It is usual for the two East Asian giants, China and Japan, to hog the demographic headlines, especially those bearing bad news. China is struggling with the fallout of its self-inflicted one child policy disaster, while Japan is in a sustained demographic decline. But sandwiched between these two is a smaller nation with a similar
READ MOREWhen the COVID-19 pandemic began in March, most people never imagined the government-imposed restrictions would be as harsh and arbitrary as they have been, nor that the entire affair would drag on into the new year. Yet glimpses of hope are arriving this week, small pieces of good news we can joyfully carry throughout Advent
READ MOREIn early August 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait and declared it to be his nation’s lost 19th province. Said George H. W. Bush, “This will not stand!” Translation: Get out of Kuwait, Saddam, or we will come over there and throw you out. Six months later, after a five-week air assault
READ MOREMany families took one look at their school district’s remote or hybrid learning offerings this fall and said “no, thank you.” That’s the message gleaned from national and state-specific data on the surging number of homeschooled students this academic year. Prior to the pandemic and related school closures last spring, there were just under two
READ MOREWalter Williams loved teaching. Unlike too many other teachers today, he made it a point never to impose his opinions on his students. Those who read his syndicated newspaper columns know that he expressed his opinions boldly and unequivocally there. But not in the classroom. Walter once said he hoped that, on the day he
READ MOREConvinced that President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, the media suddenly became less hysterical. Just like that, the media, at least to some degree, rediscovered concepts such as fairness and perspective, AWOL the last four years. Two weeks after the election, New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof haltingly, grudgingly, and reluctantly, admitted that
READ MOREFormer President Barack Obama took a bold step the other day when he suggested that calls to defund the police might alienate a number of voters. “You lost a big audience the minute you say it,” Obama noted in a Snapchat interview, “which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get
READ MOREThough some students have found learning at home relieves them of school’s social stresses, many others miss their teachers, classmates, and the routine of the school day. Some of the little ones have become more defiant and have reverted to bed-wetting, while many older students suffer from depression. In “The Children of Quarantine: What does
READ MOREThe five-week offensive by Azerbaijan against the Armenian-inhabited enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh—the Azeris’ internationally recognized territory—has ended in a clear victory for the attacker. Tens of thousands of Armenians have fled their homes in the land they call Artsakh, which they had inhabited continuously for over two millennia. This is yet another defeat of embattled Christendom
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