Watching the World
Arms Trade Slowing Down?
According to the UN Disarmament Newsletter, there is some good news in the world weapons trade. It seems that the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that “the global value of trade in major conventional weapons was 35% lower in 1990 than in 1989, which was itself lower than the figures recorded for the years of the mid-1980s.” However, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently took a dim view of political talk about arms reductions, noting: “Back in the real world, actual weapons sales are booming.” For example, the Bulletin cites France, which saw “a 70 percent jump in weapons exports” in 1990. Since the crisis in the Persian Gulf began, weapons makers in the United States have contracted to make $15 billion worth of weapons—just for Middle Eastern countries! And in July 1991 alone, worldwide U.S. military exports amounted to $7 billion.
The Price of Cocaine Babies
Another grim statistic is soaring—the number of pregnant women in the United States who abuse the drug cocaine. According to New Scientist magazine, estimates on the number of babies exposed to the drug while still in the womb range from 92,000 to 240,000 per year. The U.S. government estimates that 158,400 such babies were born in 1990 alone. Cocaine has little trouble in crossing the placenta to invade the fetal sanctuary, and scientists are only beginning to understand how it may damage the fetus. One study found that cocaine babies stayed longer in the hospital, were twice as likely to have a low birth weight, and were 50 percent more likely to go into intensive care for a variety of ailments. The cost of all this extra hospital care? An estimated $504 million a year!
Fatal Comeback
Moose were at one time in danger of becoming extinct in the North American states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. However, the moose population has sharply rebounded during the past decade, and this has led to a sharp increase in collisions between the animals and vehicles. Adult moose, which weigh from 1,000 [450 kg] to 1,600 pounds [700 kg], stand as high as seven feet [2 m] at the shoulder. Since this puts the animal’s head above the beam of headlights, there is no reflected light from the eyes to warn approaching drivers at night. “If you hit a moose head on, you just take its legs out from under it and you won’t see it till it comes through the windshield,” says wildlife expert Howard C. Nowell. Maine alone had 500 moose-vehicle collisions in 1990. Another problem is that moose are unpredictable. A driver of a small car thought he could scare away a moose on the road by honking his horn. Instead of being frightened, the moose charged the car and rolled it into the woods!
Missing Women
By analyzing broad statistical patterns in birth and death rates, demographers have come up with a disturbing finding. A hundred million women seem to be missing from the world’s population. The New York Times reports that while 5 or 6 percent more boys than girls are born, males have a much higher mortality rate. So in developed countries such as England and the United States, women outnumber men by about 105 women to 100 men. However, in many less-developed countries, particularly in Asia, there are notably fewer women—sometimes only 93 to every 100 men. The reason? Notes the Times: “The tens of millions of missing include females . . . who are aborted or killed at birth or who die because they are given less food than males, or because family members view a daughter with diarrhea as a nuisance but a son with diarrhea as a medical crisis requiring a doctor.”
The Outlook of Japan’s Youth
A recent survey found that Japan’s youth have a surprisingly bleak outlook on Japanese society and the future. The Asahi Evening News reports: “More than 50 percent of the polled students said yes to the assertions that ‘since present society attaches importance to money and things, spiritual affluence is being neglected.’” Nearly 70 percent of the students expressed dissatisfaction with society. When asked to choose a color that best expressed their view of their country’s future, 38.8 percent chose gray, 15.7 percent chose black, and only 3.1 percent picked rosy. When asked what they wanted school to teach them, most opted for guidance on how to build character, such as how one should live. “This is a desperate call for help,” concludes the paper.
Enhancing the IQ
Is your IQ—your Intelligence Quotient as measured by a standardized test—a gauge of your stable, general intelligence? Or is the IQ also affected by outside influences? Such questions are hotly debated among experts in the field of intelligence testing. New evidence strongly suggests that school, since it teaches children how to think and solve problems, plays a large role in forming the IQ. According to the magazine Science News, psychologist Stephen J. Ceci of Cornell University in the United States reviewed some 200 different studies that charted IQ development. He found that children’s IQs consistently drop a bit after a long vacation from school. Furthermore, children who attend school only intermittently tend to suffer a steady decline in IQ. Ceci’s studies suggest that for each year of school that a child misses, the IQ may drop from one quarter of a point to six points.
Crime Epidemic in South Africa
The past two years have witnessed “a devastating leap in serious crime” in South Africa, reports The Star, a Johannesburg newspaper. In 1990 there were 15,109 murders—a 28-percent increase over the 1989 murder rate; in the first eight months of 1991, the rate rose a further 2 percent. Other violent crimes have soared dramatically as well. The Witness Echo of Pietermaritzburg reports that “every three minutes a woman is raped in South Africa”—as many as 300,000 a year, by one estimate. The paper cites a visiting sociologist as concluding that South Africa has the highest incidence of rape in the world. One crime-prevention agency estimates that 1 out of every 4 South African women suffers rape in her lifetime. Just ten years ago, the rate was 1 in 10.
A Bullfighting Priest
The Spanish newspaper El País reported the case of Ángel Rodríguez Tejedor, 55 years old, parish priest of Titulcia (Madrid), who fought a young bull in front of a crowd of 1,500 to raise money for his church. (The money he raised from a previous bullfight paid for a heating system in a convent.) On his way to the bullring, he stopped in front of the church to pray and with trembling voice he cried out to the statue of the Virgin of the Rosary: “¡Guapa, ayúdame!” (Pretty one, help me!) When the moment came to kill the bull, the priest sent in the church sacristan to finish off the animal. The paper reported that the priest and his team were awarded the dead bull’s ears as a trophy and that the afternoon’s work by the priest “was appreciated more than the Mass he held on Sunday, at least judging by the attendance.”
Family Life in Europe
The French book Euroscopie notes that divorce rates in Europe have tripled (from 171,000 to 530,000) within 20 years. The book singles out the United Kingdom, where divorce rates multiplied by six between 1960 and 1988. In Denmark, 1 out of every 2 marriages now ends in divorce—about the same as in the United States. Commenting on this section of the book, the French magazine L’Express says: “Even though Europeans continue to put [the family] at the top of their list of values, the age-old institution is relentlessly crumbling.”
Hard Facts?
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal questioned the reliability of many of the “scientific” studies that manufacturers use to advertise or defend their products. By surveying a limited, unrepresentative sample of people, or by asking misleading questions, or by working with self-serving assumptions, studies can be made to support virtually any position. Often they are paid for by companies with a financial stake in the outcome. For instance, the cloth-diaper industry recently sponsored two studies that concluded that paper diapers are harmful to the environment. Meanwhile, the paper-diaper industry sponsored two studies “proving” just the reverse! Eric Miller, editor of a newsletter that reviews some 2,000 such studies each year, told the Journal: “There’s been a slow sliding in ethics.” He added: “The scary part is, people make decisions based on this stuff. It may be an invisible crime, but it’s not a victimless one.”