ABSTRACT
This morning's headlines—every day's headlines—announce ongoing disasters: the massive health, human-rights and refugee problems of the new world order in Somalia, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Indonesia, as well as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and other warring splinters of the former Soviet Union. Other new world order disasters, less dramatic, receive only intermittent attention. These include such items as the effect of sanctions on medical care, nutrition and infant mortality in Iraq; the daily toll in death and dismemberment of land mines in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan and elsewhere; the ongoing effects of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl and Chelyabinsk, and of deadly pollution of air, soil and groundwater by lead, other toxic metals and organic toxins in much of Eastern Europe. Dwarfing all of these is the implacable daily toll of poverty and its health consequences in the Third World; to cite the best-known statistic, the 40,000 children who die each day.
