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The South China Morning Post recently reported that Chinese demographers expect their country’s population to peak in 2018

The official National Bureau of Statistics reports that China’s total fertility rate or TFR, the number of births per woman living through childbearing age, was a stunningly low 1.05 last year, well below the replacement rate of 2.1

reports that on Saturday China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission projected the number of Chinese births to rise 5.7% this year to 17.5 million, 0.95 million

If you were born in 1940, there was a 92 percent chance you’d do better than your parents. That number has declined every decade since — from 79 percent for those born in 1950, to 62 percent in 1960, 61 percent in 1970, to a low of 50 percent for those born in 1980.

Even worse, younger people who do better than their parents are highly concentrated in the upper-middle class. Those born outside of the top-30th income percentile were likely to make less than their parents:

American life expectancy has decreased for the first time in decades. The decline is due to increases in deaths from multiple causes, including heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and suicide.

Modern conservatism, at least in its pre-Donald Trump incarnation, evolved to believe in a marriage of Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman, in which the wisdom of tradition and the wisdom of free markets were complementary ideas.

Both, in their different ways, delivered a kind of bottom-up democratic wisdom — the first through the cumulative experiments of the human past, the second through the contemporary experiments enabled by choice and competition.

In health care policy, however, conservatives tend to simply favor Friedman over Burke. That is, the right’s best health care minds believe that markets and competition can deliver lower costs and better care

A new book by General Sir Richard Shirreff, NATO's deputy supreme allied commander for Europe between 2011 and 2014, evokes a potential scenario that leads to a devastating future war with Russia.

In his account, Russia rapidly expands its war aims by invading the Baltic States, which are NATO members, and world war ensues.

The latter, written at the height of the Cold War, was conceived as a "future history," supposedly looking back at the outbreak and subsequent unfolding of a full-blown NATO vs Warsaw Pact war.

Thailand is now entering its third year under military dictatorship, a reign established when generals seized power from an elected government on May 22, 2014.

The army has vowed to use its sweeping powers to heal a nation torn by class resentment.

When the army seized power two years ago, it justified its takeover by promising a wave of grand reforms. Thailand, the generals said, would become a nation purged of corruption and of the recurring, sometimes bloody street protests that have convulsed the political order for nearly a decade

ongressionally mandated analytical and statistical review of global terroris

m. It is important to understand how the U.S. government defines this subjective phenomenon:

overall decrease in global terrorism

They think he is an existential threat to a diverse and tolerant America, and they want to see a diverse coalition of voters rise up to smack him down. They want to see him electorally humiliated — made a total loser — by the very people he's disrespected and disregarded.

It would also be logical: It seems like common sense that when Trump insults people, it motivates them to do whatever they need to do to vote against him.

But it is never a good idea to believe that just because something ought to happen (logically or morally), it is happening. That's especially true when it comes to the 2016 election and Donald Trump.

A fresh string of attacks by Donald Trump this week on rivals in the GOP establishment — including one delivered against a prominent Latina governor in her home state — raised new doubts about his ability or desire to unite the party’s badly fractured leadership.

The intraparty skirmishing began with an attack on New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) during a campaign rally in Albuquerque, where Trump blamed her for mismanaging the state’s economy and suggested that she was shirking her responsibilities to her constituents

He knocked South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s decision to endorse Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), mocked former Florida governor Jeb Bush for his energy level and blasted 2012 ­Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney as a “choker.” None of the three have endorsed him.

When the rice shoots began to wither on Lam Thi Loi’s farm in the heart of the Mekong Delta, a usually verdant region of Vietnam, she faced a hard choice: Let them die in the parched earth, or pump salty water from the river to give them a chance.

The Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s premier rice growing region, is suffering its worst drought since French colonial administrators began recording statistics in 1926.

The increasingly dramatic effect of El Niño, the weather phenomenon that causes excessive heat and reduced rainfall in Southeast Asia, is the prime reason for the crop failures in the delta, scientists say. But it is not the only one.

