"Terminator" seen as world children's top hero

Source: Reuters

A UNESCO study said that "Terminator," the killer robot played by American actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is the most popular character among the world's children. The survey, billed as the first ever worldwide study of violence in the media, said a stunning 88 percent of children around the world know "Terminator." The survey said television was the strongest single factor creating a global culture, and the omnipresence of violence on the box was contributing to making the world more violent.

Use of guns likened to disease 02-21.00

Washington (AP)

The willingness of young men to use guns spreads like a disease, or even a fashion fad, through urban neighborhoods, often causing youth to view firearms as essential to survival and status, a new study suggests. Jeffrey Fagan, director of the Center for Violence Research and Prevention, said gun homicides among young men is a contagious impulse that becomes a powerful social current, forcing even violence-averse youth to grab a firearm. "We found that guns become sort of a social toxin," Fagan said Sunday at the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "Guns became a major influence on the way that one young man interacts with another." Fagan said firearms become status symbols, a central part of a violence theme that spreads like a fad from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Violence is chic

Source: Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., WorldNetDaily

Date: June 1999

What's to blame for the shootings in Colorado? Several members of the Senate lashed out at A paradox of realities? Hollywood and its supposed glorification of violence. But kids these days don't have to go to the movies to see maiming and killing. They can see the real thing by turning on the nightly news.

U.S. bombs do to Belgrade what tornadoes did to Oklahoma and Kansas, and the senators think they can send a non-violent message to young people? Worse, Clinton and Gore think pious speeches can blunt the reality that the U.S. military is killing civilians in foreign countries every day. If offing [murdering] people you hate is OK in Pristina, why not Littleton? The primary sponsor of violence chic is not the movies, which portray fantasy, but the government, which engages in real-life war.

The seventy premature babies in a Belgrade hospital, whose incubators went dead after the U.S. bombed an electrical plant, are the real-life casualties of Clinton's war. To hype up the Gulf War, the Bush administration told stories about Iraqi troops dumping preemies on the floor, stories which turned out to be false. This time, however, it is for real, but it is the U.S. doing it.

If violence in the Balkans is getting to be old hat, turn your attention to Iraq, where the bombings and bloodshed, not to speak of the murderous sanctions, have been relentless. With everyone's attention riveted on Yugoslavia, the U.S. has stepped up its war on Iraq, with almost daily skirmishes against radar and other sites, and the deaths of dozens of civilians.

U.S. jets launched missiles near Mosul, killing two civilians and mutilating another 12. Twenty-five miles north of Mosul, a family of seven was snuffed out by U.S. bombs. The official excuse: the U.S. was targeting air-defense sites. Gee, but isn't that a funny place for a family to live?

Enough of this nonsense. The credibility of administration spokesmen has begun to run very thin. For instance: a court recently cleared the owner of the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant of having had any connection to chemical weapons. But this was a year after the U.S. reduced the entire place to rubble, and insisted, vehemently and for many months, that it was making chemical weapons to be used against Americans. Moreover, these same administration spokesmen denounced all skeptics as wackos with an agenda, or people in the pay of terrorists.

It is the Clinton administration, not the movies, that is the source of the new violence chic. If politicians want to send a moral message to American kids, let them start by stopping their own acts of violence. Then they could give us the gun control we need: background checks and waiting periods for politicians trying to buy bombers, and safety locks on Tomahawk missiles. Parents, freed from the influence that officially sanctioned violence has on their children, can take it from there.

When life imitates video

Source: Compiled from articles by John Leo, US News & World Report, and David Grossman, Christianity Today

Was it real life or an acted-out video game? Marching through a large building using various bombs and guns to pick off victims is a conventional video-game scenario. In the Colorado massacre, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris used pistol-grip shotguns, as in some video-arcade games. The pools of blood, screams of agony, and pleas for mercy must have been familiar--they are featured in some of the newer and more realistic kill-for-kicks games. "With each kill," the Los Angeles Times reported, "the teens cackled and shouted as though playing one of the morbid video games they loved." And they ended their spree by shooting themselves in the head, the final act in the game Postal, and, in fact, the only way to end it.

We are now a society in which the chief form of play for millions of youngsters is making large numbers of people die. Hurting and maiming others is the central fun activity in video games played so addictively by the young. A widely cited survey of 900 fourth-through-eighth-grade students found that almost half of the children said their favorite electronic games involve violence. Can it be that all this constant training in make-believe killing has no social effects?

The conventional argument is that this is a harmless activity among children who know the difference between fantasy and reality. But the games are often played by unstable youngsters unsure about the difference. Many of these have been maltreated or rejected and left alone most of the time (a precondition for playing the games obsessively). Adolescent feelings of resentment, powerlessness, and revenge pour into the killing games. In these children, the games can become a dress rehearsal for the real thing.

Psychologist David Grossman of Arkansas State University, a retired Army officer, thinks "point and shoot" video games have the same effect as military strategies used to break down a soldier's aversion to killing. During World War II only 15 to 20 percent of all American soldiers fired their weapon in battle. Shooting games in which the target is a man-shaped outline, the Army found, made recruits more willing to "make killing a reflex action."

Video games are much more powerful versions of the military's primitive discovery about overcoming the reluctance to shoot. The Marine Corps is adapting a version of Doom, the hyperviolent game played by one of the Littleton killers, for its own training purposes.

Some newer games seem intent on erasing children's empathy and concern for others. Once the intended victims of video slaughter were mostly gangsters or aliens. Now some games invite players to blow away ordinary people who have done nothing wrong--pedestrians, marching bands, an elderly woman with a walker. One ad for a Sony game says: "Get in touch with your gun-toting, testosterone-pumping, cold-blooded murdering side."

These killings are supposed to be taken as harmless jokes. But the bottom line is that the young are being invited to enjoy the killing of vulnerable people picked at random. This looks like the final lesson in a course to eliminate any lingering resistance to killing.

"We have to start worrying about what we are putting into the minds of our young," says Grossman. "Pilots train on flight simulators, drivers on driving simulators, and now we have our children on murder simulators."

Just like in the movies TV plays a part as well. "We have introduced forms and amounts of media violence beyond anything achieved in other countries," says Harvard scholar Sissela Bok in her 1998 book Mayhem. According to the American Psychological Association, the average child will witness at least 8,000 murders on TV by the time he or she leaves elementary school, along with more than 100,000 assorted other acts of violence.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published the definitive study on the impact of TV violence. The research demonstrated what happened in numerous nations after television made its appearance. In every nation, region, or city with television, there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate. Why 15 years? That is how long it takes for the brutalization of a three- to five-year-old to reach the "prime crime age." That is how long it takes for you to reap what you have sown when you brutalize and desensitize a three-year-old.

Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society are superior to those linking cancer and tobacco. Hundreds of sound scientific studies demonstrate the social impact of brutalization by the media. The Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that "the introduction of television in the 1950's caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate; i.e., long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one half of the homicides committed in the U.S., or approximately 10,000 homicides annually." The article went on to say that "…if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults" (June 10, 1992).

The massacre at Columbine High

Source: Worldnet Daily

Date: April 21, 1999

We'll be sorting out the details of the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado for days and weeks to come. Much of the reactionary spin will be familiar. We've got to get rid of guns, they'll say. As if the dead-eyed, cold-blooded teen killers in this case had somehow legally obtained and carried their weapons to school.

Then there will be those who blame society -- the culture. Certainly there's something here. America has become desensitized to violence. Certainly the entertainment media bear some responsibility. Certainly the video games, the hideous rap music, the TV and the movies have some effect.Those who contribute to the pop culture need to reflect on what they produce. Garbage in, garbage out, goes the old saying.

But this is still America. There is no place in America for confiscating guns from law-abiding people, and there is no place for government-imposed censorship. It doesn't work. It's un-American. And it doesn't address the real root problems -- the kind that trigger Columbine High massacres.

The real problem is that in America we have forgotten the concepts of personal responsibility, individual rights and the sanctity of life. In fact, it's not a matter of forgetting. There has been a wholesale effort to obliterate these values from the soul of our nation.

We forbid kids from praying at school. We teach them that they evolved spontaneously from single-cell organisms in the swamp. We immerse them in a grossly polluted moral ecosystem. We break up their families. We tell them there are no absolutes, no right and wrong, ultimate truth.

It's just amazing with that recipe that there aren't more Columbine Highs. And, tragically, I think there will be, unless America wakes up and recognizes how we have betrayed our children -- cheated them, deceived them, broken their hearts. We'll find out in the days ahead, I predict, that the perpetrators of this ghastly slaughter had an "us-against-them" mentality. They were part of a gang -- a misunderstood, oppressed minority of cast-outs.

One of America's strengths has been its ability to bring diverse groups and individuals together around a creed. We were a melting pot where people of different faiths, colors and ethnic backgrounds could come together and share a common dream.

In recent years, our political and cultural establishments have attacked that concept. They have shattered the idea that this is even a worthy goal. Today, our rights don't descend to us as individuals created in God's image, but rather are earned by the amount of social pressure various groups can exert on the power structure.

This is wrong. This is not what America is about.

I wonder if anyone ever told those tortured minds that carried out this crime that God loved them. I can't believe they ever heard that message. I'll be surprised if we find out they were first in their Sunday school classes.

The tragedy at Columbine is evidence that we're in a war. I'm not talking about what's going on in Serbia. I'm talking about what's going on all around us -- an invisible war raging in the heavens and on earth. It's a titanic battle of good vs. evil.

"Oh, don't start on that religious stuff, Farah," some will respond.

But how can anyone deny it when we are faced with this kind of stark and chilling evidence? How else can we explain Columbine?

This is a spiritual war fought by powerful forces. That doesn't diminish the role of personal responsibility. Far from it. Each and every one of us -- including our children -- have to decide which side we're on in this epic struggle. There is no middle ground. There are no neutrals. There is no safe haven or sanctuary -- it's a war that will affect and consume us all. You can pretend it's not happening, but that won't make it go away.

In a great new movie out there now called "The Matrix," the central character is asked if he really wants to discover the truth about his world. That movie is a metaphor for the raging battle I am discussing here -- the war inside our souls and the war of powers and principalities in this world.

That's the question each of us must ask ourselves in reflecting on Columbine High -- and a thousand other tragedies occurring in this world every day.

Armed and fashionable in Johannesburg

Source: Suzanne Daley, NY Times News Service

Date: December 1999

JOHANNESBURG -- Not long ago, outside the razor- Guns wire-topped fence around our house here, I drove past a man in street clothes with a large pistol tucked in the leather holster at his waist. After a second, I decided he must be a security guard. But I looked at that gun and scoffed. What was he going to do with such a puny gun, and holstered besides? Up the street was a guard pacing a driveway with a pump-action shotgun. Now that might do some good.

Could this be me? Four years ago, when I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at the sight of a civilian with a gun on my block I would have called the police.

But guns are everywhere in Africa. Here the special line for checking guns at the airport is often as long as the one to go through the metal detector. Police and army roadblocks are standard practice all over the continent, manned by young men with huge automatic weapons dangling carelessly from their shoulders. In South Africa, you might be asked for a bribe. In some other countries, the roadblocks are often an encounter with hungry, drunken youths itching to show their authority.

Since moving here four years ago, I have learned to distinguish an AK-47 from a South African R-4 or an R-5 from an Uzi--though this skill isn't much use. They can all kill you. Still, the learning process is a little like getting to know the kinds of trees and birds that are native here.

The first time I arrived late at night at my hotel in Angola I thought I was done for when two figures moved out of the shadows with machine guns. Now I know they are the doormen, and I don't like getting out of the car until I see the glint of their hardware.

South Africa is considering new anti-gun legislation. But there will always be easy access to guns--big guns--nearby. Mozambique is awash with weapons, left over from its long civil war. By some estimates there are still enough AK-47's around to arm every man, woman and child in that country.

At night in our lush suburb with a pool in every yard, the pop of gunfire can be heard regularly. But it usually takes a visitor to remind me. Like the screeches of the ibises that peck the thatch from our roof, I don't even hear them anymore.

It's time to focus on U.S. drug cartels

Source: Andres Oppenheimer, Miami Herald

Date: December 1999

The latest round of drug-smuggling arrests at Miami International Airport raises a question that U.S. officials don't want to hear: whether the United States should be included among the countries that are "decertified" for tolerating drug trafficking.

As you know, a U.S. law requires the President to issue an annual "certification" on foreign countries' efforts in the war on drugs, and to penalize poor performers with economic sanctions. Latin Americans have long criticized this process as an exercise of U.S. hypocrisy.

"The U.S. should be evaluated," says Bruce Bagley, a leading drug-trafficking expert with the University of Miami. "If we look seriously at the U.S., there are many areas in which it should be decertified. We tell Latin American countries to toe the line, and yet we have allowed major cocaine-smuggling rings to operate for many years right under our noses."

Not long ago, U.S. agents arrested 13 Miami International Airport workers, including three supervisors, on drug-trafficking charges. The raid came shortly after the spectacular Aug. 23 raid in which 58 Miami airport workers were arrested on similar charges. Many had been smuggling drugs for at least three years, and perhaps for more than a decade, U.S. officials say.

Clinton administration officials say the arrests are evidence of the U.S. success in cracking down on drug traffickers at home. But critics wonder why the U.S. government, so quick to single out Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, takes so long to detect U.S. drug-trafficking rings, or to identify major U.S. drug lords.

