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China's urban population now exceeds the number of rural dwellers for first time in its history, the country's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Tuesday.

Chart of Mega-Deaths or Multicides in human history, with one exception. The Holocaust.

To those who've declared European civilization dead due to demographics, I've often replied that in Europe, there are ents. In J.R.R. Tolkein's "The Lord of the Rings" series, ents were extremely long-lived tree-like creatures who thought in terms of centuries, not years. They were painfully slow to act, but amazingly forceful when they do. What we're witnessing in Europe is a rebound of birth rates that is slow and incomplete, yet highly significant and growing. These rebounding birth rates are not due to Islamic and African immigrants. In many nations, the number of Islamic immigrants is much lower than perceived...

This FaithIssues video shows the exponential population growth of human beings from a biblical perspective. The bible says in the book of Daniel that in the last days man will travel to and fro and knowledge will increase. And along with that has been a huge population increase. Enjoy this video and share it with your friends. Thank you. Faith Issues Link to video: http://www.youtu.be/KlNYwsAQYzQ

A growing number of Americans is thinking about turning expat, according to a survey by America Wave and Zogby International. The share of Americans planning to relocate increased to 2.5 percent from 0.8 percent in 2009. If this number describes the entire population, that means around 6 million Americans are planning on leaving the country. America Wave's Bob Adams (a Business Insider contributor) found that single people, political conservatives and men were more likely to be in this group.

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla) lashed out at those who argue for laws to protect “personhood” calling them “purveyors of an extreme and radical notion.” The inspiration for Wasserman-Schultz’s outburst is the growing movement for enacting so-called “personhood” amendments to state constitutions in Mississippi, Ohio, Texas, Kansas, and Florida. Under these amendments an unborn human would be deemed a person for the purpose of defending his or her legal rights. The most alarming aspect of this from Wasserman-Schultz’s perspective would be that the amendments would bar such persons from being deprived of life, liberty, or property without...

First, the context: Modern political science -- which readily understands imperialism, resistance, and clash of competing interests -- does not similarly understand “the wasting away of nations.� That, says David Goldman, author of How Civilizations Die: (and why Islam is dying too), is because political scientists tend to assume that people will follow their rational self-interest. In fact, they often don’t.From antiquity, he notes, a symptom of a civilization’s decline has been the destruction of children:Macedonian poet Poseidippus of Pella wrote: “Even a rich man always exposes a daughter.� A 200 BCE survey of seventy-nine families in Miletus, an ancient...

More than 30 countries, mostly in Europe and East Asia, face rapidly ageing populations. The world’s richest nations are approaching a baby bust. It’s a bear market for newborns and the effects could spell economic and social dislocation in the next 20 years, according to some analysts. As demographers debate the dangers and benefits of the earth’s population reaching seven billion on October 31, advanced economies in Europe, East Asia and even the US are facing declining birth rates. With senior citizens making up a larger proportion of the population, countries are worried that there will be too many retirees...

And Baby Makes Seven Billion William McGurn has flagged a United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) news item, "The State of World Population 2011." His comment: "Nothing brings out the inner Malthus like a newborn baby." [quote] At Columbia University's Earth Institute, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs tells CNN "the consequences for humanity could be grim." Earlier this year, a New York Times columnist declared "the earth is full," suggesting that a growing population means "we are eating into our future." And in West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette editorializes about a "human swarm" that is "overbreeding" in a way that "prosperous, well-educated families"...

She's a 40-year-old mother of eight, with a ninth child due soon. The family homestead in a Burundi village is too small to provide enough food, and three of the children have quit school for lack of money to pay required fees. "I regret to have made all those children," says Godelive Ndageramiwe. "If I were to start over, I would only make two or three." (snip) By the time Ndageramiwe's ninth child arrives, and any further members of the Kasadha clan, the world's population will have passed a momentous milestone. As of Oct. 31, according to the U.N. Population...

