In Brief...
World News Review

Contributors: Cecil Maranville and Jim Tuck

• New York City Establishes Gay High School
• The Future Arab World
• Pentagon Report Cites Buildup of China’s Missiles
• North Korea Says It Will Start Testing Nuclear Bombs
• Constitutional Convention Is Unknown to Most European Citizens
• Gay-Themed TV Gains a Wider Audience
  

New York City Establishes Gay High School

Controversy exploded in the United States when New York City public education officials announced the opening of a new high school for "gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered youth," which they designate by the acronym GLBT.

Named Harvey Milk High School, after an openly gay San Francisco city supervisor who was assassinated in 1978, the school actually began in 1984. Now, however, officials, using taxpayer dollars, are renovating a building for the exclusive use of the GLBT school, which will open with 100 students this fall.

The school’s first official principal, William Salzman, says, "The school will be a model for the country and possibly for the world."

The city’s rationale for creating the school is that children with these sexual orientations are not safe in regular public schools, where they suffer violent harassment from other students. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told the Associated Press, "I think everybody feels that it’s a good idea because some of the kids who are gay and lesbian have been constantly harassed and beaten in other schools."

However, not "everybody" feels it’s a good idea.

Joseph Farah comments: "I don’t believe this would be happening now without the U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating the anti-sodomy law in Texas. Now the homosexual activists are working at a fever pitch to transform Western civilization. Indoctrinating the next generation is an important step in that process...

"Do you see where our culture is headed? Do you now understand what Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was warning about in his dissent in the Texas sodomy case?"

—Sources: Mark Goebel, "New York Expands GLBT Public School," July 28, 2003, PlanetOut Corporation; Joseph Farah, "The 1st Homosexual School," July 29, 2003, WorldNetDaily.com.

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The Future Arab World

The 22 Arab nations of the world currently have a population of 280 million people. In spite of oil wealth for a small number of the Arab states, the majority of these people live in extreme poverty. Even where there is oil revenue, the wealth often "sticks to the hands" of a relatively few national leaders or "royal" families and does not trickle down to the masses.

By comparison, the gross domestic product of Spain is greater than that of all of the 22 Arab countries combined.

What does the future portend? The population of these 22 nations doubled in the past 50 years and will nearly double again in less than 20 years. UN estimates place the 2020 population figures at between 410 and 460 million. Among the fastest growing populations are Somalia, the poorest Arab country, and Saudi Arabia, whose general population already reels under a greatly reduced average income. Iraq, currently at slightly less than 23 million, will have 35 to 41 million people by 2020.

Egypt, the largest Arab country, will reach 100 million people if it continues to grow at the present rate. Due to vanishing work opportunities in the Saudi oil fields, thousands of college graduates in today’s Egypt do not have enough income to marry and have a family. That causes much unrest and anger.

The population growth in Arab countries also means explosive growth in the population of adherents to Islam. Egypt is 94 percent Sunni Muslim. Iraq is 97 percent Muslim (Shiite 60 to 65 percent, Sunni 32 to 37 percent). Saudi Arabia is 100 percent Muslim. Somalia is 100 percent Sunni Muslim.

Writing of the current Muslim population, Dennis Prager says: "Though most people ignore the fact, almost all of the world’s believing Muslims believe that all of mankind should be Muslim. This, in and by itself, is not troubling—after all, most Christians would like the whole world to be Christian, and most Westerners would like the whole world to be democratic. What is troubling is that if only 10 percent of these Muslims are prepared to use violence to impose their religion on others, we are talking about 100 million people" (emphasis added). (In fact, his figures on the total Muslim population of the world are on the conservative side.)

And, as noted in the last issue of World News and Prophecy, the lack of adequate water supplies is now, and will continue to be, a serious problem.

"About 85 per cent of countries in the region share their total available water with at least one other country either as riparians (along a common river) or by sharing a common aquifer. More powerful upstream and downstream countries have been able to determine the water shares of the other riparian or aquifer-sharing countries.

"Equitable water-sharing is often compromised by politics.

" The rapid increase in population in the region is putting increasing pressure on water availability per capita. Meanwhile, the persistently high share of water used in agriculture (including ambitious, intensive irrigation programmes) is starving other users, industrial and domestic—in the case of the latter, also helping to worsen health problems. Current shortages can only worsen, even without factoring in any impact of climate change.

