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What's the best country in the world to raise a child? If a well developed public education system tops your list, you'd likely consider the United States -- it took the top spot in education in this year's Best Countries Report, done annually since 2016 by U.S. News & World Report and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

"One area where the US falls behind quite a bit is in the safety metric," she said. "In that attribute, the US actually ranks 32, pretty far down the list. So that really impacts its ratings for raising kids, of course." Read MoreCanada came in fourth for raising kids, followed by the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia and Austria. The UK came in at number 11.

The Best Countries report evaluated 73 nations across 65 different metrics. To do so it surveyed more than 20,000 people in the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Respondents are rather evenly split between leaders in business; college-educated citizens who consider themselves middle class or higher and who read or watch the news at least four days a week; and the general public, defined as over age 18 who's age and gender were nationally representative of their countries' demographic.

Johnson has proved staunch in his defense of his close ally since the latter was accused of breaking the UK's strict lockdown by driving 260 miles with his wife, who he admits was displaying some symptoms of coronavirus, and young son to be near his extended family.

In quarantine-fatigued Britain, however, where many have agonized over the command to stay away from frightened, sick and dying relatives, the Prime Minister's words have not gone down well. Highly unusually, several of his own Conservative MPs are now calling for Cummings to be sacked, and even the government-friendly Daily Mail asked: "What Planet Are They On?" of his decision to stand by his man.

In one of the more moving responses, Helen Goodman, until December the Labour Party MP for Durham, the northern town Cummings visited to stay in a property belonging to his parents, said she was "appalled" by his behavior, given her own father had died alone from Covid-19 in a local care home after she obeyed the rules and did not visit.

Since the start of the coronavirus outbreak some places have fully embraced wearing face masks, and anyone caught without one risks becoming a social pariah.But in many other parts of the world, from the UK and the US to Sydney and Singapore, it's still perfectly acceptable to walk around bare-faced.

the official advice from the World Health Organization has been clear. Only two types of people should wear masks: those who are sick and show symptoms, and those who are caring for people who are suspected to have the coronavirus.

a mask is not seen as reliable protection, given that current research shows the virus is spread by droplets and contact with contaminated surfaces. So it could protect you, but only in certain situations such as when you're in close quarters with others where someone infected might sneeze or cough near your face.

Mona Hamdy believes that technology married with pragmatic optimism can save the world. That’s what the entrepreneur and Harvard University Applied Ethics teaching fellow told me while we sat overlooking the Potomac River at her restaurant in Georgetown. We discussed impossible problems like plastics in the ocean, hostile AI, hypersonic missiles, the perils of cashless economies for the world’s poorest, socioeconomic challenges for women in the Middle East and North Africa, and cultural misunderstandings between the U.S. and Arab nations. 

“The kind of technology we have created should give us pause. It means we are aware of its potential in our hands. We can regulate it and use it to help relieve human despair like no other time on earth. Conflict, famine, poverty, and ecological destruction can be mapped on top of each other. Let’s learn as much as we can, and create economies that address these problems as solvable opportunities.” 

“The nature of our company combined this traditional wisdom with futuristic technology like cinematic worldbuilding, mixed reality and AR for education,  digital twinning, and 3d printing as effective modes of information transfer. These things were not considered part of the poverty-eradication toolkit a decade ago, but the world is coming around to it. Tech and heritage-- it’s the 21st century version of what our ancestors would have done. ”

People with at least two grandparents who were born in Orkney or Shetland are being sought for a genetics study aimed at improving health.The research aims to better understand the causes of conditions such as diabetes, stroke, heart disease and cancer, and in turn find treatments.Those taking part in the University of Edinburgh study-led Viking II project will complete an online questionnaire about their health and lifestyle.

The team believes the "unique genetic identity" of those with Northern Isles ancestry offers a "rare opportunity" to give a detailed picture on how genes are implicated in health

It is believed this information could be useful in terms of their future healthcare, including taking preventive actions to reduce the impact of health conditions.The study is being backed by the Medical Research Council.

