Scene outside a Phoenix, Ariz., office building where several people reportedly were injured in a shooting on Wednesday morning, Jan. 30, 2013.
It is unknown at this time how many people were hit or the severity of their injuries.
Police are looking for a suspect.
A gunman shot and wounded three people at an office building in Phoenix, Ariz., today and police are now searching for the shooter, authorities told ABC News.
There are no reports of deaths at this time.
Police are clearing the office complex in the in the 7310 block of 16th Street, near Glendale Avenue.
Officials say there was only one gunman, who remains at large.
Police are also investigating a separate scene near Glendale Avenue, according to ABC News affiliate KNXV-TV. It's not clear if it's related to the office shooting.
The shooting took place moments after former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the victim of a shooting in Phoenix in 2011, testified before Congress on gun control.
In the weeks since 20 students were gunned down at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school on Dec. 14, 2012, several mass shootings have garnered public attention as the nation debates its relationship to firearms.
Five days ago, two men were arrested for a opening fire at Lone Star College in Houston, Texas. No one was injured. Earlier this month, a 16-year-old student was arrested after shooting a classmate in Taft, Calif.
CAIRO/BERLIN (Reuters) - Egyptian authorities scaled back a curfew imposed by President Mohamed Mursi, and the Islamist leader cut short a visit to Europe on Wednesday to deal with the deadliest violence in the seven months since he took power.
Two more protesters were shot dead before dawn near Cairo's central Tahrir Square on Wednesday, a day after the army chief warned that the state was on the brink of collapse if Mursi's opponents and supporters did not end street battles.
More than 50 people have been killed in the past seven days of protests by Mursi's opponents marking the second anniversary of the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak.
Mursi imposed a curfew and a state of emergency on three Suez Canal cities on Sunday - Port Said, Ismailia and Suez. That only seemed to further provoke crowds. However, violence has mainly subsided in those towns since Tuesday.
Local authorities pushed back the start of the curfew from 9:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. in Ismailia and to 1:00 a.m. in Port Said and Suez.
"There has been progress in the security situation since Monday. Calm has returned," Suez Governor Samir Aglan said.
Mursi, speaking in Berlin before hurrying home to deal with the crisis, called for dialogue with opponents but would not commit to their demand that he first agree to include them in a unity government.
He sidestepped a question about a possible unity government, saying the next cabinet would be formed after parliamentary elections in April.
Egypt was on its way to becoming "a civilian state that is not a military state or a theocratic state", Mursi said.
The violence at home forced Mursi to scale back his European visit, billed as a chance to promote Egypt as a destination for foreign investment. He flew to Berlin but called off a trip to Paris and was due back home after only a few hours in Europe.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, who met him, echoed other Western leaders who have called on him to give his opponents a voice.
"One thing that is important for us is that the line for dialogue is always open to all political forces in Egypt, that the different political forces can make their contribution, that human rights are adhered to in Egypt and that of course religious freedom can be experienced," she said at a joint news conference with Mursi.
SPIRIT OF REVOLUTION
Mursi's critics accuse him of betraying the spirit of the revolution by keeping too much power in his own hands and those of his Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement banned under Mubarak which won repeated elections since the 2011 uprising.
Mursi's supporters say the protesters want to overthrow Egypt's first democratically elected leader. The current unrest has deepened an economic crisis that saw the pound currency tumble in recent weeks.
Near Cairo's Tahrir Square on Wednesday morning, dozens of protesters threw stones at police who fired back teargas, although the scuffles were brief.
"Our demand is simply that Mursi goes, and leaves the country alone. He is just like Mubarak and his crowd who are now in prison," said Ahmed Mustafa, 28, a youth who had goggles on his head to protect his eyes from teargas.
Opposition politician Mohamed ElBaradei called for a meeting of the president, ministers, the ruling party and the opposition to halt the violence. But he also restated the precondition that Mursi first commit to seeking a national unity government.
The worst violence has been in the Suez Canal city of Port Said, where rage was fuelled by death sentences passed against soccer fans for roles in deadly riots last year.
After decades in which the West backed Mubarak's military rule of Egypt, the emergence of an elected Islamist leader in Cairo is probably the single most important change brought about by the wave of Arab revolts over the past two years.
Mursi won backing from the West last year for his role in helping to establish a ceasefire between Israel and Palestinians that ended a conflict in Gaza. But he then followed that with an effort to fast-track a constitution that reignited dissent at home and raised global concern over Egypt's future.