The world's population looks set to smash through the seven billion barrier in the next few days, according to the United Nations. It comes just 12 years since the total reached six billion - with official estimates saying the figure will top eight billion in 2025 and 10 billion before the end of the century. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2049451/Room-World-population-reach-7-BILLION-days.html#ixzz1aulmmPWc

I was alerted to a fascinating and alarming article on demographic trends that shows forth several significant trends: a globally aging population (not just in the West), the wide scale decline of the nuclear family, and the continued growth of mega cities. One of the most surprising assertions in the article is that many of the trends we have attributed to the increasingly decadent West, are becoming far more worldwide even to include the Muslim and African worlds. Of course we must remember that demographics often look at current trends and project them out into the future. As the article...

David and Victoria Beckham may have been overjoyed to welcome their new daughter, Harper Seven, last week but, according to a growing group of campaigners, the birth of their fourth child make the couple bad role models and environmentally irresponsible.

Older people almost always seem to think they had it tougher than “kids today” do. So some older folks are striking back against the privileges enjoyed by today’s young people. And this doesn’t bode well for the future of society. Consider a recent story out of Pennsylvania. “The owner of a small restaurant outside Pittsburgh is banning children under the age of six, saying they regularly disrupted other customers’ meals,” the Wall Street Journal reported recently. “I’ve decided someone in our society had to dig their heels in on this issue,” the owner (a former teacher, luckily not of grammar)...

In a speech at Sichuan University, US Vice-President Joe Biden told the Chinese government that its one child per family policy will “come back to bite you.” “While the world must be grateful for your heroic efforts to control excess population via rigorous enforcement of widely available pregnancy termination services, there is also a downside,” Biden cautioned. “The decline in the younger-aged cohorts of the population will generate a severe actuarial imbalance in your social security program. This will impair your ability to fund benefits for the aging cohort. Simply put, there won’t be enough younger people working to support...

44.6 million: Projected decline in China’s population of 15- to 24-year-olds this decade. China’s era as the world’s go-to provider of inexpensive labor may be drawing to a close. Workers are demanding higher wages and low-end manufacturers in coastal areas have in recent years complained of labor shortages. Rising affluence and increased opportunities in China’s interior certainly have something to do with that, but so does a profound demographic shift. Largely because of the one-child policy introduced in the late 1970s, the number of children per woman fell to 1.77 in 2000 from 3.78 in 1975, according to the World...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rural America now accounts for just 16 percent of the nation's population, the lowest ever. The latest 2010 census numbers hint at an emerging America where, by midcentury, city boundaries become indistinct and rural areas grow ever less relevant. Many communities could shrink to virtual ghost towns as they shutter businesses and close down schools, demographers say. More metro areas are booming into sprawling megalopolises. Barring fresh investment that could bring jobs, however, large swaths of the Great Plains and Appalachia, along with parts of Arkansas, Mississippi and north Texas, could face significant population declines. These places...

DAVID AND VICTORIA Beckham were overjoyed by the birth last week of their fourth child, a baby girl they named Harper. “We all feel so blessed and the boys love their baby sister so much!!!’’ the former Spice Girl exulted to her vast following on Twitter. A few days later she posted a picture of her husband cradling his new daughter, with the tender comment: “Daddy’s little girl!’’ Whose heart wouldn’t be warmed by the Beckhams’ delight in their newborn? The Observer’s wouldn’t. In a remarkably churlish article on Sunday, Britain’s influential left-leaning newspaper (the Observer is the Guardian’s sister...

Children now make up less of America's population than ever before, even with a boost from immigrant families. And when this generation grows up, it will become a shrinking work force that will have to support the nation's expanding elderly population — even as the government strains to cut spending for health care, pensions and much else.

Launching the scheme yesterday in Rajasthan's Jhunjunu, 155miles west of New Delhi Sitaram Sharma the desert town's chief medical officer was hopeful that these enticements would tempt at least 30,000 people to undergo sterilisation. "We are confident that this idea will work well" Mr Sharma said of the three-month long scheme. The inducements on offer contributed by a local charitable trust include one Nano, the world's cheapest car for the first volunteer, five motorcycles and an equal number of colour televisions and food blenders for disbursal amongst subsequent candidates. Others would be paid varying cash amounts that would supplement the...

