International short-term volunteers reach out to an elderly Jewish couple and share comfort from God's Word.

A Thousand Moons

Not since the Second World War has attention been so firmly focused on food. Before coronavirus we took a steady availability for granted. Now after coronavirus we’re wondering just how secure our food chain really is.

Roma pastors and leaders from across Eastern Europe and the Balkans gather together for a Roma conference.

SIR Andy Murray has sent a heartfelt message to NHS staff for their heroic work during the coronavirus crisis.

ANDY MURRAY will swap a tennis racket for a games controller when he takes part in a virtual Madrid Open later this month.

GUS MACKAY was full of good intentions when he agreed to become Cricket Scotland’s new chief executive last October.

Dear Editor,Rumours have more potential to cause chaos now more than ever before. Previously, misconceptions and mischaracterisations took longer to infect the minds of a society. Maybe that left us unprepared.

HOUSING bosses in Scotland’s capital have finally moved all homeless families with children out of unsuitable B&Bs after Airbnb properties and hotel rooms were left empty by the coronavirus lockdown.

The ingenuity of Scotland’s independent food sector, and its determination to keep feeding us in these testing circumstances, is remarkable. Restaurants and cafés have gone down the takeaway route, small artisan suppliers who lost overnight all their catering customers have rapidly reconfigured their business around home delivery. Farmers who previously struggled to attract supermarket shoppers have never been so busy. Farmer’s markets have adapted to sell delivered or collected vegetable b

MARC Mazoyer is getting ready for the week ahead. He’s made soup, and a loaf of bread, and roasted a chicken and he’s thinking about what he’ll do with the food over the next few days. Some of the chicken can go into a dahl, and maybe a risotto, and he might make some quesadillas with it too. And the leftovers can go into a caesar salad. This is how Marc keeps physically well. But it’s how he keeps mentally well too.

Caerlaverock Castle

KIRSTY WILSON, BEECHGROVE PRESENTER

THIS time last year the Scottish Government, Police Scotland and the Crown Office were united in great fanfare about groundbreaking new legislation designed to tackle domestic abuse.

The Celtic Connections roots and traditional music festival recorded 100,000 visits this January.

It wasn’t that long ago that health experts were championing golf as a soothing, morale-boosting haven away from the ravaging rigours of the coronavirus.

THE Open Championship will not take place at all this year.

Quarantining people arriving from abroad is being “actively” looked at, a senior member of the UK Government has admitted, as criticism mounts over the country dragging its feet compared to other parts of the world.

IN April 2004, the Victoria & Albert museum in London staged an exhibition of the work of Vivienne Westwood. The show was a celebration and a culmination of the fashion designer’s move from the margins of the industry in the 1970s, where she was creating clothes for the punks who hung around the King’s Road, to her 21st-century incarnation as first among equals in British haute couture.

THE Through the Keyhole Pandemic Special has certainly given rise to some entertaining sights.

A FEW weeks ago, Wendy James was trending on Twitter. It’s been happening quite often over the last few months, a result of BBC Four’s repeats of Top of the Pops reaching 1988 and 1989, the years in which a pink-lipsticked, bra-flaunting James launched herself on the public consciousness as the brash, blonde frontwoman of Transvision Vamp.

The Meadowbank Stadium was one of the shabbier landmarks in east Edinburgh until it was knocked down last year. A new one is rising from the ashes, looking like one of those massive cruise liners that appear in the Forth.

The Long Beach, Calif., school district is deploying a multifaceted strategy to put more students of color in high-level math courses and help them succeed.

The evidence that culturally responsive teaching can fix the nation's schools for children of color is promising, but woefully incomplete, writes Heather C. Hill.

AN SNP MP has been accused of capitalising on the virus crisis to undermine Nicola Sturgeon and boost their own profile following a series of remarks made in an online party meeting.

The Presbyterian minister's efforts in 1964 to send his son to an integrated school in Charlotte, N.C., led to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding busing as a desegregation tool.

Jill Gascoine, actress and novelist

State structures can make the difference in whether local education research partnerships are effective, according to a new report by the Data Quality Campaign.

Suicide rates increased by 76 percent for 15- to 19-year-olds between 2007 and 2017 and nearly tripled for 10- 14-year-olds, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The coronavirus crisis has made staffing and hiring decisions more uncertain, but planning needs to start now, writes Terry B. Grier.

Monday 13 January: Royals’ family meeting

An EL Education school in Rochester, NY, shows that giving young children real problems to solve can instill the qualities students will need as adults.

Every year about this time, I write a series of articles about suicide and bullying prevention, and this year will be no different. I can always count on advocates and education companies from all over the world to send me information about what's new in the field. Out of all the companies and produ

It's resulted in a creepy Orwellian environment where Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others have replaced Big Brother.

