When Spain’s Prime Minister José Rodríguez Zapatero this summer revealed a plan to offer women 2,500 euros ($3,400) to have more children, he was seeking to reverse a future in which the elderly would outnumber the working young — a demographic trend that affects not only Spain, but also the entire continent. For almost a generation, wealthy and well-fed Europe has been bringing forth too few children to replenish its graying population for the coming decades. Save Ireland, and possibly amorous France, birthrates have dipped far below the replacement level of 2.1, giving the old continent an overall average of [...]
Paradoxically, the Libyan supreme court’s verdict Wednesday confirming the death sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor found guilty of infecting children with the AIDS virus may be the beginning of the end of their eight-year ordeal and not the final step towards their death. The five nurses — Snazhana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valya Cherveniashka, Valentina Siropulo, and Kristina Valcheva, and the Palestinian doctor, Ashram Juma Hajuj, were arrested in 1999 and charged with injecting 438 children with HIV-tainted blood in a hospital in the Libyan coastal town of Benghazi. Fifty-six of the children have since died. At [...]
BRUSSELS — Buying a packet of cigarettes in Belgium these days can be a harrowing experience. European cartons already carry large health warnings, such as “Smoking Kills” and “Smoking When Pregnant Harms Your Baby,” often framed in black and occupying up to half the surface of the pack. But from May, smokers in this rain-swept country of 10 million people will also been confronted with graphic pictorial warnings on their cigarette packs. The pictures are not for the faint-hearted. One shows a man with a swollen-red tumour protruding from his neck. “Smoking can lead to a slow and painful death,” [...]
