The following items were printed in the (June, 2002) issue of The Prophetic Expositor:

Last month, we carried the following item:
"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... .
[A FOLLOW-UP COMMENT: (This information arrived too late to be included in the May Prophetic Expositor although it was added to our web page edition):
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!]

The Globe & Mail, May 13, 2002: Obituary - William Tutte, by Bill Gladstone: Math wizard broke Nazi code.
"He moved to Canada after accomplishing 'the greatest intellectual feat of the war'" headed an illustrated five-column obituary. Recruited to Bletchley Park, Britain's top-secret code-breaking facility, he made deductions from code patterns that indicated the sprocket-wheel design of the code-generating machine being used. Unlike Enigma, those assigned to work out "Fish", the Lorenz code, had no models to indicate the nature of the originating machine. To expedite the results, colleagues built "Colossus", described by New Scientist in 1999 as "the world's first programmable electronic computer." (Only those unaware of Colossus could claim that the U.S.-built ENIAC was the first, the magazine asserted.) By 1945, Britain kept 10 Colossus machines busy, decrypting 1.200 Nazi messages a month, but everything was destroyed or classified after the war. Prof. Tutte helped shape the University of Waterloo, ON, in its formative years and drew some top minds to its mathematics department. Born in Newmarket, Suffolk, England, May 14, 1917; died May 2, 2002 in Waterloo, predeceased by his wife Dorothea in 1994.

The Globe & Mail, May 14, 2002: Why the Vikings still rule,
- They didn't have horned helmets and didn't plunder nearly as much as legend has it. But a new blockbuster exhibit explains why marauding Norsemen still loom large in our imagination, Ray Conlogue writes. The lengthy well-illustrated article describes an exhibit presently at the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que., across the river from Ottawa.

The Weekly Telegraph No. 564 of May 15-21, 2002 - 3 items:
1. Britannia still rules the young
- THE POPULAR image of young people as opposed to tradition, the monarchy and patriotism is wrong, says a poll of attitudes to Britishness, writes Tom Leonard. The survey of 20- to 30-year-olds shows that symbols of "old" Britain, such as the Royal Family, Buckingham Palace and Marks & Spencer figure far more prominently than the trappings of "Cool Britannia". Nearly three-quarters of those questioned said they were proud to be British.
Three-quarters wanted the Queen's head to remain on stamps and Prince William was easily the popular choice as best ambassador for Britain. The survey will make uncomfortable reading for Government supporters who believe the Prime Minister has captured the imagination of younger voters. Although he managed to beat David and Victoria Beckham, Tony Blair came sixth behind Prince William.
As to what most united Britain and its people, the Royal Family came second after sport. Asked to name an "icon of nationhood" two-thirds said Buckingham Palace, followed by the Mini, public protests and the London Eye. And asked the brand that best represented Britishness, their most popular choice was Marks & Spencer, followed by Cadbury's, Virgin, Marmite and Burberry.

2. Public Records: How Stalin had Britain's Ace of Spies killed - Reports by Michael Smith Defence Correspondent:
THE true story of how Stalin's secret police killed Sydney Reilly, the "Ace of Spies", has been released to the Public Record Office in Kew. Reilly, who, despite his name, was Russian, was supposedly shot dead by Bolshevik border guards in October, 1925 as he tried to cross the Finnish border into Russia. But an MI6 report describes how he was, in fact, shot in the back at Stalin's insistence after days of being interrogated in the Lubyanka, the Moscow headquarters of the GPU, Stalin's secret police.
Reilly, who worked for MI6 as Agent ST-1, had been sentenced to death by the Bolsheviks in absentia in 1918 for his involvement in the Lockhart Plot aimed at overthrowing the Bolshevik leaders. Despite the failure of the "plot", which was infiltrated by Bolsheviks, he was awarded the Military cross on his return to Britain and celebrated as a secret agent. ... .

