News

A tragedy is underway in the world’s youngest country, South Sudan. Years of warfare have brought crop destruction, starvation and resulting hyperinflation—a rise in food prices by over 280% since last year (Deutsche Welle, November 6, 2017). Food shortages have affected 4.8 million of the nation’s 12 million people.

According to a secret federal government policy document leaked to the German publication Der Spiegel, the German Defense Ministry has rehearsed six different scenarios they believe could play out in Europe in the next 23 years (Telegraph, November 6, 2017;

Over the last five years, the sexually transmitted infection (STI) gonorrhea has increased by 63 percent among Australians living primarily in cities. Gonorrhea has no visible symptoms in 80 percent of cases and can lead to sterility. Australian researchers note that the majority (75 percent) of new cases erupt among heterosexual young people aged 20-29 (BBC, November 6, 2017).

Saudi Arabia closed its border with Yemen after Houthi rebel missiles fell near the international airport in Riyadh (Telegraph, November 6, 2017). The Yemeni proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran is heating up and increasingly worrisome.

So say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN (MSN, October 25, 2017). After ten years of study and the development of a research tool that is 350 times more precise than previous tools, a team of brilliant international scientists cannot identify an imbalance between particles and antiparticles that should theoretically exist if the Big Bang itself produced all the matter in the universe.