News and Prophecy Staff

Japan has had a pacifist stance since World War II. Yet with China’s massive military buildup and territorial expansion in the South China Sea and North Korea’s overt missile testing, Japan is being moved to expand its military. In an unprecedented move, the island nation will double its military budget by 2027, from 1 to 2 percent of its GDP, in line with the higher level expected of NATO members. Japan will focus in part on “counter-strike” capabilities and buy hundreds of U.S.-made missiles to help reach this goal.

Scavenging animals are often looked down upon as dirty creatures. Yet, they play a vital role in balancing and protecting the ecosystem, and “the more scientists find out more about these consumers of the dead, the clearer it becomes that we should be valuing and protecting scavengers far more than we do today.… By devouring carcasses, they prevent pathogens from spreading to humans and wildlife and contaminants from leaching into the environment” (BBC, December 8, 2022).

As technology continues to advance, one cutting-edge area focuses on brain-computer interfaces, or BCI (The Conversation, December 2, 2022). This new technology has many applications from the biomedical field to defense arenas. However, ethicists fear the technology is rushing forward while crucial ethical questions remain unanswered.

For decades, America and Saudi Arabia have had a marriage of convenience. Saudi Arabia provided the United States with access to oil and the U.S. provided Saudi Arabia with security—until recently. Some say the relationship began faltering after the September 11 attacks in 2001, when it was discovered that the majority of the terrorists involved were Saudi nationals. More recent events have fed the decline in relations between the nations.

According to The Guardian, studies show that behaviors and attitudes associated with religious faith can benefit believers’ health in many ways. As a professor of public health at the University of California at Berkley put it, “Religious and spiritual traditions give you access to different methods of coping that have distinctive benefits” (December 3, 2022).