Watching the World
Too Little, Too Late
Africa is facing famine again—perhaps its greatest famine ever, according to the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. An estimated 20 million to 29 million people are threatened with starvation. The director of the United Nations Children’s Fund says that a hundred million dollars is needed to meet the demand for food. However, the appeal for aid has had little impact because it was sent out when much of the world’s attention was focused on the recent hostilities of the Persian Gulf war. As a result, too little aid is arriving too late. The French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur reports that the public in general has become so accustomed to seeing images of starving people that the tragedy of famine seems to have become almost commonplace.
Evolution on Trial
Phillip Johnson, a professor of criminal law at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States, has long been fascinated by the way biologists defend the theory of evolution. They seem so defensive and dogmatic on the subject that Johnson set about finding out “what the vulnerable points were they’re trying to protect.” The result of his research is a book, Darwin on Trial, that The Sacramento Bee describes as “a lawyer’s examination, bit by bit, of the logic of and evidence behind the theory of evolution.” The newspaper summarizes: “Darwin flunks.” Johnson claims he found many scholars, including biologists, who are afraid to speak out publicly against evolution. “One of the things I’ve learned from this experience,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle, “is that to establish an intellectual orthodoxy and keep it beyond criticism, you don’t need concentration camps and secret police. All you have to do is say that people will laugh at you and you’ll lose your prestige. This has an enormous effect in academic life.”
Finland’s Drinking Problem
Finland has the world’s greatest per capita consumption of alcoholic spirits. According to the newspaper The European, in Finland “alcohol-related traffic accidents are increasing and police figures show that drunkenness is the chief cause of violent behaviour ranging from wife-beating to street-fighting.” With a population of some five million people, Finland consumed 66 million gallons [250 million liters] of alcohol during 1990. This does not include the 13 million gallons [50 million liters] of duty-free alcohol that was purchased or consumed on Baltic cruises and ferries. The European stated that “heavy drinking is regarded by many Finns as a means of survival in a nation which is cold and dark for almost half the year.”
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FINLAND
The Price of Celibacy
Forcing priests to remain single “leads to paternity suits, to mistresses, to increased levels of homosexual activity among clergy and seminarians, to loneliness and in some cases to pedophilia.” That, according to the National Catholic Reporter, is the substance of a warning that Joe Sternak, a former Catholic priest of the Chicago archdiocese in the United States, issued on the subject of celibacy at a recent annual conference. Sternak, who is currently writing a book on pedophilia, charges that dioceses in over 20 states use church donations to pay for lawsuits and out-of-court settlements in cases of priestly sexual abuse of children.
Homosexual Suicides
A new medical study has found that the suicide rate among young homosexual men is unusually high, The Boston Globe reported recently. The study involved 137 male homosexuals and bisexuals between the ages of 14 and 21 living in the northwestern United States. Some 30 percent of these subjects had attempted suicide—many by overdosing on drugs or by slashing their wrists. Of that 30 percent, half had tried to kill themselves more than once. According to the authors of the study, this suicide rate is some two to three times higher than that for heterosexuals. While the study’s researchers gave no single reason for this level of self-destructiveness, they noted that many of the study’s subjects were troubled by their own homosexuality. Others had suffered from sexual abuse as children, and still others had drug problems.
AIDS in Malawi
According to The Daily Telegraph of London, the World Health Organization reported recently that 37 percent of the population of Malawi is infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. That amounts to nearly three million people carrying the virus; over seven thousand have already died of AIDS. A reporter for the Telegraph writes from Blantyre, Malawi, that 90 percent of the country’s prostitutes are thought to be infected, as are almost 75 percent of the country’s army and police, and some 60 percent of the mothers delivering babies in urban areas. The Telegraph reporter visited one hospital in southern Malawi where half of the patients are suffering from AIDS-related diseases. She writes: “With one nurse for every 100 patients, the victims are left to die as best they can.”
A Sobering Lesson
In the United States, where drunk driving causes a death every 23 minutes, police have resorted to some forceful measures to impress youthful offenders with the seriousness of this crime. They take the youths to the morgue. The program has been under way for several years in Los Angeles County, California, where drug or alcohol intoxication plays a part in more than a third of the fatal traffic accidents involving youths. After visiting the morgue and the hospital trauma center and watching a grisly video on traffic accidents, many youths finally see the link between the mangled corpses of accident victims and their own conduct. Of 375 youths who have been through the program, not one has ended up in court again. There are plans to extend the program across the country.
Shopping-Cart Accidents
The latest annual report from the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the United States shows that 32,866 persons were hurt in accidents involving grocery store shopping carts. More than 58 percent of these were children. According to The New York Times, “more than 19,000 children 4 years old or under required emergency room treatment for the injuries.” Researchers have found that most cases of injured children occur when parents leave their children unattended with or on the shopping carts.
Ivory From Mammoths
When elephants were put on the endangered-species list, the bottom dropped out of the world’s ivory market. Rather than face extinction themselves, though, those who deal in ivory have found another source of the material: the woolly mammoth. This great hairy beast abounded in northern climes until it was wiped out of existence thousands of years ago. But according to The Wall Street Journal, experts guess that some ten million mammoths remain frozen in the ice and permafrost of Siberia; it is not uncommon for them to roll free, still intact, from eroding river banks and shifting Arctic ice. Ivory carvers are now snapping up mammoth tusks, and the price of mammoth ivory has skyrocketed. Conservationists, however, worry that thus keeping the ivory market alive will only further endanger the remaining live elephants.
Can Teens Decide?
Are young teenagers mature enough to make decisions about their own medical treatment? This question often arises when adolescent Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse blood transfusions. While some legal and medical professionals may assume that the answer is generally no, a recent study by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development suggests otherwise. According to Science magazine, seven studies compared how adolescents and young adults dealt with medical situations both real and hypothetical. The researchers found that there was little difference in the decision-making abilities of “adolescents as young as 14 or 15 years of age” compared to young adults (from 18 to 25 years old). They showed the same “thoroughness and ‘quality’ of reasoning” as their older counterparts, the study found.
Hepatitis From Blood
A recent study in Japan verified the danger of contracting Type-C hepatitis through blood transfusions. This type of virus is said to cause half of Japan’s cases of liver cancer and cirrhosis of the liver. According to the study, 8.3 percent of 962 people who had received blood transfusions carried Type-C hepatitis viruses, whereas only 0.7 percent of 1,870 people who had never received transfusions did. Surprisingly, 40 percent of virus carriers went undetected when they took the blood test used by the Japanese Red Cross Society.