Indeed, it's hard to believe that all the bad guys in the drug underworld are in Latin America, when much of the business takes place in the U.S. The U.S. is the world's biggest cocaine consumer, paying for about 40 percent of the drug's world production. There are about 14 million users of illicit drugs in the U.S., including 3.6 million chronic cocaine users, according to the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy.

If the U.S. continues to judge other countries for harboring cocaine-smuggling rings, it should get ready to be judged by others on its own record of pursuing domestic drug rings.

Pirates ride high on Mexico's highways

Source: Mary Beth Sheridan, Los Angeles Times

Date: December 1999

VERACRUZ, Mexico--Nestor Castellanos eased his 18-wheeler onto the freeway, carefully checking the rearview mirror. Tailing him was a black minivan with two pistol-packing guards. In the seat behind Castellanos perched a former riot police officer, tear gas at the ready. "We've got dangerous cargo," warned the driver.

Castellanos was beginning one of the most perilous journeys in late 20th century Mexico: carrying bolts of fabric to a ladies' clothing factory in the capital, about 200 miles northwest of this port.

In another sign of the collapse of order in Mexico, brigands are terrorizing the highways in a way not seen since the days of the 1910–17 revolution. Assaults on trucks have soared from a few hundred to perhaps 40,000 a year. Businesses are losing millions of dollars; some now send armed guards to escort truckers like Castellanos, much as Wells Fargo did with its stagecoaches in the Old West.

"There are no authorities. There's a void. [The highways] have become no man's land," said Luis Angel Carvallo, head of the truckers association in Veracruz.

"There's been a total crack in society," said Carlos Monsivais, a social critic. "Organized crime has become an alternative state."

Trucks aren't the only targets of the modern-day pirates. In the first six months of this year, nearly 300 buses were assaulted on federal highways, according to the Interior Ministry. But authorities claim to have sharply reduced raids against such passenger vehicles, crimes they say are generally committed by amateurs. In contrast, truck robbery has become so organized and lucrative that authorities are comparing it to narcotics trafficking.

For Castellanos and other truck drivers, piracy has transformed their work from a secure occupation into a life-threatening one. Occasionally, Castellanos has the luxury of traveling with armed guards on the freeway, as he did on this recent trip from Veracruz to Mexico City.

But providing the guards can double the cost of transportation for the clients. Like most Mexican truckers, Castellanos generally travels alone at night on poorly lighted local roads, since his company can't afford to pay the expensive freeway tolls and remain competitive.

When he arrives safely at his destination, he breathes a sigh of relief. "I commend myself to God. I go always with Him," Castellanos said. "What else can we do? We have to go on working."

Drugging kids and school violence

Source: Samuel L. Blumenfeld, WorldNetDaily

Date: August 1999

Believe it or not, there are now over 5 million school kids in America on psychotropic drugs, most of which are prescribed and administered by the schools themselves. That's the report we get from Kelly O'Meara, writing in Insight magazine on June 28. In addition, according to Teacher Magazine of December 1996, there are four million kids on Ritalin alone, one of the most powerful of the drugs now being given routinely to children in American schools.

What is most disturbing, however, is the growing awareness that the increased violence among school children may have more to do with the drugs than with the guns they use to carry out their violence. We know, for example, that Eric Harris, 18, who, with his friend Dylan Klebold, murdered his fellow students at Columbine, had been taking Luvox, one of the new antidepressant drugs.

We also know that T. J. Solomon, 15, who shot and wounded six classmates at Heritage High School in Conyers, Ga., on May 20 was on Ritalin for depression. Shawn Cooper, 15, who fired two shotgun rounds, narrowly missing students and teachers at his high school in Notus, Idaho, was also on Ritalin.

Kip Kinkel, 15, was on Ritalin and Prozac. He murdered his parents and then went on to school where he fired on students in the cafeteria, killing two and wounding 22. Also, we know that Mitchell Johnson, the 13-year-old student at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., who mowed down several children and a teacher with his friend Andrew Golden, 11, was on some sort of medication since he was being treated by a psychiatrist.

Ritalin is used most commonly to treat a disorder known as ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) or ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder). What are the symptoms of this disorder that has afflicted millions of American children? According to a Time cover story in July 1994, "ADHD has three main hallmarks: extreme distractibility, an almost reckless impulsiveness and, in some but not all cases, knee-jiggling, toe-tapping hyperactivity that makes sitting still all but impossible." Ritalin is supposed to alleviate the symptoms. It does not cure the disorder.

Drs. Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey, authors of "Driven to Distraction," write, "ADD lives in the biology of the brain and the central nervous system. The exact mechanism underlying ADD remains unknown." In other words, we are dealing with a neurological enigma wrapped in a biological mystery. But is it possible that there is a much simpler explanation for ADD, one that would put a lot of doctors and drug manufacturers out of business? Indeed, is it not possible that the school atmosphere itself is causing the extreme distractibility and impulsive behavior that are the major symptoms of ADD?

There was no such thing as ADD or ADHD when I was going to school back in the 1930s and '40s. In fact, you couldn't possibly have Attention Deficit Disorder in the kind of classrooms I was in. First of all, all of the desks and seats were bolted to the floor. You couldn't move them. Also, the walls were generally bare. Maybe a picture of George Washington, or a map. Otherwise there was nothing on the walls to distract anyone.

The room was also silent. You were not permitted to talk to your fellow classmates during class. The teacher was the focus of attention. She sat at her desk in front of the class and exercised a benign, no-nonsense discipline on all of us. She taught us all the same thing, and she used rational methods of teaching, methods that had been proven over the centuries to produce academic results. Our teachers were not interested in our feelings or our sexuality or trying to change our values.

Thus, there was no ADD. Any impulsive behavior would have landed you in the principal's office.

But now, let's fast forward to 1999 and enter a typical first-grade classroom in today's public school. The kids are no longer seated in rows in desks bolted to the floor. They are now seated around tables, interacting with each other, pestering each other, chatting, interrupting. Each child is doing something different. One may be writing, another reading, another drawing. One child may be under a table reading a book; another may be sprawled on the floor drawing a large picture. Several children may be working on a project.

The walls are now covered with every conceivable kind of distraction: dinosaurs, Mickey Mouse, bulletin boards, pictures of animals, travel posters, you name it. Then there are fish tanks, gerbils, and rabbits to grab one's attention. Mobiles hang from the ceiling, swaying in the breeze. Anything and everything that could possibly distract a child is there.

The teacher, of course, is no longer the focus of attention. She is now a facilitator who wanders around the room, helping one child here, chatting with another there. She is also using the most irrational teaching methods ever devised by so-called educators: whole language, invented spelling, the new new math, plus sensitivity training, values clarification, transcendental meditation, cooperative learning, death ed., sex ed., suicide ed. She's very much interested in your feelings, your sexuality, your family, your thoughts about death, suicide, abortion, feminism, homophobia, the environment, global warming, and world citizenship.

