News

"Why America is Falling Behind the Rest of the World" is the title of a sobering new Time Magazine article (July 21, 2015). The article reviews twelve signs of the decline of America—the research findings of two faculty members at Brooklyn College and City University of New York.

“French president Francois Hollande has called for a stronger more harmonised eurozone following a politically turbulent few weeks in which crisis with Greece has exposed the fault-lines in how the single currency is managed... He called for a vanguard of countries that would lead the eurozone, which should have its own government, a ‘specific budget’ and its own parliament” (EU Observer, July 20, 2015).

Diplomats were smiling in Vienna last week when the United States and six other nations struck a nuclear weapons control deal with the Iranian government. Yet, while many in the West consider the deal a historic breakthrough, other nations such as Israel and Saudi Arabia now fear that Iran may use this deal as cover to create a nuclear weapon.

“The United States is now the world’s second largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico, according to a new study published by the prestigious Instituto Cervantes… there are 41 million native Spanish speakers in the US plus a further 11.6 million who are bilingual, mainly the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants. This puts the US ahead of Colombia (48 million) and Spain (46 million) and second only to Mexico (121 million)” (The Guardian, June 29, 2015).

Some news reports grab your attention and will not let go—particularly when they involve some desperate situation that affects masses of people. We see many such epochal forces going on now with massive flooding across the South in the United States, resulting in widespread property damage and loss of life. Yet a few hundred miles away from some of the affected areas, California—America’s most populous state—parches in prolonged drought.