In The News

Pointless accumulation of material goods, as compensation for widening inequality, was an underlying cause of the widespread UK riots in August, contends Unicef UK. Work-weary parents who replace playtime and conversations with “stuff” are raising unhappy, difficult children. In a follow-up to a 2007 Unicef study showing that the well-being of British children was the lowest among OECD nations,...

Colombia currently ranks fourth in the world in the number of spoken indigenous languages, after Brazil, Mexico and Peru. Nevertheless, only three of those indigenous languages are spoken by more than 50,000 people, and most of the indigenous languages could vanish by the end of the century, reports John Otis for the GlobalPost. Increasingly more indigenous people choose to learn Spanish over...

China has lost the will to enforce its unpopular one-child policy, largely because the need for enforcement has vanished. Europe and the US have long criticized the one-child policy, blaming it for China’s ballooning aging population and a gender imbalance. Fertility rates have gradually fallen throughout urbanizing and industrializing East Asia, and China is no different. China’s overall...