Watching the World
Inflation’s Fruitage
◆ U.S. wholesale farm products rose a record 23 percent in August, and, according to the Labor Department, the nation’s overall inflation rate nears the worst in the century. Inflation has brought a host of other problems, including a sharp increase in shoplifting and employee theft. The Wall Street Journal reports that there is more “shoplifting by the elderly whose fixed incomes can’t keep pace with food prices.” Others have taken to switching price labels from low- to high-priced goods. “Some people feel tag switching is less dishonest [than shoplifting],” says a department store security manager. “They think they’re just getting a good deal.”
New Evolution Quandary
◆ Scientific evidence, says Time magazine, is causing “uneasiness among scientists over current explanations about how life arose spontaneously on earth.” Also, recent discoveries in Africa “challenge the validity of long-cherished theories concerning the origin and evolution of the human race,” says an article in Tuesday magazine. One was the finding of bones in Kenya that anthropologists allege are “more than twice as old, and are far more modern in shape than those of our presumed ancestor.” Concerning another similar find, it continues: “Equally disconcerting are the artifacts found with the fossils.” These indicated a high degree of civilization, including mining, tool manufacturing, record keeping and a well-developed language.
“Pestilence” Still Plaguing Man
◆ By early September 800 cases of cholera were reported in Italy; over 20 persons had died. Tainted mussel beds near the Naples sewage discharge were blamed as the main source of the outbreak. These have been destroyed. Lemons were $2.50 a pound and alcoholic beverages were selling by the crate, because they were thought to have value in resisting the disease. In perspective, during the past two years, 20,000 of the 80,000 cases of cholera in Africa are reported by the World Health Organization to have been fatal, with many more unreported. A cholera patient may lose as much as a quart of body fluid an hour by diarrhea before dying of dehydration.
Disaster in Mexico
◆ Natural forces again demonstrated man’s smallness. In Mexico the most devastating floods in 30 years struck the flatlands and areas in the south and southeast, causing great material loss. Then, on August 28, an earthquake of such magnitude that it dislocated the seismographs near the epicenter, shook an area of 28,000 square kilometers (10,811 square miles). The quake’s duration, about six minutes, was the longest on Mexican record. In Puebla State, buildings and homes collapsed. At least 500 persons died and 4,000 were injured.
Competition’s Ravages
◆ Papua-New Guineans were recently asked by the Chief Minister “not to take the competition into the streets,” after Papua defeated New Guinea in a rugby game. “Hordes of dissatisfied spectators stormed from the grounds and expressed their resentment by running, shouting and hurling soft-drink bottles,” reports the Papua New Guinea Post-Courier. Angry mobs “took out their frustration . . . on shop fronts, passing vehicles and pedestrians.” Calling for a ban on future games between the two teams, the Minister of the Interior, Dr. Guise, says: “Such games . . . have the reputation of always resulting in brawls, often flare up emotional feelings.”
Tobacco Setbacks
◆ The state of Arizona passed a bill banning public smoking in elevators, indoor theaters, libraries, art museums, concert halls and buses, except in designated areas. While puffing a cigarette, a state senator, who denounced the bill as “an invasion of privacy,” died of a heart attack a month later at age 67. The U.S. Congress also passed a bill in September that bars TV and radio ads for “little cigars,” which had been circumventing the ban on cigarette advertising.
Misgivings About Transfusions
◆ Medical and government authorities increasingly attack the high cost and indiscriminate use of blood. The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) says: “Blood is expensive, in part, because charges are imposed which bear no discernible relationship to costs.” A blood-bank medical director, writing in Medical Economics magazine, fears that when reporters, consumers and insurance companies “start asking questions about why blood may cost as much as $75 a unit, and when lawyers start thinking about serum hepatitis as something other than an act of God, then there’s going to be pandemonium.” He says there “is a reckless reliance on blood transfusions . . . without careful consideration of safer, less expensive alternatives.”
Driving to Death
◆ “Sometime in 1974 the nation will pass the bloody milestone of two million vehicle-traffic deaths since the advent of the motor car,” says a U.S. congressional subcommittee. Highway deaths soon will be double those American dead in all wars since the Revolution. The fact that about three fourths fail to use seat belts contributes to the high rate. But, according to the subcommittee’s six-year study, there are other factors: “Even some of the nation’s newest interstate highways . . . have been designed and built without applying basic research knowledge and engineering principles and, in some cases, old-fashioned common sense.”
Why Bother?
◆ What has long been suspected as the reason some people go to church no longer exists for many of them, so they do not bother to go. ‘No social pressure from their neighbors to attend’ is why nearly half of those surveyed in a San Antonio, Texas, suburb stopped going. “A lack of genuine faith in Christianity was the cause for drifting most often cited,” according to the San Antonio Express & News.
Britain’s Prisons
◆ London’s Daily Mail says that widespread disturbances made 1972 the most troubled year in the history of Britain’s prison system. One representative of the Prison Officers’ Association is quoted in the newspaper as claiming: “We are just a few steps from a total breakdown in the prison service, . . . We believe last year’s trouble was a rehearsal for things to come.” Outdated and overcrowded prisons, as well as recent changes in prisoner schedules, are said to contribute to the problem. Of prison officers, he says: “Our morale has never been worse.”