Western countries were alarmed this month by video that emerged showing Mursi making vitriolic remarks against Jews and Zionists in 2010 when he was a senior Brotherhood official.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said ahead of Mursi's visit that the remarks, in which Mursi referred to Zionists as "descendants of apes and pigs" were "unacceptable".
"NOT AGAINST JEWS"
Asked about those remarks at the news conference with Merkel, Mursi repeated earlier explanations that they had been taken out of context.
"I am not against the Jewish faith," he said. "I was talking about the practices and behavior of believers of any religion who shed blood or who attack innocent people or civilians. That's behavior that I condemn."
"I am a Muslim. I'm a believer and my religion obliges me to believe in all prophets, to respect all religions and to respect the right of people to their own faith," he added.
Egypt's main liberal and secularist bloc, the National Salvation Front, has so far refused talks with Mursi unless he promises a unity government including opposition figures.
"Stopping the violence is the priority, and starting a serious dialogue requires committing to guarantees demanded by the National Salvation Front, at the forefront of which are a national salvation government and a committee to amend the constitution," ElBaradei said on Twitter.
Those calls have also been backed by the hardline Islamist Nour party - rivals of Mursi's Brotherhood. Nour and the Front were due to meet on Wednesday, signaling an unlikely alliance of Mursi's critics from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Brotherhood leader Mohamed El-Beltagy dismissed the unity government proposal as a ploy for the Front to take power despite having lost elections. On his Facebook page he ridiculed "the leaders of the Salvation Front, who seem to know more about the people's interests than the people themselves".
In a sign of the toll the unrest is having on Egypt's economy, ratings agency Fitch downgraded its sovereign rating by one notch to B on Wednesday.
(Additional reporting by Tom Perry, Yasmine Saleh and Marwa Awad in Cairo, Yusri Mohamed in Ismailia and Stephen Brown and Gernot Heller in Berlin; Writing by Peter Graff)
JOHANNESBURG: Most of the priceless ancient books and manuscripts housed in a centre in Timbuktu were smuggled to safety as Islamists overran the Malian city last year, curators revealed Wednesday.
"A vast majority was saved... more than 90 per cent," said Shamil Jeppie, Timbuktu Manuscripts Project director at the University of Cape Town.
Jeppie said more than 20,000 manuscripts had been moved out of the South African-sponsored centre by May last year and hidden mostly in the capital Bamako and elsewhere in Timbuktu.
The texts were spirited out in trunks and placed deep in the vaults of another building.
It was feared the manuscripts had been destroyed by Islamists during their rampaging retreating from French forces, who now control the city.
The insurgent fighters had already destroyed many of the city's centuries-old shrines, the iconic legacy of Timbuktu's golden age of intellectual and spiritual development.
The fighters took the city in April, swiftly implementing a version of Islamic law which forced women to wear veils and set whipping and stoning as punishment for transgressions.
Islamist fighters had considered the texts and the shrines -- which helped earn the city UNESCO world heritage status -- to be idolatrous.
But details of an amazing effort to save the irreplaceable documents are now coming to light.
The texts, most dating from the 13th and 14th centuries, include a prized biography of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad and texts about music, astronomy, physics, traditional medicine.
"Archivists and librarians associated with the Ahmed Baba library, in fact, over the months of the occupation, worked to take the manuscripts out, to conserve them and hide them," Jeppie said.
In a statement, the project office said "a limited number of items have been damaged or stolen, the infrastructure neglected and furnishings in the library looted."
Jeppie suspects some of the delicate manuscripts could have also been damaged during movement but not at the "hands of these ignorant people."
The Ahmed Baba collection, the largest of its kind in Timbuktu, was home to around 40,000 texts.
They were housed in a state-of-the-art archive, paid for by international donors, including South Africa.
Opened in 2009, it is meant to keep the manuscripts safe and to act as a centre for research.
"There are two buildings" housing the documents, curator Ben Essayouti El-Boukhari told AFP. "There is the old one and the new one built by South Africans."
The old building is where most of the manuscripts had been kept -- including some dating back to the pre-Islamic era.
But with phone connections down, officials have been unable to get a full picture of the extent of the damage elsewhere in the city.
Officials have previously estimated there are more than 100,000 manuscripts held in several private libraries and by families in Timbuktu.
