Watching the World
Unholy Water
A surgeon in Ireland was puzzled when a 72-year-old woman twice developed serious eye infections just prior to having cataract surgery. What caused the infections? “Holy” water from Lourdes that she had put on her face. “The problem,” says The Irish Times, “is that holy water is often contaminated by dangerous bacteria.” The woman might easily have been blinded by the infection if the surgery had been performed as scheduled. The Irish Times continues: “Blessing simply doesn’t kill germs. And the sprinkling of holy water that is meant to cure, may actually cause life-threatening infection in certain circumstances.” According to the report, well-meaning friends or relatives who sprinkle you with “holy” water when you are in the hospital may be “the greatest risk to your survival.”
Land-Mine Dilemma
“The global campaign to rid the world of land mines has found that the objective is as elusive as the mines themselves,” notes The Wall Street Journal. “Adequate equipment doesn’t exist to ensure the safe removal of land mines.” Soldiers today use the same basic equipment that their grandfathers used in World War II—sticklike probes and metal detectors. But the new generation of mines are much harder to detect, as they are mostly plastic and lie buried with shrapnel and other debris that trigger many false alarms. When the metal detector senses an object, a fiberglass rod is carefully pushed into the soil at an angle. The object is to find the mine by hitting its side. If the mine is at an angle and the top is hit, it will blow up in the person’s face. While mines often cost less than $5 each, clearing them out can cost more than $1,000 per mine. Between 1.5 million and 2 million mines are placed in the ground each year, and over 25,000 people—including many children—are maimed or killed by them.
No Way Out for Children
“Children in general started to become victims of their elders’ quarrels when warfare became total: bombs and missiles make no age distinction in their killing,” states The Economist. “Civil wars—the common ones nowadays—often consume entire countries. In some places aid agencies now have to give as much attention to demobilising child soldiers as to supplying basic foodstuffs. Everywhere they go they can expect to find children among the refugees, the wounded and the dead.” Although everyone claims to love children, it is children who are suffering more than ever before. Aid agencies estimate that 24 million children under 18 years of age were displaced by war last year and that some 2 million were killed in the past ten years. An additional four million to five million were disabled. “The psychological effects can only be guessed at,” says The Economist.
Celibacy Controversy
“The Roman Catholic Church is losing a great deal of qualified labour due to its insistence on celibacy for priests,” according to a report published in the ENI Bulletin. At the Fourth International Congress of Married Priests, held in Brasília, it was reported that 100,000 Roman Catholic priests throughout the world have left the priesthood and have given up celibacy. According to former priest Jorge Ponciano Ribeiro, now a professor at the University of Brasília, 1 out of every 5 priests has left the priesthood to get married. Brazil alone has 3,500 married priests. Said Ribeiro: “Celibacy was established to avoid problems between the church and the priests’ heirs, and not because the Word of God can be better disseminated by those who do not engage in sexual relations.”
Elephant Delinquents
“Like children, young elephants need discipline if they are to grow up as responsible members of society,” notes New Scientist. “Wildlife biologists say that orphan bull elephants in South Africa’s Pilanesberg Game Reserve have turned delinquent because they have never been taken in hand by their elders.” The rogue elephants have attacked humans, have gored to death 19 white rhinoceroses in the past three years, and have even tried to mate with rhinos. Two humans were killed, including a professional hunter sent out to shoot an offending elephant after it had charged a group of tourists. In each instance, the delinquent animal was from a group of young male elephants brought into the reserve from Kruger National Park after the rest of their herd was culled to control the size of the elephant population. While a number of factors have placed stress on the elephants, scientists feel that the lack of discipline and nurturing from older animals, a dominant feature of the normal life of elephant families, is at least partly responsible for their wayward behavior. Now, only whole elephant families will be moved so that the young bulls “will continue to receive the strict parental discipline they need,” says the article.
First Hit-and-Run Accident in Space
The first confirmed hit-and-run accident in space has occurred over 400 miles [700 km] above the earth, reports New Scientist. A French satellite called Cerise went tumbling wildly when a stabilizing boom was vaporized after being hit by a ten-year-old chunk of an Ariane rocket that was traveling at 30,000 miles per hour [50,000 km/hr] at the same altitude. The chances of such collisions increase yearly as debris accumulates in earth orbits. Already, there are more than 20,000 known pieces of space junk hurtling around the globe. While those in low orbits are often eliminated through natural processes, such as expansion of the atmosphere, those in high orbits can remain there for thousands of years. When they collide with other pieces of debris, they fracture into many smaller pieces that can penetrate an astronaut’s space suit or a spacecraft’s shield. Even bits of paint are a potential hazard. At present, there are about 4 dead satellites in orbit for every 1 still operating, and spent rockets that have blown up in orbit account for a quarter of the known space debris.
Sponges Had It First
“So many of humanity’s bright ideas turn out to be nature’s old tricks,” states The Washington Post. “Take fiber optics, for example. Scientists developed glass-like fibers to capture light and carry it around corners in 1951. It turns out deep-water sponges in Antarctica’s Ross Sea had been doing the same for eons.” The giant sponges, found in waters up to 100 feet deep, have fiber spicules sticking out of them that capture light and can transmit it, even around a 90-degree bend, to photosynthetic algae that inhabit the core of the sponge’s body. Experiments have shown that light striking at an angle is also gathered, indicating that the spicules on the sides of the sponge are also capable of feeding the algae light.
Gamblers Lose
“Casinos are so made that their owners by no means lose money,” says Brazilian economist Ricardo Gazel. “The mathematical chances that a person will get money from gambling are minimal.” Warning that easy access to casinos will most likely create more gambling addicts, Gazel adds: “There is the illusory prospect of earning money without much effort. People dream of the possibility that in a stroke of good luck, they will get rich quick.” Further, Veja quotes him as saying regarding the lack of basis for criticism by church or government: “The government is the biggest gambling establishment in the country. There are six different kinds of lotteries maintained by the federal government, not to mention state lotteries. The church cannot criticize the legalizing of gambling because to raise money for the parishes, the church promotes the habit at bazaars, where there is always a small stand at which the faithful lose money betting.” According to Gazel, ‘specialists say that compulsive gamblers who do not seek help run the risk of ending up in prison, committing suicide, or going insane.’
Snake-Toting Bandits
Thieves have been victimizing residents of Diriamba, a Nicaraguan town 30 miles [50 km] south of Managua, by using poisonous snakes. As reported in the newspaper El Nuevo Diario, the gang would collect the rattlesnakes from nearby fields, remove their venom, and then rob people as they traveled on the roads outside of town by threatening to have the snakes bite them. One girl, who fainted when she saw the snake’s fangs, found that when she came to, her gold chains had been stolen. The gang has also robbed peasants of foodstuffs and cash.