In public, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says his country’s growing friendship with China is unshakable — a strategic military and economic collaboration that has entered a golden era.
But in the corridors of Lubyanka, the headquarters of Russia’s domestic security agency, known as the F.S.B., a secretive intelligence unit refers to the Chinese as “the enemy.”
Yeah, we are now at about 30ish % of the adult population with reading skills under 2nd grade level, ie, functionally illiterate.
... And that metric is almost 10% worse than it was 10 years ago.
We've gone from about 20% illiterate to about 30% illiterate in 10 years.
Normally you only see a decline like that in a country that is an active warzone, or a smaller country has been utterly devestated by an immense disaster.
If you go by ranking of countries by literacy rate, we dropped from somewhere in the top 20 to 30... to between the top 80 and 90... in ten years.