US voters cast their ballots on election day. Photo / AP
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Struggling through one of the most devastating years in US history, a year of strife and suffering and loss, the nation's people responded with resolve on the first Tuesday of November. Together but apart, they voted.
Undaunted by a pandemic that worsens by the day, they showed up in the early-morning snow outside the clapboard town offices of Newbury, New Hampshire. Formed a shivering line into a gymnasium in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania. Waited their turn in an elementary school in Louisville, Kentucky; a public housing complex in Houston; a recreation centre in Garden Grove, California; a bowling alley in Mandan, North Dakota.
They provided final punctuation to the 100 million votes already cast through mail-in ballots and in-person early voting, the crest to a tidal wave of turnout.
The New York Times looks at how on Election Day, anxiety was the great uniter, and motivator.
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• Opinion: There was a loser last night. It was America
• Opinion: Biden risks being a lame duck president
On a cold weekend in mid-February, when the world still harboured false hope that the new coronavirus could be contained, a World Health Organisation team arrived in Beijing to study the outbreak and investigate a critical question: How did the virus jump from animals to humans?
What the team members did not know was that they would not be allowed to investigate the source at all.
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As the results rolled in Tuesday night, so did a strong sense of déjà vu. Pre election polls, it appeared, had been misleading once again.
No matter the result, it was already clear that the industry failed to fully account for the missteps that led it to underestimate Donald Trump's support four years ago. And it raises the question of whether the polling industry, which has become a national fixation in an era of data journalism and statistical forecasting, can survive yet another crisis of confidence.
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• Exit polls show vote came down to pandemic versus economy
• Historic gender gap: Why men and women are voting differently
Former top forensic scientist Sue Petricevic has traded in her lab coat for a barrister's gown to defend the people her work once helped to put behind bars.
After being a key expert witness for the Crown in horrific cases such as the 2001 RSA murders in Auckland, where she found killer William Bell's DNA on cigarette butts, and the 1996 hammer killing of Tania Furlan, in which she analysed blood spatter evidence, Petricevic says she's now finding the job of advocating for suspects more rewarding.
Petricevic talks to Donna Chisholm of the New Zealand Listener about her career shift.
For the past two years Mark Sedwill was one of the most powerful men in the United Kingdom, advising the prime minister on affairs of state as the nation lurched from one crisis to another.
Not only did he have to deal with a country torn apart by Brexit and two very different prime ministers, but also a pandemic that left Boris Johnson battling for his life.
Sedwill tells The Times about life inside No 10.
On November 2, 2000, three astronauts docked at the International space station and began a four-and-a-half month stay in orbit.
Humans have been living off the planet ever since.
Initially derided as a poster child for government waste, the outpost in orbit is now seen as a linchpin for future economic activity in space.
It's beginning to look suspiciously as though New Zealanders really yearn for a sort of benign dictatorship.
Once again, we've gone for a voluntary one-party state – having soundly thrashed one of the minor parties we once elected for accountability and given the other one a hell of a fright.
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To the outside world Nxivm was an exclusive wellbeing programme for the rich and famous. In reality it was a brutal and abusive sex cult.
Laura Pullman of The Times speaks to the men and women who escaped.
Covid-19 has had an immediate and massive impact. But how will it affect the longer term? That is far harder to tell.
What do we already know, after 10 months of Covid-19? We know that the world was ill-equipped to cope with a pandemic. It has caused about 1.1 million deaths worldwide, mostly among the elderly. Moreover, some countries have suppressed the disease far more successfully than others.
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• In Italy, like everywhere the virus goes, it's the discontent that's contagious
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Master sommelier is the most prestigious title in American wine, and those who earn it instantly join the ranks of the highest-paid and most influential members of the profession.
Only 155 people have achieved the honour since the 1997 founding of the Americas chapter of the Court of Master Sommeliers, the examining body that confers the title on those who survive its gruelling, yearslong qualification process. Of those, 131 are men.
Many young women join the court's programme of mentorship and education in the hope of avoiding the sexist hazing that is notorious in the wine industry.
What they have encountered is very different.
To an extent not seen in years, Cardi B's WAP has become something of a political lightning rod, decried by pearl-clutching commentators as being "vulgar".
Yet despite the song's uninhibited raunch, its popularity was partly earned from one of the music industry's oldest bugaboos: self-censorship.
NYT: Director on rejected sequel ideas and working with a “fractious” Denzel Washington.