Watching the World
Warped Priorities
The desperate living conditions in developing countries could greatly improve if governments would only modify their national budgets, according to the Dutch magazine Internationale Samenwerking (International Cooperation). Basing its conclusions on a recent report issued by the UN Development Program, the magazine states that “if developing countries would merely freeze their defense budgets,” they could save over $10 billion a year. Such a sum, which the magazine calls a peace dividend, could pay for basic education, primary health care, sufficient food, and safe drinking water. However, the magazine also notes that many countries “are presently spending at least twice as much on weapons as on education and health care,” listing as examples nations in Africa, Asia, and South America.
Promoting Tobacco in Africa
As smoking continues to take its toll on millions of Africans, health officials are speaking out. Says Dr. Paul Wangai, a World Health Organization consultant in Kenya, Africa: “Tobacco . . . is the only product I know that kills if used as intended by the manufacturer.” According to the southern African newspaper Lesotho Today, “175 billion cigarettes are smoked in Africa every year.” This means spending the equivalent of three and a half times the national budget of Côte d’Ivoire. Dr. Wangai asserts that cigarette manufacturers unscrupulously take advantage of the lack of restrictions on advertising in Africa as well as the prevailing ignorance of the health hazards of smoking. According to Lesotho Today, cigarette advertising and packaging in most of Africa does not carry “health warnings as is the requirement in developed countries.”
Polluted Cup of Freedom
The fall of the Iron Curtain has revealed that Eastern Europe is swamped with environmental problems, says London Calling, the program journal of the British Broadcasting Corporation. “Unregulated chemical factories, polluted waterways, dying forests and unsafe nuclear reactors,” reports the journal, form only a fraction of the “environmental legacy left by Communism . . . , bitter dregs in the cup of freedom.”
“Granny Dumping”
Hospital workers call the practice granny dumping. Family members bring an aged relative to a hospital emergency ward, often citing some physical complaint that may call for a battery of expensive tests and a stay of a night or more. After the tests, the hospital tries to contact the elderly person’s family, only to learn that the address and phone number that they left are false. Some nursing homes follow a similar practice. While an aged resident is in the hospital, they simply give his or her bed away—often to a more reliable paying customer—and then refuse the hospital’s efforts to return the patient. According to Newsweek magazine, experts agree that this practice is on the increase. It notes that in one informal survey, “some doctors reported as many as eight elderly patients dumped on their emergency wards every week.”
Drilling in the Arteries
Doctors in Australia are using an unusual new tool to clear blocked heart arteries, reports Asiaweek magazine. Called the Rotablator, the tool has a tiny head encrusted with thousands of microscopic diamond chips. As the head spins at 190,000 revolutions per minute, it sands away highly calcified arterial blockages, breaking them up into particles that are too fine to pose any danger of causing a stroke by getting stuck in the brain. The bloodstream simply sweeps them away safely. According to Asiaweek, the tool is so precise that “in demonstrations it grinds a groove in the outer shell of a raw egg without breaking the inner membrane.”
A Positive Role Model?
“I am gay!” These words came from a surprising source recently—a comic-book superhero. Northstar, red-suited Canadian hero of a popular comic book published by Marvel Comics, was depicted in a recent issue as declaring that he is a homosexual. Although the character was previously billed as “Canada’s most eligible bachelor,” homosexuals have long suspected that he was intended to be gay, according to the New York Daily News. Homosexual groups praised the latest revelation, which is trumpeted on the comic book’s cover with the words: “Northstar as You’ve Never Known Him Before!” As a parent, do you consider a homosexual to be a positive role model for your children? God’s Word the Bible condemns those who ‘become inflamed in their lust for one another, males with males.’ It calls what they do “obscene.”—Romans 1:24-27.
A Trunkless Tree
“At present, we no longer have a global explanation for the evolution of life on earth,” says Le Figaro-Magazine of Paris. Reporting on an international conference held in Blois, France, where 200 leading scientists from around the world met to discuss the origin of life, the magazine observes that “the old theories are collapsing.” The magazine sums up the comments of several scientists this way: “The Darwinian theory can explain a certain number of secondary things but not the essential stages of evolution, such as the appearance of new organs or new types of organization such as birds or the vertebrates.” Commenting on the huge gaps that riddle the theory, paleontologist Robert Fondi said: “If we picture a genealogical tree of evolution, only the leaves and a few branches exist but no knots or trunk. It is a tree that cannot stand!”
Mentally Ill and Homeless
The number of people who are both homeless and mentally ill continues to surge upward in the United States. In fact, the ranks of this pitiful group swelled by 7 percent in just the past year, according to a survey of 21 North American cities taken by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The 21 cities reported an estimated total of 208,000 homeless, about a third of whom—69,000 people—are severely mentally ill. The survey included the three largest cities in the country—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Some mayors at the conference complained that this problem is largely due to a lack of government funding for mental-health care for the mentally handicapped.
Earth’s Temperature Rising
The 1980’s were a hot decade. Perspectives, a magazine published by the International Institute for Environment and Development, reports that “six of the seven warmest years over the 140 year period that temperature records were kept have all occurred since 1980.” And according to data released by the British Meteorological Office, 1990 was the hottest year on record. This information, claims Perspectives, “confirms that the average surface air temperature is rising and provides new evidence that the globe is set on a general warming trend.”
The Dogs of Paris
With one dog for every ten humans, Paris, France, boasts the densest canine population of any European capital. These 200,000 dogs deposit some ten tons of waste on the streets daily. The city spends $8 million (FFr42m) a year to employ a fleet of motorbike-riding sanitation workers who scoop up nearly half of the excrement, while the rest is supposedly washed into the gutters and sewers. However, so much of the offensive stuff remains on city pavements that it ranks as the third most common complaint that Parisians make about their city. The city is now launching a campaign to enforce laws that order people to clean up after their dogs.
The Plague of Juvenile Crime
“Juvenile delinquency is on the increase. It has doubled in the last five years. It has increased by a third in just the last few months.” This is the dark picture painted by statistics on the growth of juvenile crime in Italy between 1986 and 1990, according to the newspaper La Repubblica. Cases of grievous bodily harm inflicted in 1986 numbered 3,064, while in 1990 there were 6,092 such crimes involving juveniles. There were 715 cases of drug trafficking and consumption in 1986, compared with 2,113 in 1990. Sadly, Italy is not alone in this regard. At the Second International Conference on Security, held in Paris in November, it was mentioned that with the exception of Japan, juvenile crime is on the increase everywhere in the world.
“The Storks of the Night”
In Brazil, Veja magazine reports that a clandestine women’s organization is leaving babies at the doorsteps of well-to-do families. After depositing the child, they ring the bell and run off to watch from a car parked nearby. Later that night they telephone the family anonymously, urging them to adopt the baby. The family never hears from the women again. Veja reports that in the last six years, 60 wealthy families in Feira de Santana, Brazil, have thus found newborn babes at the doorway. The group of women, known as “the storks of the night,” are supposedly trying to help children who have been abandoned, but the practice is controversial. Márcia Serra Negra, a lawyer and specialist in family matters, is quoted as saying: “What the storks are doing is a kind of coercion.”