From the safety of the political sidelines, former Vice President Al Gore is venturing into a touchy topic, presenting his holistic view of how to curb the buildup of greenhouse gases warming the planet. Besides improving technology to reduce fossil fuel emissions, he is advocating "educating and empowering girls and women." "That's the most powerful leveraging factor," Gore said in a speech Monday in New York. "When that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices." Although not entirely spelled out in the speech, Gore's thinking goes this way: If women are confident their...

I have long argued that the morally twisted beliefs of many environmentalists imply that humans are pollution and that the Earth would be better without us. Al Gore, the Guru of Gaia, now seems to agree with this assessment and comes down clearly against the human race. In an interview the former vice president argued that one way to reduce the carbon emissions that he claims are causing climate change is “to stabilize the population, and one of the principle ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women.” Specifically, “You have to have ubiquitous availability of...

Since the late 1970s, 163 million female babies have been aborted by parents seeking sons. BY JONATHAN V. LAST Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In "Unnatural Selection," Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance... (snip) In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. (snip) Yet today in India...

Perhaps one of the most persistent and pervasive myths that have shaped the thinking of many people and, subsequently, public policy is the myth that the world’s population is spiraling out of control and that it will ultimately lead to catastrophic shortages of the essential resources necessary to sustain life. This whole concept of “overpopulation” can be traced to Thomas Malthus, the British scholar and Anglican clergyman (albeit a very misguided one) who, without any specific knowledge other than his own speculations, predicted in 1789 that the planet’s rapid increase in population would soon outstrip the planet’s ability to produce...

The United Nations recently published its two-yearly update of world population projections. These suggest that Nigeria could rise to 725 million people by 2100. Western media are shrilly calling for Nigeria to put a check on her population growth. No way, sorry. We Nigerians are rejoicing. Africans love children. First for financial security. In the past children helped in the farms and the more of them the better. Today, with little or no social security, children are needed to support their parents in old age. Their contributions constitute an informal pension scheme. And having more children means a better pension....

China has claimed for several years a national fertility rate of 1.8 children born per female of child-bearing age. The latest census figures, released just weeks ago, report about 220 million children aged 0-15. This is consistent with a fertility rate of only 1.4. So why the discrepancy? Why would China lie about failing to reach a birth rate goal that it has succeeded in reaching? If China is lying about having as many as 1.8 children per female, doesn't that suggest that China finds it more advantageous to report the higher birth rate? The birth dearth in China is...

Unless you haven’t eaten in the past several months, or you already grow all of your own produce, you’ve probably noticed that food prices have been rising dramatically. According to the USDA, the average cost to the U.S. consumer of Lettuce is up 4.5%, and fresh Tomatoes are up 4.7% from the same time last year. The recently released U.S. Labor Department consumer price index survey reports that the price of grains such as corn, wheat and soybeans has roughly doubled since last summer...

A new study of DNA suggests North America was originally populated by just a few dozen people who crossed a land bridge from Asia during the last Ice Age. About 14,000 years ago, humans crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia to North America, most experts agree. But just how many intrepid explorers were involved in spawning subsequent populations has not been known. "The estimated effective size of the founding population for the New World is about 70 individuals," said Jody Hey, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University.

World Population To Hit 7-Billion Mark In 6 Months 5/4/2011 9:17 AM ET (RTTNews) - The world population is expected to hit the seven-billion mark on October 31, 2011 with bulk of the increase in the population coming from 58 "high-fertility countries," says a new U.N. report on population. "A world of 7 billion is both a challenge and an opportunity," U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) Executive Director Babatunde Osotimehin said in a statement on Tuesday. "The population projections underscore the urgent need to provide safe and effective family planning to the 215 million women who lack it. Small variations in...

Economies across the developed world are facing the threat of an aging population, increasingly reliant on a shrinking working age population, according to data from the OECD. While instances such as Japan are well known, the problem is endemic across Europe, with many countries seeing their dependency ratios, that is the amount of workers per retirees, shrink as we approach 2050. That has the potential to cause serious funding problems for everything from social security, to pensions, to health care across the developed world, and wreak havoc on countries fiscal policies. We've ranked the OECD countries projected to have the...

