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Anti-Sex’ Beds in the Olympic Village? A Social Media Theory Is Soon Debunked. The coronavirus has forced a number of social distancing measures at the Summer Games, but the recyclable cardboard beds provided by organises. it’s recyclable  cardboard beds and mattresses for all the athletes. Competitors arriving at the Tokyo Olympics have discovered something unusual about the beds in the athletes’ village: They’re made of cardboard. Some have shared images on social media of the modular bed frames, which are made by the Japanese company Airweave and are recyclable. Organizers say it is the first time that the beds at the Games will be made almost entirely out of renewable materials.But in the time of the coronavirus, when Olympic organizers worried about transmission are trying to discourage close contact as much as possible, the unusual bed frames have led some to suggest there’s another motive behind them. Paul Chelimo, an American distance runner,  speculated on T...

Luz Portillo, the oldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, has many plans. She is studying to be a skin care expert. She has also applied to nursing school. She works full time, too — as a nurse’s aide and doing eyelash extensions, a business she would like to grow.  But one thing she has no plans for anytime soon is a baby. Ms. Portillo’s mother had her when she was 16. Her father has worked as a landscaper for as long as she can remember. She wants a career and more control over her life. “I can’t get pregnant, I can’t get pregnant,” she said she tells herself. “I have to have a career and a job. If I don’t, it’s like everything my parents did goes in vain.” For decades, delaying parenthood was the domain of upper-middle-class Americans, especially in big, coastal cities. Highly educated women put off having a baby until their careers were on track, often until their early 30s. But over the past decade, as more women of all social classes have prioritized education and career, dela...

  War, violence, persecution, human rights violations and other factors caused nearly 3 million people to flee their homes last year, even though the COVID-19 crisis restricted movement worldwide, the U.N. refugee agency said in a report Friday.   In its latest Global Trends report, UNHCR said the world’s cumulative number of displaced people rose to 82.4 million — roughly the population of Germany and a new post-World War II record.  Filippo Grandi, the United Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, said conflict and the fallout from climate change in places such as Mozambique, Ethiopia’s Tigray region and Africa’s Sahel area were key drivers of refugees and internally displaced people in 2020.  Such factors added hundreds of thousands to the overall count, the ninth consecutive annual increase in the number of forcibly displaced people. The millions who have fled countries such as Syria and Afghanistan due to protracted wars or fighting have dominated the U.N. age...

  Every Sunday at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, the Rev. Joseph Jackson Jr. praises the Lord before his congregation. But since last fall he’s been praising something else his Black community needs: the COVID-19 vaccine. “We want to continue to encourage our people to get out, get your shots. I got both of mine,” Jackson said to applause at the church in Milwaukee on a recent Sunday.  Members of Black communities across the U.S. have disproportionately fallen sick or died from the virus, so some church leaders are using their influence and trusted reputations to fight back by preaching from the pulpit, phoning people to encourage vaccinations, and hosting testing clinics and vaccination events in church buildings. Some want to extend their efforts beyond the fight against COVID-19 and give their flocks a place to seek health care for other ailments at a place they trust — the church. “We can’t go back to normal because we died in our normal,” Debra Fraser-Howze, the fo...

Public sentiment in Japan has been generally opposed to holding the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, partly based on fears the coronavirus will spike as almost 100,000 people — athletes and others — enter for both events. The Japanese medical community is largely against it. The government’s main medical adviser Dr. Shigeru Omi has said it’s “abnormal” to hold the Olympics during a pandemic. So far, only 5% of Japanese are fully vaccinated. The  medical journal The Lancet has raised  questions about the health risks and criticized the World Health Organization and other health bodies for not taking a clear stand. The  New England Journal of Medicine  has said the IOC’s decision to proceed “is not informed by the best scientific evidence.” The second-largest selling newspaper in Japan, the Asahi Shimbun, has called for the Olympics to be canceled. So have other regional newspapers.  Still, they are going ahead. How have the International Olympic Committee and the ...

New research reveals how more friends may not always be better. 1. Consider the number of friends you have and how you think this makes you look. If the number of friends you have grows, do you become more appealing to other people as a possible friend? Or do you become less appealing? If you were to take a wild guess, what would you say? 2. Now let’s flip this question around: If you could choose between someone who has a slew of friends or someone who has a handful of friends, which person would you rather have as a friend? 3. A team of researchers explored these questions in a series of studies, and their results highlight an intriguing contradiction between what we assume will make us more inviting as a friend and what we actually like better in others. 4. In both online and real-world situations, the investigators found that we have a propensity to presume that we’ll seem more appealing to other people if we have more friends, but when it comes to what we want in a friend, we tend...

 In the run-up to a bout with Evander Holyfield in 1996, a reporter asked reigning American boxing champion Mike Tyson about his opponent’s fight plan. “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” Tyson sniffed. The global response to Covid-19 could elicit a similar response. After a year in which the coronavirus killed more than 3 million people, it is re-accelerating in India. But even though the global crisis is far from over, it has already planted the seeds of a conflict over which economic and political models were reinforced by the pandemic, and which were weakened by it. In “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe”, historian Niall Ferguson seeks to put Covid-19 in context by reviewing nearly everything bad that has ever happened to humanity. Seeking an analytical framework to apply to human miscalculation in the face of cataclysm, he ranges far and wide. He offers the example of Pliny the Elder, the otherwise clever Roman philosopher, who having watched Mount Vesuv...

They are being offered little more than a couple of masks, some hand sanitizer and social-distancing guidance that may be hard to abide by.  For Olympic host cities, one of the keys to a successful Games is the army of volunteers who cheerfully perform a range of  duties , like fetching water, driving Olympic vehicles, interpreting for athletes or carrying medals to ceremonies.  If the rescheduled Tokyo Games go ahead as planned this summer, roughly 78,000 volunteers will have another responsibility: preventing the spread of the coronavirus, both among participants and themselves.  For protection, the volunteers are being offered little more than a couple of cloth masks, a bottle of sanitizer and mantras about social distancing. Unless they qualify for vaccination through Japan’s  slow age-based rollout , they will not be inoculated against the coronavirus.  “I don’t know how we’re going to be able to do this,” said Akiko Kariya, 40, a paralegal in Tokyo wh...

  In recent history, a few individuals have made decisions that could, in theory, have unleashed killer aliens or set Earth's atmosphere on fire. What can they tell us about attitudes to the existential risks we face today? In the late 1960s, Nasa faced a decision that could have shaped the fate of our species. Following the Apollo 11 Moon landings, the three astronauts were waiting to be picked up inside their capsule floating in the Pacific Ocean – and they were hot and uncomfortable. Nasa officials decided to make things more pleasant for their three national heroes. The downside? There was a small possibility of unleashing deadly alien microbes on Earth. A couple of decades beforehand, a group of scientists and military officials stood at a similar turning point. As they waited to watch the first atomic weapon test, they were aware of a potentially catastrophic outcome. There was a chance that their experiments might accidentally ignite the atmosphere and destroy all life on th...