Saturday, November 2, 2013

Emigrant Rufino Lopez, born in Cedeira, Galicia, Spain in 1955, was awarded on Wednesday with the 2013 Spanish-American International Award by the Spanish Benevolent Society of New York.

Graduated in literature by the Lehman College of CUNY in 1976, Rufino Lopez has preserved his admiration to the great figures of Spanish literary and philosophical tradition, as Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset, or Cervantes, while shaping the Solera Restaurant, located in the city of New York for more than twenty years, near the United Nations Headquarters. Rufino is the only son of Galician Francisco Lopez, who emigrated to New York City as a construction worker in 1971.

While studying, Rufino Lopez worked in Italian and French restaurants, finding no Spanish restaurants that could represent the high value of Spanish cuisine in the Big Apple. In 1987 he founded his first restaurant, called Alcalá, in the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and in 1991 founded Solera Restaurant. Since its opening, in the days when the paella was made ??in Manhattan in a pot with a lid instead of the regional authentic way as made in Valencia, with a pan, the Executive Chef of Solera Restaurant at that time, Dominick Cerrone, began incorporating Spanish regional dishes prepared with fidelity to its Spanish origin, one of the marks of the restaurant.

The history of the Spanish-American International Award began in 2012, when the writer and filmmaker Artur Balder was awarded. Artur Balder, now a US citizen, directed the documentary Little Spain, which displayed the historical memory of the Spanish district of Manhattan. According to the website of the organization, the award was created with the mission to promote the image of Spanish emigration in the United States, and is given to promote the work of those who are contributing to the consolidation of the Spanish-American identity in the United States. The Spanish-American International Prize was created to support emigrants who have made an outstanding contribution to the Spanish-American identity and the American heritage.

Saturday, May 14, 2022

On Saturday morning, the graduation ceremony for the class of 2022 took place at the Tsongas Center in Lowell, Massachusetts. Graduate students of UMass Lowell this year, such as Raymond Wang, Simon Wang (no relation to Raymond Wang despite the shared surname), and Michaela Kiberstis went to the Tsongas Center and its big, crowded arena this morning to get their diplomas. Raymond and Michaela have known each other since last October, as they were classmates in the American Music History class in the Fall 2021 semester. In November, all 25 students in the class took turns, across multiple class sessions, to give presentations about various music topics covered in class. Michaela gave her presentation on the Drum Corps Associates, governing body for modern all-age and senior drum and bugle corps in North America, on November 18, 2021. Michaela spoke for 26 minutes that morning, from 10:23 a.m. until 10:49 a.m.

The ceremony’s morning session ended at 11:20 a.m. Eastern Time today. Raymond’s younger brother Bryan was not at all fond of the loud clapping and cheering of the excited crowd. While Raymond was totally fine with it, Bryan remembered the time he graduated from high school four years ago and said this is “exactly how [he] remembered it.” Bryan thinks hearing loud claps and cheers every ten seconds is a terrible way to mark the milestone of graduating. Bryan is simply bothered by the clapping and cheering in general. After the ceremony, Raymond, Bryan, and their parents got in the car, which was parked in the parking garage, and went to the Beijing Chinese restaurant in Lexington, Massachusetts to have lunch.

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Tuesday, January 16, 2018

A car accident involving the car occupants and a dentist’s office happened on Sunday night in Santa Ana, California. A white Nissan sedan which was apparently driving too fast hit the raised concrete median on the road, after which it was launched into the air, slamming straight into the wall of the second floor of a two-story dental practice building, where the car got wedged.

According to the police, the car approached from a side street. The room of the dental office penetrated by the sedan was used as a storage space. A fire department crane was used to extract the vehicle from the building, which took several hours.

There were two people in the sedan. One of them managed to escape from the hanging vehicle on his own, while the other one remained trapped inside it for over an hour. They were both hospitalized with minor injuries, according to the Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA). According to the police, the driver of the car admitted narcotics use, and after toxicology tests the case is to be submitted to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.

The moment of the accident was captured by surveillance video from a bus which the car narrowly missed when becoming airborne.

According to OCFA spokesperson Captain Stephen Horner, there was a small fire after the crash, which was extinguished quickly.

Monday, March 21, 2005

Portal and search company Yahoo! has purchased Ludicorp Research and Development Ltd., the private corporation which owns the photo sharing site Flickr.The news was officially disclosed in a Sunday posting to the corporation’s staff blog and is credited to Caterina Fake, Flickr’s vice president of marketing and community. The posting announced the sale, but did not disclose details of the deal. In a report by Silicon.Com, Yahoo! spokeswoman Joanna Stevens confirmed the deal on Sunday but also did not disclose the terms.

Both Fake and Stevens said Flickr will remain independent. Stevens added that Flickr’s employees will relocate to the Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California later this year.

Rumors of the sale have been circulating amongst bloggers for some time, though neither company would confirm or deny the rumored sale. Other rumors had Google or AOL as Flickr’s probable suitor.