Is it any wonder that so many children suffer the equivalent of a cognitive breakdown in American schools? The entire school configuration is designed to cause distraction, inattention, frustration, impulsiveness, hatred, anger, and violence. And the only way that many children can be forced to endure that atmosphere is by drugging them.

A glimpse of totalitarianism

Source: Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily

Date: July 1999

Most Americans have grown to trust their government to protect them and their rights.

This is why Americans are flirting with a loss of all freedom. If you wonder what a total government power monopoly will be like, all you need to do is examine the reaction by government schools to the recent rash of student attacks.

Remember, government schools in all 50 states long ago banned firearms. So what's the next step?

School districts all over America are increasingly treating all students like criminals. In Michigan, one school system has banned book bags, lunchboxes--even coats and jackets--from school premises for fear they might be used to conceal weapons. A 12-year-old boy in Louisiana was suspended and then locked up in a juvenile detention center for two weeks for telling fellow students, "I'm going to get you." In Pennsylvania, a 14-year-old girl was strip-searched and suspended for two weeks when, during a class discussion, she observed that she understood how unpopular students might eventually resort to violence. A 9-year-old in Virginia was suspended and later expelled for sketching a gun in class. Four boys in Arkansas overheard talking about guns were taken to the police station, strip-searched without their parents' knowledge and suspended or expelled. A 16-year-old in Virginia was suspended for the rest of the year for writing an essay about a nuclear bomb.

Has America gone mad? Is this overreaction or collective insanity?

I'm afraid it's neither. Instead, it's the predictable eventuality when government is given the authority--tacitly or otherwise--to be the sole guarantor of our safety, security and liberty. That's where we're headed in America. The government schools are already there. To see what life in an American police state will be like one, two, five years down the road, just take a glimpse of the Gestapo tactics being employed in U.S. government schools.

You don't even have to go to your kid's government school to see the early stages of the coming fascism. You can see it when you go to the airport and you are forced--at government's insistence--to prove you are not a criminal. You can see it when you go to your local theme park with your children and guards search your backpacks and purses for weapons.

Slowly but surely Americans are being forced to cope with and live with government-mandated security checkpoints, draconian rules, random searches and seizures. Americans are so conditioned to this trend as a way of life that most even defend it as a necessary evil as we head into the brave new world of the 21st century.

Do you like what you see when you look into the mirror, America? Do you like what your kids see?

Dread of crime haunts Mexico

Source: Washington Post Foreign Service

Date: July 1999

He's an ordinary banker, but in Mexico City these are not ordinary times. So he has a driver trained in counterkidnapping maneuvers and they take a different route to work every day. The windows of his two private cars have been treated with a special film to resist smashing. In addition to a new alarm system, his home has a new television camera to monitor the front door and there are plans to build a vaultlike "safe room" on the second floor that can be sealed with the family inside should someone break into the house.

In a city where crime is a major growth industry--for criminals and companies that sell security systems to thwart them--such extreme measures are increasingly common.

The extra security is warranted by an explosion in crime that has forced residents to dramatically change their lifestyles and even has prompted some rich Mexicans to move their families out of the country. The surge in kidnappings--up to six a day in Mexico City--and violent crime has been a boon to companies that provide bodyguards, alarm systems, specially trained ransom negotiators and other security services.

Daniel Bell, general manager of Kroll-O'Gara of Mexico, a leading international security firm, said that the business of bulletproofing cars in Mexico has grown more than 400 percent in the last four years. "Mexico changed forever with the economic crisis, the opening of borders [with the United States under the North American Free Trade Agreement] and the globalization of the economy," he said. "Before '94, this was a very peaceful place, but the economic crisis had such a severe impact that it changed the moral fiber of the country."

There is a sense that crime pays. According to the federal government, 95 percent of all reported crimes go unpunished. Crime victims' reluctance to go to the police is fueled by suspicion that police themselves are behind much of the crime.

"Everybody wants to get into it because it's easy money," said Max Morales, a Mexico City attorney who has been involved in numerous kidnap negotiations. "They do financial research and choose their targets," he said. "Sometimes they pick the best time for a kidnapping by studying vacation time, travel habits and [they study] cash flow through the victim's companies to make the ransom collections easier."

Kidnappers have also devised a technique called "express kidnapping"--a short-term abduction in which the aim is to drain the victim's liquid assets quickly, often by forcing him or her to make multiple withdrawals from different automatic teller machines.

Another popular crime is "virtual kidnapping," in which a family is falsely led to believe that a loved one has been kidnapped. In a typical scenario, a stranger meets a woman at a bar and engages in personal banter. Then the woman goes to a movie while the stranger calls her family, saying she has been kidnapped and demanding an instant ransom, to be paid before the movie's over.

Violence is chic

Source: Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., WorldNetDaily

Date: June 1999

Excluding God

Source: By Linda Bowles, Creators Syndicate

The real story [of the tragedy at Columbine High School] has to do with the breakdown of morality in America and the consequences of that breakdown.

All the elements of that story are present in the words of President John Adams, who delivered one of the most powerful and insightful statements ever made about America: "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Adams makes the point that the only effective form of control in a nation of free people is self-control. There are no mechanical fixes to moral problems.

The only force capable of defeating this evil, aborting it at the very moment of conception, is a deeply ingrained moral sense of right and wrong.

But the culture within which we are all immersed breeds immorality and nourishes the worst that is within us. Its pervasive voices and faces have become increasingly brutish, vulgar, vile and violent. Our music, books, movies, sitcoms, soap operas and video games pound out messages of mayhem and depravity, the audience ever younger.

This decadent culture has invaded and overwhelmed the church, the family and the school--the conscience-forming institutions of our society. The Supreme Court has upheld laws that are openly hostile to religious speech and expression, particularly in government schools, where prayer is prohibited, and God, by mandate, is treated as a pariah.

What chance do parents have of prevailing with a view of right and wrong when the entire culture works against them? What chance do parents have when the government itself has systematically seized control of children by asserting the right to feed them, baby-sit them, give them condoms, arrange abortions for them, and decide where they go to school and what they are A student lays flowers in memory of those killed in the shooting taught--including attitudes and values that undermine parental rights and religious convictions?

Government schools are a microcosm of our society. We have erected a wall of separation of God from His children and cleared the way for an unimpeded assault on the traditional standards of decency that stand between degenerates and what they want to do and be.

Unbridled excesses have filled our lives, not with joy, but with crime, disease and carnage. Eventually, this may require heavy-handed government repression to restore order and quell anarchy.

Will and Ariel Durant, in their classic book, The Lessons of History, asked themselves this question: "Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality?" Their answer: "There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion." We have declared God persona non grata at our peril.

