KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent and the Grenadines — A volcano in the southern Caribbean that had been dormant for decades erupted in a billowing blast of gray smoke on Friday, spewing clouds of ash for miles and forcing thousands to evacuate. The volcano, known as La Soufrière, on the northern tip of the main island of St. Vincent, in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, had started showing signs of renewed activity in late December. It moved into an “explosive state” on Friday morning, the National Emergency Management Organization said on Twitter.

Darryl Richardson voted for the union. But while trying to persuade others, he realised Amazon's messaging was working: "They were scared that healthcare was going to be taken away. That's why a lot of them voted "no" against the union. We got the outcome we have now because they threatened them, that benefits and wages were going to drop."

Hillbilly Elegy won rave reviews, inspired a legion of think pieces and took up residence on the bestseller charts for much of the following year. Ohio Senator Rob Portman was among those who named it their favourite book of 2016. In 2020 it was turned into a film, directed by Ron Howard and starring Glenn Close as Mamaw. Despite unfavourable reviews, it was one of the most streamed films on Netflix at the end of the year.

The report, commissioned by the board that oversees the Toronto police, also strongly criticized Mark Saunders, who stepped down as the city’s chief of police last year, for publicly dismissing concerns that a serial killer was targeting Toronto’s gay community, finding that he corroded public confidence within that group. At the top of the 151 recommendations in the four-volume report is a proposal that police turn over some missing persons investigations to public health and social services agencies and nonprofit community groups. The report also proposes that within the police force, missing person cases be coordinated by civilians and be centralized rather than spread out through individual precincts. But Mr. Rahim, whose group was among those that criticized the police for not treating the missing-persons cases as possible serial killings earlier, said that the report was just “a starting point,” and that it remained to be seen if the police were receptive to change.

The CPSC said it believed at least one of the 39 incidents occurred while a parent was running on the treadmill. It also warned that children could be seriously injured while the Tread+ is being used by an adult and not just during cases where children have been left unsupervised.

"My nani, my family, and our families should not feel unsafe at work, at their place of worship, or anywhere," she said."Enough is enough - our community has been through enough trauma."

And after the game ended, as she headed back to the bus, what she had on her mind was grabbing food with other members of the band. They had determined that Vianey had exposed a whole group of horns and saxophones on her bus, and the other positive student had exposed a whole bus full of clarinet players. And because the fourth and final game was just two weeks away, it meant that they would miss their last game — a game everyone called senior night because it celebrated the students who wouldn’t be coming back next year. She ended up calling me back in about 5 or 10 minutes to argue further that her daughter was on the other bus.

All of this was the backdrop when, a few weeks later, in early November, the Odessa High School marching band and their drum major, fighting back a headache, climbed onto the bus to go to the biggest football game of the season — the rivalry game against the Permian Panthers — a night that would spark the largest quarantine of the semester. And because the fourth and final game was just two weeks away, it meant that they would miss their last game — a game everyone called senior night because it celebrated the students who wouldn’t be coming back next year. And the unfortunate irony of the whole band-bus quarantine was that while dozens of members of the band were unable to attend the final game, Vianey and the other positive student, who had inadvertently exposed those students to the virus, were allowed to go to the game.I tested negative.

When I moved to Boston, Schuller was in the final years of his transformative tenure as president of the New England Conservatory. Schuller also taught for two decades at the Tanglewood Music Center, serving as artistic director for 15 of those years, until 1984. For all his formidable skills and vision as a composer, Schuller may have been more consequential as a teacher, mentor, conductor and a tireless (sometimes shrill) agitator on behalf of contemporary music and living composers than as a writer of music himself. It was commissioned as a children’s opera by the Junior League of Boston, and first performed in 1970 by Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston — though Caldwell had another composer in mind for the project when she found herself working with the imposing Schuller.

