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healthy individuals, especially those with essential jobs who cannot avoid public transportation or close interaction with others, may need to start wearing masks more regularly.

While wearing a mask may not necessarily prevent healthy people from getting sick, and it certainly doesn’t replace important measures such as hand-washing or social distancing, it may be better than nothing,

Masks work by stopping infected droplets spewing from the wearer’s nose or mouth, rather than stopping the acquisition of virus from others. That is why the W.H.O. and C.D.C. recommend that people already infected with the coronavirus wear masks, to protect others who may come into close contact with them

Fixing America's failing infrastructure won't be easy, despite Trump's pledge

Infrastructure is finally in. Washington’s politicians may struggle through the capital’s terrible traffic to an inbox of complaints about crumbling roads, dams, airports from their constituents, but the political will to do anything has been bogged down by arguments about how to pay for it. Until now, potentially.

Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to rebuild America’s failing backbone and he doubled down on that pledge last week. This week he’ll be offered another chance to push for investment when the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) release its latest report on the state of America’s infrastructure. It’s expected to be bad.

I’m from Flint, Mich., and even though I recently transferred to a private Catholic high school in my city, top tier-education is new to my family.

Stanford researchers found, for example, that sixth graders in our town are two to three grade levels behind the national average. They are almost five grade levels behind students in more prosperous counties 30 miles away.

The friends I made at Phillips Exeter were from fancy-sounding towns and seemed to have it all. Most attended prestigious private or highly ranked public schools. They were impossibly sporty, charming and intelligent

The report is a collaboration of nonprofit partner organizations, including the environmental advocacy groups Toxic-Free Future, WE ACT for Environmental Justice and Defend Our Health.

This year's Toxic Hall of Shame includes the well-known brands of Starbucks, Subway, Publix, Nordstrom, Ace Hardware, 7-Eleven, Sally Beauty and Restaurant Brands International (RBI), the parent company of Burger King, Popeyes and Tim Hortons, a popular Canadian fast-food chain.

Called "forever" chemicals, because they do not degrade in the environment, PFAS are so widespread that levels have been detected in the blood of 97% of Americans, according to a 2015 report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Last year, the university produced a 96-page report that concluded slavery was “in every way imaginable . . . central to the project of designing, funding, building, and maintaining the school.”

U-Va.’s efforts come as dozens of universities across the country undertake similar examinations — and as America marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown. The dark milestone has spurred a reckoning with the awful reality of slavery and the myriad ways it shaped the nation.

Jefferson — who by then had served as both U.S. president and vice president — envisioned U-Va. as a breeding ground for the next generation of the country’s political elite, beneficiaries of his educational program molded in his image, Taylor said. Still, he wanted students to differentiate themselves in at least one important way: He wanted them to end slavery in America.

When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their “attendance points.”

And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they’ve been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full.“They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.”

Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.

Which kind of face mask will best protect you against coronavirus?

Does it matter what sort of mask you wear? Yes. Different types of mask offer different levels of protection. Surgical grade N95 respirators offer the highest level of protection against Covid-19 infection, followed by surgical grade masks. However, these masks are costly, in limited supply, contribute to landfill waste and are uncomfortable to wear for long periods. So even countries that have required the public to wear face masks have generally suggested such masks should be reserved for health workers or those at particularly high risk.

but still suggests that face masks can contribute to reducing transmission of Covid-19. Analysis by the Royal Society said this included homemade cloth face masks.

Perplexity AI “unlocks the power of knowledge with information discovery and sharing.” This, it turns out, means “does research.” Type something into it, and it spits out a comprehensive answer, always sourced and sometimes bulleted. You might say this is just Google on steroids — but really, it is Google with a bibliography.

Caleb Jackson, a 22-year-old junior at Ole Miss studying part time, is a fan. This way, he doesn’t have to spend hours between night shifts and online classes trawling the internet for sources. Perplexity can find them, and he can get to writing that much sooner.

What’s most important to Ole Miss faculty members is that students use these tools with integrity. If the university doesn’t have a campuswide AI honor code, and so far it doesn’t, individual classes should. And no matter whether professors permit all applications of AI, as some teachers have tried, or only the narrowest, students should have to disclose just how much help they had from robots.

students at Wave Preparatory described a nervous few hours that began when the principal went on the intercom to say that the school was being locked down and that they were to remain in their classrooms.

