One sign of this egalitarianism can be found in Icelandic attitudes toward motherhood. In contrast to the competitive, anxious parenting of middle- and upper-class Americans, there is an ease to being a mother in Iceland, at least among the native population. This can be explained, in part, by the fact that Icelandic parents receive extensive social benefits, including nine months of paid leave to be shared between parents and affordable preschools. Most people also have networks of relatives available nearby to pick up the slack. Lacking “stranger danger” fears, eight-year-olds are encouraged to cross roads to play at the playground, or walk home from school without adult supervision. As almost all Icelandic mothers work, there are no “mommy wars,” and few women seem to suffer from the overwrought desire to “have it all.” There is also relaxed sexual morality: two-thirds of the country’s babies are born to unwed mothers—the highest rate of out-of-wedlock births in the world—with couples often having children together and then getting married, or deciding not to.

WALSENBURG, Colo. — Over the past six years, Colorado has conducted one of the largest experiments with long-acting birth control. If teenagers and poor women were offered free intrauterine devices and implants that prevent pregnancy for years, state officials asked, would those women choose them?
They did in a big way, and the results were startling. The birthrate among teenagers across the state plunged by 40 percent from 2009 to 2013, while their rate of abortions fell by 42 percent, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

As many as 80 percent of the girls in some states’ juvenile justice systems have a history of sexual or physical abuse, according to a report released Thursday. The report, a rare examination of their plight, recommends that girls who have been sexually trafficked no longer be arrested on prostitution charges.
The study, “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story,” found that sexual abuse was among the primary predictors of girls’ involvement with juvenile justice systems, but that the systems were ill-equipped to identify or treat the problem.

UNITED NATIONS — The most senior United Nations official to have been informed of accusations of child sexual abuse by French soldiers in theCentral African Republic last year, who took no action at the time, has resigned from her post, United Nations officials confirmed on Wednesday.
The official, Flavia Pansieri, the deputy high commissioner for human rights, based in Geneva, is stepping down for health reasons, said a spokesman for the human rights office, André-Michel Essoungou.

NEW DELHI — The governing council of a leading energy institute in Indiais replacing its director general, the former head of a United Nations panel on climate change, who is facing allegations of sexual harassment from an employee.
Dr. Pachauri, 74, was accused of assault and criminal intimidation by a 29-year-old female research analyst at the organization in February. According to the woman’s lawyer, Prashant Mendiratta, Dr. Pachauri sent her inappropriate emails and texts after she rebuffed his physical advances.

Spelman College has discontinued a professorship endowed by Bill Cosby, a university spokeswoman said.
The Cosbys have had a long relationship with Spelman, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta. Two of Mr. Cosby’s daughters, Erika and Evin, attended the college, as did Keshia Knight Pulliam, who played Rudy Huxtable on “The Cosby Show.”
Bill and Camille Cosby donated $20 million to the college in 1988. Several other colleges have also cut ties with Mr. Cosby in the last year, including his alma maters, Temple University, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Beginning in college, years before she planned to have children, Yi Gu began strategizing about how to have a career that was flexible enough to fit in family responsibilities.
She knew that arrangement wasn’t realistic in her first two jobs: banking, in which she worked very long hours, or consulting, in which she traveled often. Instead, she saw those as preparation for the more flexible job she took last year at age 31, in strategy at a major pharmacy company. She became pregnant soon after.

Zhou Qunfei is the world’s richest self-made woman. Ms. Zhou, the founder of Lens Technology, owns a $27 million estate in Hong Kong. She jets off to Silicon Valley and Seoul, South Korea, to court executives at Apple and Samsung, her two biggest customers. She has played host to President Xi Jinping of China, when he visited her company’s headquarters.
But she seems most at home pacing the floor of her state-of-the-art factory, tinkering.

Too many people we love had not died in the way they would choose. Too many survivors were left feeling depressed, guilty, uncertain whether they’d done the right thing.
The difference between a good death and a hard death often seemed to hinge essentially on whether someone’s wishes were expressed and respected. Whether they’d had a conversation about how they wanted to live toward the end.

When Jim Palermo was serving as a trustee of the village of La Grange, Ill., he noticed something peculiar about the local police officers and firefighters. They were not going to live as long as might be expected, at least according to pension tables.
After Mr. Palermo dug into the numbers, he found that the actuary — the person who advises pension plan trustees about how much money to set aside — was using a mortality table from 1971 that showed La Grange’s roughly 100 police officers and firefighters were expected to die, on average, before reaching 75, compared with 79 under a more recent table.
But if more workers are retiring and not dying on schedule, it can be a recipe for financial disaster.