Families and supporters of the Redshirt protesters in Thailand handed in a letter to the London embassy yesterday calling for an end to the killings and suppression of pro-democracy campaigners.

While London's black cabs were proclaiming that 1994 was the year of the taxi, GPs in Britain could be forgiven for thinking it was actually the year of rampant acronymophilia. Acronyms, pronounceable words formed from the initial letters of other words, have multiplied on all sides, but particularly in the literature of cardiovascular medicine.

The building of the consensus group, however, forced these interests to distinguish annoying features of the law from unworkable ones, and the list of the unworkables steadily dwindled.

[E]ach degree of the hydrometer, when at or near proof, is about a quart in a hundred gallons stronger or weaker, as the hydrometer vibrates under or over the silver speck or sight on the index or upper stem; at the intermediate or strong overproofs, is about a pint in ditto; and at the low underproofs is about three pints in ditto.