Flickr allows users to upload pictures from their computers, digital cameras, or camera phones to a personal website where they can display them, engage in photo blogging and create photo albums. The graphics may be licensed under a variety copyright license schemes including public domain, and photo owners can be easily contacted through the website.

Yahoo! had earlier announced Yahoo! 360°, a blogging service with sharing privileges and integration with other Yahoo! services such as internet broadcasting and instant messaging.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

A number of relatively unknown entrants made the Taiwan 2008 Invitational Games for the Deaf soccer tournament an unpredictable event. Teams from Thailand, Australia, Iran (Silver Medalist in soccer at the 2005 Summer Deaflympics), Uzbekistan, Malaysia, and Japan took part.

On September 6, soccer giants Thailand and Iran defeated Malaysia and Uzbekistan in shutouts of 11-0 and 9-0 respectively. Anothai Sathiyamat, Somsak Thongdee, Nares Numphakdee of Thailand all scored hat-tricks in the game against Uzbekistan.

On the second day of competition, a decisive battle in Group A between Japan and Iran was keenly watched by Thailand, as one of the two teams would be their opponent in the finals. The game was scoreless in the first half, with conservative tactics from both teams.

Iran’s Mostafa Heydaribondarabadi scored rapidly after the second half started, but Shun Igasaki of Japan scored a penalty kick after a foul by Iran in the penalty area and tied the score again. The penalty became the key of the match when Tetsuya Kurata scored 5 minutes further in, as the Iranian players became frustrated by the penalty kick. Finally, Japan won with a final score of 2-1, and advanced to the championship match on the final day.

After group standings were mostly stabilized in the third day of competition, Thailand and Japan handled their respective Group matches by replacing several substitutes with frequently lined-up players to defeat their opponents easily. They will face off on the final day for the gold medal of soccer event in the “Invitational Games for the Deaf, Taipei 2008”.

Match-play Date: September 10, 2008.

• 5th Place Match: Malaysia vs Uzbekistan
• Bronze Medal Match: Iran vs Australia
• Gold Medal Match: Japan vs Thailand

Friday, October 18, 2019

Early yesterday morning, United States Representative Elijah Cummings died while in hospice care. Cummings, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, was 68.

Elijah Eugene Cummings, first elected to Congress in 1996, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951. His parents, Robert Cummings Sr. and Ruth Elma Cummings, were sharecroppers. In grade school, Cummings expressed intent to become a lawyer. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in political science from Howard University, he attended law school at the University of Maryland. Cummings passed the state bar exam in 1976, and went on to start his own law practice.

In 1982 Cummings successfully ran to be a state delegate, joining the Maryland General Assembly in 1983. He remained there for fourteen years, eventually serving as the speaker pro tem of the chamber. Cummings was the first African American to hold that office.

When Representative Kweisi Mfume of Maryland’s seventh Congressional District announced his resignation in 1995, Cummings joined the race to replace him, winning the election. He went on to serve in the House of Representatives for twenty three years. He was among the Representatives who voted against the Iraq War in 2002, and in 2003 and 2004 served as the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. He was also a member of the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Following Democratic victories in the 2018 midterm elections, Cummings became the chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. In that role, Cummings oversaw the committee’s impeachment inquiry into President Trump, alongside the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees.

The Baltimore Sun reported Cummings had been sick and was missing from Capitol Hill; his last roll call vote was on September 11. At 2:45 a.m. local time (0645 UTC), his office said, he died at Gilchrist Hospice Care. In a statement, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, his wife and the current chairwoman of the Maryland Democratic Party, said Cummings “worked until his last breath”.

In response to Cummings’s death, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, ordered the Capitol’s flags be lowered to half staff. Flags at the White House were reportedly similarly lowered.

Politicians from across the political spectrum publicly mourned Cummings’s death. Democrat Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, told MSNBC Cummings “was a great man,” while Republican President Trump noted his “strength, passion and wisdom” on Twitter.

Representative Carolyn Maloney, the most senior Democrat on the Oversight and Reform Committee, has stepped into Cummings’s role as the committee’s acting chair. As of yesterday evening, the process to select the next permanent chair had not yet been announced, according to the Baltimore Sun.

Under Maryland state law, Republican Larry Hogan, the current governor, has until October 28 to release plans for a special election to fill Cummings’s congressional seat.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Chinese officials have said that their country’s exports surged last December to edge out Germany as the world’s biggest exporter.

The official Xinhua news agency reported today that figures from the General Administration for Customs showed that exports jumped 17.7% in December from a year earlier. Over the whole of 2009 total Chinese exports reached US$1.2 trillion, above Germany’s forecast $1.17 trillion.

Huang Guohua, a statistics official with the customs administration, said the December exports rebound was an important turning point for China’s export sector. He commented that the jump was an indication that exporters have emerged from their downslide.

“We can say that China’s export enterprises have completely emerged from their all-time low in exports,” he said.

However, although China overtook Germany in exports, China’s total foreign trade — both exports and imports — fell 13.9% last year.