Reports suggest that China could soon have more Christians than any other country on Earth. Researchers estimate that the number of Christians in China could surpass 247 million within the next five years, overtaking the United States, Brazil, and Mexico to become the largest Christian population globally. This represents a remarkable transformation. In 1949, when the Communist Party took power, China had only about five million Christians.
Despite decades of strict secular governance and tight regulation of religious activity, Christianity has grown rapidly in recent decades. Many believers, particularly among younger generations seeking spiritual meaning, have turned to unofficial house churches that operate outside government oversight. This quiet but powerful expansion continues even under challenging conditions, highlighting a significant shift in China’s religious landscape.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images
Farmers across the Midwest are entering planting season under mounting financial pressure, as the Iran conflict drives up diesel and fertilizer prices — deepening the worst agricultural downturn in decades, report Nathan Bomey and Axios Local reporters across the Farm Belt.
Why it matters: Rising fuel and fertilizer costs threaten to kill more family farms, drive up food prices and further strain rural economies already battered by trade disruptions, inflation and extreme weather.
The big picture: Mark Mueller — a northeast Iowa farmer and president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association — tells Axios that the current landscape is tougher than at any time since the 1980s farm crisis, when interest rates soared and exports plunged, triggering agricultural bank failures.
Bankruptcies are rising. Lenders are becoming more reluctant to loan to farmers.“There’s going to be fewer farmers next year than this year,” Mueller says.
Farmers are grappling with a confluence of forces:
Skyrocketing energy prices triggered by the Iran war. Diesel is up 60% from last year. Spiking fertilizer pricesand shortages after Iran blocked shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. 70% of farmers say they can’t afford the fertilizer they need. Disrupted export markets tied to President Trump’s tariffs and Chinese import restrictions.Global drought and other weather pressures.
The crisis is hitting farmers hard across the country:
In Arkansas, energy and fertilizer costs are way up even as farmers are selling their crops for less.
In Ohio, first-generation farmer Michael Kilpatrick said his fuel bills are up from $400 to $700, and container costs have risen 30%.
In Iowa, farmers are dealing with a decline in soybean prices from $13-$15 to around $10 per bushel, as exports to China have fallen due to trade tensions.
In Minnesota, calls to the state’s farm and rural issues mental health helpline are climbing.
The U.S. cattle herd is at its lowest level in decades, largely due to global drought.Contributing Axios reporters: Worth Sparkman in NW Arkansas, Monica Eng in Chicago, Casey Weldon in Cincinnati, Jason Clayworth in Des Moines, Arika Herron in Indianapolis, Torey Van Oot in the Twin Cities, and Kelly Tyko in Florida.Share this story.
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These days, the conversation around AI automation and the job market is increasingly focused on “labor displacement,” the phenomenon in which new technology eliminates certain jobs but supposedly creates new ones elsewhere.
But AI, more than any tech that came before it, represents the possibility of mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale. Since workers in market economies depend entirely on employment for survival, mass unemployment would leave untold millions of people without anything to lose. Whether AI actually causes that remains a topic of debate, but the outcome if it does could be widespread social upheaval.
Working class person’s wellbeing in a market economy depends almost entirely on their employment, it’s entirely possible that — if mass AI unemployment ever does genuinely hit, which to be fair is a major “if” — the conditions for serious social unrest could emerge.
In the hotbed of dog-eat-dog capitalism that is the United States, anti AI-sentiment is already on the rise. The data centers underlining the AI boom are widely reviled, and a surprising number of workers are admitting to sabotaging their company’s AI in the workplace. According to one survey, seven in ten people living in the US already think AI will make it harder to find work, a sentiment that isn’t helped much by a horrible job market.
As Royal Military College of Canada political scientist Yannick Veilleux-Lepage argued in a recent paper on AI and populist backlash, “AI generates the structural conditions historically associated with the onset of political violence.”
“As AI company executives acquire more personal security, risk may shift to researchers on open campuses; as corporate campuses harden, risk shifts to the power substations that serve them; where national figures are unreachable, local policymakers who approved the data center become the proxies for the same structural anger,” Veilleux-Lepage writes.
As the Atlantic notes in a recent piece discussing AI backlash, tech executives are already walking back their apocalyptic rhetoric. Where the AI industry once bragged about the coming AI job apocalypse to boost their valuations, they’re now downplaying the risks of automation as grievance grows.
In 2023, for example, the Atlantic notes that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman bragged that “jobs are definitely going away, full stop.” These days, his prediction is much more even-keeled: “jobs doomerism is likely long-term wrong,” Altman wrote on social media.
Perhaps he’s covering his bases after his San Francisco estate was firebombed by an angry 20-year-old, or maybe his beliefs have really changed. Either way, his problems aren’t going away: it isn’t about what executives say, but about what they do.
RUDE AWAKENING | LEGO News Rap Parody Animation Air Force One touches down… but nobody told them the welcome mat had already been moved. 🛬❌ In this episode of our LEGO News Rap series, we break down one of the most talked-about diplomatic moments of the year — told entirely through satirical rap lyrics, cinematic LEGO CGI animation, and raw political storytelling. No insults. No violence. Just facts, flow, and LEGO bricks. 📰 WHAT’S IN THIS VIDEO: → Satirical rap parody inspired by real geopolitical events → Full cinematic LEGO Blender-style animation → 30-scene storyline following the arrival, the meeting, the data, the spin, and the flight home → Original beat production with G-Funk influenced delivery → Chapter-by-chapter storytelling from tarmac to transcript 🎤 LYRICS THEME BREAKDOWN: The story follows a high-profile international arrival that gets quietly but decisively reframed before the plane even lands. Tariffs dropped. Folders prepared. Chess pieces moved. The welcome stayed formal — but the terms had already shifted. That’s diplomacy. That’s the game. That’s the rap.
In September 2020, alleged cocaine kingpin Dritan Gjika texted a contact that the phones they were using were no longer safe.
Despite this, he and key interlocutors kept using their Sky phones for another six months — a move that would contribute to their downfall after police hacked into the encrypted messaging platform the following year.OCCRP has now obtained hundreds of pages of Gjika’s Sky chat logs, which were filed by Ecuadorian prosecutors as evidence in a criminal case against him and members of the powerful cocaine trafficking network he allegedly led.The chats reveal granular details about the daily logistics of running a cocaine empire, from infiltrating Ecuador’s ports, to handling international transfers of drugs and cash.Gjika, an Albanian national who is now one of Ecuador’s most wanted criminals, was arrested in Abu Dhabi in 2025 and is currently awaiting extradition to Ecuador.At least 17 others have been convicted in Ecuador of belonging to or aiding the same criminal syndicate. Four others were convicted of laundering the proceeds of the racket, making transfers of more than $43 million between 2015 and 2023.Read the full story → The Crime MessengerIn 2024, OCCRP published The Crime Messenger, a series of stories which showed how organized crime groups used mobile phones from encrypted communications company Sky Global to facilitate their operations.Reporters from OCCRP and 12 partners gained access to over 3,800 files from a major court case involving Sky, including police reports and chat logs, providing an unprecedented look inside these operations.
Farmers growing desperate
Skyrocketing 
Spiking 
Disrupted export markets tied to President Trump’s 
canisgallicus 