Free Republic

PANJIN, China — It’s been 11 months, and Xu Min still rarely leaves the house. He spends his days on the couch in front of a TV, trying to block out memories of his dead son. He blames fate for the car accident that killed the 23-year-old in September. But for the loneliness that will haunt him and his wife the rest of their lives, Xu blames the Chinese government. China told the couple that they could have only one child and threatened to take away everything if they didn’t listen. They were good citizens, Xu said, “so for 20...

The Head of the Samaria Regional Council, Gershon Mesika, said Tuesday that the latest statistics prove that the Jewish settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria cannot be undone. "The data that are published, again and again, give a clear picture that shows that the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria has passed the point of no return,” he said. "The population beyond the Green Line currently numbers over 730,000 Jewish citizens,” he noted. The “Green Line” refers to the 1949 armistice line, and the territories beyond it include parts of Jerusalem, as well as Judea and Samaria. "There are more...

Talk of population growth among conservatives often leads to two basic perspectives: (1) environmental concerns over excessive population growth are largely unfounded (i.e., the rejection of Paul Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" hypothesis); and (2) more population growth equals larger economic markets, which is a good thing.  But population growth is not always supportive of true conservative principles, and the trends are heading in a problematic direction. The urban-rural vote split needs to be front-and-center in conservative political strategizing.  It is not working in our favor.  After the 2010 mid-term elections, The Economist magazine noted that "there's scarcely a major city in...

A new global Christianity report predicts that there will be 2.6 billion Christians by 2020, with most of the growth expected in the global South while Christianity continues to decline in the global North. The study conducted by U.S.-based Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary titled, "Christianity In Its Global Context, 1970-2010", offers a timely overview of the changing context of Christianity since 1970, while looking forward to 2020. The data in the study also details the religious and social contexts of each of the 21 United Nations regions and the changes that will...

China was downgraded Wednesday to the lowest ranking in an annual U.S. survey of human trafficking across the globe, raising the prospect of rare sanctions from Washington. The U.S. State Department said China together with Russia and Uzbekistan have been dumped to the Tier-3 blacklist of the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report after languishing on Tier-2 Watch List, the second lowest rank, for nearly a decade. They join the other countries that have been on the blacklist for years—North Korea, Syria, Zimbabwe, and Iran. In downgrading China, the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons cited an...

A state analysis of U.S. Census data released today shows Hawaii has by far the largest share of Asians and the smallest share of whites in any U.S. state's total population. The research division of the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism said the data shows 56.9 percent of Hawaii's population identified as Asian, either alone or in combination with one or more races as of July 1 last year. That's by far the highest share of any state, with California ranked second at 15.8 percent. Despite a population of just under 1.4 million, Hawaii ranks fifth in the...

A newborn infant has been rescued from a toilet pipe in eastern China after being allegedly flushed down by his parents. Firefighters plucked the baby boy from a pipe section right under the toilet commode. The pipe was cut away piece by piece to reveal the screaming newborn, who was wedged in tight.

On Thursday I had a chance to go to the Eurasia Foundation’s 20th anniversary gala (thanks Eurasia Foundation!) where I listened to a few very interesting speeches on Russia and the greater Eurasia region. One of these speeches was by Robert Zoellick, the former head of the World Bank and someone who is just a little bit more influential than your humble author. In the course of his remarks, which were primarily focused on the economic transformation that resulted from communism’s collapse, Zoellick made several offhand observations about how Russia’s population is collapsing, the death rate is rising, and alcoholism...

Japanese elderly now outnumber children. TOKYO, April 19, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Japan is seeing the most rapid decline in population of any country on earth, according to the World Population Data Sheet produced by the U.S. Population Reference Bureau. A newly released report on demographic trends by the Japanese government reveals that Japan's population continues to plummet, and that 2012 saw the biggest population drop since record-keeping began in the 1950s. On October 1, 2012, the country’s population was estimated at 127,515,000, down 0.22 percent from the previous year, said the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in a April 16 report....

Destroying America is big these days. Everyone wants to do it. Including retired UN bigwigs. Sure Obama is doing it pretty quickly, but what if we put the Destroy America bulldozer in gear and just rammed it forward while spouting absolutely insane ideas? To answer that question we have this proposal from the former director of the United Nations Population Division to make America the most populous country in the world. Sure you might be asking yourself, “Wait a minute. Is that a good thing. Why do we want to be the most populous country in the world?” But that’s...

