Watching the World
Soviet Aid for New York?
◆ New York City councilman Gilberto Gerena-Valentin recently led a delegation of nine from the Soviet Union through a rubble-strewn area of the city’s South Bronx section. Crime, vandalism and arson have destroyed many buildings in that part of the city. “What I am doing is asking the Soviet Government, through the Soviet Peace Committee, for $5,000 million in foreign aid to rebuild the South Bronx,” declared the councilman. The Soviets “huddled in small groups,” reports the New York Times, “quietly and uncomfortably surveying the destruction around them. ‘It seems like it was bombed,’ one delegate whispered in Russian to another.”
“T-Shirt” Christians
◆ Thousands of Cambodians in the Khao Dang refugee camp of Thailand appeared to have given up their Buddhism for Christianity, according to France’s Le Monde. But the newspaper indicates that part of their zeal for their new religion may have been an idea that such a “gesture will improve their chances of emigrating to the West.” The work of the busy missionaries in the camp was reflected by one refugee from Phnom Penh who said: “Some of them say that by becoming Christian you can be sent to the United States. As far as I am concerned, I’ve become Christian because they gave me a T-shirt marked with a cross and bearing the phrase: ‘I love you Jesus!’”
Great Wooden Wall
◆ The famous Great Wall of China was built of stone to keep out Mongol hordes from the north. Now the People’s Republic plans to build another “wall” across thousands of miles of its wind-stripped northern frontier to help cope with bleak climatic and ecological conditions. This time it will be a wooden wall of 1.6 million acres (0.65 million ha) of trees to be planted during the next two years alone. According to a plan approved by the State Council, volunteer workers are to supply the labor.
Church “Cover-up” Fails
◆ Goaded by a Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé and threatened legal action, the Roman Catholic Church finally made payment of $2.9 million (U.S.) to some 1,500 elderly Catholics who years ago bought bonds from a scandal-ridden religious order. A series of newspaper reports exposing financial abuses by the Pauline Fathers of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, won the prestigious Pulitzer award for public-service journalism. The series by Gannett News Service also exposed what it calls a “massive cover-up” by the church, involving “some of the most powerful churchmen in this country and Rome—including Pope John Paul II.” Charles Germain, spokesman for Bishop George H. Guilfoyle of Camden, New Jersey, said the bishop would not comment on the matter, but also observed: “The diocese is a corporation. If you had a scandal, you’d do anything to cover it up, too.”
German Textbook and Creation
◆ A biology textbook titled “Evolution” recently was introduced for use in West Berlin schools. Its introduction briefly outlines different opinions on the origin of life. The first subheading, “Genesis, Old Testament,” is followed by several verses from that Bible book. Next are short commentaries from noted evolutionists and others, including Lamarck, Darwin and Teilhard de Chardin. The last contribution on the page is subheaded “Wachtturm Bibelund Traktatgesellschaft” (German name for Watchtower Bible and Tract Society). Quotations from the Society’s book Did Man Get Here by Evolution or by Creation? follow: “At best ‘natural selection’ or ‘survival of the fittest’ can only mean separating the strong from the weak. But a new kind of plant or a new kind of animal is never the result of survival alone. And since new kinds of living things do not result from mutations either, evolution is left completely without a mechanism that could account for it. . . . The true scientific facts point, not to the evolution of man from the beasts, but to the creation of man as a kind separate and distinct from the animals.”
Laboratory Gold
◆ Gold has been created from bismuth at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California—a feat dreamed of by alchemists of the Middle Ages. But it took the BEVALAC atomic particle accelerator to do it, not alchemy. The machine hurled ions of carbon and neon at the bismuth. This “knocked away fragments of the bismuth atoms, leaving the lighter element gold,” reports Science 80 magazine. Will this prompt a gold rush? Not likely. It took $10,000 (U.S.) in accelerator operating expenses to make about a million atoms of gold. “In all our work,” said the scientist operating the machine, “we produced gold that was worth less than one billionth of a cent.”
Learning by Doing
◆ A recent report in The Canadian Journal of Surgery notes that, in spite of certain difficulties, “major operative procedures are being performed on Jehovah’s Witnesses without blood transfusion.” The doctors tell of their experience in performing two serious, complex “portacaval shunt’ operations without blood. Because of their success in using surgical techniques that minimize blood loss, the doctors wrote: “The management of these two patients without blood transfusion suggests that less blood need be used in more routine surgical procedures.”
Similarly, the Canadian Medical Association Journal reports on a “sequential triple-[heart] valve replacement in a Jehovah’s Witness—the first case in the world, to our knowledge.” The report describes the replacement of three heart valves in two operations without blood, using appropriate techniques. Said the doctors who wrote the report: “We believe that the data presented here support the conclusion that the availability of bank blood need no longer be considered a prerequisite for open heart surgery.”