With more than 50,000 women dying annually from unsafe abortions, especially in Africa and South-Central Asia, Governments everywhere must make greater efforts to ensure that the old-age and widespread practice of abortion was safe, legal and available to all women and girls, today's keynote speaker told the Commission on Population and Development as it continued its general debate. "When political leaders and policymakers fail to implement known, affordable solutions to an entirely preventable problem, one can only conclude that they do not sufficiently value the women and girls whose lives are at stake," said Eunice Brookman-Amissah, Vice-President for Africa of...

Maybe we can call this Generation U — for unemployed. Three decades ago, the US experienced a dramatic shift in culture and economics as women entered the workforce in record numbers, and our economy expanded to meet the labor supply. As USA Today reports, we have now returned to the same working percentage of the population as we had at the beginning of the expansion, an astonishing decline that doesn’t appear to be slowing much: The share of the population that is working fell to its lowest level last year since women started entering the workforce in large numbers three...

The notion that we are imperiled by the size of the human population has been around since Anglican priest Thomas Malthus first postulated it in the late 18th century. In regard to famine, immorality, war and human misery of all sorts, Malthus maintained that there is "one great cause," preventing "improvement of society," and that is "the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it." If the size of the human population were to go unchecked, Malthus' demographics suggested that people would soon outrun global food supplies. Yup, that tired notion has been around...

According to the latest estimates of US population growth emanating from the Census Bureau, in 50 years from now the United States of America will need to have made room for a bloated populace numbering some 459 million American citizens -and that's not even including 3M+ illegals flooding our nation's borders annually. Yet legal US population growth alone will bring +200 million new Americans by 2060- and the vast majority of this organic incremental increase will consist of immigrants and their offspring... not children born of established American families. The cumulative US Census prediction is represented by a yellow mid-range line of the (below)...

Detroit lost 25% of its population - or 237,000 people - over the last decade, according to new U.S. Census data. It's the largest percentage drop for any American city, the NYT reports, with the exception of New Orleans, which lost 29% of the pop. after Hurricane Katrina. The exodus was driven primarily by the collapse of the auto industry and the mass migration of middle-class African Americans to the suburbs. Detroit's official population is now 713,777, the lowest it has been since 1910. That's down from a peak of 2 million in 1950, when Detroit was the nation's fifth...

Almost daily there are announcements about companies planning to open new operations in Maricopa County, especially in the Mesa area, while job opportunities in Tucson continue to remain dormant or shrink.

Where have all the children gone? It's a problem that Mark Steyn first addressed in his book America Alone. Other than a piece Jonathan Last recently wrote for Weekly Standard, few if any reporters, pundits, politicians, or scholars seemed to take any interest. This is rather astonishing in so far as everything from our national security, economy, and future well-being depends on our ability to procreate. As Mark Steyn quipped, "...a people that won't multiply can't go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the age we live in." If one is to glimpse at the TFR (Total...

The budget stalemate between the right and the left comes down to a basic difference in economic views, the left feels that we need to tax more in order to consume more money, and the right believes that we need to consume less money in order to tax less. Whichever side of the argument you come down on, it's not hard to see which of these positions is fundamentally unsustainable. And it is amazing that the same people who can and do lecture for hours on environmental sustainability, seem to have no grasp of economic sustainability. If you tell them...

Californians for Population Stabilization says the federal government continues to admit more than 1 million immigrants and temporary workers a year "to take American jobs despite the country's highest unemployment levels since the Great Depression." The group launched a TV campaign last month, with ads airing in San Francisco, San Luis Obispo and Bakersfield, where the group says the jobless rate exceeds 16 percent but has topped 18 percent within the last year. In the ad, a man separates the first two letters from the word "illegal." "Attention is turning to the millions of illegal workers in the state. It's...

One of the most intriguing statistics in the 2010 census is the unprecedented movement of black families into homes and jobs in the suburban counties surrounding Dallas. In Collin and Denton counties, and in the suburbs of Dallas and Fort Worth, black growth rates soared by as much as 178 percent over the past decade Allen’s black population soared from 1,915 to 7,071, and the percentage of population almost doubled. Frisco’s black population grew even faster, to 8.1 percent of the population from 3.8 percent in 2000. In Dallas County, Cedar Hill now has a black majority at 51.9 percent...

