irish and Welsh can openly celebrate their national days and we can't. I am not at all racist, just proud to be English."

2. We will sample the Peter Simple column which takes note of M. Le Pen's recent political foray with this paragraph: "Much of my pleasure in Le Pen's success came from the dismay and alarm of all those orthodox Left-liberal politicians and thinkers. Millions of Frenchmen have voted for a man who actually dared to point out the overriding importance of mass immigration for France and Europe, and the connection of that immigration with growing crime and disorder. How dare they? Where will this 'Right-wing extremism' end?"

3. Tradition back at last night of Proms By Hugh Davies: TWO CLASSICS have been restored to the Last Night of the proms programme after the BBC rejected plans to abandon permanently traditional elements of the finale. Restored: Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia! Sustained: Jerusalem .

Globe & Mail April 30, 2002 Heading: Britain will give Afghans PoW status; Canada won't.

The Globe & Mail May 4, 2002: U.S. effort off track, Pakistani general says. If bin Laden is in Pakistan, he could only be in Peshawar, former spy believes By Mark MacKinnon ISLAMABAD and Paul Koring, WASHINGTON
The article quotes Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan's spy agency, InterServices Intelligence.

Jane's Intelligence Digest: Lead article: Turkey's Israeli links strained (Over the current Israeli activities in Palestine.)

Biblical Archaeology Review May/June 2002, Vol. 28 No. 3, Philistine Kin Found in Early Israel. - Links in Sardinia, Horned helmeted Shardana warriors to Palestine.
COMMENT: Articles which break the localized fixation of Palestinian archaeology in the minds of the public, and extend its reach westward are to be welcomed, as people who "see farther shores" when reading their Bibles can more easily envision Israelite connections with Spain and Britain - especially if the featured players wear horned helmets!