News from the BIPM concerning the meter, the kilogram, the second, and the ampere

Some new aspects of the tasks of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) are outlined. They arise from the extended use of stabilized lasers as practical standards for length measurement; the need for a better insight into the long-term maintenance of mass standards exposed to pollution, implying improvement of balances and air-buoyancy correction; the transfer to BIPM of the responsibility for the International Atomic Time Scale (TAI), including coordination of clock comparisons, collection, analysis, and treatment of data, and distribution of TAI; and the use of quantized references for the maintenance of stable and reproducible representations of the volt and the ohm based upon the Josephson effect and the quantum Hall effect. Although news in the fields of time and electricity is more relevant to the traditional interests of the Conference on Precision Electromagnetic Measurements (CPEM), the expansion of the CPEM's depth of interest in the area of fundamental constants makes it appropriate to include some remarks on length and mass.