- AFP/jc
BALTIMORE A soldier who lost all four limbs in an Iraq roadside bombing says he looks forward to driving and swimming with his new arms.
Twenty-six-year-old Brendan Marrocco spoke at a news conference Tuesday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He was joined by the surgeons who performed the double-arm transplant there.
Marrocco says he's happy and amazed to have new arms. He has prosthetic legs but says that without arms, he felt "kind of lost for a while."
"It's given me a lot of hope for the future," Marrocco said. "I feel like it's given me a second chance."
The procedure was only the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant ever conducted in the United States.
Dr. W. P. Andrew Lee, the lead surgeon on Marrocco's team, said this surgery "was the most extensive and complicated" transplant surgery ever performed, involving the connecting of bone, nerves, blood vessels, muscles, and other tissue. He said his team had rehearsed four times on cadavers in the last two years.
Marrocco said he already can twist the wrist in his left arm, which had a lower amputation than the right, allowing doctors to begin that arm transplant at his elbow. Lee said nerves regrow at about an inch per month, so given the length of an arm, it will take several months to more than a year for most normal arm movements to occur with Marrocco.
Lee said Marrocco, a New York native, will check out of the hospital Tuesday, and begin outpatient therapy while staying nearby for several months.
The infantryman was injured by a roadside bomb in 2009. The New York City man also received bone marrow from the same dead donor to minimize the medicine needed to prevent rejection.
The military is sponsoring operations like these to help wounded troops. About 300 have lost arms or hands in the wars.
Through all the procedures and the recovery, Marrocco has generally maintained a positive attitude.
In a 2010 interview with CBS News correspondent David Martin (at left), he said: "I just seem to have a good lookout on things. I'm still alive. My buddy wasn't as fortunate."
Marrocco was referring to one of the other members of his squad, whom he described as his best friend, who was killed when their Humvee ran over a tripwire.
"I remember the flash, the sound, it was ridiculously loud. I remember all the screaming in the truck trying to see who was hurt. After that I remember waking up in the hospital," Marrocco said.
He described the thing that took his limbs as a "copper dart" that was "molten hot," saying it "cauterized my wounds." The New York native said he has marveled at the fact that he survived, when others did not, adding that his friend who died "wasn't hurt nearly as bad as I was."
Even after waking up in the hospital and realizing that he lost his arms, Marrocco said his father told him his reaction was relatively nonchalant, saying "I just shrugged my shoulders and went back to sleep."
Sarah Palin's break up with Fox News should not have been, well, breaking news, as she had publicly complained in August on Facebook that the network had canceled her appearances at the Republican National Convention. And going back even further, Palin didn't give Fox the scoop in October 2011 when she announced she wasn't going to run for president. Still, the news of the Fox split overtook Twitter and the news cycle by storm.
One thing I've learned in my years covering Palin, which began on Aug. 29, 2008, when Sen. John McCain stunned the country by selecting her as his running mate: Everyone has an opinion on whatever she does, and she can get clicks and coverage like no one else.
The prevailing theory now is that since Palin no longer has a megaphone like Fox News through which she can blast her opinions, her moment is now officially over.
The 'Ends' of Sarah Palin
It might be true, but there have been so many "ends of Sarah Palin" that it's almost too hard to keep track of them all. She was over when she lost the 2008 campaign, she was over when she quit the Alaska governorship, she was over when she decided to do a reality show, she was over when she decided not to run for president, and now again, she's over because her appearances on Fox News are over.
I, for one, did think Palin would lose her relevancy when she quit the Alaska governorship, and also when she didn't run for president. But in both cases, people who both love her and hate her just couldn't get enough information about her, and she still got an incredible amount of news coverage. Her voice was heard loud and clear, even if it blasted only from her Facebook posts. That's just another example of what she's been able to pull off that others who've come before or after just haven't. Palin's been written off from Day One, but like a boomerang, she just keeps coming back.
Yes, she wasn't really helpful to Mitt Romney's campaign, but she also never really explicitly backed him. And what an odd pair they would have made if she had. In her interview last weekend with Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News who made "The Undefeated," the positive 2011 movie about her, she said, "The problem is that some on the right are now skittish because of the lost 2012 election. They shouldn't be. Conservatism didn't lose. A moderate Republican candidate lost after he was perceived to alienate working-class Reagan Democrats and independent voters." Not a sign that she wants to rethink some of her policy points, or that she will retreat into the shadows.
