I was pleasantly surprised to see the BBC News web site describe the area of the Amazon rain forest being lost in square kilometers:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7756241.stm (The unpleasant surprise was to read about the acceleration in the loss of rain forest. :-( I switched to the UK version of the site just to be sure they didn't edit the wording differently there ..... but the article is exactly the same. Based on previous articles I've seen, I was bracing myself to see "square miles" listed in parentheses afterwards. I wonder if usage for larger areas in the UK (aside from real estate transactions) is trending toward metric only, namely, hectares and square kilometers exclusively. Ezra