So when her high-school counselor and her Ph.D.-educated aunt urged her to apply to Cornell, on her path to becoming a veterinarian, she had her doubts.“It was one of those, ‘I’ll give it a shot, boost my ego a little bit,’” she said, laughing infectiously, of her decision to apply. She figured she was helped by the fact that Cornell, like hundreds of other universities, had suspended its standardized test score requirement for admission during the coronavirus pandemic. She also said she believed that protests kindled by the death of George Floyd had caught the attention of admissions officers, inspiring some to draft essay questions aimed at eliciting students’ thoughts on racial justice and the value of diversity.

So when her high-school counselor and her Ph.D.-educated aunt urged her to apply to Cornell, on her path to becoming a veterinarian, she had her doubts.“It was one of those, ‘I’ll give it a shot, boost my ego a little bit,’” she said, laughing infectiously, of her decision to apply. She figured she was helped by the fact that Cornell, like hundreds of other universities, had suspended its standardized test score requirement for admission during the coronavirus pandemic. She also said she believed that protests kindled by the death of George Floyd had caught the attention of admissions officers, inspiring some to draft essay questions aimed at eliciting students’ thoughts on racial justice and the value of diversity.

Middle and high schools may open at any level of community spread if they conduct weekly coronavirus testing of students and staff members. The agency also recommended that at higher levels of community spread, all schools reduce attendance by having students come to class on different days or by having some groups of students learn virtually. You can look up your community’s test positivity rate and the number of new cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days (these numbers are often available on state or county websites, though you might need to do some math to get the rate per 100,000 people), then compare the agency’s policy recommendations for that level of transmission with what your school is doing. But the guidelines acknowledge that some schools have been safely open at higher levels of community transmission than the recommendations advise.

The assault of a 13-year-old girl in Venezuela and the arrest of her mother and a teacher who helped her end the pregnancy have forced a national debate about legalizing abortion. With her mother, she sought out a doctor, who told her the pregnancy endangered her life, and then a former teacher, who provided pills that induced an abortion. But ending a pregnancy is illegal in almost all circumstances in Venezuela. And now the girl was speaking up, she said, because her teacher, Vannesa Rosales, was in jail, facing more than a decade in prison for helping her end a pregnancy — while the accused rapist remained free.

In an opinion piece for The Hill, Republican Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky, wrote that any required proof of inoculation would be "full-on vaccine fascism". He urged readers to "burn your vaccine passport if they try to give it to you, and vote out any politician who won't do the same".

"They have clearly experienced much worse outcomes overall than Canada, make no mistake. However, it's the future I'm worried about, and we're trending in a worrisome direction in comparison to them when it comes to community spread."

Voices as prominent as the former New York City schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, and the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state’s largest educators’ union, have encouraged parents to opt their children out of state tests during the pandemic. This week, the nation’s largest school system, in New York City, announced that parents would have to opt their children in to state standardized testing, which could lead to a smaller group of students taking the exams, and results that will be difficult to interpret. Jesse Hagopian, a Seattle high school teacher and writer, said testing to measure the impact of the pandemic misses what students have learned outside of physical classrooms during a year of overlapping crises in health, politics and police violence.A preliminary national study of 98,000 students from Policy Analysis for California Education, an independent group with ties to several large universities, found that as of late fall, second graders were 26 percent behind where they would have been, absent the pandemic, in their ability to read aloud accurately and quickly.

The competition between the US and China lies at the heart of many of the differences in the scenarios - whether one of them becomes more successful or whether the two compete equally or divide the world into separate silos.

MEXICO CITY — Record numbers of asylum seekers are applying for sanctuary in Mexico — some after arriving at the southwest border of the United States hoping to find a safe haven under President Biden, but hitting a closed door. In March, the Mexican government received asylum petitions from more than 9,000 people, the highest monthly tally ever, officials said. The soaring numbers of asylum petitions in Mexico are in part a reflection of the turmoil at the American border, where the Biden administration is struggling to deal with a surge in undocumented migration and has prevented many asylum seekers from presenting their cases to immigration officials. Mexico has also become an increasingly attractive destination in its own right for refugees, who have generally found asylum easier to achieve in Mexico than in the United States.

