Angel >> The Diniacopoulos BBC World News Project Concordia University is transcribing some 9,000 hours of BBC World broadcasts, aired between 1970 and 1986, from quarter-inch tapes to CD-ROM, archiving the global broadcasts for research purposes. Because the BBC does not keep copies of its tapes, the archives will provide unique insight into the eras of Watergate, Vietnam, the Camp David accords, the death of Mao Zedong and the Reagan-Thatcher years. Transcribing the collection, compiled by the late Concordia communications prof Denis Diniacopoulos and bequeathed to the university after his mother’s death in 2000, is part of a $900,000 gift from the family.

Insect >> Executions Amnesty International announced on Tuesday that the number of executions by governments last year doubled that of the previous year. Although the jump is due in large part to China’s crackdown on crime (between April and July last year at least 1,781 people were executed; China’s year-end total was 2,468). The report also states that four countries account for 90 per cent of the world’s executions: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Amnesty was heartened, however, by the fact that only three minors were executed last year: one in Pakistan, one in Iran and one in the USA.