Another Possible TV Home
I think more likely than her fading away (we all still cover every eyebrow-raising Facebook post of hers) is that she will possibly find an on-air home elsewhere, at somewhere like CNN. She told Breitbart.com that she "encourages others to step out in faith, jump out of the comfort zone, and broaden our reach as believers in American exceptionalism. That means broadening our audience. I'm taking my own advice here as I free up opportunities to share more broadly the message of the beauty of freedom and the imperative of defending our republic and restoring this most exceptional nation. We can't just preach to the choir; the message of liberty and true hope must be understood by a larger audience."
Later in the interview, she added, "I know the country needs more truth-telling in the media, and I'm willing to do that. So, we shall see."
CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) - Egypt's army chief said political unrest was pushing the state to the brink of collapse - a stark warning from the institution that ran the country until last year as Cairo's first freely elected leader struggles to curb bloody street violence.
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a U.S.-trained general appointed by President Mohamed Mursi last year to head the armed forces, added in a statement on Tuesday that one of the primary goals of deploying troops in cities on the Suez Canal was to protect the waterway that is vital for Egypt's economy and world trade.
Sisi's comments, published on an official army Facebook page, followed 52 deaths in the past week of disorder and highlighted the mounting sense of crisis facing Egypt and its Islamist head of state who is striving to fix a teetering economy and needs to prepare Egypt for a parliamentary election in a few months that is meant to cement the new democracy.
Violence largely subsided on Tuesday, although some youths again hurled rocks at police lines in Cairo near Tahrir Square.
It seemed unlikely that Sisi was signaling the army wants to take back the power it held for six decades since the end of the colonial era and through an interim period after the overthrow of former air force chief Hosni Mubarak two years ago.
But it did send a powerful message that Egypt's biggest institution, with a huge economic as well as security role and a recipient of massive direct U.S. subsidies, is worried about the fate of the nation, after five days of turmoil in major cities.
"The continuation of the struggle of the different political forces ... over the management of state affairs could lead to the collapse of the state," said General Sisi, who is also defense minister in the government Mursi appointed.
He said the economic, political and social challenges facing the country represented "a real threat to the security of Egypt and the cohesiveness of the Egyptian state" and the army would remain "the solid and cohesive block" on which the state rests.
Sisi was picked by Mursi after the army handed over power to the new president in June once Mursi had sacked Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, in charge of Egypt during the transition and who had also been Mubarak's defense minister for 20 years.
The instability has provoked unease in Western capitals, where officials worry about the direction of a powerful regional player that has a peace deal with Israel. The United States condemned the bloodshed and called on Egyptian leaders to make clear violence was not acceptable.
DEEPLY POLARISED
The 58-year-old previously headed military intelligence and studied at the U.S. Army War College. Diplomats say he is well known to the United States, which donates $1.3 billion in military aid each year, helping reassure Washington that the last year's changes in the top brass would not upset ties.
One of Sisi's closest and longest serving associates, General Mohamed el-Assar, an assistant defense minister, is now in charge of the military's relations with the United States.
Almost seven months after Mursi took office, Egyptian politics have become even more deeply polarized.
Opponents spurned a call by Mursi for talks on Monday to try to end the violence. Instead, protesters have rallied in Cairo and Alexandria, and in the three Suez Canal cities - Port Said, Ismailia and Suez - where Mursi imposed emergency rule.
On Tuesday, thousands were again on the streets of Port Said to mourn the deaths of two people in the latest clashes there, taking the total toll in Mediterranean port alone to 42 people. Most were killed by gunshots in a city where weapons are rife.
Mohamed Ezz, a Port Said resident speaking by telephone, heard heavy gunfire through the night. "Gunshots damaged the balcony of my flat, so I went to stay with my brother," he said.
Residents in the three canal cities had taken to the streets in protest at a nightly curfew now in place there. The president's spokesman said on Tuesday that the 30-day state of emergency could be shortened, depending on circumstances.
In Cairo on Tuesday afternoon, police again fired teargas at stone-throwing youths in a street near Tahrir Square, the center of the 2011 uprising. But the clashes were less intense than previous days and traffic was able to cross the area. Street cleaners swept up the remains of burnt tires and other debris.