President Trump has given a master class in the unhappy link between his “gut” and the gutting of American credibility.

From Trump’s sort-of green light to Turkey’s assault on northern Syria, to his threat to “totally destroy and obliterate” the Turkish economy, to his Chamberlain-like dismissal of Kurds’ fate (“We are 7,000 miles away!”), he has played the clown in chief.

Europeans now shrug when they don’t laugh. The consensus is the United States has lost it. There’s nobody home. A child-president in the Oval Office writes a letter to the Turkish leader who appropriately tosses it in the garbage.

im Shultz tried everything he could think of to stop facial recognition technology from entering the public schools in Lockport, a small city 20 miles east of Niagara Falls. He posted about the issue in a Facebook group called Lockportians. He wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times. He filed a petition with the superintendent of the district, where his daughter is in high school.But a few weeks ago, he lost. The Lockport City School District turned on the technology to monitor who’s on the property at its eight schools, becoming the first known public school district in New York to adopt facial recognition, and one of the first in the nation.

Proponents call it a crucial crime-fighting tool, to help prevent mass shootings and stop sexual predators. Robert LiPuma, the Lockport City School District’s director of technology, said he believed that if the technology had been in place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the deadly 2018 attack there may never have happened.

“You had an expelled student that would have been put into the system, because they were not supposed to be on school grounds,” Mr. LiPuma said. “They snuck in through an open door. The minute they snuck in, the system would have identified that person.”

If, as expected in the next few weeks, regulators give those vaccines the green light, the technology and the precision approach to vaccine design could turn out to be the pandemic’s silver linings: scientific breakthroughs that could begin to change the trajectory of the virus this winter and also pave the way for highly effective vaccines and treatments for other diseases.

Vaccine development typically takes years, even decades. The progress of the last 11 months shifts the paradigm for what’s possible, creating a new model for vaccine development and a toolset for a world that will have to fight more never-before-seen viruses in years to come.

Long before the pandemic, Graham worked with colleagues there and in academia to create a particularly accurate 3-D version of the spiky proteins that protrude from the surface of coronaviruses — an innovation that was rejected for publication by scientific journals five times because reviewers questioned its relevance.

“No one got everything they wanted, including me,” he said in the East Room before departing on a trip to Rome. “But that’s what compromise is. That’s consensus. And that’s what I ran on.”

But liberals were still unsatisfied with a plan that was clearly unfinished — and that omitted many of their cherished priorities.

Mr. Manchin did not commit to supporting it either, saying only, “It’s in the hands of the House.”

In interviews across three German states, historians, activists, officials and ordinary citizens explained their support for monuments glorifying a former enemy and occupier as a mixture of bureaucratic drift, aversion to change and a rock-solid commitment to honoring the victims of Nazi aggression that trumps any shifts in global affairs.

“We were taught to learn from pain,” said Teresa Schneidewind, 33, the head of Lützen’s museum. “We care for our memorials, because they allow us to learn from the mistakes of past generations.”

Germany’s top court ruled just last year against the removal of a medieval, antisemitic sculpture in the very church where Martin Luther had preached. Despite debates, some swastikas from the Third Reich have been left on church bells.

Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles.

, I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.

First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments

after a decade of failed attempts, David Smith, a self-described shape hobbyist of Bridlington in East Yorkshire, England, suspected that he might have finally solved an open problem in the mathematics of tiling: That is, he thought he might have discovered an “einstein.”

In less poetic terms, an einstein is an “aperiodic monotile,” a shape that tiles a plane, or an infinite two-dimensional flat surface, but only in a nonrepeating pattern. (The term “einstein” comes from the German “ein stein,” or “one stone” — more loosely, “one tile” or “one shape.”)

Your typical wallpaper or tiled floor is part of an infinite pattern that repeats periodically; when shifted, or “translated,” the pattern can be exactly superimposed on itself