1. “What Were The Least (And Most) Corrupt Countries In 2015?”

2. No country is free of public corruption, a plague that has wide-ranging effects on the lives of billions of people. But in 2015, more countries saw drops in corruption than those that saw gains, according to the new Corruption Perceptions Index. The United States lost three points from its 2014 score (which is good), but the country kept its No. 16 ranking, tied with Austria and just ahead of Hong Kong. The top spot went to Denmark, followed by Finland. North Korea and Somalia tied for last place — a spot they shared in last year's index, as well. "To stamp out the abuse of power, bribery and shed light on secret deals, citizens must together tell their governments they have had enough," said José Ugaz, Chair of Transparency International, the group which released the annual index Wednesday. Some of the gains in 2015, Ugaz says, came because citizens used street demonstrations to protest corruption. A map shows countries (see title slide) with the most corrupt public sectors in dark red, followed by orange and yellow — which "are perceived as cleaner, but not perfect.” Two-thirds of the 168 countries in the index scored below 50, on a scale where a score of 0 means a country is perceived to be highly corrupt and a score of 100 is for countries that are perceived to be very clean.

3. In Other News  Apple's Safari browser was unavailable for some users around the world on Wednesday. IPhone, iPad and Mac customers experienced problems when launching Apple's built-in internet browser. The glitch lasted at least seven hours. Apple said the Safari issue had been fixed by around 10.45 a.m. Eastern time. It did not comment on the cause of the outage. Apple support forums online pointed to Safari's search suggestions box as the source of the glitch. Typing anything into the box appeared to crash the app. Disabling the feature in the settings menu seems to be a temporary fix to the problem.  Google announced that it will begin to roll out an update to Chrome that will make your browser speeds much faster. The update contains a new data compression algorithm called Brotli, which Google first unveiled in September. It squishes the size of a website down by 26% more than Chrome's previous compression tool, Zopfli. Like Zopfli, the new algorithm is named after a Swiss baked good. (Brötli means 'small bread' in Swiss German.) At Google, we think that internet users' time is valuable, and that they shouldn't have to wait long for a webpage to load," Google said in a September blog post, when it first announced Brotli. "Because fast is better than slow."