Last week, Tel Aviv University held its annual graduation ceremony for international master’s students. The event unfolded like most of its kind, with the school’s academic officials offering the assembled students congratulations on the occasion and wisdom for the wider world. But then the year’s valedictorian took the stage and delivered an address that was anything but the usual predictable platitudes.
Haisam Hassanein was born and raised in rural Egypt, probably the last place one would expect an Israeli university’s valedictorian to hail from.
A full-grown giant sequoia is a thirsty tree. In the height of summer, the millenia-old behemoths, some of which grow upwards of 30 stories tall, can guzzle 500 to 800 gallons of water per day. They can also survive a variety of scourges that would fell an inferior conifer — beetles, wildfires, storms. But scientists are worried the species may have met its match in the ongoing California drought.
Nate Stephenson, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, was walking through the woods last year when he noticed some of the trees he’d been studying for decades had dropped most of their leaves. He joined forces with other researchers from the USGS, as well as from the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, to launch a comprehensive health study on the sequoia.
Anthony Ambrose, a tree ecologist at University of California, Berkeley, led a recent bout of fieldwork to monitor how stressed the sequoia have been, and if, in fact, we should be worried about their longevity. A few weeks from now, his team plans to collect a slew of samples from more than 50 trees that have dropped up to 75 percent of their leaves. He hopes the research can provide real-time data to forest managers who can prioritize care for threatened trees.
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Credit: Anthony Ambrose
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Julian Bond, a charismatic figure of the 1960s civil rights movement, a lightning rod of the anti-Vietnam War campaign and a lifelong champion of equal rights, notably as chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., died on Saturday night in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. He was 75.
The Southern Poverty Law Center announced Mr. Bond’s death on Sunday. His wife, Pamela Sue Horowitz, said the cause was complications of vascular disease.
Mr. Bond was one of the original leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee while he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He was the committee’s communications director for five years and deftly guided the national news media toward stories of violence and discrimination as the committee challenged legal segregation in the South’s public facilities.
Watched over by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, U.S. Marines raised the American flag at the embassy in Cuba for the first time in 54 years on Friday, symbolically ushering in an era of renewed diplomatic relations between the two Cold War-era foes.
Three retired Marines who last lowered the flag in 1961 participated in the ceremony, handing a new flag to the Marine Color Guard, which raised it on the grounds outside the embassy building on the Havana seafront.
Kerry, the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Cuba in 70 years, told the ceremony it was obvious that “the road of mutual isolation and estrangement that the United States and Cuba have been traveling is not the right one and that the time has come for us to move in a more promising direction.”
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Every year, thousands of innocent people are sent to jail only because they can’t afford to post bail, putting them at risk of losing their jobs, custody of their children — even their lives.
On the morning of Nov. 20 last year, Tyrone Tomlin sat in the cage of one of the Brooklyn criminal courthouse’s interview rooms, a bare white cinder-block cell about the size of an office cubicle. Hardly visible through the heavy steel screen in front of him was Alison Stocking, the public defender who had just been assigned to his case. Tomlin, exhausted and frustrated, was trying to explain how he came to be arrested the afternoon before. It wasn’t entirely clear to Tomlin himself. Still in his work clothes, his boots encrusted with concrete dust, he recounted what had happened.
The previous afternoon, he was heading home from a construction job. Tomlin had served two short stints in prison on felony convictions for auto theft and selling drugs in the late ’80s and mid-’90s, but even now, grizzled with white stubble and looking older than his 53 years, he found it hard to land steady work and relied on temporary construction gigs to get by. Around the corner from his home in Crown Heights, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Tomlin has lived his entire life, he ran into some friends near the corner of Schenectady and Lincoln Avenues outside the FM Brothers Discount store, its stock of buckets, mops, backpacks and toilet paper overflowing onto the sidewalk. As he and his friends caught up, two plainclothes officers from the New York Police Department’s Brooklyn North narcotics squad, recognizable by the badges on their belts and their bulletproof vests, paused outside the store. At the time, Tomlin thought nothing of it. ‘‘I’m not doing anything wrong,’’ he remembers thinking. ‘‘We’re just talking.’’
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Massive explosions that rocked the port city of Tianjin were so strong that residents miles away thought they were experiencing an earthquake, witnesses said Thursday as the death toll rose to 50.
Twelve firefighters were among those killed in the twin blasts, which sent massive fireballs into the sky and devastated a warehouse district as well as nearby homes. More than 700 wounded were being treated at hospitals, including 71 in serious condition. No figure was given for those missing.
Chinese authorities did not say what caused the blasts. Local officials said firefighting was suspended on orders of the central government so that a team of chemical experts could assess hazardous materials on site.
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Death toll rising from massive explosion in Tianjin, China
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The global “currency war” entered a new phase on Tuesday as China’s surprise devaluation threatened to unleash competitive devaluations and keep monetary policy around the world looser for longer, perhaps even forcing the U.S. Federal Reserve to delay its expected interest rate rise.
“Currency wars,” a phrase used by Brazil’s former finance minister Guido Mantega in 2010 to describe how competing countries explicitly or implicitly weaken their exchange rates to boost exports, have intensified in recent years.
As interest rates have fallen to zero in some developed economies and money printing has proliferated, exchange rate policy has become one of the few remaining levers to stimulate business activity and in some cases avoid deflation. So investors are now concerned that China may elect to keep pushing the yuan lower.
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St. Louis County authorities declared a state of emergency Monday and more than 100 people were arrested on the second day of protests marking a year since a police officer killed Ferguson, Missouri, teen Michael Brown.
The move was announced by County Executive Steve Stenger, who cited the violence that marred protests Sunday night in Ferguson.
“The recent acts of violence will not be tolerated in a community that has worked so tirelessly over the last year to rebuild and become stronger,” Stenger said in a statement.
Pro Football Hall of Famer and veteran sports journalist Frank Gifford has died in Connecticut, his family announced on Sunday. He was 84.
In a statement, his family said:
It is with the deepest sadness that we announce the sudden passing of our beloved husband, father and friend, Frank Gifford. Frank died suddenly this beautiful Sunday morning of natural causes at his Connecticut home. We rejoice in the extraordinary life he was privileged to live, and we feel grateful and blessed to have been loved by such an amazing human being. We ask that our privacy be respected at this difficult time and we thank you for your prayers.
Born in Santa Monica, California, in 1930, Gifford attended the University of Southern California on a football scholarship and went pro after being selected 11th overall in the first round of the 1952 draft.
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New York Giants halfback Frank Gifford during a workout September 1958 in New York. Rooney / AP, file
Typhoon Soudelor made landfall in Taiwan near the city of Hualien early on Saturday morning local time, CNN reports.
Taiwan evacuated hundreds of people from their homes on Friday as the strongest typhoon to threaten the island in two years churned towards it.
Authorities said 611 people had been moved, most from east coast areas, as Typhoon Soudelor approached. The storm has already claimed its first victims, with two people dead and one missing in choppy waters off the coast of Taiwan’s northeastern Yilan county, the coastguard said.
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An elderly woman is escorted in Typhoon Soudelor’s strong winds in Taipei, Taiwan, on Aug. 7, 2015. | Credit: Wally Santana/Associated Press
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Haisam Hassanein
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
James' World 2 