When life imitates video

Source: Compiled from articles by John Leo, US News & World Report, and David Grossman, Christianity Today

Taiwan’s angry children

Source: Associated Press

TAIPEI — For almost a week, four teen-age boys took turns raping a 15-year-old captive, beating her and torturing her with electric shocks. Their girlfriends watched, or sat in front of the TV in the next room. When she finally died and the teens were arrested, the junior high-school dropout who led the gang said the victim deserved what she got for stealing a pager and being "a pain."

Taiwanese youth long were viewed as deferential bookworms, model strivers who worked hard in school and grew up to help build the island into an increasingly vibrant and affluent society. However, vicious juvenile crimes like the killing of the girl has Taiwan increasingly afraid of its own children. A new stereotype is emerging—that of the sneering, remorseless young tough.

Police say 409 juveniles were arrested for murder in 1997. In Japan, with more than five times the population and its own worrying problem of increasing juvenile crime, the figure was only 97.

Hsieh Fen-fen, commander of the Taipei police department’s juvenile branch, said teens’ inability to communicate frustration plus constant exposure to sex and violence in comics, video games and TV can lead to random, vicious crime. "Kids slowly get used to gore and sex in the media," she said. "Then, they feel an escalating need for thrills. They want the real thing."

Waiting for a brief probation interview at Taipei district court, a 20-year-old woman said kids choose their own path at school. "So if you’re not motivated, you just do what you want," she said. On probation for assaulting another girl when she was 16, the woman said things might have been different if someone had "been there" for her.

25 may be dead in school shooting

Source: Associated Press

Date: Apr 20 , 1999

Three young men in fatigues and black trench coats opened fire at a suburban Denver high school Tuesday in what police called a suicide mission, and the sheriff said 25 people may have been killed. Two of the suspects were found dead in the library. Several students said the killers were gunning for minorities and athletes. The dead suspects, believed to be former students at Columbine High School, had devices on them that could be bombs. A third young man was led away from the school in handcuffs more than four hours after the attack, which began at 11:30 a.m. By early evening, FBI agents and police SWAT teams were still moving through the school, searching for victims and explosives.

At least 20 people were wounded at Columbine, which has 1,800 students. Shots ricocheted off lockers as the gunmen opened fire with what students said were automatic weapons and set off explosives. One girl was shot nine times in the chest. Many students dived to the floors and sprinted for the exits. Dozens of students hid in classrooms before escaping with the help of police in an armored car. Others were trapped for hours while SWAT teams searched for the gunmen.

Outside, hundreds of officers from throughout the Denver area surrounded the school. Frantic parents were sent to a nearby elementary school, where they searched for word of their children. Some students had called their parents on cellular phones from inside the building. Three youths wearing black - but not trench coats - were stopped by police in a field near the school. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation said the three were friends of the gunmen who were being taken in for questioning.

Columbine High is in the middle-class suburb of Littleton, population 35,000, southwest of Denver. Nearby schools were locked down, with students prohibited from entering or leaving for hours.

The massacre at Columbine High

Source: Worldnet Daily

Date: April 21, 1999

This is wrong. This is not what America is about.

"Oh, don't start on that religious stuff, Farah," some will respond.

But how can anyone deny it when we are faced with this kind of stark and chilling evidence? How else can we explain Columbine?

That's the question each of us must ask ourselves in reflecting on Columbine High -- and a thousand other tragedies occurring in this world every day.

A rising tide of crime

Source: The Sunday Times

It was enough to bring tears to any 12-year-old's eyes. His pride and joy, a new £200 mountain bike, the Christmas present his parents had saved hard for, was gone: stolen from his own back garden by a gang of jealous youths. But Dean Pope had another reaction: if you can't beat ’em, join ’em. He turned to his mother Val and said words that broke her heart: "I might as well turn to [stealing], too."

A few months later Val Pope got a call from the local police to say her son had been arrested with a gang of other youngsters caught on a shopping spree with stolen credit cards. It was the start of a teenage life of crime that led to arson charges, jail and only ended in remorse last March when his younger brother Daniel, 14, died in a car crash, joyriding, following his big brother's example.

The Pope family's case is tragic, but hardly unique. Statistics for England and Wales reveal a staggering increase in crimes committed by young people including, more than ever, girls as well as boys, many of them under 14.

The figures make harrowing reading. One in five young men has committed a violent offence by the time they reach the age of 25. The figure for women is one in 20, but that is little cause for comfort. The number of violent offences committed by girls aged 10 to 17 has doubled since 1981, while the perpetrators of nearly 8% of all violent crimes committed by women are aged between 10 and 13. Among under-25s, 17% said they had at one stage carried a weapon, either in self-defense, or with intent to cause harm. Criminals under 18 are now responsible for 28% of all violent crimes, 40% of burglaries, 11% of drug offences and 33% of criminal damage offences.

But it is not just a native disease. Across Europe there is a spreading epidemic of juvenile crime, evidence of a continent-wide youth underclass growing up outside the law.

Last week the Parisian transport system was brought to a standstill by a strike, sparked not by pay disputes but by the soaring number of attacks on staff, most of them from teenagers. Violence against staff on the Metro and buses rose by a third last year. One bus driver was badly beaten, then stabbed in the leg and stomach after refusing to drop a teenage passenger off between stops.

The Parisian public has been horrified by a spate of gruesome murders carried out by teenage girls. At 19, Florence Rey killed four people in a bungled robbery and car chase. Veronique Herbert, 18, seduced a 16-year-old Tunisian immigrant, then she and her 17-year-old boyfriend stabbed him 39 times--just for fun.

In Germany juvenile crime rose 10% over the past year.

In Russia the crime situation has reached pandemic proportions. The collapse of communism taught a new generation that everything their parents believed in was wrong. Now the crisis in the country's fledgling capitalist economy has further inculcated an attitude of "every man for himself," except that it starts a lot younger.

Interior ministry figures show that crimes committed by minors rose 10 times over the past seven years. In 1996 there were 70,000 crimes committed by 14- and 15-year-olds. By last year, that figure had risen to 87,000.

Even in stereotypically staid Sweden the average age of male criminals has dropped over the past decade from 20 to 15.

A lack of parental control is an intrinsic part of the problem. On a Thursday night 10 days ago, on the streets of Speke, outside Liverpool, a gangly, 5ft 3in 12-year-old was the ringleader of a gang of 10 youths in tracksuits and Reebok trainers, roaming the streets in search of trouble. He stole a car, and with a few hooting pals drove at a speed he later boasted was 140mph, shaking off a police chase before setting light to the vehicle on wasteland.

In the past year he has cost his mother £500 in fines and is not just unrepentant, but arrogant: "She tries to keep me in, but she can't. What can she do? I started getting into trouble when I was about 11, robbing cars. Me mates were all doing it."

