At the start of 2019, fewer than 2,000 active satellites circled Earth...

At the start of 2019, fewer than 2,000 active satellites circled Earth. By June 2026 there were 15,711 — and nearly two out of every three belonged to a single constellation: SpaceX's Starlink.

A June 2026 traffic index counted nearly eight times as many working satellites as existed at the start of 2019, with Starlink making up 65.97 percent.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Starlink 6-78 mission launches from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on Nov. 20, 2025. Credit: U.S. Space Force photo by Gwendolyn Kurzen, public domain.

By Deep Field · Edited by Lachlan Brown

Published August 17, 2026 · How we edit


Look Up’s quarterly space index, released on 2 June 2026, counted 15,711 active satellites in Earth orbit. It assigned 10,365 of them to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. That is 65.97 percent, making “nearly two out of every three” the arithmetic of this particular catalog.

The same index put the active population below 2,000 at the start of 2019. The total had therefore grown almost eightfold in a little more than seven years. That interval is unusually revealing because the first full batch of 60 Starlink satellites launched in May 2019.

These are dated operational counts, not permanent facts. “Active” is judged from tracking and operational evidence, and different catalogs can reach different totals. The June numbers should be read as a coherent snapshot from one provider, not a universally standardized census.

The 15,711 figure came from a commercial traffic index

Look Up is a French space-situational-awareness company operating tracking radars and a data platform called SYNAPSE. Its second-quarter 2026 index, produced with the French magazine Le Point, reported 15,711 active satellites as of the start of June. The previous edition three months earlier had counted 14,389.

That is an increase of 1,322 active spacecraft in roughly one quarter. The index attributed 3,320 new active Starlinks to the preceding year, while also recording growth in Chinese fleets. It listed China at 1,286 active satellites, including the developing Qian Fan and GuoWang systems, and Eutelsat OneWeb at 651.

The denominator matters. The report was counting working satellites, not every human-made object overhead. It separately said that more than 33,000 cataloged objects were being tracked, including active payloads, rocket bodies and debris. A piece of fragmentation debris does not become a satellite in the 15,711 total simply because it circles Earth.

Religion’s Longstanding Gender Gap Is Narrowing Among Gen Z. But Which Gender Is Narrowing It—and Why?

by Chantelle Lee

Reporter
Jul 9, 2026 6:00 AM ET

Photo-Illustration by Chloe Dowling for TIME (Source Images: Fabrice Lerouge—Getty Images; Weiquan Lin—Getty Images; Hiroshi Higuchi—Getty Images; Syuzanna Guseynova—Getty Images; SivStockMedia via Canva)


A gender gap has long persisted in religious identity. Historically, data has widely, and with remarkable consistency, shown women being more religious than men. But that appears to be changing when it comes to Gen Z.

Recent surveys indicate the longstanding gap is now closing among young men and women—and one even suggests that it might be beginning to open in the opposite direction.

Which gender is driving the shift, and why, is a matter of some contention, however.

Recent Gallup polling attributed the narrowing gender gap among Gen Zers primarily to a rise in religiosity—meaning the depth of religious belief—among young men. But other surveys have found no such change in young men’s religious identities, and have instead shown that the change is being caused by more young women turning away from religion—a trend that some attribute to young women’s frustration with the sexism that persists in some places of worship.

TIME spoke to pollsters, political scientists, religious leaders, and others about the data and what they make of it.

Are young men becoming more religious?

Gallup polling released in April found that in 2024-2025, 42% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 said religion was “very important” to them. That figure marks a jump of 14 percentage points from just two years before, when 28% of young men said this. It also shows a reversal of past gender dynamics: in previous years, women surpassed men in saying that religion is important to them. In 2012-2013, for instance, 51% of women between the ages of 18 and 29 said so, compared to just 41% of men in that same age group. In 2024-2025, meanwhile, just 29% of young women said religion is very important in their lives, notably lower than the 42% of young men who said the same.

“Historically, there has been a gender gap in religiosity in this country as long as we’ve had survey research,” says Frank Newport, a senior scientist at Gallup who worked on the poll. “What I think is important in our findings so far is that the gender gap among young Americans—18 to 29—has basically disappeared across several measures of religiosity. Men and women are either statistically the same or, in one measure, men are more religious, among 18 to 29 year olds.”

From ZERO to MAJORITY?! — 5 Countries That Shockingly Became Catholic

'They refuse to conform': 100,000 churches could close across the U.S.

