It’s a lesson in reading, writing and reefer.

Florida moms and dads have been spotted smoking weed, drinking and walking around half-naked in the background of their kids’ online classes, frustrated teachers said at a school board meeting.

“Parents, please make sure that you have on proper clothing when you are walking behind your child’s computer because we’ve seen them in their drawers, their bras, and everything else,” Boca Raton Elementary teacher Edith Pride vented Wednesday, according to KATV.

The disruption to schools caused by the coronavirus pandemic constitutes a “global education emergency” that threatens to derail the education of at least 24 million students projected to drop out of school as a result, said Henrietta Fore, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“At the height of Covid-19,” 192 countries shuttered schools, leaving 1.6 billion students without in-person learning, Fore said on a press call hosted by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. She added that now, more than 870 million students, “or half the world’s student population in 51 countries,” are still unable to return to school.

“The longer children remain out of school, the less likely they are to return,” she said. “That’s why we are urging governments to prioritize reopening schools when restrictions are lifted.”

She added that beyond education, schools around the world provide many students with a source of nutrition and immunizations.

“At least 24 million children are projected to drop out of school due to Covid-19,” she said.

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without clothes on their backs or roofs over their heads, but most of us would not wish for a world with more people, if they had to live homeless and naked against the elements. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy -- to light their homes and cook their food, and if that level is reached, they’ll be in the market for still more -- to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At moderate levels of economic development, people start to desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and cars to drive. And at the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, which they reach by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

One solution is to simply open our borders, to allow more of the world’s desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered the earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious -- that the opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in a third world country. And if you are rich or middle class American, there are benefits from immigrants – cheaper labor and better bottom-lines on stock dividends (as large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, and drastically cut salaries and benefits for their employees). But Cafaro notes that those economic benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for the poorest Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live reasonably comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.

Gender reveal parties are a form of domestic terrorism

One dead grandmother-to-be. A downed plane. An incinerated car. Several terrifying explosions. An altercation at Applebee’s. A massive wildfire that burned 47,000 acres of Arizona forest and resulted in an estimated $8m worth of damage.

All that’s just a small snapshot of the manslaughter and mayhem unleashed by gender reveal parties over the last couple of years. And that’s before you factor in the latest nightmare ignited by the terrible trend: the El Dorado fire in California. The fire, which was caused by a “smoke-generating pyrotechnic device” set off at a gender reveal party, has burned more than 13,000 acres of forest so far and prompted the evacuation of 3,000 residents.

It’s worth pausing here for a moment to fully absorb the fact that, as well as resulting in a woman’s death, gender reveal parties have destroyed at least 60,000 acres of land in the last three years. (To put this in perspective, the area of Manhattan is around 14,600 acres.) We all know that the police are fond of a bit of profiling; based on these statistics alone they ought to be implementing stop-and-frisk tactics on all heterosexual couples who come within five miles of a heavily wooded area. If the woman’s got a baby bump and the man’s got a dad bod then law enforcement should search them for explosives, stat.

The rate of suicide among those aged 10 to 24 increased nearly 60% between 2007 and 2018, according to a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rise occurred in most states, with 42 experiencing significant increases.

"It's a real trend that has been demanding, for a while, a serious public health and research effort to understand what is happening and why," said Anna Mueller, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington who studies suicides in adolescents. "I don't buy that it's just social media, which is one of the explanations that I most consistently see."

"We absolutely need to be really careful to not think about suicide as just a white kid problem," Mueller said. "It's absolutely not. Kids across racial and ethnic groups and sexual orientations experience suicidal thoughts, and even attempt at significant rates."

But Mueller cautioned not to lose sight of the fact that suicidal thoughts are not uncommon, especially among young people.

For the first time since 2000, the official guidance on relationships and sex education (RSE) in England is changing. From this month, RSE is mandatory in every secondary school, regardless of whether they are state or private (though the Government has said it will make allowances for schools as yet unable to implement the change because of the coronavirus crisis).

Relationships education – which is now compulsory in every primary school – will mainly deal with families and friendships. It will cover the risks of online relationships, digital privacy, physical boundaries and recognising abusive behaviour.

But will the new guidance protect and empower young people for sex and relationships in a modern world?“The curriculum puts the physical health and emotional wellbeing of young people at its core,” Chiquita Henson, headteacher of Cirencester Deer Park School, a secondary school in Gloucestershire, tells i.

A Popeyes employee has been fired after a cop in Texas claimed his food had been tampered with.

According to the San Antonio Police Department Officer A. Martinez said he heard the fast food restaurant worker making derogatory remarks about members of law enforcement while getting his meal of chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy at the drive-thru.

The cop claims that he had already begun to eat the meal then saw 'ACAB' – an abbreviation for 'all cop are b*****ds' - written inside in black marker and noticed what looked like saliva on his food.

DEAR ABBY: Although he has never hit me, my husband has been emotionally and verbally abusive ever since our wedding five years ago. One of his favorite names for me when he’s angry is “Fuckin’ Bitch.” I know this is my fault because I have tolerated it.

Today, my 2½-year-old daughter (who is usually a good girl) threw a tantrum and called me the same name twice. I try to discipline her, but she doesn’t understand that she’s saying something bad if Daddy can call me that. How can she?

He blames me for her talking that way, saying he hasn’t called me that in a month. (He called me that last week. I don’t use that language.)

