China

In response to a comment about global warming, I looked up the data for CO2 emissions from the US and China over the last 25 years and made the plots below. The data are from the Energy Information Administration's "Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government" on the web here. The data represent emissions of CO2 from the consumption and flaring of fossil fuels. The first plot shows that since 1980, the U.S. has released 2 times as much carbon dioxide as China has.

The second shows that the contrast is even greater per capita (per person): each year since 1980 the U.S. has released between 4 and 10 times as much CO2 per person as China.

The third plot shows that there is reason to be cocerned about China. Though in recent years the U.S. has continued to emit more CO2 than China, China's emissions are accelerating drastically and will eclipse ours.

According to various blogs (for example this one and this one), Max Lucado, Rick Atchley, and various others met with Chinese officials in Washington, D.C., in mid-July and were hoping (scheduled?) to meet with the president of China in Beijing this past Friday. The subject of these conversations was to be religious freedom in China.

Via the Kyivmission blog: here's an interesting article from The Washington Post about a case of fact-check neglect. It had been widely reported in may different sources that 600,000, 350,000 and 70,000 were the numbers of new engineers produced in 2004 in China, India, and the US, respectively...evidence that the US is falling behind in the technology race. It turns out that the realistic numbers are more like 352,000, 112,000, and 137,000. That means, per million residents, the rate of engineer production is higher in the US.

From an article by Peter S. Goodman in the Washington Post:

Last year, the United States issued nearly 8,000 visas to Chinese-born children adopted by American parents. More than 50,000 children have left China for the United States since 1992. And more than 10,000 children have landed in other countries, according to Chinese reports. The foreign adoption program has matched Chinese babies with foreign families eager for them, while delivering crucial funding to orphanages in this country. But it has also spawned a tragic irony, transforming once-unwanted Chinese girls into valuable commodities worth stealing. Last November, police arrested 27 members of a ring that since 2002 had abducted or purchased as many as 1,000 children here in Guangdong province and sold them to orphanages in Hunan for $400 to $538, according to reports in Chinese state media and interviews with sources familiar with the case, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because provincial officials have ordered a media blackout. The orphanages placed most of those children in homes with unwitting foreign families, many of them Americans, in exchange for mandatory contributions of $3,000 per baby -- a sum nearly twice the average annual Chinese income -- according to sources familiar with the prosecution.