Not in the Script
◆ A murder mystery movie titled “Eyewitness” was being filmed in a New York office building when suddenly the actors and crew became eyewitnesses to an unscheduled murder attempt. The movie ‘murder’ had just been discovered when “suddenly two men raced in from the street, crashing into the scene, one wielding a knife and the other clutching his bloodied neck,” reported the New York Times. Seeing the filming equipment, the knife-wielder fled, with all the action being filmed, not only by the movie crew, but also by a TV crew who were videotaping the overall action for a news feature. The two impromptu characters “were definitely not in the script,” said the actress who plays the heroine in the film.
Starry Defense
◆ A 23-year-old Miami, Florida, man charged with robbery, rape and assault says it isn’t his fault. It was in the stars, according to Attorney Jack Nagley, whose client is pleading not guilty by reason of astrology. Three leading astrologers were to testify that the position of the stars and planets at the time of his birth led him into a life of crime over which he had no control. One of the astrologers claimed that if the criminal was born during a “disharmonious alignment of the planets, he cannot cope in a constructive way.” Will criminals next be basing their defense on tea-leaf, tarot-card or crystal-ball readings?
Food for the Heart?
◆ People who enjoy eating Chinese food may also be doing their hearts a favor. According to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine, “Coronary artery disease in China in general and the southern provinces in particular is uncommon.” The report’s author, Dr. Dale E. Hammerschmidt, may have found the reason. It seems that black tree fungus, called mo-er by the Chinese, is a common ingredient of Chinese food, especially certain Szechwan and Mandarin dishes. During a medical experiment, Dr. Hammerschmidt found that a man’s blood sample failed to clot normally. He traced it to black fungus the man had eaten earlier in a plate of Szechwan hot bean curd. The scientist believes that this anticlotting effect may possibly hinder the buildup of deposits on artery walls (atherosclerosis) that contributes to heart attacks.
Huge Hangover?
◆ Circus elephants performing high up in the Andes at Pasto, Colombia, needed warming up in the chill mountain air. So the owners decided to give them whiskey instead of water, according to the newspaper El Dia of Montevideo, Uruguay. But the embarrassed owners had to announce at the next performance: “We are sorry to inform you that only six—rather than the usual seven—elephants will perform because one got drunk.”
Fatal Tantrum
◆ The desire for material possessions recently proved fatal for a 21-year-old college student in Yokohama, Japan. “Since he acquired a driver’s license last February,” explains Tokyo’s Mainichi Daily News, the boy “had been asking his parents almost daily to buy a car for him.” They refused, so he apparently committed suicide by inhaling fumes from a rented car.
“Bombing” Gallstones
◆ According to the New China News Agency, in the People’s Republic of China, a tiny “bomb” recently blasted apart a patient’s gallstone. “As far as is known, this is the first time a stone has been removed by means of an explosion inside the human body,” claimed the agency. A surgeon and an explosives expert worked together to develop a miniature bomb, learning the right charge, and how to keep it sterile and waterproof. It was inserted in the patient’s bladder by using the urinary tract, and “directional blasting” of the gallstone was carried out. The resulting four pieces of the stone “were discharged normally afterward,” said the report. The 40-year-old man was said to have experienced only a slight vibration and numbness in the area of the explosion.
World’s Energy Use Down
◆ Apparently the world as a whole is awakening to the need to conserve energy. The Swiss ministry of transport says that global energy consumption declined in 1979 by 1.9 percent. Oil products as a source of energy dropped from 75 percent of the total fuel consumption in 1978 to 73 percent in 1979.
Getting Back Together?
◆ Church officials and laymen recently came together on the famous Greek isle of Patmos for meetings aimed at repairing the 1,000-year-old rift between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Six months before, the pope had visited the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, expressing the wish: “Is it not time that we hastened our pace for perfect brotherly reconciliation so that the dawn of the third millennium [2,000 C.E.] finds us side by side in full communion?” Similarly one Orthodox observer noted: “The Pope said that it is his ambition to see a reunited church of one billion souls in his lifetime.” What are the chances? “It all depends on how long he plans to live,” said the observer.
Bicycle Congestion
◆ In Japan, the Mainichi Daily News tells of a flood of parked bicycles congesting railway stations. More and more commuters pedal bicycles to the nearest railway station to catch their trains. As a result, a total of about 850,000 bicycles now are left near the stations, often becoming obstacles to motor and pedestrian traffic. The figure does not include the number of parking places already set aside for bicycles.