|
Pastoral Bible Institute News Religious “Reading at Risk,” a survey based on data from “The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts,” was conducted by the Census Bureau in 2002. Among its findings are that fewer than half of Americans over 18 now read novels, short stories, plays or poetry; that the consumer pool for books of all kinds has diminished; and that the pace at which the nation is losing readers, especially young readers, is quickening. The Census Bureau study was one of the largest studies ever conducted on the subject. The one category of book to rise markedly was that of religious texts, with total sales of $337.9 million, 36.8 percent over the previous year. —New York Times, 7/8/2004 China is using tactics it employed to quash the Falun Gong spiritual movement against Christian churches and other fast-growing religious groups in a broad government clampdown on dissent. The campaign focuses on rural China, where religious conversion to Christianity and other faiths is flourishing. Across China, a religious revival is gaining momentum. Foreign church groups estimate that there are 35 million Chinese Protestants alone, and as many as two million more are baptized every year. The crackdown targets “cults,” defined by government documents as having characteristics commonly associated with “weeping and shouting.” —Wall Street Journal, 7/27/2004 The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., filed for bankruptcy Tuesday, becoming the first Catholic diocese in the nation to seek financial protection against millions of dollars in potential sexual-abuse claims. Though Portland is the first, it probably will not be the last of the nation’s 195 dioceses to seek court protection from the scandal’s effects. The diocese of Tucson is expected to seek bankruptcy protection by mid-September. [Its vicar] has likened the increasing sexual-abuse claims to a monsoon. In New York, Father Thomas Reese, editor of the Jesuit magazine America, said he expected more bankruptcies. “People in the pews … don’t want to pay to settle these suits, not with their hard-earned money.” —Los Angeles Times, 7/7/2004
—TIME, 8/2/2004 Social The proportion of the world’s new H.I.V. infections occurring in Asia has risen sharply in the past two years as the epidemic has outstripped efforts to stop it, the United Nations said in a report. The size of the increase surprised United Nations health officials, who said that one in four—or nearly 1.2 million of the estimated 4.8 million new infections in 2003—occurred in Asia. Worldwide, the rate of new infections of human immunodeficiency virus, the virus that causes AIDS, in 2003 was the highest of any year since the epidemic was recognized more than two decades ago, the report said. Since 1981, more than 20 million people have died of AIDS, 2.6 million of them in 2003. About 5.1 million people in India are living with H.I.V., leaving India poised to overtake South Africa, with 5.3 million, as the country with the most infected people. —New York Times, 7/7/2004 Most Indians have extremely limited and unreliable access to what they need most. About three in every four people have no public sanitary facilities (such as toilets). Even more have no access to safe drinking water. They experience a daily crisis. Many even die from it: every year more than one million Indian children are killed by bad drinking water. In states such as Andhra Pradesh, abysmal irrigation means crops keep failing. The state is a leading software magnet, yet away from its air-conditioned offices, some 500 of its farmers have committed suicide in 2004, often by drinking the pesticide that was purchased with debts they could not repay. Even in Hyderabad, the gleaming state capital, municipal water comes only every other day. —Financial Times, 7/24/2004 An Amazonian tribe whose language has no word for numbers beyond two is the subject of a study to understand how language contributes to ideas. Language molds thoughts so much that man cannot conceptualize ideas for which there are no words, according to American researcher Peter Gordon of Columbia University. Dr. Gordon’s work was reported in the journal Nature, and shows the ability of tribal adults to conceptualize numbers is no better than that of infants or some animals. The tribe has words for “one” and “two” but anything more than that is not quantified but merely lumped together as “many.” The tribe has little social structure, no art, and they barter instead of using currency. Their language is limited to just ten consonants and vowels. Dr. Gordon says that his research casts doubt on claims by linguists that people have an innate numerical sense. —Daily Telegraph, 8/20/2004 Professor J. Anthony von Fraunhofer of the University of Maryland Dental School … took 20 healthy teeth extracted for orthodontic or periodontal reasons, cut them into tiny blocks of tooth enamel and exposed the blocks to a variety of popular soft drinks. All the drinks weakened or permanently destroyed the enamel. Diet sodas were just as bad as regular sodas, and canned iced tea caused 30 times the damage of fresh-brewed tea or coffee. The main culprit in this dental destruction, says Fraunhofer, is the presence of chemicals, such as citric, malic and tartaric acids, that are added to impart tartness to the drinks. Each year Americans drink, on average, nearly 600 cans of soda apiece. —TIME, 8/9/2004 A new report warns that businesses world-wide need to gear up for a growing risk of water shortages, which already have led to plant closures or threatened shutdowns in India and elsewhere. Water shortages have arisen in recent years across the U.S. Southwest and Northwest, as well as in India, China and Africa. Some critics of globalization argue that companies should steer clear of arid places where water supplies are already under pressure from growing populations. —Wall Street Journal, 8/23/2004 Political Scientists are beginning to accept that earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, so named because humans have come to rival nature in their impact on the global environment. The EuroScience forum in Stockholm, Sweden, said that climate change was the most obvious of a