IN pre-lockdown days I had a much-ridiculed addiction. Using Snapchat Maps online, I would click all over the map to see the ‘stories’ of random people I didn’t know in all corners of the world.

IT was impossible to escape a heart-sinking feeling this week when reading reports that a senior UK Government source believed people were “addicted” to the furlough scheme.

Despite being aware of the need for discretion when talking about Jesus, Argentinian Cecilia felt no fear while she was in Central Asia.

Two OMers were asked to help a church network deliver relief supplies to churches in Kumamoto after two large earthquakes had struck the area.

The extra work that many dual-language bilingual educators take on "too often goes unrecognized and is never remunerated," a new small-scale study concludes.

It has been well documented that exposure to tobacco marketing is a risk factor for smoking initiation among youth. However, few studies have tested the specificity of this association.

This study extends findings from other studies and shows (from a longitudinal design) that exposure to cigarette advertising is significantly associated with youth smoking initiation, whereas exposure to advertising for other commercial products is not. (Read the full article)

Children with special health care needs (CSHCN) account for more than one-third of pediatric health care costs. Little is known regarding the impact of shared decision-making (SDM) over time on child health care expenditures and utilization.

In a national sample, we found that increasing SDM was associated with decreased health care costs and utilization for CSHCN. Results support prospective studies to determine if pediatric interventions to foster SDM reduce the financial burden of caring for CSHCN. (Read the full article)

Although it has been shown that cystic fibrosis newborn screening is beneficial, the strategies vary widely, and there has been uncertainty about the costs and consequences of different algorithms and whether screening methods/decisions should be based on assumed cost differences.

This study contributes by offering a comparison of both costs, assessed comprehensively, and the consequences associated with the 2 most popular screening methodologies, immunoreactive trypsinogen/immunoreactive trypsinogen and immunoreactive trypsinogen/DNA, by using a decision-tree framework allowing variation in the model parameters. (Read the full article)

For children and young people with life-limiting conditions, palliative care services should be available, but few national or local data are available to estimate the burden of these conditions.

The prevalence of life-limiting conditions in children and young people in England was double the previously reported estimates, at 32 per 10 000 population. This identifies a need for specialist pediatric palliative care services. (Read the full article)

Studies have found that the degree of detail with which palliative care is described and the order in which options are presented can affect end-of-life decisions. None of these studies, though, involved decisions regarding very premature infants.

Unlike other end-of-life decisions, those regarding extremely premature infants are influenced neither by the degree of detail nor order of presentation of management options. Deep-seated values embodied in the reasons given for these choices suggest why they are so robust. (Read the full article)

Valid parental permission requires that the decision be both informed and voluntary. Previous research has focused on the informational components of decision-making (eg, disclosure and understanding), with little empirical attention to the voluntariness of decisions.

We address this gap by examining the voluntariness of parents making research or treatment decisions in pediatric oncology. We identify demographic and contextual correlates of voluntariness and highlight the clinical implications of the findings for physicians and investigators. (Read the full article)

Assessing for adequacy of supervision in the clinical setting is challenging and may result in significant variability in care. Clinicians must quickly decide if a child and family necessitate direct counseling, further intervention, or require reporting to state agencies.

This study identified the most important characteristics for the evaluation of the adequacy of supervision of a young child. A standardized scale using these characteristics may result in an efficient means to reduce variability in care. (Read the full article)

Batteries, especially button batteries, are an important source of pediatric injury. Recent reports suggest that fatal and severe button battery ingestions are increasing.

An estimated 3289 battery-related ED visits occurred annually among US children <18 years of age, averaging 1 visit approximately every 3 hours. The number and rate of visits increased significantly during the 20-year study period, driven by increases during the last 8 study years. (Read the full article)

Male circumcision reduces risk of HIV acquisition in men by 60% and is associated with other health benefits. Compared with adult circumcision, infant male circumcision is safer, less expensive, and represents a cost-saving intervention for HIV prevention in many settings.

IMC is little known in East Africa and is not routinely practiced. This is the first study to assess acceptability and uptake of IMC in East Africa among parents who were actually offered the procedure. (Read the full article)

Various studies have documented marked racial/ethnic disparities in children’s receipt of dental services at single time points or brief periods.

This study reveals significant improvements in children’s receipt of dental care overall, as well as a dramatic narrowing of African American/white disparities in children’s receipt of dental services over the last 40 years in the United States. (Read the full article)

Materialism and life satisfaction are known to be associated with each other. Research among adults has shown that materialism and life satisfaction negatively affect each other, leading to a downward spiral.

In contrast to research conducted among adults, no longitudinal effect of materialism on life satisfaction was found for 8- to 11-year-olds. However, life satisfaction did negatively affect materialism, but only for children who were frequently exposed to advertising. (Read the full article)