I have suggested marriage counseling in the past, but he refused. I can’t leave him because I am seven months pregnant with our second child. How do I get both of them to respect me?

DISRESPECTED IN THE EAST

A civil rights complaint in Michigan has accused a math teacher of creating a racially hostile environment by displaying black students' poor grades to the class and calling them criminals.

Mother Charmelle Kelsey filed the complaint on Monday with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights on behalf of her daughter Makayla, a rising junior at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor.

The complaint was filed in conjunction with a 14-page letter composed by the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School, which details the allegations of Makayla and several other named and unnamed students.

Suddenly I’m thinking of moving to Spain.

A bill introduced recently in the nation’s parliament would require that Spanish children do housework and homework. They would also be required to “participate in family life” and “respect their parents and siblings.”

Wow. Good luck with that.

Back here in the United States, I can barely get my 16-year-old to take out the trash. Sometimes, it feels like Middle East peace talks must be easier.

Meanwhile, other parents don’t even ask their kids to pitch in—either because they’ve completely surrendered, have concluded that it’s easier to do the job themselves, or have decided that after-school activities and playtime are more valuable. Children have gone “from being our employees to our bosses,” Jennifer Senior notes in her book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.

Q. Inappropriate food: My son, “Chris,” is 9. A few weeks ago, we decided to open our bubble to include the family of “Neil,” Chris’s best friend. Both of Neil’s parents are doctors, so this seemed like a safe decision. Both parents were born and raised in India. We let Chris have dinner at their place the other night since both boys were having a great time together. When we came to pick up Chris, Neil’s mom recounted to me how much chicken curry and lentils and vegetables Chris ate. I couldn’t believe that they served my son spicy curries without even calling to ask us if that would be OK! I was taken aback and gently mentioned that spicy foods can be hard on small tummies, but it didn’t seem to register. Thankfully Chris didn’t get sick. My wife says to drop it because any conversation will look racial in nature and to only let the boys play at our place. Please help.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I are friends with a lovely couple. We have many things in common and enjoy hanging out with them. The problem is their kid. They have a son the same age as our younger son and the boys like hanging out with each other. At first that seemed like a great bonus to this friendship. But the longer we’ve been friends, the clearer it has become that their kid is a horrible person—rude, spoiled, insolent, a liar, and frequently downright mean to our kid (although our kid doesn’t seem to care and still wants to hang out with him). The parents do nothing to address his bad behavior. In fact, they coddle him. I know we need to mind our own business and not make comments on their objectively garbage parenting style, but can we distance our kid from theirs? Is it too weird to hang out with the parents and just never bring our own kid along? As a side note, we could leave our son with his older brother; they don’t have any other kids so we don’t really have an “adults only” option.


—Keeping My Mouth Shut Is Hard

We are in the middle of a mass extinction, the first caused by a single species. There are 7.8 billion of us, on a planet that scientists estimate can support 1.5 billion humans living as the average US citizen does today. And we know that the biggest contribution any individual living in affluent nations can make is to not have children. According to one study, having one fewer child prevents 58.6 tonnes of carbon emissions every year; compare that with living car-free (2.4 tonnes), avoiding a transatlantic return flight (1.6), or eating a plant-based diet (0.82). Another study said it was almost 20 times more important than any other choice an environmentally minded individual could make. Such claims have been questioned. After all, does a parent really bear the burden of their child’s emissions? Won’t our individual emissions fall as technologies and lifestyles change? Isn’t measuring our individual carbon footprint – a concept popularised by oil and gas multinational BP – giving a free pass to the handful of corporate powers responsible for almost all carbon emissions? The only thing that isn’t up for debate is that we all know that we are living in ways that can’t continue.

Coronavirus isn’t likely to give us coronababies – but a pandemic isn’t the reason that having children has shifted from an inevitability to a choice, and now, a moral question. A long time ago, “Do we have children?” became “Should we?”

A sign at the entrance of a metal-cutting shop in Kentwood, a suburb of Grand Rapids, asks customers to “remove your mask or raise both hands high” to avoid being mistaken as a robber.

The sign in front of Tubergen Cutting Tools Inc. reads “In responce [sic] to Gretch, attention: This facility is protected by armed employees for your safety! Remove your mask or raise both hands high and keep um up! Don’t be mistaken as a robber! Thank you, management. Open carry still welcome.”

"As the women's movement went mainstream, I loved the options for women it created, but also felt there was a demonizing of men, an undervaluing of the family, and a blindness to how boys and men were being harmed that would have profound effects on families, boys, addiction, careers, male unemployment, the global economy and so on," he explained. "When I uncovered reasons that were not part of the public consciousness, I felt I had something to contribute."

Farrell soon discovered that there was little serious attention being paid to the space of boy's development, either in academia or anywhere else. The subject was, in Farrell's words, "a national afterthought."

What was not an afterthought to Farrell were the big disparities in outcomes of every kind between boys and girls in America. Disparities that crossed ethnic, racial and geographic boundaries.

"Before age 9, boys and girls commit suicide equally," Farrell told a Tedx audience. "By age 10 to 14, it is twice the amount for boys. Between 15 and 19, it is four times the amount, and by ages 18 to 24, it is six times the amount. That's staggering." Often, these tragedies seem to share one circumstance: the lack of a father in the home.