The police have been facing "unprecedented attacks accompanied by the appearance of groups that pursue violence and whose members possess different types of weapons", the state news agency reported, quoting the Interior Ministry spokesman.
Street flare-ups are a common occurrence in divided Egypt, frustrating many people desperate for order and economic growth.
WARY MILITARY
Although the general's comments were notably blunt, Egypt's military has voiced similar concerns in the past, pledging to protect the nation. But it has refused to be drawn back into a direct political role after its reputation as a neutral party took a pounding during the 17 months after Mubarak fell.
"Egyptians are really alarmed by what is going on," said Cairo-based analyst Elijah Zarwan, adding that the army was reflecting that broader concern among the wider public.
"But I don't think it should be taken as a sign that the military is on the verge of stepping in and taking back the reins of government," he said.
In December, Sisi offered to host a national dialogue when Mursi and the rivals were again at loggerheads and the streets were aflame. But the invitation was swiftly withdrawn before the meeting went ahead, apparently because the army was wary of becoming embroiled again in Egypt's polarized politics.
Protests initially flared during the second anniversary of the uprising which erupted on January 25, 2011 and toppled Mubarak 18 days later. They were exacerbated in Port Said when residents were angered after a court sentenced to death several people from the city over deadly soccer violence.
Since the 2011 revolt, Islamists who Mubarak spent his 30-year rule suppressing have won two referendums, two parliamentary elections and a presidential vote.
But that legitimacy has been challenged by an opposition that accuses Mursi of imposing a new form of authoritarianism. Mursi's supporters says protesters want to overthrow Egypt's first democratically elected leader by undemocratic means.
The army has already been deployed in Port Said and Suez and the government agreed a measure to let soldiers arrest civilians as part of the state of emergency. Sisi reiterated that the army's role would be to support the police in restoring order.
Mursi's invitation to rivals to a national dialogue with Islamists on Monday was spurned by the main opposition National Salvation Front coalition, which described it as "cosmetic".
The presidency said a committee would be formed to look at changes to the constitution, but it ruled out changing the government before the parliamentary election.
Mursi's pushing through last month of a new constitution which critics see as too Islamic remains a bone of contention.
(Additional reporting by Yasmine Saleh and Omar Fahmy in Cairo, Yusri Mohamed in Ismailia and Abdelrahman Youssef in Alexandria; Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Peter Millership)
MADRID: A Spanish doctor on trial over a major blood doping racket involving top professional cyclists said Tuesday he had worked for athletes in "all kinds" of sports.
Eufemiano Fuentes, 57, was testifying at his trial in the so-called Puerto affair, one of the biggest ever doping scandals, which came to court this week seven years after it erupted.
Fuentes is charged with public health offences rather than sports doping, which was not illegal at the time in Spain.
Although the doctor admits providing blood transfusions for athletes, who he refuses to name, he denies this risked their health.
That may limit the trial's impact on the sporting world, which is reeling from US cyclist Lance Armstrong's admission that he doped his way to seven Tour de France victories.
"I worked on a private basis with individual athletes of all kinds," Fuentes told the court in Madrid in his four-hour testimony on Tuesday.
Police detained Fuentes in 2006 when they seized 200 bags of blood and other evidence of performance-enhancing transfusions, in an investigation dubbed "Operation Puerto".
Asked who those bags of blood belonged to, Fuentes told the court: "It could be other kinds of athlete, but in 2006 it was mainly cyclists."
Investigators listed 58 cyclists suspected in the scandal.
Of the 58, only six have received sporting sanctions: Spain's Alejandro Valverde, Germans Jan Ullrich and Joerg Jaksche and Italians Ivan Basso, Michele Scarponi and Giampaolo Caruso, who was later cleared by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Fuentes, his sister Yolanda and three other defendants are charged with endangering public health rather than incitement to doping, which was also not a crime in Spain at the time of the arrests.
He denies that his treatment endangered the cyclists' health.
He told the court on Tuesday that athletes such as footballers and boxers came to him for "medical and nutritional advice, physical and medical tests to guarantee that their health would not suffer".
He said he did not know whether the cyclists he treated told their team managers about it.
Fuentes said that he and another doctor, Jose Luis Merino Batres, tested the viscosity of the athletes' blood -- known as the haematocrit value -- and extracted blood if they found the level too high.
After freezing the blood in a bag to preserve it, they re-injected it if the haematocrit value had fallen too low, "because that too is dangerous" for the health, Fuentes said.