3. I'm in danger, Nurse Cavell warned mother
- EDITH CAVELL, the English nurse executed by the Germans for helping Allied soldiers escape from behind enemy lines, sent a desperate message home days before her arrest saying that her life was in danger, it was disclosed last week by MI5 files released to the Public Record Office. Miss Cavell, whose activities and death established her as a First World War heroine, warned her mother not to talk to anyone about her work behind enemy lines.
The nurse had spent 13 years in Belgium and was head of the Surgical Institute of Brussels. She was one of the leaders of a group that assisted wounded British and French soldiers. After German police searched her home in July, 1915, Miss Cavell passed a message to her mother through an acquaintance, the Count de Borchgrave. He was to tell her mother that she was "alright at the moment but it is extremely dangerous for Englishwomen to be in a country occupied by the Germans". He was also to warn her mother that "if she talks to people about her it might get known to the Germans and there would be no telling what her fate might be". Soon after, Miss Cavell was arrested and put on trial. On Oct 11, she was sentenced to death and at 2am the next day placed before a firing squad.

The Weekly Telegraph No. 565, May 22-28, 2002: 5 items -
1. Terrorists face Pentagon sting
- THE next generation of combatants in the war against terrorism has been unveiled: elite squadrons of bomb-sniffing bees. The Pentagon said it had succeeded in training ordinary honey-bees to swarm towards the smell of even tiny traces of explosives. In tests, they proved 99 per cent accurate.

2. Last Gallipoli veteran dies
- THE LAST known survivor of the World War I Gallipoli campaign, the Australian Alec Campbell, died at the age of 103. Mr. Campbell was last seen in public on April 25 when, despite being confined to a wheelchair and partly blind, he led an Anzac Day parade. John Howard, the prime minister, offered his family a state funeral. Mr. Campbell was one of the youngest soldiers at Gallipoli after lying about his age to enlist when only 16. - Reuters

3. Hunt for villa buried by Vesuvius - by Bruce Johnston in Rome:
WHEN Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, a sprawling Roman villa, once inhabited by Julius Caesar's father-in-law, disappeared beneath a sea of lava. Now Italian archaeologists are trying to unearth the ruins. They hope to uncover a priceless library of papyrus scrolls. The Villa of the Papyri near Pompeii was discovered by chance in 1752 during the digging of a well shaft. The excavators found 1,800 papyrus scrolls, providing tantalising evidence of the existence of a vast library of classical works. But in a report this week, the authorities put the cost of earlier digs at £10 million and say they were so mismanaged that almost nothing of value was uncovered.
The new excavations will cost £3 million and last for almost two years. They will involve the National Research Institute in Rome, two Italian universities and various academics, including British experts.

4. Editorial: The importance of English:
[Summary: Those who push a multilingualism agenda do not accord with ethnic minorities who know that learning English is the key to success in Britain today.]

5. Editorial: Britannia's charms:
[Summary: Tony Blair has discovered that tourists come to Britain for historic reasons and connections, not to visit rootless modern carnivals, etc.]

The Globe & Mail May 16, 2002 - Who said that? Computers fake moving mouths by Graeme Smith:
A breakthrough in video technology will give television producers and film directors the power to animate images of real people saying words they've never actually spoken, researchers say.
Computer animators have been trying for years to achieve the perfect illusion of human speech. It could bring Marilyn Monroe back for a music video, or allow Peter Mansbridge to read the evening news in Chinese.
But now that researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have written the necessary software, media watchers are worrying that one of the last barriers between hard truth and video fantasy has been broken.
"The old truism is that the camera never lies," said Chris Dornan, director of Carleton University's school of journalism and communication. "But here is a piece of software that places that entirely in question. You can never, from here on in be absolutely sure that the images you see on-screen are true to life."
Though it might be tempting to use such technology to edit a news reader's delivery or customize broadcasts in dozens of languages, news organizations should be cautious about playing with viewers' perceptions, said Stephen Ward, who teaches journalism ethics at the university of British Columbia. "I see it as very dangerous," Mr. Ward said. The MIT team's software records facial expressions while a person speaks into a camera, and learns to associate the images with sounds. Using that database, a false image of the person can be synthesized to a soundtrack of new words. It's a remarkable illusion, made possible by cutting-edge morphing algorithms that smooth out the jumps between frames. When test groups of 21 and 22 people watched pairs of video clips - one produced by the software, one genuine - they identified the real speaker only about 50 per cent of the time. "We were surprised," said Tomaso Poggio, a neuroscientist at the MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and a member of the research team. "They absolutely could not distinguish them." A trained eye would be more likely to notice the faked video, Mr. Poggio said, but future improvements may erase all hints of forgery.
Observers have complained that such powerful illusions could cast doubt on news footage, crime-scene surveillance and advertising endorsements. Mr. Poggio rejects the criticisms. "I think people don't trust images already," he said. "It has been quite a few years that you could modify or retouch still pictures."