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Switzerland and Finland are two of the European countries with the most guns per person - they both have compulsory military service for all men over the age of 18. How do US gun deaths break down?Figures from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show there were a total of more than 38,300 deaths from guns in 2019 - of which more than 23,900 were suicides. Other figures from the Gun Violence Archive suggest mass shooting may have risen last year.

“Sharon had an outsize influence on Belize,” he said in a phone interview. After high school she signed up to be a survival instructor in the Air Force, which sent her to Panama for jungle training. She fell in love with the tropics, and with an Air Force dentist named Jack Schreier. Ms. Matola studied Russian at the University of Iowa but soon moved to Sarasota, Fla., where she enrolled at New College and switched majors to biology.

LIMA, Peru — Peru’s presidential election is headed for a runoff, with Pedro Castillo, a far-left former union activist and teacher, in the lead, according to data released Monday by the country’s electoral body. Mr. Castillo, a social conservative, was one of 18 candidates, and tapped into a wave of anti-establishment sentiment in an election characterized by widespread frustration with the political system. He is likely headed into a runoff with Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the jailed former authoritarian leader Alberto Fujimori, according to a survey of electoral tallies by the firm Ipsos for a local television channel. Either pairing would set the stage for a highly polarized second-round election, the results of which could steer the country in radically different directions.

By Friday, Canada’s seven-day average of new daily cases was 8,600; hospitalizations were up by 22 percent; I.C.U. Manitoba discovered its first case of the variant this week. In Ontario, the B.1.1.7 variant that initially appeared in Britain is the worry; the province may be facing a devastating 10,000 daily new cases, according to a projection released on Friday. Numbers may be up in Atlantic Canada, but because the region has maintained the tightest pandemic restrictions in the country, it is now escaping the level of outbreak seen in Ontario and elsewhere.

Some truth about yesterday. While sitting in the @WhiteHouse Rose Garden listening to @POTUS, when he mentioned Jaime, I broke down & cried like a baby.I was not sure I wanted to share this but decided it is important for all to know the painful reality of why I do this. pic. twitter. com/N7sc5a4Kc6

By Friday, Canada’s seven-day average of new daily cases was 8,600; hospitalizations were up by 22 percent; I.C.U. Manitoba discovered its first case of the variant this week. In Ontario, the B.1.1.7 variant that initially appeared in Britain is the worry; the province may be facing a devastating 10,000 daily new cases, according to a projection released on Friday. Numbers may be up in Atlantic Canada, but because the region has maintained the tightest pandemic restrictions in the country, it is now escaping the level of outbreak seen in Ontario and elsewhere.

Raúl Castro announced Friday that he was handing over leadership of Cuba’s powerful Communist Party to a younger generation “full of passion and anti-imperialist spirit,” leaving the island nation without a Castro at its helm for the first time in over 60 years. Mr. Castro, who turns 90 in June, reiterated his long-expected intention to step down in a speech kicking off the Communist Party congress on Friday. After serving two terms as Cuba’s president, Mr. Castro stepped down from that office in 2018, replaced by his handpicked successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez. Cuba’s leadership will likely announce further reforms during the party congress, to reorient the country toward a socialist system and away from the more austere Communist model that fueled the revolution that brought Mr. Castro and his brother, Fidel, to power in 1959.

Mr Packer was arrested in Virginia and has been charged with trespassing in a federal building and "violent entry and disorderly conduct" on Capitol grounds. Known for appearing with a painted face, fur hat and horns while carrying a "Q sent me" banner in public, Mr Chansley, 33, has been charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct after appearing in multiple images inside the halls of Congress and the Senate chamber. Local media reports say Mr Barnett is involved in a group that supports gun rights, and that he was interviewed at a "Stop the Steal" rally following the presidential election - the movement that supports Mr Trump's unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. The so-called Q Shaman requested a pardon from Mr Trump before he left office, citing "the peaceful and compliant fashion in which Mr Chansley comported himself" during the riot.