Watching the World
A VIOLENT DECADE
The murder rate in the United States is on the rise again. The New York Times notes that while the rate dropped slightly in the early 1980’s, after 1985 it began increasing again. The number murdered in 1989 was about 5 percent higher than the 20,680 slain in 1988, which was already an average of 1 person killed every 25 minutes. Guns figured in some 60 percent of the slayings and thus became the eighth leading cause of death in the nation. In the schools alone, according to one study, an average day sees at least a hundred thousand pupils carrying guns. New York City schools are thus forced to maintain the “eleventh largest security force in the U.S.,” notes Time magazine. For New York City, the ’80’s were the most violent decade in the city’s history, with some 17,000 murders. The advent of the drug called crack contributed to the figure.
HEPATITIS UNDETECTED IN BLOOD
Five years ago a South African man contracted hepatitis B from a blood transfusion while undergoing heart surgery. Today he can barely walk, is in pain, and has had to retire. Three months before the operation, the donor of the blood had been tested and found free of contamination. Furthermore, she had a long history of blood donation—67 units in all. Donors who have repeatedly given blood without causing infections are widely held to be the safest donors. So how had this happened? The incubation period of the hepatitis B virus varies from 4 to 26 weeks. Thus, the donor’s virus, explains the South African newspaper Rapport, “was still in the incubation stage and could not be detected during the initial tests.”
RELIGIOUS CON ARTISTS
“‘False prophets of the investment world’ have swindled religious Americans out of nearly $500,000,000 in the past five years,” states The Dallas Morning News. The “Bible-quoting con artists” have victimized over 15,000 Americans in their religiously oriented schemes, according to a report prepared by the national Council of Better Business Bureaus and the North American Securities Administrators Association. Spurred on by the amounts of money raised by TV evangelists, the con artists have taken advantage of the increase in religious programs to close in on their victims. “The schemes have ranged from bogus investment funds offered by self-proclaimed born-again financial planners to givers of ‘divinely inspired’ investment advice about coins, precious metals, real estate and oil drilling programs,” the paper said.
MAKING AN EXCEPTION
The Vatican has a standing policy to allow individual priests to drink nonalcoholic wine during the celebration of Mass if they make such a request. But recently the priests of the entire Friuli region of Italy have been granted permission to drink unfermented grape juice at Mass instead of wine. Why? According to the Catholic Herald, the priests made the request because they feared that the alcoholics in their ranks might “relapse into heavy drinking” by taking the one sip of wine at Mass. The Catholic newspaper also noted: “Surveys of the Friuli region show that 15 per cent of the population has a drinking problem and that many of the area’s 400 priests are in the high-risk category.”
CYNICAL ROMANCE
“Romance” in this age of AIDS and rampant immorality has become increasingly risky. In an effort to lower the risks, more single women are hiring private detectives to investigate the men they are dating, reports The New York Times. While investigative agencies attribute much of the current boom in their business to the spread of AIDS, they say that women also commonly ask them to check into their suitors’ employment status, credit rating, and education, as well as sexual practices. One detective agency is even running an advertisement in a Chicago magazine. It asks: “Do you know who you’re dating?” and adds: “Now more than ever, it’s important to know.”
FATAL ATTITUDE
France has one of the worst auto-fatality records among the industrial nations—330 deaths for every million cars on the road, compared with 185 in the United States, 182 in Italy, 163 in Japan, 162 in West Germany, and 127 in Britain. The Paris-based International Herald Tribune reports that psychologists at a recent symposium on driving behavior blamed much of the problem on impatience, frustration, and aggression. They noted that many use their automobiles as a way to show the high opinion they have of themselves and the low opinion they have of others.
THE PRICE OF GREED
While some scientists deny that human pollution is causing our atmosphere to warm up in a greenhouse effect, French agronomist Rene Dumont asserts that the effect is already killing people—one million in just the last year. He says that the greenhouse effect causes droughts, which in turn cause famines. Dumont, who has a long record of successfully forecasting famines, warns that “we are on the verge of the greatest famine in the history of humanity.” He blames the crisis on the greedy consumption of energy in developed nations: “There are two billion people living in poverty in the world and they are hostages to our greed, to our waste of energy.”—The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada.
IS THERE A CURE?
The murder of three young boys, two of them sexually abused, in the Western United States has fueled a growing debate over whether habitual child molesters can be cured or not. The man charged in the murders had repeatedly been sentenced to sexual counseling for committing crimes against children. Prior to being arrested for the three murders, he had completed eight months of counseling by a psychologist who himself had spent 13 years in prison as a drug smuggler and armed robber. “Anybody can hang a shingle and call themselves a therapist,” the head of the Association for the Behavioral Treatment of Sex Abusers complains in The New York Times. The Times notes that more and more health-care professionals are concluding that “some habitual child molesters are basically incurable and should be locked up for life.”
GARDENING MISHAPS
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents released the latest figures on gardening injuries in Britain. During a one-year period, “21 people were killed in their garden—14 were killed by machinery while ‘plants and trees’ were responsible for the other seven deaths,” reports The Medical Post. The British statistics indicate that 151,000 gardeners were treated in hospitals. The injuries included 6,400 with lawn mowers, 4,200 from hedge trimmers, 4,000 by garden forks, 3,000 by garden spades, 2,000 by pruning shears, 1,000 by scythes, and 1,600 by bamboo poles. Lawn furniture caused 3,200 accidents, the wheelbarrow inflicted 1,200 wounds, and “the lowly flowerpot managed to injure 59 gardeners.”
WOMEN AND CRIME IN JAPAN
The crime rate is rising in Japan, and women are responsible for an increasing percentage of it. In 1988 some 1,641,310 serious crimes were committed in Japan, an increase over the previous year of some 63,000. The generally law-abiding Japanese were distressed to see crime reach an all-time postwar high in 1989. But perhaps more surprising, reports Tokyo’s Sankei Shimbun, women now commit some 25 percent of Japan’s crimes.
TRAIN DUMPING
Amtrak, an American railroad service, has come under harsh criticism lately for its practice of dumping raw human sewage onto the train tracks. Toilets in trains have always flushed directly onto the tracks below, and Amtrak calls the practice “environmentally harmless.” But authorities in Florida began to investigate the railroad after fishermen complained of being sprayed with sewage when trains passed over trestles above them. A Florida court has found Amtrak guilty of commercial pollution. Amtrak plans to appeal the case and claims that it would cost $147 million to adopt more sophisticated methods of waste treatment. In the meantime, train conductors will ask passengers to refrain from flushing while the trains pass over certain trestles.
NONRELIGIOUS FUNERALS
As disillusionment with religion increases, more British people are interested in secular funerals with no hint of religion to them. The British Humanist Association has published a popular book entitled Funerals Without God: A Practical Guide to Nonreligious Funerals and sends out volunteers to conduct secular funerals. The society’s coordinator claims that families are tired of clergymen who say the same words at all funerals; so the society tries to make its funerals more personalized. At a funeral for a man who loved to dance, the mourners danced a tango. At a funeral for a circus performer, the sons of the deceased did a juggling routine in front of the coffin.