COMMENT: the article concludes, mentioning other workers in the field, and obvious applications in replacement of live movie stars, movie compression techniques and video-phones.

The Globe & Mail May 21 2002 - Delphic priestesses may have been high
- Athens: The advice of the Delphic oracle was many things: cryptic, revelatory and, as the likes of Croesus also discovered, at times even disastrous. But few would have guessed that the high priestesses of Apollo, who dispensed the Delphic oracle's advice, were in a drug-induced delirium, high on gas and air.
"They were high; there is no other word for it," said Dutch geologist Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, who has studied the Greek site for five years. "All the evidence shows they were inhaling hydrocarbon fumes like ethylene, a substance that was used in anesthesia until surgeons discovered it was dangerous." The thousands of supplicants who sought the advice of the oracle may have ultimately suffered because those who interpreted it were too doped to be coherent, even though the famous maxim "Nothing in excess" adorned the temple's facade. The priestesses' bad trips could become their clients' own worst nightmares, Prof. De Boer said. (Croesus, the monarch of Lydia, lost his mighty kingdom after succumbing to the oracle's ambiguous advice that if he invaded Persia a great empire would fall. He did not know it would be his own.)
The sanctuary, revered by the ancients as the centre of the world, is located in a seismic area. The discovery of oily deposits containing traces of ethylene and other gasses in bedrock beneath the temple showed that a complex of active faults was to blame for the delirium of the priestesses.
Fissures in the rock under the site funnelled narcotic vapours that welled up with spring waters within the temple compound, said Prof de Boer. The geologist said ethylene was "similar to laughing gas." Taken in moderate doses it could produce euphoric feelings, but that turned to "delirium, hysteria, unconsciousness and even death" if the dose was higher. Guardian news Services

The Globe & Mail May 22 2002 - Exhibit explores enduring allure of the Queen of Sheba by John Lee
- One of history's most enigmatic figures will be revealed this summer when London's British Museum stages a spectacular exhibition on the myth and mystery of the Queen of Sheba. Revered alongside Delilah and Cleopatra in Western popular culture as a romantic and sexual icon, the queen has been recast in opera, burlesque, paintings and Hollywood movies. But, as examined in The Queen of Sheba: Treasures from Ancient Yemen, she occupies a far deeper and more complex role in other cultures. The museum's main summer exhibition, which opens June 9, includes millennia-old representations of the Sabean ruler, along with more suggestive art-works from the Renaissance, 19th century and modern periods. These include a previously unseen water-colour by Victorian artist Edward Poynter depicting the arrival of the queen at King Solomon's court. The queen's influence, though, is not restricted to her short appearance in this Bible story. Modern scholars speculate that she introduced Judaism to Ethiopia. And while the Koran describes her as a convert to Islam, Arabian legend links her to the politically significant incense trade, and Ethiopians and Yemenis both claim her as their most revered ancient ruler.
The exhibition examines these often conflicting historical and mythical accounts, mixing ancient treasures from the British Museum's own collection with artifacts on loan from the American Foundation for the Study of Man. Museums in Yemen, the modern-day nation believed by many to be the queen's ancient heartland, have also contributed exhibits. But the exhibition is not just a scrapbook of the Sheba legend. At least as mysterious as the queen herself is the little understood ancient civilization she represents, inspiring the museum to illuminate the regions' historical culture and practices. Through the use of new archeological discoveries, the exhibition reveals a rich and sophisticated Bronze Age society. Intricate dress and rare gold jewellery evoke the daily life, while imposing bronze and alabaster statues of warriors and kings suggest its military might.
Trade was the main source of the region's power and it prospered by supplying the Roman Empire with fine incense. Indicating the high importance of this once-valued commodity, extravagant incense burners of the period are on display, and the resin's richly perfumed fragrance is being filtered through the exhibition's galleries. Perhaps most enlightening of all is the section on religious practices. An exquisitely crafted miniature bull's head - the revered symbol of the Almaqah deity - is on public display for the first time, alongside a stunning bronze altar with bull's head spouts. In addition, a lifelike bronze hand provides an unusual insight into the region's powerful superstitions about death. Special to the Globe and Mail