On ABC's This Week Sunday, George Will made a comment about the need for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that is likely to raise eyebrows on both sides of the aisle. "As the baby boomers retire, and as the birthrate declines, we need something to replenish the workforce to sustain the welfare state" (video follows with transcript and commentary):*NOTE: Video at link* JONATHAN KARL, SUBSTITUTE HOST: George, right to you. You heard a debate among Republicans on immigration. Which side should the Republican Party come down on? GEORGE WILL: Every conservative sympathizes with what Jeff Sessions was saying...

(CNSNews.com) - The number of American workers collecting federal disability payments climbed to yet another record of 8,853,614 in March, up from 8,840,427 in February, according to newly released data from the Social Security Administration. That means there are more than 3 times as many Americans taking disability payments as there are people living in the city of Chicago, which according to the Census Bureau has a population of 2,707,120. March was the 194th straight month that the number of American workers collecting federal disability payments increased. The last time the number of Americans collecting disability decreased was in January...

Liberally translated from the French from Muslim Immigration to France. You won't Be Able to Say You didn't Know: In 1968 the French population was 49.7 million people. Muslims in France were 610,000 or 1.23% of the population. In 1988 the French population was 56 million. Muslims in France were 2,000,000 or 3.6% of the population. In 2009 the French population was 67 million. Muslims in France were 8,000,000 or 11.94%. These are official figures, which are likely to underestimate the real number of Muslims. France's Muslim population has been multiplying by at least 3.5 every 20 years since 1968. If this growth is not...

Liberal icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, "You're entitled to your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts." But that was decades ago, and today more leftists than ever have graduated from confusion to delusion and believe they're entitled to their own fiction. A good example is naturalist David Attenborough, who recently complained that man is a plague upon our planet. He warns that our burgeoning population will ensure that we consume the world's resources like a sun-occluding swarm of high-tech locusts. Writes The Telegraph: "We are a plague on the Earth. It's coming home to roost...

After almost 40 years of legalized abortions throughout the United States — and longer in states that okayed abortions pre-Roe — the U.S. population has been decimated to the point that the nation is seeing the lowest population growth since the 1930s.Abortion has destroyed not only one generation of Americans but a second as well — people who should be boosting the fertility rate in their childbearing years now who were victims of abortions in the 1970s and 1980s. In total, more than 55 million Americans are been victimized by abortions and millions more were never born because their parents...

The New York Times has finally discovered that fiscal cliffs aren’t the only thing that menace the modern nation-state. There’s a demographic cliff, too. A couple weeks ago, the Times’s Ross Douthat wrote a column about America’s bleak demographic future and suggested that the reason we aren’t having enough babies is that we’ve become a decadent society. Douthat’s column touched off something of a firestorm on the left as liberal writers flipped out over the ideas that (1) There aren’t enough babies; (2) More babies would be a good thing; and (3) The dearth of babies suggests there might be...

NUMBER FIVE: Pro-abortion advocates insisted that illegal abortions were rampant throughout South America. They claimed 800,000 Mexican abortions per year. Then Mexico City legalized abortion, and anyone who has gotten illegal abortions in Mexico can travel there to get legal abortions. Only 14,000 have done so. That's 786,000, or 98%, fewer abortions than estimated. NUMBER FOUR: In 1995, the Beijing Conference on Women set as a goal increasing the global availability of abortion, to prevent the global population from increasing to 20 billion by 2050. The conference failed miserably at increasing abortion (see Happy News #1), but no worries: the...

In the Judeo-Christian understanding, God is a being who loves humanity—even sinful and erring humanity—and creates an ordered world that we can know and harness for productive ends. This is a very different conception from the capricious and transcendent God of Islam, who cannot love because such would imply weakness or incompleteness. Muslims can be sure of heavenly reward only through dying to protect Islam from its enemies. Under Islam, human beings submit as a collectivity to Allah’s absolute power; in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in contrast, individuals have inalienable rights granted by a God who limits His own power in...

The U.S. birth rate dropped to its lowest level in more than 90 years, led by a drop among immigrants, according to a report data released Thursday by the Pew Research Center. In 2011, the overall birth rate was 63.2 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, the lowest since at least 1920, Pew reported, citing numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics. The birth rate reached 122.7 in 1957, the peak of the Baby Boom. After the mid-1970s, the birth rate stabilized at about 65 to 70 births per 1,000 women annually, until the beginning of the Great Recession....

DNA sequencing of 36 complete Y chromosomes has uncovered a previously unknown population explosion that occurred 40 to 50 thousand years ago, between the first expansion of modern humans out of Africa 60 to 70 thousand years ago and the Neolithic expansions of people in several parts of the world starting 10 thousand years ago. This is the first time researchers have used the information from large-scale DNA sequencing to create an accurate family tree of the Y chromosome, from which the inferences about human population history could be made. "We have always considered the expansion of humans out of...