While international delegates wrestled with complicated questions about urban planning and resources at the Habitat II conference in Istanbul last week, the Vatican representatives were raising a furor over references in the meeting documents to abortion, birth control and sexuality. On Wednesday, Vatican official Joaquin Navarro-Valls criticized U.S. delegates who had placed discussion of subjects like birth control, women's rights and sexuality on the agenda. Yet, the Church also called for massive government-welfare projects to build housing for the world's peoples. And more than one-third of the current batch of juvenile arsonists are under 15. The paper adds that this makes it difficult to find and track arsonists, since they probably don't have criminal records.
Juveniles start fires for kicks, out of curiosity or for purposes of intimidation.
According to the arson experts, adults torch buildings for personal gain or profit, or to cover other crimes. Thousands of women throughout the Islamic world are being driven to an expensive, sometimes dangerous medical operation, according to today's Sunday Times of London. Jurists reportedly often sympathize with such men. The operation has been banned in Egypt, where the relatively secular government is locked in a violent struggle with Islamic fundamentalists intent on establishing a religious theocracy similar to than in Iran.