68 Percent of Korean Poll Respondents Said They Think It’s Possible for China to Rule Asia if the US Can’t Enhance Its Competitiveness Vis-à-Vis China.

As Vice President Kamala Harris travels in Asia, it’s hard for her not to be concerned by attitudes about American engagement in the region.

It’s no surprise that surveys show many Koreans view China as a major security threat, but their questions about US strength and commitment to the region are striking. A joint survey from The JoongAng Daily–Seoul National University Asia Center (January 2022) on Korean public opinion regarding US-China relations showed “68% of respondents believed that it is possible for China to rule Asia if the US is not able to enhance its competitiveness vis-à-vis China.”

Melting Arctic Sea Ice Does Not Itself Raise Sea Levels. But…

For all the recent headlines on climate extremes across the United States and Europe, climate change is significantly more dramatic in the Arctic. Several recent studies suggest that the Arctic is warming at nearly four times the average global rate; Alaska, of which roughly a third is above the Arctic Circle, is warming more than twice as fast as the contiguous United States.

Vladimir Putin has described Crimea as Russia’s “center of spiritual unity.” In reality, it has been home to more than 100 nationalities, and was brutally “Russified” by Joseph Stalin in the 1940s.

One of those nationalities, the Crimean Tatars, have called the peninsula home for many centuries. They remained there even after Catherine the Great’s victory over Ottoman forces in 1783.

But in 1944, Joseph Stalin formally ordered the deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar community (roughly 200,000 in number), falsely accusing them of collaborating with the Nazis. Stalin’s government forcibly loaded most onto freight cars bound for Central Asia, where they were to be resettled. Reports suggest that nearly half of the deported died during the ordeal. Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Canada have all formally recognized Stalin’s brutal deportation as a crime of genocide or cultural genocide.

The US is the World's Fourth Largest Spanish Speaking Country.

A recent report conducted by Instituto Cervantes asserts that nearly 493 million people in the world speak Spanish as their native language. Measured by number of native speakers, that would make Spanish the world’s second most prominent language behind Mandarin Chinese.

Mexico has the world’s largest Spanish speaking-population—by a wide margin—but the US currently has the world’s fourth largest Spanish-speaking population, when measuring native Spanish speakers. In fact, the US has 40 times the number of Spanish speakers of any other country where Spanish is not an official language.