Hima is one of the last remaining Kusunda, a tiny indigenous group now scattered across central western Nepal. Their language, also called Kusunda, is unique: it is believed by linguists to be unrelated to any other language in the world. Scholars still aren't sure how it originated. And it has a variety of unusual elements, including lacking any standard way of negating a sentence, words for "yes" or "no", any words for direction, or even a set grammatical structure.

According to the latest Nepali census data from 2011, there are 273 Kusunda remaining. But only one woman, 48-year-old Kamala Khatri, is known to be fluent.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220804-kusunda-the-language-isolate-with-no-word-for-no

What's more, no one in the Biden administration has given us its definition of victory yet. As in Afghanistan, the goal posts are unclear and keep moving. Various members have suggested that the U.S. must keep weapons flowing to Ukraine and sanctions tightening on Moscow until Russia is permanently "weakened" and its military capability degraded, "so Putin doesn't do it again."

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he will declare victory when his forces reclaim all of the country, one fifth of which is now controlled by Russia. But even with our aid, Ukraine's definition of victory is implausible given Russia's overwhelming military superiority.

https://www.newsweek.com/bidens-recklessness-turning-ukraine-another-afghanistan-opinion-1726140

Nepal's Kusunda language has no known origin and a number of quirks, like no words for "yes" or "no". It also has only one fluent speaker left, something linguists are racing to change.

At  present there are 7 109 languages, most of them – spoken.

All hiararchies of languages are built on vehicular languages, because regional languages are interesting only to their speakers. That;s why any attempt to substitute a regional language for a regional one is doomed to failure.

As Americans, we all want Ukrainians—and everyone around the world—to live in a democracy. But that could be an unachievable goal for Ukraine in the near future. U.S. billions will not stop Putin's war, and like Afghanistan, Ukraine is not a mature candidate for a Jeffersonian and Western-style government.

https://www.newsweek.com/bidens-recklessness-turning-ukraine-another-afghanistan-opinion-1726140

Usually substantivized adjectives carry the idea of plurality with the sole exclusion:

The deceased – покойные (покойники)

The deceased – покойный (покойник)

Thus, you would expect “As Ukraine's military step up their strikes”, but it is not the case:

As Ukraine's military steps up its strikes on Kherson, hinting at a new offensive to recapture the region, there is another force working alongside. They are Ukraine's shadow army, a network of agents and informers who operate behind enemy lines.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62333795

Ukraine's definition of victory is “implausible” – political correctness

REBEKAH KOFFLER , PRESIDENT OF DOCTRINE & STRATEGY CONSULTING, FORMER DIA INTELLIGENCE OFFICER
ON 7/19/22 AT 6:00 PM EDT

As Americans, we all want Ukrainians—and everyone around the world—to live in a democracy. But that could be an unachievable goal for Ukraine in the near future. U.S. billions will not stop Putin's war, and like Afghanistan, Ukraine is not a mature candidate for a Jeffersonian and Western-style government.

Despite the rosy image of Ukraine painted by Washington politicians and the mainstream media, the country remains one of the most corrupt places in the world, ranking 123rd out of the 180 countries on the corruption scale, only slightly worse than the legendarily corrupt Russia, which is 139th.

Washington's democracy promotion project, as noble as it may sound, has been tried and failed many times around the world. And it is unlikely to succeed in Ukraine.

What's more, no one in the Biden administration has given us its definition of victory yet. As in Afghanistan, the goal posts are unclear and keep moving. Various members have suggested that the U.S. must keep weapons flowing to Ukraine and sanctions tightening on Moscow until Russia is permanently "weakened" and its military capability degraded, "so Putin doesn't do it again."

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he will declare victory when his forces reclaim all of the country, one fifth of which is now controlled by Russia. But even with our aid, Ukraine's definition of victory is implausible given Russia's overwhelming military superiority.

https://www.newsweek.com/bidens-recklessness-turning-ukraine-another-afghanistan-opinion-1726140

It is 1917 and in Russia the Bolsheviks have seized power, de-throning the Tsar and declaring a revolutionary communist regime that would transfer the means of production to the people. Within a year, the royal family and their entourage lie dead as imperialism is violently dismantled to make way for Russia's radical new future. But one important remnant of the old order remains: the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory (IPM) on the outskirts of the city now known as St Petersburg.

Renaming it the State Porcelain Manufactory, the Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, took control of this symbol of tsarist decadence, seeing surprising potential in it as a wheelhouse for artistic innovation and the production of propaganda. Stocks of unpainted, snow-white china became a tantalising canvas for avant-garde artists keen to express their utopian ideologies and rouse enthusiasm for the new socialist era, giving this delicate, bourgeois material an unexpected, almost contradictory, second life.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220629-how-teapots-were-used-to-spread-russian-propaganda

"The word 'discipline' has been misconstrued as 'punishment', meaning inflicting pain as a consequence of doing something," says Dan Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the author of six books on parenting, including No-Drama Discipline. He points out that the word "discipline" comes from the Latin word disciplina – which means instruction or teaching.

"Parents say, 'Parents should be good disciplinarians.' We go, 'Yes – and a disciplinarian is a teacher.'"

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220607-what-should-you-do-when-a-child-misbehaves

It's no surprise that the influence and impact of Ancient Greece resonates today. As defined by Britannica, the phrase refers to the northeastern Mediterranean region in the era between "the end of the Mycenaean civilisation (1200BC) and the death of Alexander the Great (323BC)", when it was one of the most important places in the world, according to National Geographic. The people of Hellas – as the lands of the Hellenes were called (the names Greece and Greek were conferred on them later by the Romans) were great thinkers, writers, warriors, actors, athletes, artists and politicians.
Roderick Beaton in his history book The Greeks, writes that the Greek civilisations were the "origin of much of the arts, science, politics and law as we know them throughout the developed world today".
Think Aristotle in his studies of plants, animals and rocks; Herodotus in writing history; Socrates and Plato in philosophy. The Greeks pioneered democracy; reading with an alphabet; the Olympics; geometry and mathematical calculations; health innovations (the Hippocratic oath is still a standard of ethics for physicians); great architecture, like the Parthenon, Temple of Zeus and Acropolis; theatre, care of Greek comedy and tragedy; and language – with an estimated 150,000 English words still in use being derived from Greek words.
All this before we've touched on religion and deities. For sheer fantasy value, what can beat the idea of a family of superpowers – such as Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Athena, Apollo and Poseidon – dwelling in a cloud palace above Mount Olympus, each controlling a different aspect of life? For some, such as Eric Weiner, author of The Socrates Express, a treatise on the ancients' philosophy and travel, the Ancient Greeks have a lot to teach us about values today. In an essay on how technology can deceive us, especially in relation to war reporting, he writes: "One way to build a brighter future is by revisiting the past. Ancient Greece in particular."
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220601-the-mysterious-ancient-civilisation-that-resonates-now
 

The English writer Rose Macaulay published What Not: A Prophetic Comedy in 1918. What Not depicts a dystopian future where people are ranked by intelligence, the government mandates mind training for all citizens, and procreation is regulated by the state. Macaulay and Huxley shared the same literary circles and he attended her weekly literary salons.

George Orwell believed that Brave New World must have been partly derived from the novel We by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. However, in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World long before he had heard of We. According to We translator Natasha Randall, Orwell believed that Huxley was lying. Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano (1952), he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We".