Watching the World
$25,000 Honesty
◆ What would you do if you found $25,000 in cash on the street? A Brooklyn deliveryman spotted a canvas bag tagged with the notation of this amount. It had fallen unnoticed out of an armored truck during a minor accident. The 27-year-old deliveryman, reports the New York Post, “a Jehovah’s Witness with three children, detoured off his route and took the bag, with $25,000 in bills no larger than $20, to the Elmhurst [police] stationhouse in Queens.” Marveled the detective there: “In 18 years on the job I’ve never seen anything like this. If I’m here 18 more years I doubt I’ll see it again.” But the deliveryman’s wife told the Post: “It was an easy decision. According to the Bible, it was the right thing to do.”
Widest Wealth Gap
◆ Among Western nations the French have the widest after-tax income gap between the rich and the poor, according to a study released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. The report reveals that the richest 10 percent of households in France have almost 22 times the after-tax income of the poorest 10 percent, while in the Netherlands and Sweden the gap is less than one third as great. The richest 10 percent in Norway, Germany, Britain and Japan make around 10 times as much as the poorest 10 percent, and in Canada, Australia and the United States they make over 15 times as much. Spain is the only Western country that approaches the French wage gap, with after-tax income of the wealthy group 19 times that of the poor.
Sun over Japan
◆ A Tokyo District Court recently ruled that “sunshine is essential to a comfortable life, and therefore a citizen’s right to enjoy sunshine at his home should be duly protected by law.” The court awarded four neighbors of a nine-story city industrial exhibition hall nearly $7,000 for their loss of sunshine in its shadow. Much of earthquake-prone Tokyo is covered with thousands of one- or two-story homes and shops, but better construction methods and land scarcity are pushing buildings higher and bringing more “sunshine” lawsuits.
Why So Much Unemployment?
◆ During the past ten years the American labor force has grown more than one third faster (proportionally) than the population, according to figures cited in The Wall Street Journal. Behind this growth is the fact that female workers have increased two and a half times faster (proportionally) than males during the same period. The Journal suggests that the need for more than one breadwinner to ‘make ends meet,’ increasing freedom from housework because of modern conveniences, and the fact that today’s jobs can readily be handled by women are all factors in the female worker boom. If the work force had grown in parallel with the population, notes the Journal, there would be only two million people looking for work instead of about 7-1/2 million.
Language of the People
◆ This year, for the first time, Greece is using the common spoken language, demotiki, in school textbooks and legislation drafted in Parliament. Until now, these have been written in katharevusa, an artificial language based on ancient Greek. It was devised after the formation of modern Greece in the 1830’s because the spoken language was considered too degenerated to represent the ‘reincarnation of ancient Greece’ properly.
“It was a silly, romantic idea,” says Greek teacher and author Harry T. Hionides. “Europe told us we were the inheritors of ancient Greece, and we believed them.” Katharevusa “became the badge of the educated elite and an important source of power and profit because the common people could not read the newspapers, the laws or even the instructions on a medicine bottle,” notes the report in the New York Times.
Knitting for Rubles
◆ “Strong healthy people are quitting jobs, plunging into knitting with an overwhelming passion,” reports the Soviet newspaper Pravda about inhabitants of the Northern Caucasus mountain area. “They knit at home, in the street, during a movie, at the club, in a store and in any other situation with enviable speed.” Why the avid interest in knitting? A hobby catching on? No. Apparently demand in the far north for warm sweaters, shawls, stockings and caps is great enough to bring high profits to these enterprising Soviets. “There was a time when only grandmothers were engaged but their monopoly has been broken,” said Pravda.
Out in the Open
◆ The prominent Episcopal priest Malcolm Boyd proudly has announced his homosexuality. He became widely known for his unorthodox book of prayers titled “Are You Running With Me, Jesus?” Boyd says that he does not expect any reprisals from the church. His superior, New York Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, stated earlier this year that the ordination of avowed lesbian Ellen Barrett as a deaconess “is a healthy development in our culture and our church.” Priest Boyd says that “it’s usually assumed that 10 per cent of the population is homosexual. In large urban centers I think the figure probably is higher than that among Episcopal priests.”
Food for Work
◆ In 1975 the impoverished nation of Bangladesh began a “food-for-work” program, offering six pounds of wheat for each ton of earth a worker moved in flood-control projects. About two million of the nation’s seven million unemployed dredged canals and built levees to help to control yearly monsoon floods.
It is reported that already about 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) of canals and 1,850 miles (2,977 kilometers) of embankments have been completed. “More earth has been dug up for the canals and embankments than was dug for the building of the Panama Canal,” declared a U.N. adviser on the scene. The very fertile land could produce far more food if floodwaters can be controlled, but he estimates that it would still take five years to reach self-sufficiency in food at the present rate of improvement.