" Conservation and reuse programmes are weak, and no country in the region has effective water-demand management systems and economic instruments to rationalize the use of water" ("UN Arab Human Development Report 2002," pp. 44-45).

Additional Sources: Dennis Prager, "The Future Is Muslim, European or American," Creators Syndicate, Inc., Feb. 26, 2003; CIA World Fact Book 2002; Thomas L. Friedman, "Arabs at the Crossroads," The New York Times, July 3, 2002.

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Pentagon Report Cites Buildup of China’s Missiles

A recent Pentagon annual report to Congress says that China is acquiring short-range missiles much faster than U.S. officials had thought and is aiming the weapons at Taiwan and possibly at U.S. forces to block their use on the island’s behalf in any future conflict. The report on Beijing’s military also said that preparing for a potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait is the primary driver for China’s military modernization.

China has about 450 short-range ballistic missiles but is expected to increase its inventory by more than 75 missiles each year. This assessment is significantly higher than last year when it was projected that China’s military had acquired 350 ballistic missiles and was adding them at a rate of 50 a year.

The sophistication and accuracy of the missiles have improved, with the Chinese army developing longer-range models of the CSS-6 missile, which is capable of reaching as far as Okinawa, Japan, home to more than 33,000 U.S. troops. A senior defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said China may be using Okinawa "to checkmate or deter or threaten U.S. involvement" if conflict erupts in the Taiwan Strait, which separates the Chinese mainland from Taiwan.

The report also said China is spending far more on its defense budget than it has acknowledged. U.S. officials estimate the military budget, which Beijing announced as $20 billion early last year, actually falls between $45 billion and $65 billion, and the report noted a potential for annual spending to increase three or four times by 2020.

The buildup of China’s military over the last several years runs counter to Beijing’s stated desire for a peaceful resolution of the reunification dispute over Taiwan. Taiwan split from the mainland in 1949 after Nationalist Chinese leaders fled there following the Communist victory in China. Beijing considers Taiwan a renegade province and has threatened to retake the island by force if necessary. U.S. policy is to help Taiwan maintain a defense capability, but Washington does not favor Taiwanese independence.

The Pentagon report also highlights China’s acquisition of Russian-made submarines that could be used to cut off sea access to Taiwan and threaten American forces that might respond. For the fourth year in a row, China bought $2 billion worth of weapons from Russia, at least double its annual procurement from Moscow over the previous decade.

—Source: International Herald Tribune.

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North Korea Says It Will Start Testing Nuclear Bombs

North Korea has raised the stakes dramatically in its confrontation with the United States by privately threatening to conduct its first underground nuclear test, and the United States fears that this declaration could be a prelude to an atomic attack.

A senior official of the hardline Communist regime warned in New York that his country would take countermeasures, "for example, a nuclear test," if the United States did not ease pressure on his isolated country.

The warning, by Han Sung Ryol, North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, was delivered to an American official earlier this month, according to reports circulating in Tokyo. The test would be conducted inside a tunnel dug into a mountain in the run-up to Sept. 9, the anniversary of the republic’s foundation, the respected Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported.

Officials in Tokyo close to the Pyongyang (North Korea’s capital) regime say if Washington does not offer a nonaggression guarantee for abandoning its nuclear program, North Korea is prepared to announce it has become the world’s ninth nuclear power.

Senior American officials, who are reluctant to rule out future military action, fear that the warning shows that the rogue state’s relations with the United States are out of control.

William Perry, a former secretary of defense under President Clinton, warned that Pyongyang may have acquired six to eight nuclear weapons by the end of the year, allowing the regime to target Japan, South Korea and even Hawaii in the United States.

"I think we are losing control of the situation," he said. "The nuclear program underway in North Korea poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities."
In an effort to block any export of weapons from North Korea, the United States has assembled a group of 10 other nations, including Britain, which have agreed to intercept suspicious North Korean shipping.

The deteriorating situation has fueled increasing concerns of an arms race in Asia, with Russia and Japan watching the standoff between North Korea and the United States with growing trepidation.