complex range of man-made effects that is rapidly changing the physics, chemistry and biology of the planet. Paul Crutzen, the Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist who first proposed the term Anthropocen four years ago, said the concept was winning wide acceptance from colleagues in other fields. A dozen hotspots have been identified which could trigger rapid large-scale changes across the planet if sufficiently stressed. Among them is the Amazon basin and the Sahara. Other hotspots include the North Atlantic Ocean circulation, the West Antarctic ice sheet, the Asian monsoon system and the Strait of Gibraltar. —Financial Times, 8/27/2004 After being powerless to prevent mass murder in Srebrenica and genocide in Rwanda, the United Nations appears ineffective at quelling the Sudanese government’s aggression against civilians of Darfur. In August, the U.N. reported aerial bombings against civilians. In addition, forced relocation of villagers and continued violence by the government-sponsored Janjaweed militia hindered humanitarian workers from helping the 1.2 million refugees now “guarded” in concentration camps by some of the same militiamen who made them flee. In July, the U.S. Congress described the atrocities of Darfur as genocide. While some leaders have advocated military intervention, no country has troops to spare at the moment. The U.N. Security Council’s threat of economic sanctions against Khartoum has failed to produce results. So far, the people of Darfur have lost their homes and livelihood; they live in constant fear of attack. —African
Geopolitics Quarterly, 8/31/2004 A numb Russia observed the first national day of mourning for the more than 350 victims of the terrorist school seizure. In Beslan, townspeople crowded around the coffins of children, parents, grandparents and teachers ahead of the 120 burials scheduled in the town cemetery and adjoining fields. At the school at the center of the tragedy, people lit candles and left shrines including children's notebooks, shoes, and bottles of water—symbolizing the water the hostages were denied over three days of terror. Two rescue workers from Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry who were killed in the first moments of the battle over the school—when they arrived to remove the bodies of executed hostages—were being laid to rest in Ramenskoye, the ministry's base outside Moscow. The official death toll stood at 335, not including the 30 slain attackers; the regional health ministry said 326 of the dead had been hostages, and the Emergency Situations Ministry said 156 of the dead were children. The school seizure came … just over a week after two Russian passenger planes crashed following explosions, killing all 90 people aboard. As with the hostage-taking, those attacks appeared linked to Russia's ongoing war in Chechnya. —Associated Press, 9/6/2004 Financial Hurricane Ivan cut a destructive swath across four Southeastern states, spawning deadly tornadoes, toppling houses into the Gulf of Mexico and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. At least 20 deaths were blamed on Ivan, on top of the 68 people killed during Ivan's destructive trek through the Caribbean. The storm could rank as the second-costliest U.S. hurricane, behind Hurricane Andrew, which in 1992 killed 26 people in Florida and caused insured losses of $20.3 billion, adjusted for inflation. Hurricane Charley inflicted about $6.8 billion in insured losses during August, and Frances caused an estimated $2 billion to $4 billion after it hit in September. —Wall Street Journal, 9/17/2004 The stark new reality of life in a global economy is that Europeans have to work longer hours. The French, who in 2000 trimmed their workweek to 35 hours in hopes of generating more jobs, are now talking about lengthening it again, worried that the shorter hours are hurting the economy. In Britain, more than a fifth of the labor force, according to a 2002 study, works longer than the European Union’s mandated limit of 48 hours a week. From the 1970s until recently, Europe followed a philosophy of less-is-more when it came to labor, with the result that Europeans work an average of 10 percent fewer hours a year than Americans. Germans, with the lightest schedule, work about 18 percent fewer hours. The French have an average of 25 vacation days a year, while the Germans get 30 days. The average in Japan is 18 days and in the United States, 12 days. —New York Times, 7/7/2004 Two groups have put up a giant digital display to tick off the cost of the Iraq war. Organizers calculated the war’s cost as of Wednesday at $134.5 billion and were adding $177 million per day. The billboard is on a hotel façade at Broadway and 47th Street [in New York]. —Los Angeles Times, 8/27/2004 The US Treasury has created a taskforce to examine how to save the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) in the event of a default by United Airlines, the bankrupt carrier. The crisis in the airline industry has raised fears that the U.S. taxpayer may be required to pick up the bill. Bradley Belt, executive director of the PBGC, said ... ”the level [of premiums] received by the PBGC is simply inadequate to cover financial claims.” —Financial Times, 8/30/2004 About 1.3 million Americans fell into poverty in 2003, while the total without medical insurance swelled by 1.4 million, according to official figures from the Census Bureau. The total number of Americans living in poverty reached 35.9 million in 2003—12.5 percent of the population in the United States. The Census Bureau said rising levels of people without insurance was largely because of a fall in the number of people being offered coverage by their employers. The poverty line in the U.S. is set at an annual income of $9,573 for individuals and $18,660 for a family of four with two children. The poverty rate has risen from 11.3 to 12.5 percent since 2000 but remains below the average for the 1980s and 1990s. —Financial Times, 8/27/2004 The [Greek] government is saddled with 40 stadiums and sports venues that glistened during the Games but may prove to be white elephants; there is no government plan for how to use the installations, and the