Watching the World
“8,000 DEATHS A DAY”
The use of tobacco continues to alarm health professionals, who envision a grim future for smokers. In the next 25 years, an estimated 500 million people will die from smoking, warns a recent study by WHO (World Health Organization). Research by WHO predicts that smoking will become the number one cause of death in the world by the turn of the century. “Today there will be 8,000 deaths a day from smoking, but when the kids reach middle age there will be something like 28,000 deaths a day,” said a WHO representative at the World Conference on Tobacco and Health in Perth, Australia.
COURT RULING FAVORS WITNESS COUPLE
On April 13, 1990, a San Francisco, California, Superior Court jury returned a $500,000 verdict against the University of California (San Francisco Hospitals and Clinics) and a leading kidney-transplant surgeon. The plaintiffs were Jehovah’s Witnesses whose minor son was given a blood transfusion—against their wishes—after a successful kidney transplant from his father. (For Scriptural reasons Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse blood transfusions, choosing in lieu thereof nonblood management of their health care.) “The parents were assured from the outset of their contact with the hospital, even right up to the night of the surgery, that there would be no blood transfusions or court orders,” one of the attorneys representing the couple told Awake! “However, almost from the beginning, the hospital engaged in a deceitful and secret scheme that showed utter disregard for the family’s fundamental rights.” In violation of their agreement, without notifying the parents, the surgeon took steps to obtain a court order several days before the operations. Thus, the jury found the hospital liable for violations of the parents’ federal civil rights and for fraud, and it found both the doctor and the hospital liable for intentional breach of confidence. “This verdict to grant damages against doctors in a blood transfusion case involving Witnesses is the first ever in the United States,” said the attorney.
CLOTHES TO KILL FOR
Some inner-city teenagers in the United States, lured into buying costly and faddish clothing in order to be accepted as cool by their peers, are paying for the clothes with their lives. Sneakers that cost as much as $175 and athletic jackets that cost up to $200 can turn youths into targets for assault and robbery. Some victims, desperate to hang on to clothes that cost them so much money, resist the thieves and have ended up stabbed or shot in the process. The death toll is mounting. The New York Times comments: “Such incidents not only underscore the degree to which street crime and violence are now endemic to life in the inner city, but also serve as a perverse measure of the hottest local fashion trend.”
DANGEROUS WORK
Being a journalist has always entailed hard work combined with long hours. Now it is becoming deadly too. Last year 53 journalists were killed worldwide—twice as many as in 1988. Those most in danger are the adventurous free-lance reporters and photographers. Drug barons and military commanders are the most likely to commit this type of “censorship by death,” stated an editorial in The New York Times. When journalists are “silenced, jailed or censored, understanding is dimmed and information lost.”
MAJORITY FAVOR SCRAPPING CELIBACY
A survey published in the Australian Catholic Weekly revealed that up to 70 percent of Australian Catholics favor an end to the vow of celibacy required of their priests. They believe that priests should be allowed to marry. Among the reasons they gave was that marriage would give priests a more “credible lifestyle” and perhaps keep them in closer touch with their parishioners. Also, some of those polled said that scrapping celibacy rules may help attract more young men to the priesthood. (The average age of Catholic priests in Australia at present is 63.) One priest lamented that when he was training for the priesthood, his class consisted of from 25 to 30 students. Just ten years later, the class size had dropped to 12 students.
TAKING STOCK OF DIVORCE
Divorces in the Federal Republic of Germany climbed from 49,300 in 1961 to 128,700 in 1988, reports the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Half the divorces broke up families with children, involving a total of 93,000 minors. The wife petitioned for divorce twice as often as the husband, mostly after between four and six years of marriage. Sociologist Peter Hartmann noted variations in divorce rates. The city-states of Hamburg, Bremen, and Berlin have noticeably high rates; regions of long-term unemployment list higher rates than prosperous areas. The report yielded one surprise. There is little difference in divorce rates between Catholic and Protestant areas.
WORLD’S LONGEST FIBER-OPTIC CABLE
Australia claims the record for the world’s longest fiber-optic cable link. The telecommunications cable joins Australian state capitals Adelaide and Perth, a distance of more than 1,600 miles [2,600 km], and it spans the Nullarbor Plain, a renowned arid, desertlike area. A spokesman for Telecom (Australia’s telecommunications system) told The West Australian newspaper that satellite telecommunication has now been outdated by the use of fiber-optic cable. The newspaper explained that “the cable can carry up to 8000 telephone conversations, as many faxes in a mere two seconds and video communications. All this is transmitted on a 12 fibre cable, with each fibre being only the width of a human hair.” Telecom anticipates that the present remarkable capacity could even be quadrupled by about the middle of the 1990’s.
FATTY FAST FOOD
In some industrialized nations, where the fast-food meal has become a way of life, chicken or fish sandwiches and chicken “nuggets” are popular because many think of them as low-fat alternatives to the traditional hamburger. But such foods are sometimes cooked in oils high in saturated fat. Besides, a fast-food chicken sandwich often contains a large percentage of chicken skin, so it “may contain as much fat as a pint and a half of ice cream, and a half-dozen chicken ‘nuggets’ have more fat than a hamburger,” says the International Herald Tribune, reporting on a recent study by the Massachusetts Medical Society. Too much fat in the diet is linked to a high incidence of diabetes, coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, strokes, and obesity.
THE INDIFFERENT
Religious indifference has become widespread throughout the world, especially in countries that were former strongholds of Christendom. Writing in the Catholic newspaper La Croix, Jesuit Xavier Nicolas laments the growing problem. He says that down through the centuries, there have been many confrontations between believers and nonbelievers over the ultimate questions about God, the Hereafter, and religion. Today, however, a third group exists—the indifferent, those who are neither for nor against religion, being rather unconcerned about the ultimate questions of life. He believes that the church has not totally grasped the extent of the real secularism of our times. He asks: ‘How can we claim to have the answers if the questions are not even being asked?’
EMPTY CONFESSIONALS
“The rite of confessing one’s sins to a priest and receiving absolution” has been widely abandoned, reports The New York Times. “The abandonment occurs silently, spontaneously, without anyone’s urging it and almost without discussion.” One study of churchgoing Catholics disclosed that only 6 percent went to confession once a month and only 1 percent went more often than that, although many did go yearly during the Lenten season of repentance. The development has puzzled church leaders. Some attribute it to disagreement with the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception, a growing disbelief in hell, a loss of a sense of sin, and confusion over what is right and wrong. However, the study showed the laity as “attributing the drop in confessions to their ability to experience forgiveness and reconciliation better in other ways,” says the Times. It adds: “Catholics themselves have increasingly questioned whether it was conducive to genuine spiritual transformation.”