Catholicism shrinks in Latin America while more are religiously unaffiliated, Pew surveys find

Pope Leo XIV greets people during his weekly general audience in the Pope Paul VI hall at the Vatican, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026.
(Andrew Medichini / Associated Press)

By Luis Andres HenaoJan. 21, 2026 7:44 AM PT

• Catholic affiliation has plummeted across six major Latin American countries over the past decade, while the religiously unaffiliated population has surged dramatically.
• The share of unaffiliated adults now exceeds that of Protestants in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, marking a historic shift in the region’s religious landscape.
• Despite declining church affiliation, Latin Americans remain deeply religious, with about 90% believing in God and majorities praying daily.

Catholicism in Latin American countries has shrunk over the last decade, while a growing percentage of adults identify as religiously unaffiliated, describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”

Those are among the key findings in a report released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center based on surveys conducted in early 2024 of adults in six of the region’s most populous countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.

“Our analysis found that the Catholic share of the population in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru — which collectively make up about 75% of Latin America’s population — has significantly declined since 2013-14, while a growing share of adults in the region are religiously unaffiliated,” said Kirsten Lesage, a Pew research associate and the lead author of the report.

Some cultures are simply not compatible with American values

Opinion by Washington Examiner, Washington Examiner

Some cultures are simply not compatible with American values

First, there was fraud in the Department of Agriculture’s Federal Child Nutrition Program. Then it was fraud in Medicaid’s “nonstandard benefits” programs. Now, there is fraud in the Department of Health and Human Services’s Child Care and Development Block Grant program. The common element running through all these scandals is Minnesota’s Somali community. This is a story not just about fraud, but about how the United States has failed to think seriously about cultural compatibility in immigration policy, and how the costs of that failure are borne by taxpayers and by the rule of law.

Minnesota’s Somali population is almost entirely a post-1990 phenomenon. Refugee resettlement following Somalia’s clan wars brought more than 10,000 Somalis to the state in the 1990s, with the population tripling by 2010 and surpassing 75,000 by 2024. Nationally, more than 110,000 Somali refugees were admitted between 2000 and 2024 alone. Nearly all (99.7%) are Muslim.

This population did not scatter randomly across the country. Somali migrants disproportionately settled in states offering the most generous public benefits: expansive Medicaid eligibility, large child care subsidies, extensive language services in schools, and dense networks of refugee-focused nonprofit organizations. Minnesota became the epicenter, but similar targeting occurred elsewhere. That was not an accident; it was rational behavior in response to incentives.

What followed has been a sustained failure of assimilation, and, increasingly, an explosion of fraud.

Why do some people stay in their religion and others leave? A new Pew report has some clues.

(RNS) — Americans who had a good experience as children were likely to keep their faith. Those with bad experiences left, according to a new study from Pew Research Center.

Religious pluralism means more than living around people of different faiths. (Thai Noipho/iStock via Getty Images Plus)

Bob Smietana
December 15, 2025


(RNS) — Americans who had a positive religious experience as kids are most likely to keep the same faith as adults. Those who had negative experiences are most likely to change faiths or give up on religion. And while a majority (56%) of Americans still identify with their childhood faith, a third (35%) have switched — including 20% who now say they have no religion.

Those are among the findings of a new report from Pew Research Center, based on data from Pew’s 2023-24 U.S. Religious Landscape Study and a survey of 8,937 American adults conducted between May 5 and May 11.

Researchers asked Americans what religion they’d been raised in as well as their current religion, then asked those who switched or left their childhood faith about why things changed. They also asked Americans who are religious why they remain part of that faith.

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The Dollar Store Backlash Has Begun

 

A Dollar General store in Chicago. Jim Young/Reuters

Tanvi Misra 

Dec 20, 2018

 

The U.S. has added 10,000 of these budget retail outlets since 2001. But some towns and cities are trying to push back.

It has become an increasingly common story: A dollar store opens up in an economically depressed area with scarce healthy and affordable food options, sometimes with the help of local tax incentives. It advertises hard-to-beat low prices but it offers little in terms of fresh produce and nutritious items—further trapping residents in a cycle of poverty and ill-health.

A recent research brief by the Institute of Local Self Reliance (ILSR), a nonprofit supporting local economies, sheds light on the massive growth of this budget enterprise. Since 2001, outlets of Dollar General and Dollar Tree (which bought Family Dollar in 2015) have grown from 20,000 to 30,000 in number. Though these “small-box” retailers carry only a limited stock of prepared foods, they’re now feeding more people than grocery chains like Whole Foods, which has around 400-plus outlets in the country. In fact, the number of dollar-store outlets nationwide exceeds that of Walmart and McDonalds put together—and they’re still growing at a breakneck pace. That, ILSR says, is bad news.

