As the Brooklyn Public Library prepares to turn the page on 2024, it’s looking back on the last year in literature and taking stock of which books Brooklynites loved most. Locals checked out millions of books, electronic media, and more this year, according to BPL’s website, even as the library dealt with budget cuts and reduced operating hours . The borough’s most popular titles for adults reflected last year’s tastes, with some new additions. In 2024, readers were after romance novels, pop culture memoirs, and stories from both far-off lands and nearby neighborhoods. Get the Full Story “I am delighted to see the wide range of items New Yorkers are borrowing including stories about immigrants and outsiders, cities and small towns, friends, family and love,” said Nick Higgins, BPL’s chief librarian, in a statement. “Books play a critical role in everyday life — especially now — helping us to understand ourselves, one another, and the world around us.” BPL’s Top Ten Adult Titles from 2024: Brooklyn’s teens were voracious readers this year, too. Teens and young adults dove into fantasy worlds spun by Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Ross, picked up beloved manga like “Demon Slayer,” and revisited an old YA classic, “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins — perhaps inspired by the 2023 film based on a newer Collins book, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” BPL’s Top 10 YA Titles from 2024: Last but not least, there were the youngest readers in the borough, the kids . Brooklyn’s little ones enjoyed a lot of longtime classics this year, and a lot of touching graphic memoirs. Jeff Kinney, the author of the beloved “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, which has 19 installations released since 2007, features prominently on the list, as does the “Dog Man” series by Dav Pilkey. Raina Telgemeier’s graphic memoirs, “Guts” and “Ghosts,” came ranked #6 and #8 on the list, respectively. BPL’s Top 10 Kids’ Titles of 2024:However, some state workers failed to return to their jobs and a United Nations official said the country’s public sector had come “to a complete and abrupt halt”. Meanwhile, streams of refugees crossed back into Syria from neighbouring countries, hoping for a more peaceful future and looking for relatives who disappeared during Mr Assad’s brutal rule. There were already signs of the difficulties ahead for the rebel alliance now in control of much of the country. The alliance is led by a former senior al-Qaida militant, who severed ties with the extremist group years ago and has promised representative government and religious tolerance. The rebel command said they would not tell women how to dress. “It is strictly forbidden to interfere with women’s dress or impose any request related to their clothing or appearance, including requests for modesty,” the command said in a statement on social media. Nearly two days after rebels entered the capital, some key government services had shut down after state workers ignored calls to go back to their jobs, the UN official said, causing issues at airports and borders and slowing the flow of humanitarian aid. Rebel leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, who was known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, also met with Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi Jalali for the first time. Mr Jalali stayed in Syria when Mr Assad fled and has sought to project normalcy since. “We are working so that the transitional period is quick and smooth,” he told Sky News Arabia TV on Monday, saying the security situation had already improved from the day before. At the court of Justice in Damascus, which was stormed by the rebels to free detainees, Judge Khitam Haddad, an aide to the justice minister in the outgoing government, said that judges were ready to resume work quickly. “We want to give everyone their rights,” Mr Haddad said outside the courthouse. “We want to build a new Syria and to keep the work, but with new methods.” But a UN official said some government services had been paralysed as worried state employees stayed at home. The public sector “has just come to a complete and abrupt halt,” said Adam Abdelmoula, UN resident and humanitarian co-ordinator for Syria, noting, for example, that an aid flight carrying urgently needed medical supplies had been put on hold after aviation employees abandoned their jobs. “This is a country that has had one government for 53 years and then suddenly all of those who have been demonised by the public media are now in charge in the nation’s capital,” Mr Abdelmoula told The Associated Press. “I think it will take a couple of days and a lot of assurance on the part of the armed groups for these people to return to work again.” In a video shared on a rebel messaging channel, Mr al-Sharaa said: “You will see there are skills” among the rebels. The Kremlin said Russia has granted political asylum to Mr Assad, a decision made by President Vladimir Putin. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on Mr Assad’s specific whereabouts and said Mr Putin did not plan to meet with him. Damascus was quiet Monday, with life slowly returning to normal, though most shops and public institutions were closed. In public squares, some people were still celebrating. Civilian traffic resumed, but there was no public transport. Long lines formed in front of bakeries and other food stores. There was little sign of any security presence though in some areas, small groups of armed men were stationed in the streets.711 gcash 。

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Topline: How turnout compares: The percentage of eligible O.C. voters who cast ballots was down quite a bit from the 87% of voters who turned out for the 2020 election. What stood out about the results: In the end, the politically purple county will send five Democrats and just one Republican to Congress. But O.C. voters elected more Republicans than Democrats to the state legislature. What stood out about voting: Most O.C. voters mailed in their ballots — 77% — but a larger number than in recent years cast their ballots in person at a vote center. The registrar also saw the largest number yet of provisional ballots cast in an election — more than 40,000. Help LAist watchdog your new representatives : We’re particularly interested in better understanding the everyday work our representatives are doing — or not doing. And we need your help. Fill out the quick survey at the bottom of this post to let us know what you’re most interested in tracking as this next term gets underway. You can also share this link with anyone else you know who might want to share their thoughts, too.ASPI Stock News: Shareholder Rights Law Firm Robbins LLP Urges ASP Isotopes Inc. Stockholders ...Stock up on batteries for the holiday season

