Writing in the September 25, 2009, Wall Street Journal, David Feith, assistant editor of Foreign Affairs, tells the inspiring story of the indomitable spirit of Fang Zheng, an athlete whose legs were crushed by a tank at Tienanmen Square on June 4, 1989, who now, as an immigrant to the the US, is regaining the ability to walk and the opportunity to excel:

In 1989, Mr. Fang was among the 100,000 Chinese who flooded into Beijing's Tiananmen Square to demonstrate for democratic rights. He was then a Communist Party member, a student studying at Beijing College of Physical Science, and an accomplished sprinter. But by joining the peaceful protests, he became an enemy of the state.

When the government ordered a military crackdown, the People's Liberation Army killed or maimed thousands of unarmed students. Mr. Fang was one of them. On June 4, 1989, he was run over by a tank as he and other students retreated from the square. He survived, but both of his legs were crushed. His left leg was amputated below the knee, and his right leg at mid-thigh.

Immediately, Chinese officials began pressuring Mr. Fang to "admit" that his injuries were caused by a mere road accident.

He refused, even when the government denied him his college degree, which made it difficult to find work. Instead, he resolved to excel again athletically.

From a wheelchair, he became a champion in discus and javelin, breaking two Asian records at the 1992 All-China Disabled Athletic Games. He qualified for the 1994 Far East and South Pacific Disabled Games and accepted the government's demand that he not speak with journalists about his legs.

But on the eve of the Games, evidently fearing that the origin of his injuries would become known, Chinese officials banned Mr. Fang from competing. He was never invited to participate in athletics again....

Aided by doctors and specialists working pro bono, this month Mr. Fang is undergoing physical therapy at Adventist Rehabilitation Hospital in Maryland. He is learning to walk with high-tech prosthetics legs donated by the Ossur Corporation (which also engineers prosthetics for injured American soldiers).

On Oct. 7, Mr. Fang plans to dance with his wife for the first time, at a Washington, D.C., event to be attended by members of Congress and broadcast on YouTube. When he does, viewers across the globe "will make a comparison between two systems—between his fortune in China and his fortune in democracy," Yang Jianli, a Tiananmen veteran who was imprisoned in China from 2002 to 2007, told me.

Mr. Fang's dance, Ms. Ling told me, "will send such a powerful message to struggling people in China—that they have not been forgotten."

In the September 23, 2009, Wall Street Journal, Mark Helprin writes that, as Joe Biden predicted, foreign leaders are putting President Obama to the test, and so far Obama is failing, granting concessions without gaining anything for US interests in return:

Nothing short of force will turn Iran from the acquisition of nuclear weapons, its paramount aim during 25 years of secrecy and stalling. Last fall, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad set three conditions for the U.S.: withdrawal from Iraq, a show of respect for Iran (read "apology"), and taking the nuclear question off the table.

We are now faithfully complying, and last week, after Iran foreclosed discussion of its nuclear program and Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi, Mr. Ahmadinejad's chief political adviser, predicted "the defeat and collapse" of Western democracy, the U.S. agreed to enter talks the premise of which, incredibly, is to eliminate American nuclear weapons. Even the zombified press awoke for long enough to harry State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, who replied that, as Iran was willing to talk, "We are going to test that proposition, OK?"

Not OK. When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich at least he thought he had obtained something in return for his appeasement. The new American diplomacy is nothing more than a sentimental flood of unilateral concessions—not least, after some minor Putinesque sabre rattling, to Russia. Canceling the missile deployment within NATO, which Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian ambassador to that body, characterizes as "the Americans . . . simply correcting their own mistake, and we are not duty bound to pay someone for putting their own mistakes right," is to grant Russia a veto over sovereign defensive measures—exactly the opposite of American resolve during the Euro Missile Crisis of 1983, the last and definitive battle of the Cold War.

Stalin tested Truman with the Berlin Blockade, and Truman held fast. Khrushchev tested Kennedy, and in the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy refused to blink. In 1983, Andropov took the measure of Reagan, and, defying millions in the street (who are now the Obama base), Reagan did not blink. Last week, the Iranian president and the Russian prime minister put Mr. Obama to the test, and he blinked not once but twice. The price of such infirmity has always proven immensely high, even if, as is the custom these days, the bill has yet to come.

In the September 22, 2009, Wall Street Journal, economist Arthur Laffer worries that Federal Reserve and Obama Administration leaders are drawing the wrong lessons from the Great Depression. It wasn't tight money but taxes and tariffs that sent the U. S. economy into a downward spiral:

While Fed policy was undoubtedly important, it was not the primary cause of the Great Depression or the economy's relapse in 1937. The Smoot-Hawley tariff of June 1930 was the catalyst that got the whole process going. It was the largest single increase in taxes on trade during peacetime and precipitated massive retaliation by foreign governments on U.S. products. Huge federal and state tax increases in 1932 followed the initial decline in the economy thus doubling down on the impact of Smoot-Hawley. There were additional large tax increases in 1936 and 1937 that were the proximate cause of the economy's relapse in 1937....

simply cannot tax a country into prosperity. If there were one warning I'd give to all who will listen, it is that U.S. federal and state tax policies are on an economic crash trajectory today just as they were in the 1930s. Net legislated state-tax increases as a percentage of previous year tax receipts are at 3.1%, their highest level since 1991; the Bush tax cuts are set to expire in 2011; and additional taxes to pay for health-care and the proposed cap-and-trade scheme are on the horizon.

Read the whole thing for detailed numbers.

Studies show that children born in the winter face great challenges, but the connection between time of year and those challenges has been elusive. In the September 22, 2009, Wall Street Journal, Justin Lahart reports on a study that finds an interesting correlation between birth month and family background:

Children born in the winter months already have a few strikes against them. Study after study has shown that they test poorly, don't get as far in school, earn less, are less healthy, and don't live as long as children born at other times of year. Researchers have spent years documenting the effect and trying to understand it.

But economists Kasey Buckles and Daniel Hungerman at the University of Notre Dame may have uncovered an overlooked explanation for why season of birth matters.

Their discovery challenges the validity of past research and highlights how seemingly safe assumptions economists make may overlook key causes of curious effects. And they came across it by accident....

There may be validity to all of that research. But if there was any truth to the pattern that Ms. Buckles and Mr. Hungerman discovered, it would question the weightiness of other factors from past research. If winter babies were more likely to come from less-privileged families, it would be natural to expect them to do more poorly in life.

The two economists examined birth-certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 52 million children born between 1989 and 2001, which represents virtually all of the births in the U.S. during those years. The same pattern kept turning up: The percentage of children born to unwed mothers, teenage mothers and mothers who hadn't completed high school kept peaking in January every year. Over the 13-year period, for example, 13.2% of January births were to teen mothers, compared with 12% in May -- a small but statistically significant difference, they say.