You are 17 years old and living in a country where war surrounds you. With your 18th birthday around the corner, you are about to be drafted to fight for a cause with which you strongly disagree. Every day, bombs are falling on your village, and women, children and men are being shot for reasons you do not fully understand. You have friends and family who have been seriously injured by the war. You have two options: Stay in your country and risk your life by becoming an active participant in the war, or flee and seek safety for yourself and your family.
I am full of contradictions. I am vulnerable yet guarded. I hate change, but I am extremely adaptable. I am someone who seeks “safety,” but I opt for adventure. I always plan things ahead of time, but I also act on impulse. I may be like that by nature or by design, but I truly believe that I have the power to steer my life in the direction I want to. I take my decisions, I work for them and I go where I want to go – most recently, to Israel on my Alternative Spring Break. One question was all it took to make up my mind: “When will you ever plan a trip to Israel?” Before I knew it, I was in Israel with an amazing group of Northeastern students. The trip consisted of volunteer work at the Israeli Defense Force base, but for me, this experience was much more than the day-to-day work.
For most of the past decade, The Washington Post has had a section on its website called the Fact Checker. Primarily used to monitor the statements public officials make, it has been a solid source for verifying whether politicians are actually saying things that are, you know, at least partially grounded in the truth. And for nearly a decade, it has done admirably well at its job, rating statements on a scale from one to four “pinocchios.”
But then came Donald Trump.
Many of us tend to see Israel in terms of its seemingly unique attributes – perhaps as the legitimate homeland of the Jewish people or as the target of more than 70 United Nations resolutions. Yet, in terms of the way that residents there handle intransigent bureaucracies and slow-to-change norms, Israel is no different than other advanced, industrial democracies facing both internal and external challenges.
It’s no secret that women have been historically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. For many women of the early 20th century, becoming a scientist wasn’t exactly encouraged. Marie Tharp, a female geologist at a time when women earned less than 5 percent of degrees in the earth sciences, discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Earth’s largest physical feature beneath the ocean floor. However, her finding, which would later play a crucial role in ocean drilling initiatives, was at that time dismissed by a male colleague as “girl talk.” Another victim of this offhand discrimination is British chemist Rosalind Franklin, whose images of DNA in the early 1950s were the first evidence of its double helix shape. However, Franklin received almost no credit for the discovery, which is now primarily attributed to male colleagues James Watson and Francis Crick.
The U.S. Army ruled Tuesday that Private Chelsea Manning, who is serving a 35-year prison term for passing classified files to WikiLeaks, will be allowed to receive gender transition surgery, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
A federal judge temporarily halted construction Tuesday on some, but not all, of a $3.8 billion oil pipeline slated to pass through North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. The Dakota Access Pipeline has been met with resistance by Native American tribes who say they will be affected by the pipeline’s close proximity to their sacred sites and water supplies. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe took its complaint a step further, suing the federal agency responsible for the construction.
Two weeks ago, the University of Chicago found itself in the center of national debate after Dean of Students John Ellison sent a letter to incoming freshmen condemning the use of trigger warnings and safe spaces.