The larger number of white working-class voters implies that Democrats are far more dependent on winning white working-class voters, and therefore more vulnerable to a populist candidate like Mr. Trump.

Over all, 34 percent of Mr. Obama’s supporters were white voters without a college degree, compared with 25 percent in the exit polls, according to an Upshot statistical model that integrated census data

the Upshot analysis shows that all of Mr. Obama’s weaknesses were in the South — defined as the former Confederacy plus Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky and West Virginia — where he won just 26 percent.

The better course for all of us — Republican, Democrat and independent — is to step back and take the long view, and to begin building for that.

This election — not only the Trump phenomenon but the rise of Bernie Sanders, also — has reminded us how much pain there is in this country. According to a Pew Research poll, 75 percent of Trump voters say that life has gotten worse for people like them over the last half century.

This declinism intertwines with other horrible social statistics. The suicide rate has surged to a 30-year high — a sure sign of rampant social isolation. A record number of Americans believe the American dream is out of reach. And for millennials, social trust is at historic lows.

The Center for Responsive Politics estimates $6 billion will be spent in the U.S. elections by campaigns, political parties and corporations hoping to propel their candidates into the White House and what writer Mark Twain once called the "best Congress money can buy."

The projected price tag of the 2012 U.S. election dwarfs that of other nations, but corruption monitors from Transparency International (TI) say it's not just how much will be spent but where the money is coming from that threatens the integrity of politics around the world.

While the trajectory for spending in U.S. elections is soaring, total party spending in the 2010 general election in the United Kingdom was actually 26% less than in 2005.

Research suggests that children who attend church perform better in school, divorce less as adults and commit fewer crimes. Regular church attendees even exhibit less racial prejudice than their nonreligious peers.

These benefits apply broadly, across a range of faiths, so the phenomenon appears unrelated to doctrine or place

church attendance has fallen substantially among the members of the white working class in recent year

Swedish police said 15 to 20 people were injured in a fire at a shelter for asylum seekers on Saturday night.

US President Donald Trump this month suggested that immigrants in Sweden were to blame for an increase in crime. Trump's statements puzzled many in Sweden.

Sweden has taken in more refugees per capita than any other European country in recent years, fueling tension and spiking anti-immigrant sentiment.

From his leftist or "statist" perch, Bo has been challenging the "opening and reform" side of the political consensus that Deng Xiaoping secured three decades ago. Wen Jiabao, meanwhile, who plays the role of a learned, emphatic, and upright Confucian prime minister, has been challenging the other half of Deng consensus -- absolute political control -- from the liberal right. He has continuously articulated the need to limit government power through rule of law, justice, and democratization. To do this, he has drawn on the symbolic legacies of the purged reformist leaders he served in the 1980s, particularly Hu Yaobang, whose name he recently helped to "rehabilitate" in official discourse. As every Communist Party leader knows, those who want a stake in the country's future must first fight for control of its past.

Painting black tar roofs with a white, solar-reflective coating is a low cost, quick and tangible way to reduce the risk of power grid ‘brown-outs’, save millions of dollars in energy costs, and curb climate change. The statistics are as simple as they are staggering: A roof covered with solar-reflective white paint reflects up to 90% of sunlight as opposed to the 20% reflected by a traditional black roof. On a 90°F day, a black roof can be up to 180°F. That heat has a major impact on interior building temperature, potentially heating your room to between 115 – 125°F. A white roof stays a cool 100°F. Plus the inside of the building stays cooler than the air outdoors, around 80°F in this example, reducing cooling costs.

White roofs also reduce the “urban heat island” effect in which temperatures rise in dense urban areas because of the proliferation of heat-radiating, black tar surfaces. For example, the Urban Heat Island effect causes New York City to be about 5 degrees warmer than surrounding suburbs and accounts for 5 to 10 percent of summer electricity use.

Volunteers saw that all it takes is a paint roller, some solar-reflective white coating and a little hard work to start curbing climate change.