“While dollar stores sometimes fill a need in cash-strapped communities, growing evidence suggests these stores are not merely a byproduct of economic distress,” the authors of the brief write. “They’re a cause of it.”

Dollar stores have succeeded in part by capitalizing on a series of powerful economic and social forces—white flight, the recent recession, the so-called “retail apocalypse”—all of which have opened up gaping holes in food access. But while dollar store might not be causing these inequalities per se, they appear to be perpetuating them. The savings they claim to offer shoppers in the communities they move to makes them, in some ways, a little poorer.

Using code made public by Jerry Shannon, a geographer at University of Georgia, CityLab made a map showing the spread of dollar stores since the recession. 

Number of Witches in U.S. on the Rise, May Surpass 1.5 Million

By Michael W. Chapman | November 16, 2018 | 5:59 PM EST




A report in the Christian Postcontends that the number of witches (and Wiccans) has dramatically increased since the 1990s, to the degree that there may be at least 1.5 million witches in the United States, which is higher than the 1.4 million mainline Presbyterians.

"[T]he practice of witchcraft has grown significantly in recent decades; those who identify as witches has risen concurrently with the rise of the 'witch aesthetic,'" reported the Christian Post in October, citing data from Quartz, a Trinity College study, and the Pew Research Center.

Between 1990 and 2008, the number of Wiccans in the United States grew from 8,000 to 340,000, according to three religious surveys conducted by Trinity College in Connecticut. In addition, the Pew Research Center reported in 2014 that 0.4% of the population -- 1 to 1.5 million Americans -- "identify as Wicca or Pagan."



"It makes sense that witchcraft and the occult would rise as society becomes increasingly postmodern," author Julie Roys, formerly of Moody Radio, told the Christian Post. "The rejection of Christianity has left a void that people, as inherently spiritual beings, will seek to fill."

Roys added that witchcraft is especially attractive to Millenials because it has been "effectively repackaged."

"No longer is witchcraft and paganism satanic and demonic," said Roys. "[I]t's a 'pre-Christian tradition' that promotes 'free thought' and 'understanding of earth and nature.'"

Why America’s men aren’t working

The Washington Post

Ylan Q. Mui

5 hrs ago




The national unemployment rate has fallen by more than half since the nation emerged from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It peaked at 10 percent in 2010 and stood at just 4.7 percent last month.


That’s mostly good news: Private employers have added more than 14 million jobs. About 2 million people have been out of a job for six months or longer, far too many but only about a quarter of the number of long-term unemployed people seven years ago. By almost every measure, the labor market has made incredible progress.


But there’s one statistic that has been vexing economists. The size of the nation’s workforce -- known as the labor force participation rate -- continues to fall. Since the start of the downturn, the percentage of that population that has a job or is looking for one has dropped more than 3 percentage points, to 62.6 percent, a level not seen since the 1970s.

The problem is particularly pronounced among men between the ages of 25 and 54, traditionally considered the prime working years. Their participation rate has been declining for decades, but the drop-off accelerated during the recession. The high mark was 98 percent in 1954, and it now stands at 88 percent. A new analysis from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, slated for release Monday, found that the United States now has the third-lowest participation rate for “prime-age men” among the world’s developed countries.

In other words, Greece, Slovenia and Turkey have a larger share of men in their workforces than the United States does. The United States beats only Italy and Israel.

© Provided by WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post

The CEA’s analysis looks at several common theories behind why so many American men have dropped out of the job market. Legions of women have joined the workforce since the 1950s, when about one-third of them had a job or were looking for one. Women’s participation rate topped 50 percent in the late 1970s and peaked at about 60 percent in the early 2000s. Perhaps fewer men are working because their wives are bringing home the bacon instead.

But the share of women in the workforce also has decreased significantly since the recession. And the CEA found that less than a quarter of prime-age men have a working spouse -- and that number has actually declined over the past 50 years.

Economists have posited that Social Security Disability Insurance could be incentivizing men to enroll in government assistance rather than look for work. The number of disability insurance recipients has risen by 2 percent since the late 1960s, not enough to account for the much greater drop in the male workforce. The CEA estimates that the increase in disability insurance explains only about half a percentage point of the decline in the male participation rate.