The world's Muslim population will grow at double the rate of non-Muslims over the next 20 years, according to a broad new demographic analysis that is likely to spark controversy in Europe and the United States. If current trends continue, the study found, the number of Muslims in the United States will more than double, from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030. The percentage of native-born Muslims in the United States is projected to rise from 35 percent today to 45 percent in 2030. The Future of the Global Muslim Population may be the first to attempt...

WASHINGTON — Whites continued to decline as a share of the American population in 2009, and they now represent less than half of all 3-year-olds, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of census data released Monday. The country’s young population is more diverse than ever, with whites now in the minority in nursery schools, preschools and kindergartens in eight states — Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas — and the District of Columbia, according to William H. Frey, a demographer at Brookings. That was up from six states in 2000. “We are on our way to...

The Guardian has a report from the Greek-Turkish frontier - or "Europe's border", as a German member of the 175-strong Frontex security team describes it: "In 2009 some 3,600 migrants managed to slip across the frontier not far from this market town; in 2010 that number shot up to 36,000, helping explain why Greece has become the favoured port of entry for 90% of illegals pouring into the EU. "They come at all hours of the night and day," said Orestiada's police chief, Giorgos Salamangas, in his icon-bedecked office. "And they're coming not just from the Middle East and Asia...

PHOENIX (Reuters) – The number of illegal immigrants in the United States leveled off at around 11 million last year, ending a two-year slide since the start of the recession, according to a study released on Tuesday. The study by the Pew Hispanic Center noted 11.2 million illegal immigrants living and working in the shadows in the United States in March 2010, virtually unchanged from a year earlier. The report, which drew on U.S. Census Bureau data, noted the number of illegal immigrants in the workforce remained steady at around 8 million. The leveling off last year followed a two-year...

The Muslim population in the United States is projected to more than double by 2030, according to a new Pew Forum report. There are about 2.6 million Muslim adults and children in the United States (0.8 percent of the U.S. population) in 2010. That figure is expected to rise to 6.2 million (1.7 percent) in 2030, predicted the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life report released Thursday. Most of the growth will be due to immigration and higher birth rates among Muslims. Christians are, however, expected to still make up by far the majority of the population....

Bill Gates speaks at the mHealth summit. WASHINGTON, DC, January 18, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In the keynote address to the mHealth Summit held in November last year, Bill Gates introduced a plan to use cell phone technology to register every birth on the planet in a newborn vaccination database. Attributing the decline in the number of children who die before their fifth birthday from 20 million in 1960 to 8.5 million today to infant vaccination, Gates told the audience of more than 2,000 at the conference, “About one-third [of that improvement] is by increasing income. The majority has been through...

IT HAS long been true that California on its own would rank as one of the biggest economies of the world. These days, it would rank eighth, falling between Italy and Brazil on a nominal exchange-rate basis. But how do other American states compare with other countries? Taking the nearest equivalent country from 2009 data reveals some surprises. Who would have thought that, despite years of auto-industry hardship, the economy of Michigan is still the same size as Taiwan's? CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR INTERACTIVE MAP

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessor David Shearman has proposed that parents be assessed a tax of $18,000 for each child they have. “Humans are the most ecologically damaging species on the planet,” Shearman asserted. “It follows that if we are to save the planet we must prune back the human population. Putting a tax on each new child that is born strikes me as a most humane way of pursuing this goal.” The Obama Administration’s Science Czar, John Holdren, took exception to the proposal calling it “a weak and attenuated measure. It would only affect...

There is a remarkable statistic in today’s main Daily Telegraph leader: The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life estimates that there are 2,869,000 Muslims in Britain, an increase of 74 per cent on its previous figure of 1,647,000, which was based on the 2001 census. No demographic statistics are reliable in an era of open borders, but such an expansion is unprecedented. The figure of 2.87 million was first published by Pew in a little-noticed press release last September, announcing a report on Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe. The Pew Centre, based in Washington DC, is

The results of the 2010 decennial count generated a lot of attention on television and online, in part because of the announcement of which states would be gaining or losing representation in Congress. The population trends that are driving reapportionment, however, have wider implications beyond how many members of Congress a state sends to Washington. With this calculator you can pick a state, a start date and an end date and the calculator will tell you how many people and how much income moved to and from that state, from and to every other state, in the time period you've...