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About 650 of the nearly 1,700 schools in the system have populations that are 70 percent a single race, a New York Times analysis of schools data for the 2009-10 school year found; more than half the city’s schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic.

He has spoken to white parents trying to comprehend why the local schools aren’t more integrated, even as white people move in. “They say things like they don’t want to be guinea pigs,” he said. “The other day, one said, ‘I don’t want to be the only drop of cream in the coffee.’ ”

“The preponderance of evidence shows that attending schools that are diverse has positive effects on children throughout the grades, and it grows over time,” said Roslyn Mickelson, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who has reviewed hundreds of studies of integrated schooling. “To put it another way, the problems of segregation are accentuated over time,” she said.

Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw said he believed that concern over head injuries would cause football to be eclipsed in popularity by soccer and other sports within 10 years.

“Football is really on the verge of a turning point here. We may see it in 15 years in pretty much the same place as boxing or ultimate fighting.” In other words, less a lucrative American colossus and more a niche sport beloved for its brutality.

there is a growing sentiment among those who love the sport and those who loathe it that football has come to a critical juncture.

These articles are important, & I'm glad the Times is bringing this issue to awareness. However, the hyper focus on football alone creates a misperception that only football is dangerous & risky. That is simply not true. Parents here who pat themselves on the back for not enrolling their child in football - or in leveling charges of child abuse on those who do - are the same parents who enroll their child in: lacrosse, ice hockey, cheerleading, competitive soccer, skiing, ice skating, wrestling, & many other sports that have very high risks of brain injury as well. I realize some of the spotlight is on football because of all the money involved, but I have to wonder if it's also because football is filled with African American & lower income parents.It's definitely disgusting how college football uses their players like meat, risking players' health & reaping millions. By the time they're at NFL level, it can be egregious. But let's not lose sight of the risks in so many competitive sports. My friend's daughter actually broke her neck because of the style of dance where you whip your head all over (most competitive hip hop). When I taught high school, the worst concussions I saw were girls basketball & wrestling. Wrestling had the highest concussion rate, far over football. And they were treated less.The bigger issue is our culture, which awards so much $ in scholarships & extracts so more $ for those who risk nothing. And all for sports. Not learning. Sports.

Ripley is offering to show how other nations educate students so much more effectively than we do

In the best tradition of travel writing, however, she gets well beneath the glossy surfaces of these foreign cultures, and manages to make our own culture look newly strange..

Ripley made the canny choice to enlist “field agents” who could penetrate other countries’ schools far more fully than she: three American students, each studying abroad for a year.

Their assuredness is as bold as the company behind the school: IMG, the global sports management conglomerate that has helped propel the competitive leap that high school football has made beyond the traditional community team.

convention is being challenged by a more professional model at the highest levels as top players urgently pursue college scholarships, training becomes more specialized, big business opens its wallet, school choice expands, and schools seek to market themselves through sports, some for financial survival.

Increasingly, prep football talent is being consolidated on powerful public, private, parochial, charter and magnet school teams. And recruiting to those schools is widespread in one guise or another.

A growing global pro-Palestinian movement to boycott Israel instantly created a national furor on Thursday after the top executive of Orange, a leading French telecommunications company, said he would withdraw from the Israeli market if he could.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the French government to repudiate the “miserable statement.”

The Orange chief executive, Stéphane Richard, said on Wednesday that were it not for the potential legal and financial penalties, he would leave the Israeli market “tomorrow morning.”

Russia's status as a sports superpower and its participation in track and field events at next year's Olympics came under threat Monday after a report accused the Russians of widespread, state-supported doping reminiscent of the darkest days of cheating by the former East Germany.

The findings by a commission set up by the World Anti-Doping Agency were far more damaging than expected. It means that two of the world's most popular sports — soccer and track and field — are now mired in scandals that could destroy their reputations.

The WADA investigation's findings that Russian government officials must have known about doping and cover-ups, with even its intelligence service, the FSB, allegedly involved, threatened to severely tarnish President Vladimir Putin's use of sports to improve his country's global standing. Russia hosted the last Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014 and will hold the next World Cup in 2018.

From the mild-mannered Danes to crazed soccer fans, people all over the world go nuts for their national colors

People across Europe also have a passionate relationship with their flying colors, even if they are less conscious of it, and don’t normally fly the flag at fast food joints.

Think back to the dramatic Mohammed cartoon controversy of 2006, when Danish flags joined American flags in flag-burning rallies across the Muslim world after a Danish newspaper published a cartoon depicting the prophet.

