Brutal Actions by ISIS: A United Nations envoy on sexual violence recently stated that “Teenage girls abducted by Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria are being sold in slave markets ‘for as little as a pack of cigarettes’” (The Guardian, June 8, 2015).

War between China and America? A recent London newspaper declared, “US-China war ‘inevitable’ unless Washington drops demands over South China Sea” (The Telegraph, May 26, 2015). China’s Communist Party has stated, “If the United States’ bottom line is that China has to halt its activities, then a US-China war is inevitable in the South China Sea” (ibid.).

Outbreaks of Epidemic Diseases: “Hong Kong issued a ‘red alert’ advisory on Tuesday against non-essential travel to South Korea, where eight new cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) were reported, bringing the total to 95 with seven fatalities... South Korea has the second highest number of infections, after Saudi Arabia, according to data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control...

Tim Heffernan, in the article “Rust Never Sleeps” from the March 2015 issue of The Atlantic, wrote: “Technological advances and cultural change can do only so much to fight rust, however. We can greatly slow corrosion, but we cannot stop it outright. Exposed iron and steel naturally revert to their lowest energy states by giving up their electrons to oxygen and water. The process is formally known as oxidation. Informally, it’s called rusting.”

Back in 1940, as Britain faced its “darkest hour” of World War II, the nation's future hung in the balance. During a remarkable and harrowing window of eight days in late May and early June, a series of miracles took place, focused on the evacuation of the British army at Dunkirk. Now, exactly eighty years later, we can still learn much from those miraculous events.