Japan has already begun to rethink its postwar pacifist stance, while Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Alexander Losyukov, said that Moscow had begun to take steps to defend itself from the possible use of nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. Testing of the civil defense resources has already started in the districts bordering North Korea.

Despite the moves to blockade shipping, the Bush administration appears increasingly divided over how to deal with the crisis. State Department officials indicated recently that a written security guarantee to North Korea might be possible, but the suggestion was immediately dismissed by the White House.

In the Pentagon, meanwhile, hawks are privately discussing the possibility of launching a "surgical strike" similar to the Israeli raid carried out on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. A State Department official told The Telegraph: "More than a few people are worried about where we might end up six months down the road. This impasse is not going to be the status quo forever."
Under its eccentric dictator Kim Jong Il, Pyongyang has never officially claimed membership in the "nuclear club," though it admitted last October that it was pursuing a secret nuclear weapons program. The eight countries acknowledged to possess nuclear weapons are the United States, Britain, Russia, France, China, Pakistan, India and Israel.

The White House is counting on multilateral negotiations involving China, South Korea and Japan to defuse the situation.

—Source: Daily Telegraph (London).

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Constitutional Convention Is Unknown to Most European Citizens

Sixteen months of hard toil on a constitutional text by some of Europe’s most well-known politicians have not succeeded in raising awareness of the constitutional convention among the majority of Europe’s citizens.

A poll conducted on behalf of the European Commission directly after the draft Constitution was ceremoniously handed over to EU leaders at the Thessaloniki Summit (June 20 to 21), found that 55 percent of the 25,000 surveyed had never heard of the convention.

The worst informed in the enlarged 25-member European Union were the British, with only 25 percent having heard of the convention. However, they are not alone. Snapping at their heels were the Hungarians and Latvians also coming in with less than 30 percent.

At the other end of the scale, the Greeks beat everybody else hands down. There 81 percent of those asked had heard of the convention—most likely due to the fact that their country held the EU presidency during the first half of this year, resulting in broad coverage by domestic media.

About 40 percent of those surveyed said they "do not intend" to read the text, which proposes, among other things, a European foreign minister, a permanent president of the European Council and substantially increasing the powers of the European Parliament.

Finns score highest here. Some 53 percent do not want to read the treaty blueprint—despite being quite well-informed about the convention itself. But they are also keeping good company. Britons, Germans, the Dutch and the Danes also score highly in their plans to not read the draft constitution.

The European Commission intends to conduct a second survey at the beginning of October for the start of the Intergovernmental Conference to tie up any loose ends in the treaty.

—Source: EUobserver.com.

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Gay-Themed TV Gains a Wider Audience

Thirty years ago, prime-time television series often depicted homosexuals as suicidal or psychopaths. In an episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., the doctor tells a tormented patient to "win that fight" against his homosexual feelings. An episode of Police Woman centered on three lesbians who murdered the residents of a retirement home.

How things have changed. Last month the Bravo cable network presented the first episode of Boy Meets Boy, in which a gay bachelor chooses a potential partner from a field of 15 men, some of them straight.

That is followed by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, in which a team of gay men with expertise in designer clothing, food and wine and the arts, save aesthetically challenged straight men from their own warped senses of fashion.

These shows join a growing prime-time roster of gay-themed programming (Queer as Folk on Showtime, Will and Grace on NBC) that reflects a major shift in attitudes about gay subjects. Several network and cable television executives said the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in June, overruling a Texas sodomy law and legalizing gay sexual conduct, underlined what they already knew—that the nation’s attitudes toward gays and lesbians are radically changing.

"Finally, television is catching up with society at large," said Max Mutchnick, the cocreator with David Kohan of Will and Grace. "These new gay shows are a reflection of what everyone sees now in their jobs, in their families, in their schools."

But the trend has come under attack. A. William Merrell, a vice president on the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, said the new shows were a sign of the growing influence of gays in Hollywood. "I believe that the net effect is to forward an agenda making homosexuality appear first normal, and then desirable," he said.

In many ways the new shows are trying to capitalize on the popularity of Will and Grace, which was the third-most-watched sitcom on network television last season behind Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond, with an average weekly audience of 16.8 million people, according to Nielsen Media Research.

—Source: The New York Times.

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