What's your first and last name? Your education and work experience? Do you have recommendations? And are you willing to be a suicide attacker or would you prefer to be a fighter for ISIS?

Germany's interior minister said he believes data in the documents -- described by European media as the names and personal data of tens of thousands of possible ISIS recruits -- could allow authorities to prosecute people who joined ISIS and then returned to their home countries.

If they did not hear from him, they would know that he is dead."

Tragedy ForgesAlliance for Change After a young rugby player died in Northern Ireland, his family anda brain expert set about to establish concussion guidelines in Britain.

As a heartbroken Mr. Robinson and his family left the Old Townhall Courthouse in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that day in September 2013, they were told they could slip out the back to avoid the news media. But Mr. Robinson was determined that his son should not die in vain, so he, along with his ex-wife, Karen Walton, and their families, exited through the front, spoke to a scrum of reporters and instantly landed among the most vocal advocates for concussion safety standards in Britain.

Within months, Mr. Robinson was meeting with politicians, sports executives, professional athletes and, most important, Dr. Willie Stewart, the foremost scientist on the subject in Britain who formed a bond with Mr. Robinson that has helped produce some of the most comprehensive concussion guidelines in the world.

In the hundred years since, the event has been seen as a kind of miracle, a rare moment of peace just a few months into a war that would eventually claim over 15 million lives.

But what actually happened on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of 1914 — and did they really play soccer on the battlefield?

Most accounts suggest the truce began with carol singing from the trenches on Christmas Eve

Katidis is a reflection of a troubling global trend: the rise of neo-fascist politics amid the economic tumult in Europe.

The austerity measures enacted in response to the Greek economic crisis have propelled the rise of right-wing politics; nationalist groups are gaining footholds throughout the country.

While political distress causes people to leave their homelands, economic distress causes them to turn their frustration on their newest neighbors.

I use the phrase bundled choices because it seemed to me that there were some pretty striking patterns that emerged with these families in terms of how they set up their children’s lives.

For example, I talk in the book about how choosing a neighborhood leads to a whole bunch of other choices—about schools, about the other people in the neighborhood. Decisions about who to carpool with, decisions about which soccer team to be on—you want to be on the same one as all your friends, and all these aspects of the kid’s life are connected to the parents’ choices about where to live.

kids are growing up in these social environments that their parents shape. They’re having interactions with other people in these environments, and that’s, I think, where they’re developing their own ideas about race and privilege and inequality.

The irrelevance of facts is a topic that has consumed political thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. O’Brien pins the problem on a phenomenon he has named the “footballification of politics.”“In football, or soccer as you call it, you have these utterly blind tribal loyalties,” he said. “You put on your red scarf, I put on my blue scarf, and that means we will always be mortal enemies. We have no common ground. My team is incapable of committing a foul, and your team is incapable of playing fair.”

The larger question, in both Britain and the United States, is why politics have recently devolved into tribes. To William Davies, a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the author of the coming “Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World,” the answer is not that every side believes it has a monopoly on reason

VIENNA — When she says identity, he hears exclusion.When he says diversity, she hears Islamization.He accuses her of forgetting history. She accuses him of obsessing with history. He calls her a racist. She calls him a national masochist.Helmut Lethen, 79, and Caroline Sommerfeld, 42, are both writers. They represent two generations and two intellectual camps in an ever more divided Germany. They are political enemies.And they are married.

One recent evening Mr. Lethen called his wife and her far-right friends “spongers.”Their attack on liberal democracy was only possible because of liberal democracy, he reasoned. Fantasizing about an authoritarian regime like that in Hungary was akin to “sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.”Ms. Sommerfeld countered that the liberal mainstream consensus was itself authoritarian and did not even realize it. “You preach openness,” she said, “but you aren’t open to opinions you don’t like.”

May 1968 was as important in Europe as it was in the United States, fueled similarly by a youth bulge, sexual liberation, disgust with the Vietnam War and general discontent with the era’s political establishment.And it spawned much the same trajectory for its baby boomers, from budding student revolutionaries to button-down liberal elites.Germany was no exception. And neither was Mr. Lethen.

Herd immunity is typically generated through vaccination, and while it could arise through widespread infection, “you don’t rely on the very deadly infectious agent to create an immune population,” says Akiko Iwasaki, a virologist at the Yale School of Medicine. And that seemed like the goal.

Vallance and others certainly made it sound like the government was deliberately aiming for 60 percent of the populace to fall ill. Keep calm and carry on … and get COVID-19.

He says that the actual goal is the same as that of other countries: flatten the curve by staggering the onset of infections. As a consequence, the nation may achieve herd immunity; it’s a side effect, not an aim.