The media bears part of the blame too. Rami, a young Tunisian robber, is open about his inspiration: "We have seen films showing how easy it is. You just have to go in and pick up the money. It was easy, too." Before a recent robbery he had watched Menace II Society, a brutal, bloody tale of black teenage gangsters in America, glorifying fast cars, easy money and the psychology of violence. Florence Rey, the young Parisian convicted of murder, admitted to being fascinated by the controversial Hollywood blockbuster Natural Born Killers.

Consumerism is part of the cancer; the wages of sin are sneakers and CDs. Technological advance and Europe's relative affluence have spawned only more toys to inspire envy. The media and marketing cult of youth has focused on one narrow age band--between 15 and 25--squeezing all human aspirations into it, with the old deemed irrelevant and children seen only as consumers.

The 1950s are now seen as the decade that invented the teenager. The 1990s may be judged as the decade that witnessed another, more sinister phenomenon: childhood's end.

US: Watch out for the natives

Source: Wall Street Journal

Just as the U.S. State Department warns travelers about foreign lands, the U.S. is also the subject of warnings.

Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office tells its citizens that "crimes of violence are common" in the U.S., while Canadians are cautioned by their Department of Foreign Affairs that criminals in Florida attack "with little or no provocation."

Mexico City: 1 in 5 residents has been a victim of crime

Source: Reuters

More than 20 percent of Mexico City residents have been victims of crime this year, according to a university study. The Autonomous Metropolitan University said its survey of 1,660 Mexico City residents showed that 22 percent of the estimated 9 million residents of the Mexican capital were victims of theft or another crime from January to July. Crime has soared since a peso devaluation in December 1994 and a subsequent economic crisis forced thousands out of work. The university survey said the most frequent crimes were street robberies at 22 percent; theft in public transport, 20 percent; and auto theft, theft while in cars and armed attack, each at 8 percent.

Early violence

Source: AP

Madaline Fennell has been hit, kicked and spit at as a teacher in a public school in Omaha, Nebraska. Her assailants: first-graders. "I have had students who would fly off the handle at the drop of the hat, throw chairs and throw tables—these are 5-year-olds—because they didn't get their way," said Mary E. Pier, a teacher in Aberdeen, Washington. Like other teachers, she's having to spend progressively more time helping children learn social skills that used to be taught at home, church or in the neighborhood.

A message of violent solutions is creeping in more often and earlier. Speech and hearing specialist Lou Ann Smith said "just shoot him" was the advice one second-grader immediately gave to another when he told of a mild insult. She asked why. "Well, they wouldn't do it again," was the response. "I'm noticing it more and younger, and that's scary," the veteran of 33 years of teaching said.

Violence Hits 10% of U.S. Public Schools

Source: AP

One in 10 American public schools experienced serious violence such as rape or robbery last year, said a first-of-its-kind survey released by the White House. For all public schools nationwide that translates to an estimated total of 11,000 physical attacks or fights in which a weapon was used; 7,000 robberies; and 4,000 rapes or other kinds of sexual assault.

Horror movie homicides

Source: Religion Today

A California teen who helped kill his mother got the idea from watching horror movies. Gina Castillo's 16-year-old son and 14-year-old nephew said they plotted to stab her to death after watching the films Scream and Scream 2.

Japan Confronts TV Violence

Source: Variety

TOKYO -- The Japanese government launched a panel aimed at protecting the nation's youth from violence and obscene material in the media. The move comes in the wake of copycat knifing incidents blamed on a popular TV series.

Over the past two years, the crime rate for Japanese youths has climbed by more than 60%. Since the start of the year, a junior high school student stabbed a teacher to death in between classes with a knife and another junior high school boy wounded a police officer with the same type of knife, while trying to steal the officer's pistol.

"Terminator" seen as world children's top hero

Source: Reuters

Want to Raise Kids from Hell? Here's a How-to Primer

Source: By Donna Britt, The Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- Just for laughs, let's pretend. Say we wanted to create, in a relatively peaceful society, a nation of youthful killers, or at least just millions of aggressive young jerks.

How could we do it? We would have to start early. Analyzing infants, we would realize their desperate need for love and intimacy. We would also note that a baby's only real job is to study, digest and mimic everything he or she encounters.

Then we would go to work. We would create an economy in which, in most families, both parents needed to work outside the home to survive. Soon after birth, babies would be placed with caregivers who would tend to their basic needs but who, in most cases, would lack the time and interest to invest the same kind of love and attention as parents.

Working parents would remain on the job for ever-increasing hours. Their "free" time at home would be eaten up by bill-paying, cooking, cleaning, helping with homework and finishing tasks uncompleted in the workplace.

Many children would still receive considerable love and attention. To minimize that, we could design, say, an electronic box that beamed seductive, violent images into every dwelling.

The box would feature some uplifting programming--comedy, romance, educational shows. But it would also provide fistfights, beatings, rapes and murders.

Now a few troublesome kids would realize that such images are fiction. So we would invent "news" shows, highlighting real-life mayhem from local, national and even international sources. The box could also provide "talk shows" in which real people aired their problems before slapping, kicking and otherwise attacking each other as audiences cheered.

But this still might fail to make enough children violent. So what if we invented strikingly realistic visual computer "games"? Children could shoot, impale or beat to death lifelike images of people and monsters. Blood could splatter, "victims" could instantly revive to be killed again and again!

Some pesky parents would, of course, limit their children's exposure to the box and the games. To deal with that, we could create public living rooms, complete with comfortable chairs and popcorn! Here, children could share with strangers the thrill of experiencing, on gigantic screens and with sophisticated sound systems, vivid moving images of stabbings, garrotings, explosions and dismemberments.

Also, in certain parts of the country, rural and urban, we could glorify guns, make folks think they cannot live without firearms. Then we could make it relatively easy for anyone, even children, to get them.

Still not enough? We could do something with music. Kids love music, as anyone who has watched a baby react to a lullaby can attest. We could attach violent, materialistic or overtly sexualized images to music.

We could even persuade certain music-makers to celebrate guns, greed and irresponsible sex in their songs! They, too, could provide images for the box--of threatening-looking men and barely dressed women, all singing about the glories of instant, consequence-free gratification of every urge.

To be sure that children got the pro-violence message, we adults could pretend to abhor brutishness. Kids are natural rebels. So we could bemoan violence ceaselessly in the media, and--this is key--feign astonishment each time a youngster assaulted or killed someone.

So. If a society actually did those crazy things, would children--not every child, just way too many of them--behave in frighteningly aggressive ways?

Maybe. But what intelligent culture could be so stupid? Just thinking about the prospect is scary. Thank God it's just pretend.

It's only a movie?

