“In just eight years after fluoridation ended in 2011, the need for intravenous antibiotic therapy by children to avoid death by infection rose 700 per cent at the Alberta Children’s Hospital.”

According to Dickinson, a recent University of Alberta study shows that for children under five years old, the rate of dental treatments under anesthesia doubled from 22 per 100,000 in 2010-11 to 45 per 100,000 in 2018-19.

For kids aged six to 11, the rates rose from 14 per 100,000 to 19 per 100,000.

The rates stayed the same over that time period in Edmonton, where the water is fluoridated.

“Since fluoridation ceased, the cavities (holes) in teeth are more numerous and larger. These might require filling or extractions,” Dickinson said.

“They are occurring earlier in a child’s life so that treatment can require general anesthesia.”

Based on 2013 estimated costs ($324 million), net savings (savings minus costs) from fluoridation systems were estimated to be $6,469 million and the estimated return on investment, 20.0.

To see the potential impact of stopping water fluoridation, Yancoskie points to locations that have been previously studied.

"The two areas that were studied were Juneau, Alaska, and Alberta, Canada, and when they removed that fluoride, the rates of cavities increased dramatically in the children of those populations," he said.

"Seventy years of research, thousands of studies and the experience of more than 210 million Americans tell us that water fluoridation is effective in preventing cavities and is safe for children and adults," according to the American Dental Association.

White House officials are emphasising to US media that Biden's change of heart is in response to Russia’s deployment of North Korean troops - a signal to Pyongyang not to send any more.

Gilmore, Trump's OSCE ambassador, told the BBC that he believes it is "Putin who has escalated the war" by deploying North Korean soldiers, and the US cannot "just stand aside and let this dictator go ahead and conquer Ukraine".

looks like in 26-27 we're lowering the housing gap? house formation looks like it's 60-70k reading off the graph and net construction is 260-280k? so like 3 more years at that rate would close it, looks like. it's pretty deceptive how they only talk about the 5-year totals, where there is a gap.

timing is suspicious because it was a matter of hours before the committee was going to release their report

Canada would need to build some 2.3 million housing units between 2025 and 2030 to close the housing gap, and is currently on pace to complete 1.7 million homes by that time, according to the PBO.

“He’s behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it,” one source said, adding that Musk is “sure taking lots of credit for the president’s victory. Bragging about America PAC and X to anyone who will listen.

“He’s trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him. And the president is indebted to no one.”

Testimony from members of mainly female look-out units adds fuel to accusations that Netanyahu badly misread the dangers from Gaza.

"Make I tell you say U.S. no get any candidate for mind. The only ting wey go sweet us be say make the election dey transparent, credible and concluded," Entwistle said in Pidgin. "Make Nigerians pick candidates wey go sweet their belle, wey go do well well for them."

Did you get that? Here's a translation:

"Washington does not have a preferred presidential candidate. Just let Nigeria's elections be transparent and credible, and Nigerians should choose a candidate who will do them proud."

Sounds rather bland in translation, doesn't it? There's no mention of something literally making your stomach sweet (i.e., that you like it) or repetition of the word "well" for emphasis.

Wazobia's David and Adaba both praised the ambassador for being a good sport and for making the effort.

"He sold himself into the hearts of many Nigerians," David says. "That's quite a plus for the American Embassy."

LLM2CLIP: Research showing how to improve CLIP's image-text matching abilities by replacing its text encoder with a frozen LLM (like Llama) and a trainable adapter. The key innovation is fine-tuning the LLM first to make its outputs more discriminative, then using it to help CLIP's vision encoder better understand language. Results show major improvements in matching detailed descriptions to images, handling long text, and even working across languages, while requiring relatively little training time and compute.

Financial markets see the Bank of Canada‘s terminal rate at 2.75 per cent, but a number of Canadian economists are predicting the rate will go lower than that.

David Rosenberg, of Rosenberg Research and Associates Inc., expects the rate to settle at 2 per cent or even lower. Economists at CIBC Capital Markets put the end rate at 2.25 per cent.

Elon Musk’s super political action committee (Pac) spent about $200m to help elect Donald Trump to a second presidency, according to a person familiar with the group’s spending, funding an effort that set a new standard for how billionaires can influence elections.

Musk’s net worth jumped $70bn since Trump’s victory in the 5 November election.

The plan worked. Trump saw key turnout surges in battleground states.

Burchett is also optimistic that Trump wants to share more of what government agencies have compiled over the decades.

“I hope so. That’s the signals I’ve been given. I’m convinced that that’s what he wants, and that he trusts the American public,” he said. “President Trump will move towards total disclosure.”

"Systematically identifying clusters of similar assets is a critical step in statistical arbitrage strategies... Profitability is influenced more by the selection of feature sets and clustering methods than by the choice of signals."

if the race were solely about their policies, Harris would win handily

A September Wall Street Journal report said the SpaceX founder and Putin have been in “regular contact” since late 2022, saying they had discussed “personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.”

It raised national security concerns as SpaceX’s relationships with NASA and the US military may have granted Musk access to sensitive government information and US intelligence.

Earlier media reports and statements from Trump's inner circle indicated this would entail freezing the war on the current front lines and creating a demilitarized zone in the east, a claim also supported by the WSJ's sources.