R e g u l a r_ F e a t u r e s

World News and Trends

An Overview of Conditions Around the World

The Hong Kong handover is being interpreted in at least two ways. One says that, although the Union Jack came down, the British can still hold their heads high. After all, the stunning display of ceremonial pageantry was never better, and the 150-year rule from London produced one of the most productive and successful island societies on earth. This positive assessment was by far the majority view.

But then veteran journalist and British historian Paul Johnson took aim and fired. A Daily Mail editorial published his stinging national rebuke: “The surrender of the free colony of Hong Kong to the totalitarian Communist government–euphemistically termed a ‘handover’–is one of the most humiliating episodes in British history.” At no time before has Britain handed a colony over to a communist state.

“The surrender of the free colony of Hong Kong to the totalitarian Communist government–euphemistically termed a ‘handover’–is one of the most humiliating episodes in British history.”

“All the rest of our colonies were meticulously prepared for independence, by setting up model parliaments, training their politicians in democratic usages, and by providing a judiciary professionally educated on British lines to maintain the rule of law,” Mr. Johnson observed. He described the fall of Hong Kong as a “heavy and far-reaching diplomatic defeat.” Those who understand the origin and destiny of the British peoples will appreciate the significance of Paul Johnson’s pronouncements. (Sources: The Daily Mail, Time.)

Trouble with remnants of an empire

Even after the recent loss of Hong Kong, Britain still bears residual responsibility for 180,000 people in its remaining dependent territories. Most are racked by troubles of one kind or the other. Arguments over sovereignty persist in Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. Drugs and money-laundering plague the Caribbean. Montserrat is threatened by a periodically erupting volcano. One report describes the fabric of this island society as in terminal decay. Even Barbados, popularly known as Little England, is contemplating whether to continue with the queen as head of state and whether to declare itself a republic.

At the peak of empire in 1897, Great Britain held sway over 400 million people and about a third of the globe. Since then the United Kingdom has dropped from first to fifth among the remaining colonial powers. Surprisingly, the United States is first, with eight territories, ruling nearly four million people, followed by France. Britain’s colonial fate accords with many Bible prophecies written 2,500 years ago. (News sources: The Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The International Herald Tribune.)

Cousteau’s environmental warnings

With the recent death of French underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau, the environment has lost one of its greatest champions. He had just completed a 400-page autobiography in whose pages he warned that environmentally speaking “our survival is only a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.” This long-time nurturer of the natural world wrote that “unrenewable resources are being squandered. Waste is building up, goods are vanishing while rubbish thrives.”

Mr. Cousteau minced no words in his criticisms of politicians, scientists and national leaders: “With their pesticides and their pollution, their toxic discharges and the certainty of mutual destruction . . . , scientific experts have hidden the harsh reality: They will decide whether we live or die.”

Over the past generation we have seen too many men of Cousteau’s stature fade from the world scene. In Isaiah 3, God said He would take away “the mighty man and the man of war, the judge and the prophet, and the diviner and the elder; the captain of fifty and the honorable man, the counselor and the skillful artisan, and the expert enchanter” (verses 2-3). And in their place? “I will give children to be their princes (rulers) and babes shall rule over them” (verse 4).

But why would God do this? He would allow these things to happen to apportion punishment for national sins (some of which are described in these pages), particularly of those nations that have most successfully spread Bibles around the world and therefore should know better. (News sources: The Times; The Man, the Octopus and the Orchid (Mr. Cousteau’s autobiography).)

The high cost of immorality

Even if AIDS or HIV infections are not considered, the United States leads all other nations in the rate of sexually transmissible diseases, according to health-care experts representing the Institute of Medicine, affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences.

In 1996 sexually transmissible diseases accounted for five of the 10 diseases most commonly reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although most of these diseases can be cured, without treatment they can lead to birth defects, infertility, cancer and other major health problems.

In addition to the health and social costs, these diseases cost taxpayers $10 billion annually in direct costs such as Medicaid payments and indirect costs from higher health premiums. Such are the staggering costs to individuals and society for disobedience to God’s Commandments, including His laws forbidding sexual activity outside of marriage. (News source: The New York Times.)

Supergerm resists antibiotics

Health researchers are studying something they hoped they would never see, a deadly staph bacterium that can resist every drug in science’s infection-treatment arsenal.