price of upkeep will be exorbitant. The full cost to Greece of staging the Olympics is still unknown. Officially, the government Finance Ministry has estimated the price tag at 7 billion euros, but some private analysts say it could be closer to 10 billion euros—more than twice the amount budgeted. Greece’s debt stands at nearly 5% of its gross domestic product, one of the largest in Europe—in a nation already suffering high inflation and unemployment. —Los Angeles Times, 8/30/2004 Israel Tourism to Israel in the first six months of 2004 has increased 66 percent since a year ago; the Ministry of Tourism announced on July 20. The figure—673,900 people—is 69 percent higher than 2002. “We’re getting more tourists and we’re really happy,” said Nitsan llan, head of the ministry’s foreign press division. llan attributed the large increase to efforts made in targeting specific audiences—both Jewish and Christian—in the United States, Britain, France, and Russia, to an improved economic situation, and to the recent decrease in terror attacks. —Jerusalem Post, 7/21/2004 Israel was ranked 51st for economic freedom in a report released by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, DC. In “Economic Freedom of the World: 2004 Annual Report,” Israel received a score of 6.6 out of 10 compared with 6.5 a year earlier, when it came in 53rd. This is the eighth edition of the report, which ranks 123 nations for 2002, the most recent year for which data was available. It measures economic freedom in five main categories: the size of government, the legal structure of property rights, access to sound money, the freedom to trade internationally, and the regulation of credit, labor, and business. —Jerusalem Post, 7/18/2004 With immigration to Israel down sharply in recent years, a charter flight delivered nearly 400 new arrivals from the United States and Canada as part of an expanding program that has been luring middle-class Jews from North America. North American Jews, most of whom are comfortably middle-class at home, have traditionally migrated to Israel in small numbers, averaging 3,000 to 5,000 annually for the last quarter-century, according to Israeli government figures. But Nefesh B’Nefesh is seeking to raise those figures substantially. In its first try, the group brought in just over 500 immigrants in the summer of 2002. More than 1,000 came last year, despite the continuing Middle East violence and an Israel economy that was just beginning to crawl out of a recession. —New York Times, 7/15/2004 Aquaculture, among the fastest growing sectors of the world food economy, has gotten a boost from an Israeli company that has developed a new method for raising fish in sea-based cages. The company has developed a new method of growing fish in the Mediterranean Sea, according to a report in Globes financial newspaper. According to a 2003 report by Hillel Gordin of the Ministry of Agriculture, “Several technological approaches were tried in the past but none was economically viable due to the high-energy state of the sea in winter along the Israeli Mediterranean coast. —Arutz Sheva, 7/8/2004 A recent educational program on Palestinian Authority (PA) TV taught that the Jews of biblical history and those of today have no connection, and that accepted Jewish history in the Land of Israel is essentially “Arab history.” Palestinian Media Watch, a watchdog organization monitoring PA media, reports that two senior PA historians, guests on the television program, went to great lengths to deny ancient Jewish history and erase the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel while at the same time, describing a contrived ancient Palestinian Arab history and creating a historical connection to the land that never existed. —Arutz Sheva, 8/23/2004 An Iranian Revolutionary Guards spokesman says Tehran won’t strike first but if its nuclear facilities are attacked, it will launch a “devastating” attack against Israel. Iran will “wipe Israel off the face of the earth” if it or the United States attacks its nuclear facilities, a senior Iranian official has warned. Masud Yazaiari, spokesperson of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, told the Iranian student news agency that the U.S. is using Israel to threaten Iran. He added that Iran will not strike first, but if it does, its attack will be “harmful, assertive, and devastating.” —Maariv, 7/28/2004 In the same week that a United Nations court condemned Israel’s antiterrorism barrier, another division of the UN cast a more honest and revealing light on the situation of the Palestinians. The “Human Development Index” measures life expectancy, health, education, environmental quality, and overall living standards, ranking all nations from number one (Norway) to number 177 (Sierra Leone). The so-called “Occupied Palestinian Territories” earned a place near the middle of the list, with numerical scores much closer to the privileged nations of North America and Western Europe than to destitute areas of sub-Saharan Africa. The Palestinians ranked above both Syria and Egypt—the most powerful Arab nations of the region. Palestinians actually enjoy better living standards than their Arab brothers in neighboring states—or, for that matter, than citizens of the most populous Muslim countries, Indonesia or Pakistan. —beyondthenews.com, 7/28/2004 The number of Israeli civilians killed in terror attacks in the last four years is nearly equal to the number killed by terrorists in the preceding 53 years, Shin Bet (Israeli security service) head Avi Dichter told the cabinet recently. Dichter told the cabinet that from November 29, 1947, when the United Nations voted for partition and Jewish statehood, until the start of the current violence in September 2000, some 755 Israelis were killed in terror actions here or abroad. Some 674 Israeli civilians have been killed since September 2000. Dichter said that there has been a substantial increase in the Palestinian use of women and children under 18 to carry out attacks. In 2004 they account for some 81 percent of attack perpetrators. Since January 2003, Israel has succeeded in foiling 70 percent of the attempted suicide attacks. —Jerusalem Post, 8/9/2004 |