“I thought we were going to get killed,” said Javier Ferrufino, an 11-year-old in fifth grade. “We went to the back of the classroom. I hid with my friend behind some computers.”

Shakyla said: “They made us turn off the lights and hide behind the teacher’s desk. I almost cried. I was afraid we were going to get shot.”

in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play

in 2009, during a medical leave from his sophomore year at George Washington University, Mr. Sunkara turned to Plan B: creating a magazine dedicated to bringing jargon-free neo-Marxist thinking to the masses.

“I had no right to start a print publication when I was 21,” he said in an interview in a cafe near his apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Looking back, I see it as a moment of creative ignorance. You have to have enough intelligence to execute something like this but be stupid enough to think it could be successful.”

Since its debut in September 2010 it has attracted nearly 2,000 print and digital subscribers, some 250,000 Web hits a month, regular name-checks from prominent bloggers, and book deals from two New York publishers.

Since President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” the United States has spent some $16 trillion or more on means-tested programs. Yet the proportion of Americans living beneath the poverty line, 15 percent, is higher than in the late 1960s in the Johnson administration.

What accounts for the cycles of poverty that leave so many people mired in the margins, and how can we break these cycles? Some depressing clues emerge from a new book, “Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance,” by Susan Neuman and Donna Celano.

there’s a difference in parenting strategies, the writers say. Upper-middle-class parents in America increasingly engage in competitive child-rearing. Parents send preschoolers to art classes and violin lessons and read “Harry Potter” books to bewildered children who don’t yet know what a wizard is.

A boy of six was fighting for his life today after a teenage gunman opened fire at a primary school, injuring him, another classmate and a teacher.

First grade teacher Meghan Hollingsworth and another six-year-old boy were wounded in the playground shooting spree but were allowed home after being treated for their injuries.

teenager’s house about two miles from the school where the boy shot dead his fathe

The 2016 campaign produced the unthinkable: the election of a presidential candidate whom members of his own party described as a classic authoritarian.

How is it possible that tens of millions of Americans supported a presidential candidate who consistently rejected basic constitutional principles that previously had been accepted across the political spectrum?

freedom of religion (proposing a ban on Muslim immigrants), freedom of the press (calling for opening up libel laws to go after critics), the rule of law (endorsing the murder of the families of terrorists), and the independence of the judiciary (questioning the bias of a judge based on ethnicity).

the United States government is still responding at an analog pace to a low-grade, though escalating, digital conflict.

to anyone who reads between the lines and knows a bit of the back story not included in the report, the long lag times between detection and reaction are stunning.

The delays reveal fundamental problems with American cyberdefenses and deterrence that President-elect Donald J. Trump will begin to confront in two weeks

The Law and Justice Party rode to power on a pledge to drain the swamp of Polish politics and roll back the legacy of the previous administration. One year later, its patriotic revolution, the party proclaims, has cleaned house and brought God and country back to Poland

Opponents, however, see the birth of a neo-Dark Age — one that, as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, is a harbinger of the power of populism to upend a Western society. In merely a year, critics say, the nationalists have transformed Poland into a surreal and insular place — one where state-sponsored conspiracy theories and de facto propaganda distract the public as democracy erodes.

In the land of Law and Justice, anti-intellectualism is king. Polish scientists are aghast at proposed curriculum changes in a new education bill that would downplay evolution theory and climate change and add hours for “patriotic” history lessons. In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rejected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against traditional gender roles.

What is the psychological mechanism underpinning this resentment?

Democratic politicians and the media have struggled to enter the minds of Trump voters, who are evidently enraged by the imposition of norms of political correctness that they see as enforced by “Stalinist orthodoxy.”

Trump has capitalized on the visceral belief of many white voters that government-enforced diversity and other related regulations are designed “to bring Americans to submission” by silencing their opposition to immigration — legal and illegal — to judicial orders putting low-income housing in the suburbs, and to government-mandated school integration, to name just a few of their least favorite things.