The Globe & Mail May 24 2002 - Tried out nerve gas, toxin on sailors, U.S. admits
- Washington. The U.S. military used two kinds of nerve gas and biological toxin in tests on manned navy ships in the 1960's, the Pentagon acknowledged for the first time yesterday. The four tests in the Pacific from 1964 to 1968 used either the deadly nerve agent sarin, the nerve gas known as VX, or a biological toxin that causes flu-like symptoms, it said. Officials said veterans harmed by exposure to the agents could be eligible for benefits. AP

The Globe & Mail May 27 2002 - Beethoven's Ninth
- This month, the earliest-known draft of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was auctioned off in London. It went for much more than the £200,000 ($460,000) that was expected (Review, April 15); the draft sold for £1,326,650 . Some notes about The Ninth, a "landmark of Western civilization":
In 1818, the Royal Philharmonic Society in London commissioned the work, paying the composer £100. Beethoven completed the work, with its Ode to Joy choral, in 1823. It was his first symphony in more than a decade. It was unprecedented to make vocals an integral part of a symphonic movement. Beethoven's difficult, groundbreaking Ninth has been called "the hammer that finally killed classicism." At first, it received more bad reviews than any of his other works. The work was first performed on May 7, 1824, in Vienna. Beethoven attended the performance and stood beside the conductor, with his back to the audience. He was stone-deaf. At the end of the performance (some observers remember it as after the scherzo) soloist Karoline Unger touched Beethoven on the sleeve and turned him around so he could see the audience wildly waving hats and handkerchiefs.

COMMENT: Continuing, the article also mentions that The Ode to Joy is now used as the European anthem, and the symphony was his last before Beethoven's death.

The Globe & Mail May 29 2002 - Sunrise, sunset:
Ilan Ramon, in training for a US. Shuttle mission next year, will not be the first Jewish astronaut in space, but he will be the first to eat kosher food. Col. Ramon told The Washington Post he is not especially religious but that, as Israel's first astronaut, "I'm kind of representative of all the Jewish community." Now, he has caused consternation among rabbis by asking them when he should observe the Sabbath while in orbit. From his point of view, every 90 minutes the sun will rise and set. Should he rest every seven orbits? His local rabbi in Florida, Zvi Konikov, told The Sunday Telegraph: "It has been a theoretical question for some time, but now, incredibly, we have to apply it to a real-life situation."

The Globe & Mail May 30 2002: 2 items -
1. Editorial regarding that Christian family in Aylmer, Ontario, whose beliefs include Biblical forms of parental discipline. "The case burst into public view last July when newspapers published disturbing pictures of child-protection workers dragging seven children away from their home..." The judge hearing the case has placed a total ban on publication of the proceedings, and issues of the public's right to know apparently conflict with the need to protect the children from publicity.

2. Republicans seek to loosen Darwin's grip in schools - New law mandates Ohio educators to teach religious alternatives, legislators believe.
Supporters hold that "Intelligent design theory" should be allowed, but critics say it's creationism in the classroom by another name... .

ERRATA:
1. In The Prophetic Expositor, Vol. 39 No. 5, May 2002, the contents of Page 29 should have been inserted before page 26.
The easiest remedy is to print at the bottom of page 25 "Continued on page 29", and at the bottom of page 29, "Continued on page 26"!

2. In "A Christian Viewpoint", the same issue, the item "How Long Will Litter Last", Glass bottles last for 1,000,000 years. The final zero was left off that figure last month.