Instead, the CEA concludes that the problem is one of education and the erosion of demand for low-skilled workers. More than 90 percent of college-educated men are in the workforce, compared with 83 percent of those with a high school diploma or less. It’s a theme seen time and again in our increasingly globalized and high-tech economy: Blue-collar jobs that were once the cornerstone of the middle class get outsourced or replaced by automation.

© Provided by WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post

There’s a ripple effect, too. When a manufacturing plant shuts down, for example, the laid-off employees may wind up in lower-skilled jobs, displacing those workers and potentially forcing them out of the labor market.

The lower the wage, the more likely workers are to pass up the job altogether. The CEA looked at state-level data and found that among the bottom 10 percent of wage earners, a $1,000 increase in annual income boosted the participation rate by 0.16 percent for prime-age men.

“ When the returns to work for those at the bottom of the wage distribution are particularly low, more prime-age men choose not to participate in the labor force,” the report states.

The report also explores one more unorthodox explanation: the high number of men who have been incarcerated. The CEA notes that the U.S. prison population has grown significantly since 1990 and is far above that of any other developed country.

People in prison are not counted as part of the population for the purposes of labor market statistics. At first blush, that would actually boost the participation rate: A smaller population means the share in the workforce is larger. But in reality, there are immense and well-documented barriers to the job market for workers once they leave prison. And the gloomy prospects of the formerly incarcerated outweigh the statistical benefit of having a large prison population.

© Provided by WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post

Of course, the CEA argues that White House proposals -- from familiar positions such as raising the minimum wage and expanding the earned-income tax credit to wonkier ones such as reforming community colleges and flexibility in claiming unemployment benefits -- can help more men return to the workforce.

But the bigger question is whether there is really a way to reverse the tide, or if the best hope is to merely mitigate the pain. For 60 years, economists have debated the answer. And still, the share of men in the workforce continues to shrink.

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76 million Americans are struggling financially

Author: By Tami Luhby

Published On: Jun 10 2016 05:46:43 AM CDT Updated On: Jun 10 2016 12:35:42 PM CDT

Shutterstock/CNNMoney
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -

Wages are finally rising. Unemployment is the lowest it's been since 2007. Inflation remains muted.

But 31% of American adults, or 76 million people, say they are struggling to get by or just barely making it, according to the Federal Reserve Bank's latest survey on Americans' economic well-being, which looked at 2015.

And that's actually good news. Two years earlier, the Fed found that 38% of Americans were in weak financial shape.

Seven years after the end of the Great Recession, millions of Americans have yet to find firm financial footing. That's one reason why the economy remains a top concern in the 2016 presidential election.

"It's important to identify the reasons why so many families face continued financial struggles and to find ways to help them overcome them," said Federal Reserve Board Governor Lael Brainard.

The Fed survey highlights many of Americans' continuing economic worries. Some 46% of adults say they can't cover an unexpected $400 expense or would have borrow or sell something to do so.

While lower income Americans said they'd have the toughest time handling this emergency charge, some 38% of middle-class Americans reported they'd have trouble too. Even 19% of those raking in over $100,000 a year said they couldn't pay the bill promptly.

About one-third of Americans also say that their income varies month to month, mainly because they have an irregular work schedule. Some 45% say their expenses shift each month. Some 42% of those with these volatile income streams or expenses say they struggled to pay the bills at least once in the past year.

Many Americans want to work more or are already holding down multiple jobs. Some 35% of those who are not self-employed said they'd prefer to work more hours (at their current wage). This was particularly true of lower-income respondents, non-Hispanic blacks, younger folks, Hispanics and and those with less education.

And though wage growth began picking up last year, only 23% of those surveyed felt their income would be higher in the coming year. That's down from 29% last year.

When it comes to savings, the picture is mixed.

Nearly half of Americans spend less than their incomes. That savings rate is 9 percentage points higher than it was two years ago.

But nearly one-third of non-retired adults have not socked away anything for their Golden Years nor do they have a pension. This includes 27% of those age 60 and older.

This is probably why many Americans plan to continue working when they hit retirement age. Some 42% expect to either retire at age 70 or older or to never retire.

Also, 38% expect to work in retirement to give them a source of funds, and nearly 22% think their spouse or partner will work.

The report had a few bright spots, including more adults saying they were living comfortably or doing okay and the greater rate of savings. Also, just over half of Americans felt that their home value increased over the past year and 43% expect it to increase in the coming year.


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