When kids born last year head to kindergarten in a few years, a lot of them will be raising their hands when the teacher calls out "Emily" or "Jacob." In states bordering Mexico, it will be hard to miss Jose, Angel and Mia.
For the 10th year running, Emily is the most popular name for infant girls in the US, based on figures this Mother's Day weekend from the Social Security Administration.
"The whole question was whether Emma going to beat out Emily this time," said Cleveland Evans, a professor at Bellevue University in Nebraska and president of the American Names Society. Emma was number two on the list.
Biblical names dominate the boys' list. Jacob is the most popular, as it has been since 1999. Other top picks for boys are Michael, Joshua and Matthew.
"There's a lot more men mentioned in the Bible than women," Evans said. Maybe that's why the girls' list includes so many non-biblical names such as Madison.
New to the top 10 lists this year are Anthony at No. 8 for boys and Ava at No. 9 for girls. Anthony jumped up from the 11th spot.
For male twins, parents like to combine Jacob with Joshua, Matthew with Michael and Daniel with David. The most popular combination for female twins was Hope and Faith.
The agency also releases separate lists for each state, and the most popular names in states along the US-Mexico border reflect the impact of immigration.
Jose is the most popular name for boys in Texas; in Arizona, it's Angel.
Mia is the second most popular name for girls in those two states and fifth in California.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema