The week after the U.S. State Department redesignated 10 nations as countries of particular concern (CPCs) over “systemic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations,” the Christian group Open Doors USA released its annual World Watch List of the 50 most dangerous countries for Christians.

Both lists include Myanmar (also known as Burma), China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, with Open Doors noting all 10 countries had extreme, very high, or high levels of persecution against Christians.

Totalitarian North Korea created the most danger, followed closely by Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Pakistan, according to Open Doors’ analysis. India jumped from 15 to 11 on the list due to Hindu nationalists’ increased persecution and the growing power of the nationalist political party.

Overall, 215 million Christians around the world face threats due to their faith. Open Doors called Islamic extremism the “dominant” driver of persecution against Christians in 35 of the 50 countries listed. That included attacks by Islamic extremist groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan, al-Shabaab in Somalia, and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Open Doors CEO David Curry said his team found a “shocking” escalation in attacks against Christian women. Researchers documented 2,260 separate cases of sexual harassment, rape,…

A new study in The Astronomical Journal, shows our solar system may be one of a kind in the universe. And the very properties that make our planetary arrangement unique are also the elements that make Earth habitable, Jay Richards, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and co-author of The Privileged Planet, told me.

Astrophysicists at the Université de Montréal studied 909 planets and 355 stars and discovered that, unlike our solar system, planets in other systems are similar in size with regular spacing between their orbits, “like peas in a pod,” lead researcher Lauren Weiss said in a statement.

In our solar system, Jupiter, the biggest planet, is 28.5 times larger in diameter than the smallest planet, Mercury, and the inner planets have surprisingly large spaces between their orbits. The researchers noted that the variations could suggest our solar system formed differently than others in the universe. Weiss said these disparities “would not occur if the planet sizes or spacings were drawn at random.” The researchers attributed the distinct properties of our planets to disruptions caused by the sizes of Jupiter and Saturn. Of course, they entertained no notions that the unusual drawing of our planetary bodies shows the artistry of our Creator.

Richards noted the study certainly shows something highly unusual about our planetary arrangement: Our oddball solar…

The Chinese birth rate fell last year, two years after the country withdrew its long-standing one-child policy and allowed Chinese couples to have up to two children.

Birth rates rose by 8 percent to 17.9 million children born in 2016. The increase seemed to indicate the success of the new policy: Half of the babies in 2016 were born to couples who already had one child. But the rate dropped in 2017 to 17.2 million births, according to a Chinese National Bureau of Statistics report released last Thursday.

The drop alarms Chinese authorities who are on a mission to increase the size of the country’s younger population to support its fast-growing number of elderly people. With almost 1.4 billion people, China has the world’s largest population but skews elderly, with more aging parents than children to care for them.

And it looks as if a two-child policy is not doing the trick.

One expert is not surprised. Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute and author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order, testified before the Congressional-Executive Committee on China in 2015 that he didn’t expect the two-child amnesty to make a difference in the Chinese birth rate.

“Forty years of anti-natal, anti-child propaganda has left its mark on the Chinese psyche,” said Mosher. “Few Chinese young people, who are themselves only…