If you want to know who runs the world, you could do worse than check out the delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The baffling news is that proportion of women attending has actually fallen.

If we want to know more about the kind of people who run the world, we could study those who run countries, corporations or colleges. Or we could just skip that and look at the delegate list for the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, the annual schmoozefest of the world's most powerful people, to find that men rule the world.


This may not surprise any of us, but the fact that their power is only becoming more entrenched does seem a bit surprising, not least because Davos's organisers have publicly tried to invite more women.


Two years ago WEF introduced a quota system to encourage female participation, which demanded that its 100 most important (ie generous) partners send one woman to the annual meeting for every four men. And yet somehow, since then, the proportion of women has fallen from 17% in 2011 to 15% of the 2,500 delegates for this year. So much for that ploy.


When the quota was introduced, it did seem as though progress was being made. For a start, there were a few more sessions about "women as the way forward" featuring Indra Nooyi and Sheryl Sandberg and lots of glamorous events with the likes of Nobel prizewinner Lleymah Gbowee.


But it was a different matter for the companies themselves, who avoided the quota altogether by sending four rather than five delegates. That's right - they would rather send fewer people to the top table than mix the all-male bias up a little. Add to that all the delegates who were exempt from the quota - businesses, universities, media outfits and charities who still haven't achieved gender parity - and the fact that the proportion of women has actually fallen seems less surprising.


E-cigarettes will join regular smokes and other tobacco products as forbidden in most indoor public places in Chicago after aldermen today passed a measure backed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to restrict where electronic cigarettes can be used and how they can be sold.

The ordinance, which passed 45-4 after opponents took one last chance to voice their displeasure, will prohibit people from using e-cigarettes in restaurants, bars and most other indoor public places in the city. The measure also will require retailers to sell e-cigarettes from behind the counter so it's harder for minors to get their hands on them.

Emanuel has made tobacco regulations a recent focus, working to frame the discussion over cigarette sales as a question of how willing elected officials are to protect children from getting lured into addiction at a young age.

At the last City Council meeting, aldermen voted to restrict sales of menthol cigarettes near Chicago schools. Emanuel delivered a short speech from the dais positioning himself as a bulwark against the evils of Big Tobacco. Emanuel also increased the city's cigarette tax as part of his 2014 budget.

On Wednesday, the mayor used the passage of the e-cigarette regulations as a chance to again lay out his anti-tobacco bona fides, saying Chicago can't wait for the Food and Drug Administration to take a position on the safety of the products.

At 7 a.m. Tuesday morning, as temperatures hovered around freezing and the skies threatened snow, Melissa Castro and Daniel Young bundled up their two babies, crammed most of their belongings into three duffel bags and stood outside a dark D.C. government building.

For more than an hour, Castro and Young waited with about two dozen other families with young children for the daily opening of the Virginia Williams Family Resource Center, the one place in the city where caseworkers assess which impoverished families are truly homeless and, thus, will get a coveted spot in a full-to-bursting family shelter system.

Over the past 10 years, the rise in the ranks of young Brits who moved in with their parents could more than fill a city the size of Liverpool.

According to new data from the UK's Office for National Statistics, around 950,000 more people aged 20-34 were living with their parents in 2013 than a decade earlier. In total, just over a quarter of that age group - some 3.3 million people - lived with their parents last year. The population of 20- to 34-year-olds was stable over this period, so the rise is entirely due to people who chose to move in with Mum and Dad (or never left in the first place).

On its face, this is hard to square with the steady stream of good news about the British economy. The latest jobs report, released today, showed the biggest three-month drop in unemployment since 1997. Yesterday, the IMF boosted its outlook for UK economic growth more than for any other advanced economy it tracks. But wage growth is sluggish and well below the rate of inflation, particularly the runaway rise in house prices. This makes it easier to understand the apparent surge in young people living under their parents' roofs.

The anti-semitic French comedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala was arrested today on suspicion of firing a rubber bullet at two bailiffs who tried to serve a writ on him for non-payment of fines or taxes.

Dieudonné, the inventor of the allegedly anti-semitic quenelle arm gesture which has brought an FA threat of suspension to the Premier League footballer Nicolas Anelka, was being questioned by gendarmes in Eure-et-Loir, west of Paris.

The comedian, 47, whose touring stage show was banned earlier this month for fomenting hatred against Jews, allegedly refused to accept a writ from a bailiff who appeared at his home in Saint-Lubin-de-la-Hay near Dreux on Monday night. One of the bailiff says that as he was leaving an unknown person fired a "flash ball" - a rubber bullet used by police for riot control - at his car.

As mass riots continued on the streets of Kiev, protesters, as well as other people in the area, received a mysterious text message on Monday evening.

"Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance," the message read, as first reported by The New York Times.

The text came from a number only identified as 111, but the Times suggests Ukrainian authorities were behind it. The country's Interior Ministry, however, denied sending the messages, as later reported by The Guardian. But regardless of who was responsible for the SMS messages, how did they do it? How did they pinpoint only certain cellphones in a specific area?

A soldier who killed his 20-month-old daughter after surviving a rogue attack in Afghanistan has been jailed for six years.

Lance Corporal Liam Culverhouse admitted at an earlier hearing causing the death of Khloe Abrams.

The Grenadier Guardsman was medically discharged from the army after losing his right eye in a shooting incident at an Afghan police checkpoint in Nad-e-Ali in Helmand province in November 2009. Five of his comrades were killed in the attack.

Eighteen months after returning home, Culverhouse assaulted Khloe at the family home in Northampton, resulting in the toddler suffering severe brain damage and fractures to her skull, ribs and limbs.

The toddler, who was just seven weeks old, was admitted to Northampton General hospital on 8 May 2011.

Despite receiving medical treatment, she never recovered and died at the Rainbow children's hospice in Loughborough 18 months later on 7 November 2012.

Ifop poll finds that 55 per cent of French men and 32 per cent of French women are unfaithful and that infidelity is on the rise but that the French are champions of forgiveness.

Sometime around 10 p.m. on Sept. 6, the guards at Mule Creek State Prison in Amador County decided to take action against Joseph Damien Duran, a mentally ill inmate who had been acting up inside his cell for hours.

Duran, a 35-year-old career criminal who had been at the prison for two days, was refusing to take his medications, pounding on his cell door and making faces at prison staffers. He rejected orders to place his hands through the food port opening in his cell door to be handcuffed, and refused to close the food port. Finally, guards aimed through the port and blasted him in the face with pepper spray.

Scientists find that pollution from outsourced US industry comes back home on the westerly winds