The bacterium, staphylococcus aureus, is the cause of most hospital infections, including pneumonia and blood poisoning. In America alone some two million such infections develop every year.

Physicians had not faced the possibility of widespread, untreatable bacterial infections since penicillin came into general use in the 1940s. Since then, bacteria have shown a seemingly relentless ability to develop resistance to antibiotics. For example, by the 1950s almost half of known strains of staph aureus had grown resistant to penicillin. Scientists successfully gained the upper hand again with the introduction of methicillin in the 1960s, but in the 1970s some strains of staph had become resistant to this drug as well. Vancomycin, the last drug known to be effective against these other antibiotic-resistant strains, had proved effective for 30 years.

Discovery of this antibiotic-resistant strain prompted an instant worldwide alert among scientists and researchers. “We have a situation which is very worrisome,” commented Fred Tenover, laboratory chief for the hospital-infections branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The newly isolated strain showed resistance to the last line of antibiotic defense for certain strains of bacteria. “If we’re climbing the ladder,” said Mr. Tenover, “we’re almost to the roof.”

Dr. Robert Haley, former head of the CDC’s hospital-infections branch, added, “I can’t emphasize enough: This is a major turn for the worse in the fight against infection.”

Researchers fear that this new strain could claim many lives in the years it takes to develop new effective antibiotics. (Sources: The Dallas Morning News, The Chicago Tribune.)

Divorce’s long-term effect on children

The impact on children of divorce is cumulative and long-lasting, according to psychologist Judith Wallerstein, author of a quarter-century research study on the subject.

According to her research, divorce is harmful to children’s ability to deal with the challenges of the teenage and early-adult years and affects their efforts to form their own romantic relationships well into their 20s and 30s.

Miss Wallerstein began her research in the 1970s just as the American divorce rate began to soar upward. At the time, she noted, divorce was commonly viewed as a “transient, minor upheaval in the life of a child.” Her research followed 131 middle-class children for 25 years, beginning just as their parents’ marriages broke up. “Unlike the adult experience,” she concluded, “the child’s suffering does not reach its peak at the breakup and then level off. The effect of the parents’ divorce is played and replayed throughout the first three decades of the children’s lives.”

We should not find it surprising that God, who desires a family relationship with humanity, says, “I hate divorce” (Sources: The Washington Post; Malachi 2:16, New International Version.)

South Africa still in trouble

An article in a major newsweekly characterized South Africa as emerging from “a post-apartheid slump with a high-growth budget and Olympian hopes.” Yet the country is suffering not only from the wounds of the past, but from growing societal problems. Every day, on average, brings 300 robberies, 65 murders and 66 rapes. Also in 1996 some 2.4 million people were diagnosed as HIV-positive, a rise of about one third between 1995 and 1996.

Just as serious, in one sense, is that “3,000 policemen were investigated last year,” and “25 percent of the upper echelons of the police force have criminal records.” The government will have to act courageously if it is to rid the nation of rampant crime, corruption and maladministration. Some encouraging signs are emerging. For instance, the cabinet recently decided that murderers, rapists, robbers, hijackers and drug traffickers must serve at least 15 years in prison for a first violation. If implemented, this policy will be a considerable improvement on the past. (Sources: Time, The Daily Mail, The Sunday Times, The Times, The Star & South African Times International.)

America leads in child murders

America has the highest rate of childhood murders and suicide of the world’s 26 wealthiest nations, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The United States accounts for almost three quarters of homicides of children in advanced nations. For children 14 and younger, the U.S. suicide rate is double that of other industrialized nations.

The United States accounts for almost three quarters of homicides of children in advanced nations.

Agency statistics show that the recent epidemic of violence impacting younger children is almost exclusively an American trend. Juvenile crime rates in the United States for the last decade have far outstripped adult rates. In comparison, statistics from other countries show no homicides involving children less than 15 years old.

The centers did not offer an explanation for the enormous gap between murder rates of children in America compared with those of other countries. Other researchers and criminologists attribute these tragedies to a growing number of unsupervised children, families in which both parents work outside the home, high divorce rates and a tolerance of violence. (Source: The Washington Post.)

–John Ross Schroeder and Scott Ashley

(c) 1997 United Church of God, an International Association