Source: Mona Charen

In Paducah, Ky., 14-year-old Michael Carneal entered his high school during the pre-school hours carrying five guns. He found the room where a group of his friends were holding a prayer meeting and began shooting to kill. Three girls were shot dead. Another six were wounded. One is permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

How could a normal child commit such a despicable crime? How could he shoot down his friends in cold blood? While the absolute number of crimes is down, the nature of crimes committed, particularly by the very young, continues to shock and dismay us.

Normal teenaged girls have given birth in toilet bowls and then left their offspring in trash bins. Other normal kids have lured strangers to their homes--in New Jersey it was a pizza delivery man--for the pure pleasure of killing. In New York, two middle-class teenagers killed a wino they had met in Central Park and then attempted to mutilate his body so that police would be unable to identify him.

The streets of inner cities are pock-marked by the sites of casual murders; murders for sneakers, murders for clothes, murders over basketball games and murders because someone "dissed" someone else.

Michael Carneal says he was inspired by the movie "The Basketball Diaries," which features a dream sequence in which a kid who is teased gets revenge by killing his classmates with a shotgun.

Our kids are marinated in violence from an early age. The images they see and hear--from Nine Inch Nails to Marilyn Manson--are so grotesque that they dull the senses.

Clearly, the causes of violence are complex. There have always been tormented teenagers. But only recently have they thought it reasonable to blow their classmates away with shotguns. If I were a Hollywood producer who put before the eyes of impressionable kids images that glorify violence, I would find it awfully hard to sleep at night.

Doctors Say Gunshot Wounds Epidemic

Source: Los Angeles Times

A survey published in the Annals of Internal Medicine finds that 87% of surgeons and 94% of internists across the U.S. believe that it's time to consider gunshot wounds a public health epidemic--akin to AIDS, alcoholism and tobacco use.

What Children See and Do: Studies of Violence on TV

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

The simplicity of the experiment at the day-care center and the starkness of the results stunned the parents.

When a class of two- to five-year-olds watched public television's big-hearted purple dinosaur, "Barney," they sang along, marched along, held one another's hands, and laughed together.

The next day, the same class watched the aggressive teenage avengers, "Power Rangers." Within minutes, they were karate-chopping and high-kicking the air--and one another.

"Even though the goal of these programs isn't to teach, our kids are learning because they're always learning," says David Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family, who conducted the experiment.

According to the National Television Violence Study, prime-time violence, on both broadcast and cable networks, has increased since 1994. The study also concluded that the way violence is portrayed in most instances--glamorized, sanitized, and without negative consequences--poses a serious risk to children.

"These patterns teach children that violence is desirable, necessary, and painless," says Dale Kunkel of the University of California at Santa Barbara, where the study was done.

Film violence eroding moral values

Source: The Age Melbourne

Society's obsession with materialism and violent films has resulted in many children growing up with little or no understanding of moral or spiritual values.

Ms. Diane Tilmann, an American educational psychologist, said materialism and violence in films had diverted "time and focus away from traditional pastimes and the transmission of culture and spiritual values. We have not yet recognized the profound influence of violence in films on youth. It is time to look at what we are creating."

Addressing a United Nations-sponsored conference on education in Melbourne, Ms. Tilmann cited recent United States statistics on television viewing habits which found that the average 11-year-old had watched 10,000 murders on television.

Another survey showed that 45 percent of Americans said they would want $1 million to give up their television while 25 percent said they would need more than $1 million.

"One can sit in front of TV and simply have the mind filled. Many children, consequently, have limited time for the essential tasks of childhood which are critical for physical, cognitive, emotional, spiritual and social growth," Ms. Tilmann said.

A hard century for Africa

By Holger Jensen, Scripps Howard News Service

Beset by wars, tribal strife, corrupt governments, famine and crippling debt, Africa is the only continent that will enter the new millennium worse off than it was in colonial times.

It is the world's richest chunk of earth in terms of gold, diamonds and strategic minerals, but the poorest in standards of living. More than half the people of sub-Saharan Africa live below the absolute poverty line, and their number is growing.

Thirty years ago, Ghanaians earned more than South Koreans; Nigerians had higher incomes than Indonesians. Today the roles are reversed.

To grasp the scale of African poverty, consider that the combined wealth of 750 million Africans--more than twice the population of the United States--is little more than that of 10 million Belgians.

Africa has the world's most productive soil, but its people are starving. Only two countries, South Africa and Zimbabwe, are self-sufficient in food. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization list some 20 sub-Saharan nations as being perpetually in need of food aid.

Part of the problem is that many Africans simply cannot get along with each other. More than a third of the continent is in constant conflict. Africa has more major wars than any other part of the world--major, as defined by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, meaning more than 1,000 battle-related deaths a year--along with a host of lesser insurgencies and tribal battles that afflict at least 20 nations.

The worst wars are in Angola, Burundi, both Congos, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan. Lesser wars and periodic tribal uprisings afflict Cameroon, Chad, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Togo and Uganda.

How did this come about? The European countries that colonized Africa--Britain, France, Belgium, Germany and Italy--raped the continent of its natural resources but did little to establish democratic structures that would ensure humane government after they left.

Foreign aid was showered on Africa by the West between 1960 and the demise of communism in 1989. But after the Cold War ended, Western interest in Africa waned and the purse strings tightened. Aid was replaced by loans that had to be repaid to such lending institutions as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. As a result, the combined debt of African countries rose from $122 billion in 1983 to $245 billion in 1996.

Africa now has 33 of the world's most heavily indebted poor countries, known as HIPCs. Some owe foreign banks twice as much as they make in national income, spending more on interest payments than their own development.

Except for South Africa and a few islands of prosperity on its borders, every country in sub-Saharan Africa is worse off today than it was under European colonial rule.

But South Africa has its own problems. It has 20,000 murders a year--a rate eight times higher than that of the United States--and a reported rape every 26 seconds. It is the most dangerous country in the world outside a war zone, of which the continent has many that produce more casualties than the Balkans and greater refugee flows than anything seen in Kosovo.

In total, the continent has 7 million to 8 million refugees who have crossed borders to escape conflict and some 20 million internally displaced people who are homeless but still in their own countries.

TV's progress in the last decades? (Women's Encyclopedia) In 1961, Newton Minow said, "You will see on US television a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western goodmen, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons, and, endlessly, commercials--many screaming, cajoling, and offending … Gentlemen, your trust accounting with your beneficiaries is overdue. Never have so few owed so much to so many."

One in four Britons would choose TV over love.

(Reuters) One in four young Britons would rather sacrifice their partner than part with their television set, a survey said. A straw poll of 18-30 year olds by Granada Home Technology showed that 24 percent would choose to kick out their partner if given the choice between their loved one and their TV. The poll on leisure activities and spending also said the majority of people in Britain ranked watching TV as their most popular leisure activity, averaging 25 hours viewing a week.

