Shares in two of France’s biggest retailers dipped today (Jan. 17) after the companies said sales were hurt by five weeks of union-led protests over pension reform during the holiday season.
From the outside, Madjengo looks like your typical mosque. Located in the Muslim-majority town of Gisenyi, at the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Islamic center houses a mosque and a madrassa, or religious school. But on a recent Friday morning, it’s also overrun by children who play on swings and slides and peek out of the windows of colorful classrooms labeled “baby,” “toddler,” and “middle.”
Every parent knows what it’s like to be stuck inside the house with children on snow days or rainy days, when the weather causes normal life to grind to a halt. But what if the bad weather was a cloud of noxious fumes caused by giant bushfires? And what if the air inside the house was almost as toxic as the air outside? What would you do then?
Head Start, the childcare program designed more than half-a-century ago for low-income families in the US, has an unusual problem: It is both oversubscribed and under-attended.
Snow blankets the Finnish city of Espoo, on the outskirts of Helsinki, on a Friday morning in November. A dozen strollers are parked to the side of a cream-colored house. The chimney is fuming, and screams and laughter can be heard from the back of the house, where parents and children are sledding down a hill. Inside the house, people are talking and the smell of cookies in the oven wafts out from the kitchen to the room next door, where children are assembling gift bags for Father’s Day on Sunday. At various points throughout the morning, 11 moms and 13 children take over the Kotikolo family café, playing with the finger puppets that line the walls of the playroom and kitchen, along with every kind of toy and book imaginable. There are newborns and toddlers, young moms and older ones.
An international network of companies tied to Purdue Pharma in the US has been fined by an Australian drug regulator for “misleading, imbalanced, and otherwise inaccurate” advertising of opioid painkiller Targin to health professionals.
Holidays can be a stressful time for parents. When kids don’t have daycare or school to fill their days, they expect constant entertainment. Then there’s present shopping, meal cooking, and the possibility of extended family descending on you. You’d be forgiven for wanting to hunker down on the couch with your phone and tune it all out.
A group of 175 doctors published a letter in The Times today warning the UK government that air pollution is leading to a spike in respiratory diseases, bronchitis, and pneumonia, straining an already overwhelmed National Health Service (NHS).
Prime minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party won a decisive victory in yesterday’s general election, with 364 seats and one constituency left to declare as of midday Friday. It’s the party’s biggest victory since 1987.
British prime minister Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party won a landslide victory in yesterday’s general election. By Friday midday, with one constituency left to declare, the Conservatives had 364 seats, the party’s best showing since 1987.
French workers have been on strike for a week in protest against a government proposal to reform the country’s convoluted pension system. On Dec. 5, trade unions called for a nationwide strike that has since shut down public transport and schools across France.
On Dec. 12, British voters will elect a new Parliament, and the result will determine the course of their country’s exit from the European Union.
Bicycles are the common thread that links “all the dots” in Katelijne Boerma’s life.
It’s Wednesday morning, so toddlers in the Tammi nursery in Helsinki, Finland, are excited—their communal grandparent, or “kylämummi,” is here.
Angelina Spicer checked herself into a psychiatric hospital about eight months after the birth of her daughter, Ava.
The UK was supposed to have left the European Union by now. In large part, that is why voters are going to the polls on Dec. 12 to elect a new government to push Brexit through, alter the divorce deal, or cancel the whole thing entirely.
In about two weeks, voters in a London suburb will determine the future of British politics.
A new rule requiring face scans of customers signing up for new mobile plans in China came into effect Sunday (Dec. 1), amid widespread adoption of facial-recognition technology across the country.
When Boris Johnson sat down for a televised interview on The Andrew Marr Show, the BBC’s flagship Sunday program, he probably thought it was going to be easy. The British prime minister had battled with the broadcaster for days in order to be featured on the program without first agreeing to be interviewed by journalist Andrew Neil—a notoriously dogged interviewer—ahead of the Dec. 12 general election. (Neil recently grilled Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for refusing to apologize to British Jews over accusations of institutional anti-Semitism in his party.)
The unprecedented fires that burned through the Amazon in August had several culprits: farmers clearing land for cattle ranching, anti-indigenous activists attempting to drive away tribes who live in the rainforest, and lax enforcement of environmental protections by Brazil’s far-right government. But now, president Jair Bolsonaro is blaming another unlikely culprit: American actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio.
The American phenomenon of Black Friday—a post-Thanksgiving shopping binge so intense it has its own death count tracker—has long since spread to the rest of the world. Some countries aren’t happy about it.
During a much-anticipated news conference yesterday (Nov. 27), Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn dramatically revealed a stack of 451 uncensored pages of internal notes from the Department for International Trade. He said they showed that, between July 2017 and July 2019, senior UK and US officials discussed putting the National Health Service (NHS) “on the table” in a future post-Brexit trade deal. The claim countered repeated assertions by prime minister Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party that the NHS is off the table, no matter what.
For the first time, during the fifth Democratic debate, the presidential candidates faced an all-female panel of moderators. And for the first time, the candidates were asked about America’s childcare problem. It wasn’t altogether a coincidence.
Patricia Acensi-Ferré learned that she had breast cancer on Valentine’s Day.
