For the nightly "iftar" meal, festive meals traditionally bring families together and there is intense social activity Mosques and market streets teem with evening crowds tempted by the scent of syrupy sweets and hefty rice plates, as more than half a billion Muslims across southern Asia break the day's Ramadan fast. The Islamic holy month began over the weekend and during that time believers abstain from eating, drinking, smoking, and sexual relations between sunrise and sunset. The fast is...

By Andy Home LONDON, July 26 (Reuters) - Scandium sits in the shadows of the periodic table. Even by the esoteric standards of other critical minerals, the soft, silvery metal with the atomic number 21 is something of an enigma. The global market is thought to be somewhere between 15 and 25 tonnes in size, but no one is very sure. Production is potentially a lot higher. It's difficult to say, however, since much of it is in China and production is always as a by-product of other metals. Russ...

By Daniel Trotta Sept 19 (Reuters) - Book bans accelerated across the United States during the 2021-2022 school year, largely through the efforts of organized groups that called on public schools to remove more than 1,600 titles, the writers' group PEN America said on Monday. There were 2,532 instances of individual book bans affecting 1,648 titles at 5,000 schools with 4 million students, according to the report. The research found 1,000 more book bans than were documented in the group's ini...

By Andy Home LONDON, July 26 (Reuters) - Scandium sits in the shadows of the periodic table. Even by the esoteric standards of other critical minerals, the soft, silvery metal with the atomic number 21 is something of an enigma. The global market is thought to be somewhere between 15 and 25 tonnes in size, but no one is very sure. Production is potentially a lot higher. It's difficult to say, however, since much of it is in China and production is always as a by-product of other metals. Russ...