Hardened Sri Lanka

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) When the last terror bombing in Sri Lanka's capital killed more than 40 people, counselors offered to meet with the wounded, widowed or simply frightened. No one was interested.

People have grown used to living with violence, fear and distrust, said the council's director, Dr. Narme F. Wickremesinghe. After 15 years of ethnic fighting, mainly in the north of this island nation off Indian's southern tip, attitudes and emotions are so hardened that many people find it difficult to see ahead to a time without war. Ethnic animosity has strengthened and spread.

"What we can look forward to, I don't know," said Wickremesinghe, who is Sinhalese. "The amount of trust I have in my Tamil friends, I know the next generation won't have. How are you going to overcome it? I have no idea. It's gone on too long."

"Idiot box" is claiming 11 years of life

The London Times

The average American spends the equivalent of 11 years in front of a television set over a 72-year life span, according to a nonprofit organization that campaigns against the "idiot box."

The group, TV-Free America, has released the statistics in advance of "National TV Turnoff Week." The week is designed to make couch potatoes aware of the "damage to the health of individuals, families and entire communities" caused by tele-addiction.

Television is blamed, among other things, for insomnia, depression, obesity, illiteracy and profligate spending. According to the group's figures, the average American watches 3.7 hours of television a day, which adds up to about 56 days a year. Extrapolated over a lifetime, this "total television time" amounts to about 11 years.

Last year, Americans viewed for 250 billion hours: the value of that time, computed at an average wage of $5 an hour, was $1.25 trillion.

According to White Dot, an anti-TV pamphlet published monthly in Chicago, the average child has seen 8,000 TV murders by the time he or she finishes elementary school. By 18, they will have witnessed more than 200,000 violent acts on television.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center found a direct correlation between juvenile obesity and the hours spent watching, having been robbed of exercise time and encouraged to consume high-calorie snacks and fizzy drinks.

Other studies have found that a steady diet of television has produced a generation of overstimulated, underactive children who have more trouble deferring gratification or developing a contemplative mind.

Our moral wasteland

David Selbourne, The London Times

It is often argued that there is "no new thing under the sun," as Ecclesiastes puts it. But where, until now, has there been anything like the observation in The Guardian by a spokesman for Castle Morpeth council that residents of private care homes are "income-producing raw material" and the dead represent "the waste produced by the business"?

Is it an old moral thing, or a new moral thing, that there is now an arson attack in at least three schools every day? Or that one in three churches can expect to be the target of an attack of some kind--theft, vandalism, arson--each year? Or that malicious vandalism is now the biggest cause of railway accidents? Or that 86 percent of alarm calls in the Metropolitan Police area are shown to be false?

Has there ever before been such violence directed in a time of peace by youth against the frailest and most elderly, so that even women in their eighties come to be raped? Is it an old thing under the sun, or a new, that doctors--it is estimated that 1,000 of them are assaulted each year--teachers and priests should feel themselves at risk from those for whom they care? When, before, could nursing be regarded as Britain's "most dangerous profession" with one nurse in three, compared with one policeman in four, suffering an act of violence in accident and emergency units?

Yet in this whirlpool, the intensifying corruption of our sensibilities, the hubris of technological experiments with the human body, the genetic abuse of the natural order, there are, everywhere, evasions. These seek to have us believe that nothing can any longer be done about our moral condition, or that nothing needs to be done about it, since there is nothing much at fault with it in the first place. The cynicism and amorality with which some address our moral and social confusions are a further cause of our ills.

Are you concerned about the increasing incidence of violence reported to be committed by young girls? You may well be. But, replies a "professor of gender relations" in The Times, "Young women are much more positive about themselves and are likely to be more assertive.… If women are becoming more active in society, their behavior is more likely to be like men's." And, says a woman academic researcher in The Guardian: "If, to prove their equality, they have to punch someone, then so be it."

Evasion and falsehood are widely employed to give the slip to the idea that common moral rules can and should exist. There has not been, since the French Revolution, a greater concern for, and insistence upon, the promotion and expansion of individual rights in an already deeply free society. Yet this culture of rights coexists with a cynicism about the distinctions between right and wrong. There seems to be no doubt about the former and every doubt, assiduously promoted, about the latter. It is a drastic combination.

Lost horizon: The world expected peace, but got a new brutality

New York Times News Service

Around the world the crises pile up, and the collage of headlines does not make a pretty picture. In Kosovo, babies die of cold on hillsides where mothers have fled to save their lives. In Sierra Leone, madmen posing as a rebel army cut off the hands of teen-aged boys and trap families in their homes to torch them. Angolans shoot down relief planes. Haiti spirals back into chaos. And the chief judge of an international tribunal is stopped cold at Serbia's border when she tries to investigate crimes against humanity in Kosovo.

Who's in charge here?

In the last year of the century, the newer, saner world order which was confidently anticipated when communism collapsed a decade ago is nowhere to be seen. The problem is magnified by the characters of the combatants and of the causes. A great many of today's conflicts are civil wars, and 100 years of conventions written to make war civilized are useless pieces of paper in these fights. Ordinary people are the targets and the fodder of rogue militias. Nine times more civilians than combatants die. Battles are fought over no apparent principles, only greed and power.

UNICEF, the U.N. children's fund, recently reported that nearly 50 million children and women are in immediate and extreme danger worldwide, causing an agency better known for immunization drives and schoolbooks to rethink its programs in countries where disaster preparedness may have to be given priority instead.

With international peacekeeping all but dead, armies of relief workers are on the front lines. But these angels of mercy are cut no slack either. More aid workers than peacekeeping troops are now dying in the field. At least 173 U.N. relief officials have been killed in about five years.

"Ideas are much smaller now," said Arthur Helton, an international lawyer who directs migration projects at the Open Society Institute. "The circumstances are far more driven by self interest or the perception of self interest." Conflicts, he added, now ride on causes that are "regional, subregional, even to the point of clans--the atomization of societies."

Small ideas. Big egos. War in Africa. Butchery in the Balkans. Could this be reminiscent of the start of the 20th century as much as a definition of its end?

South Africa's rape shock

BBC

A survey carried out in the South African city of Johannesburg has uncovered an alarming picture of sexual violence. One in three of the 4,000 women questioned by a non-governmental organization said they had been raped in the past year.

In a related survey conducted among 1,500 schoolchildren in the Soweto township, a quarter of all the boys interviewed said that "jackrolling"--a South African term for recreational gang rape--was fun.

More than half the interviewees insisted that when a girl says no to sex she really means yes. The boys' opinions differed markedly from those expressed by schoolgirls, many of whom suggested that they were living in an intolerable sexual environment.

Johannesburg's murder rate also remains at 52 per 100,000--eight times as high as in the United States. Car hijackings last year were up by nearly 9% on the previous year's figure, and the statistics also show an increase in the rate of burglary and mugging.