WASHINGTON – The Biden administration dispatched a top State Department diplomat to the Middle East immediately to try to de-escalate the deadly conflict between Israel and Hamas, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Wednesday.
President Joe Biden faces growing pressure to help stem the violence and heightened international alarm over the spiraling death toll. The United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East, Tor Wennesland, warned on Wednesday that the situation is escalating toward full scale war.
More than 80 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting, including 17 children and seven women, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, and another 480 people have been wounded. Hamas, the Islamic militant group that seized power in Gaza in 2007, acknowledged that a top commander and several other militants were among the dead.
UAlbany faculty wants pension fund to divest from fossil fuels
One of several campuses calling for end to oil and gas investment
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Students such as these youngsters from Albany High School, have called for fossil fuel divestment as part of the fight against climate change.Times Union file photo
ALBANY Members of the University at Albany’s faculty senate are calling for their pension fund administrator to divest from fossil fuel companies, joining a growing list of campuses to do so.
“In passing this resolution calling upon TIAA to divest its fossil fuel holdings, the academic and professional faculty of UAlbany took a strong stand on behalf of environmental justice and sustainability,” said Ron Friedman, a UAlbany associate professor of psychology who helped push through the divestment resolution, which passed on Wednesday.
Modern biography can be said to have begun with John Gibson Lockhart s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart in 1838. But Scott - the Great Unknown - has always presented challenges to the biographer. Layers of myth (much of it manufactured by the faithful son-in-law Lockhart) continues to protect him from posterity. There is also the sheer size of Scott s achievements as poet, novelist, man of letters, and self-made Laird of Abbotsford. The two standard lives - Lockhart s, and Edgar Johnson s published in 1970 - run to some three-quarters of a million words apiece. Finally, there has been the precipitate slump in Scott s general popularity: he is now the great unread. John Sutherland s critical biography attempts to penetrate into the darker areas of Scott s life in a sceptical spirit, bringing the massive oeuvre and the chronicle of the life into manageable and readable proportions. Sutherland justifies Scott as a writer to be read and known today as much as in his heyd
‘Exceptional’ Staten Island student honored with Michael J. Petrides award
Updated 12:17 PM;
Today 10:48 AM
Amy Mohamed, a senior at Michael J. Petrides High School, was recently honored with the Michael J. Petrides Student Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science. (Courtesy/Staten Island Borough President s office/Lifetouch National School Studies Inc.) Staten Island Borough President s officeStaten Island Borough President
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The award is named for Michael J. Petrides, a Staten Island educator who died in 1994.
Borough President James Oddo and members of the Petrides family and scholarship committee presented the award to Amy Mohamed.
The annual honor is given to a graduating high school senior who excels in math and science. Lacey DeLucia from Staten Island Technical High School was named first runner-up. Thea Akhrass from St. Joseph Hill Academy High School was named second runner-up.
Technology, stupidity and education
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George Will, as you likely know, is a conservative political commentator, mostly for the Washington Post. He is an excellent and articulate writer and usually provides food for thought, whether I agree with him politically or not. I also give him high marks for maintaining a strong sense of balanced sanity during the troubling times our nation has been through.
A recent (4/14) column of his had some interesting perspectives on technology, which I think can have pertinent connections in education. Allow me to lay some groundwork.
The column refers heavily/often to a book called “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington,” by Ted Widmer, a historian at City University of New York. The book is apparently a detailed record of president-elect Lincoln’s 1861 journey by train from Springfield, Ill. to Washington, D.C.