“Poor but Happy”?
◆ Dr. George Gallup presented results from the first worldwide public opinion poll to a U.S. Senate committee recently. “It was hoped that somewhere in the world a nation would be found whose people are poor but happy,” he said. “We didn’t find such a place.” Gallup told the senators that his poll takers were appalled with the “amount of poverty in the world today. It is difficult for people in the advanced industrial nations to realize how many persons in the world face a daily struggle to get enough to eat.”
Tilting Rival
◆ Italy’s leaning Tower of Pisa has a rival in India. The 71-meter (233-foot) Qutab Minar near New Delhi now leans over 94 centimeters (37 inches) from center. The 775-year-old column has moved 30 centimeters (12 inches) in the last 12 years. It still has a long way to go to equal the leaning of Italy’s 600-year-old tower, though. That 54-meter (177-foot) structure already tilts 5.2 meters (17 feet) from vertical.
Immorality Backfires
◆ Content in the belief that gonorrhea can be cured with a dose of penicillin, many millions world wide continue engaging in promiscuous sex. But now, it is reported, a new strain of gonorrhea actually destroys penicillin! Gonorrhea is already considered to be a pandemic earth wide and is classified as a national epidemic in the U.S., with a million reported cases in 1975 plus up to an estimated two million unreported. Says a New York health official: “It’s out of control now; then [if the new strain spreads] the disease will just basically [spread] out of sight.”
Ramadan Fervor
◆ When the wives of two Turkish Moslems failed to observe fasting correctly during the holy month of Ramadan, their more pious husbands killed them. The Daily Milliyet of Istanbul reported that one of the Orthodox Moslems reacted to his wife’s refusal—and her lateness at setting table to break the fast after sunset—with a shotgun blast. The other also ended a heated argument over fasting with a gun. They were arrested.
Calling It like It Is
◆ Church fund raising has an interesting twist in Hartford, Connecticut. TV Guide magazine lists a two-day television special that solicits loans from viewers to be used by the local Catholic Archdiocese. “People lend money to the Archdiocese, which then invests it, uses the interest it accrues and returns it,” says the listing. The fund raiser is appropriately called a ‘BEGathon.’
Putting on Airs
◆ How do air quality ratings offered by newscasters in one American city compare with ratings given in other cities? They often do not, according to the magazine Environmental Action. It notes that an index reading of 25 was found to mean “‘excellent’ air quality in Cincinnati, ‘normal’ in Miami, ‘severe’ pollution in San Francisco, and ‘unhealthy’ in New York.” A government task force recommends that a uniform air-pollution index be adopted nationwide.
Moscow Bans Café Smoking
◆ Rather than mandating nonsmoking areas in restaurants, as is often done in the U.S., Moscow’s Municipal Council reportedly has banned smoking altogether in the dining areas of the city’s restaurants. Smoking will be allowed only in rest rooms and special smoking foyers required by the law for that purpose.
Government Spending
◆ The United States Congress recently voted to spend over $400 billion during the fiscal year beginning October 1. U.S. News & World Report notes that it took 186 years to reach the first $100 billion budget in 1962, nine years to reach $200 billion, four years to reach $300 billion, and just two years to reach the present $413 billion. This amounts to an average of over $7,500 per family of four in just one year! About a fourth of this amount goes for military spending alone.
TV Phenomenon
◆ No major invention has so quickly caught the world’s fancy as television. Invented in 1926, it is a relative latecomer, compared to the telephone (1861) and the automobile (1885). Yet television sets world wide already number about 364 million, while there are only about 360 million telephones and 300 million automobiles after many more years of existence.
Twenty-Year Oversight
◆ Florida surgeons removed a six-inch surgical clamp from a woman’s stomach. It was accidentally left there during an operation 20 years ago. The clamp appeared on an X ray taken during a recent intestinal infection. “She was very fortunate” that it had not caused any damage, observed a spokesman for the surgeons.
Welcome to the City
◆ An 18-year-old Florida youth visiting relatives in Brooklyn, New York, was given a rude reception in the big city. The same group of young hoodlums accosted him on three separate occasions within seven hours, beating and robbing him. The last two beatings took place, in turn, as he was returning from hospital treatment for the previous beating.
Save the Tigers
◆ The Bengal tigers of the Sundarbans, mangrove swamps and forests near the Bay of Bengal, are said to devour about forty of the local humans every year. Indian officials theorize that it is the area’s briny water that stimulates the animals’ desire for human flesh. So, rather than kill the endangered species, they planned to have forestry workers construct giant troughs to hold fresh water for the thirsty tigers.