Vladimir Putin envisions a Eurasian Union that will put Moscow as a top leader among the world’s nations by 2015.  The Russian Prime Minister “has a vision for a Soviet Union-lite he hopes will become a new Moscow-led global powerhouse.”  On January 1, 2012, Russia moved one step closer to this goal with an agreement with Belarus and Kazakhstan to allow free movement of goods and capital across their borders.

Several years ago, I had the honor of being a public school teacher in a major city. One year I was assigned to a new building under construction. When the time came for school to start, the building was not yet ready. So, I was given an assignment to take some other teachers to an old school building and hold classes there until the new building was ready.

Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay (a land-locked nation) have backed Argentina’s recent ban of boats carrying the Falkland flag from docking in their ports.  And Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner “claimed Britain was ready to use its military to steal natural resources ‘anywhere, anyhow.’”

Typhoon Washi swept through the Philippines two weeks ago.  Flash flooding devastated a southern region and two cities, killing over 1,100 people.  According to one official, “Mortuaries have been unable to cope and authorities have started digging mass graves to bury victims” (Reuters, December 20, 2011).  Tens of thousands of displaced persons are crowded into evacuation facilities with sanitation problems and little water.  Over 330,000 people are now unable to return to their homes (AFP, December 24, 2011).

For thousands of years, mankind has known the universe is full of stars.  When the Hubble space-telescope was launched in 1990, scientists began to number the stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone at more than 100 billion.  But the assumption, based on Hubble data, was that there were very few planets outside our own solar system. Now, NASA’s new and more powerful Kepler space-telescope is sending back evidence of planets outside our solar system—thousands of them.