Merino has been spared going on trial for the time being since he has Alzheimer's disease.
Fuentes said he kept a "blood diary" recording the extractions and tagged the frozen blood with codes identifying the athletes.
Former cyclist Jesus Manzano, a former rider on Spanish team Kelme of which Fuentes was the head doctor, has alleged generalised doping in the team and says he himself underwent unsafe transfusions.
A court official said Tuesday that Armstrong's former team-mate Tyler Hamilton will testify at the trial, after the judge granted a request by the World Anti-Doping Agency, a civil party in the case.
Other trial witnesses include Alberto Contador, Tour de France winner in 2007 and 2009, who returned to competition last year after a two-year ban for a separate case in which he denied doping. Contador, due to appear on February 5, was cleared of any involvement in the Puerto affair.
The date for Hamilton's testimony had yet to be set.
Fuentes's defence lawyer was due to take the floor on Wednesday and the trial is scheduled to last until March 22.
- AFP/jc
Sony KD-84X9000 UHD TV.
Japan is expected come July 2014 to become the first country in the world to broadcast in 4K Ultra HD resolution. This is almost two years ahead of the schedule set by Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in its bid to revive the country's ailing domestic consumer electronics industry.
4K offers four times the resolution of a Blu-ray movie. The launch of this 4K broadcast service is timed to coincide with the knockout rounds of the FIFA World Cup 2014 football tournament.
To mitigate the bandwidth limitation of existing digital broadcasting systems, dedicated communication satellites will be used initially. However, the 4K transmission will eventually encompass both commercial broadcasting satellites and terrestrial channels. This TV service is unlikely to be free for viewers, although the Japanese government is said to be funding the overall running cost.
As if this is not enough, the ministry might also be bringing forward Japan's experimental 8K broadcasts to 2016, just in time for the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
(Source: Crave Asia via The Asahi Shimbun)
History points to "The Pill" as one of the main triggers of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The "Swinging 60s" were a time of sexual revolution. But one economist argues it was a far less sexy pill -- penicillin -- that was a major force behind changing sexual mores.
"It's a common assumption that the sexual revolution began with the permissive attitude of the 1960s and the development of contraceptives like the birth control pill," Andrew Francis, an economist at Emory University, said in a press release. "The evidence, however, strongly indicates that the widespread use of penicillin, leading to a rapid decline in syphilis during the 1950s, is what launched the modern sexual era."
Dr. Francis, who conducted an analysis recently published in "Archives of Sexual Behavior," argues that penicillin reduced the risks associated with sex. He compares it to the economic law of demand: when the cost of a good falls, people buy more of the good.
Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but was not widely used until World War II. The U.S. government had to deal with the very real problem of soldiers contracting sexually transmitted diseases. Penicillin was found to be an effective cure for the most damaging: syphilis.
"The military wanted to rid the troops of STDs and all kinds of infections, so that they could keep fighting," Francis said. "That really sped up the development of penicillin as an antibiotic."
After the war, penicillin became widely proscribed, and syphilis rates fell accordingly. Between 1947 and 1957, the incidence of syphilis fell by 95 percent - all but eliminating it as a consequence of sexual activity.
The analysis also unearths dire warnings from doctors of that era. Spanish physician Eduardo Martinez Alonso, writing in the 1950s, pointed to penicillin as a way for immoral people to get away with risky behavior. "The wages of sin are now negligible," he wrote. "One can almost sin with impunity, since the sting of sinning has been removed."
Dr. Francis analyzed data from state and federal health agencies between the 1930s and 1970s. The analysis looked at three measures of sexual behavior: the illegitimate birth ratio; the teen birth share; and the incidence of gonorrhea.
"As soon as syphilis bottoms out, in the mid- to late-1950s, you start to see dramatic increases in all three measures of risky sexual behavior," Francis said.
While this does not discount the impact of the birth control pill - which Ms. Magazine co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin once called "the most revolutionary development of the 20th century" - it does shine a light on an unheralded warrior in America's cultural revolution.
The fact that this unusual analysis comes from an economist is no surprise - at least to economist Andrew Francis.
"People don't generally think of sexual behavior in economic terms," he said, "but it's important to do so because sexual behavior, just like other behaviors, responds to incentives."
Copyright © News parvoline. All rights reserved.
Design 