Nikki Giovanni, the poet, author, educator and public speaker who rose from borrowing money to release her first book to decades as a literary celebrity sharing her blunt and conversational takes on everything from racism and love to space travel and mortality, has died. She was 81. Giovanni, subject of the prize-winning 2023 documentary “Going to Mars," died Monday with her life-long partner, Virginia (Ginney) Fowler, by her side, according to a statement from friend and author Renée Watson > Watch NBC Bay Area News 📺 Streaming free 24/7 “We will forever feel blessed to have shared a legacy and love with our dear cousin,” Allison (Pat) Ragan, Giovanni’s cousin, said in a statement on behalf of the family. Author of more than 25 books, Giovanni was a born confessor and performer whom fans came to know well from her work, her readings and other live appearances and her years on the faculty of Virginia Tech among other schools. Poetry collections such as "Black Judgement" and "Black Feeling Black Talk" sold thousands of copies, led to invitations from "The Tonight Show" and other television programs and made her popular enough to fill a 3,000-seat concert hall at Lincoln Center for a celebration of her 30th birthday. In poetry, prose and the spoken word, she told her story. She looked back on her childhood in Tennessee and Ohio, championed the Black Power movement, addressed her battles with lung cancer, paid tribute to heroes from Nina Simone to Angela Davis and reflected on such personal passions as food, romance, family and rocketing into space, a journey she believed Black women uniquely qualified for, if only because of how much they had already survived. She also edited a groundbreaking anthology of Black women poets, "Night Comes Softly," and helped found a publishing cooperative that promoted works by Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker among others. For a time, she was called "The Princess of Black Poetry." "All I know is the she is the most cowardly, bravest, least understanding, most sensitive, slowest to anger, most quixotic, lyingest, most honest woman I know," her friend Barbara Crosby wrote in the introduction to "The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni," an anthology of nonfiction prose published in 2003. "To love her is to love contradiction and conflict. To know her is to never understand but to be sure that all is life." Giovanni's admirers ranged from James Baldwin to Teena Marie, who name-checked her on the dance hit “Square Biz,” to Oprah Winfrey, who invited the poet to her "Living Legends" summit in 2005, when other guests of honor included Rosa Parks and Toni Morrison. Giovanni was a National Book Award finalist in 1973 for a prose work about her life, "Gemini." She also received a Grammy nomination for the spoken word album "The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection." In January 2009, at the request of NPR, she wrote a poem about the incoming president, Barack Obama: "I'll walk the streets And knock on doors Share with the folks: Not my dreams but yours I'll talk with the people I'll listen and learn I'll make the butter Then clean the churn" ____ Giovanni had a son, Thomas Watson Giovanni, in 1969. She never married the father, because, she told Ebony magazine, "I didn’t want to get married, and I could afford not to get married." Over the latter part of her life she lived with her partner, Virginia Fowler, a fellow faculty member at Virginia Tech. She was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was soon called "Nikki" by her older sister. She was 4 when her family moved to Ohio and eventually settled in the Black community of Lincoln Heights, outside of Cincinnati. She would travel often between Tennessee and Ohio, bound to her parents and to her maternal grandparents in her "spiritual home" in Knoxville. As a girl, she read everything from history books to Ayn Rand and was accepted to Fisk University, the historically Black school in Nashville, after her junior year of high school. College was a time for achievement, and for trouble. Her grades were strong, she edited the Fisk literary magazine and helped start the campus branch of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. But she rebelled against school curfews and other rules and was kicked out for a time because her “attitudes did not fit those of a Fisk woman,” she later wrote. After the school changed the dean of women, Giovanni returned and graduated with honors in history in 1967. Giovanni relied on support from friends to publish her debut collection, "Black Poetry Black Talk," which came out in 1968, and in the same year she self-published "Black Judgement." The radical Black Arts Movement was at its height and early Giovanni poems such as "A Short Essay of Affirmation Explaining Why," "Of Liberation" and "A Litany for Peppe" were militant calls to overthrow white power. ("The worst junkie or black businessman is more humane/than the best honkie"). "I have been considered a writer who writes from rage and it confuses me. What else do writers write from?" she wrote in a biographical sketch for Contemporary Writers. "A poem has to say something. It has to make some sort of sense; be lyrical; to the point; and still able to be read by whatever reader is kind enough to pick up the book." Her opposition to the political system moderated over time, although she never stopped advocating for change and self-empowerment, or remembering martyrs of the past. In 2020, she was featured in an ad for presidential candidate Joe Biden, in which she urged young people to “vote because someone died for you to have the right to vote.” Her best known work came early in her career; the 1968 poem "Nikki-Rosa." It was a declaration of her right to define herself, a warning to others (including obituary writers) against telling her story and a brief meditation on her poverty as a girl and the blessings, from holiday gatherings to bathing in "one of those big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in," which transcended it. "and I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me because they never understand Black love is Black wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy"Who is David Sacks, Trump's crypto and AI chief?

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NoneSrinagar, Dec 24: Former IAS officer and Advisor to the Governor Khurshid Ahmed Ganai warned of serious environmental consequences in Kashmir if infrastructural development projects in Jammu and Kashmir are taken up without the environmental impact assessment ( EIA) and considerations. He was speaking in a seminar at the Department of Environmental Sciences , University of Kashmir, on the government’s science policy and the need to have a futuristic science policy to improve science education at all levels, research, innovation and entrepreneurship in Jammu and Kashmir. Ganai emphasised on the need to build up scientific temper in the society and training of the youth in new technologies to impart skills that will get them jobs and enable them to be innovators and entrepreneurs. He said that Jammu and Kashmir had a late start with computer science education and information technology (IT) in comparison to rest of the country and the world and the same should not happen in respect of new technologies like AI, robotics, fintech and other emerging technologies which are already in use in many parts of the world. Ganai repeatedly stressed on education, capacity development, need for a dynamic science, technology and innovation policy ( STIP) with the government and supportive schemes for innovation and entrepreneurship in Jammu and Kashmir. He complimented the union government for one nation, one subscription scheme ( ONOS) to make top journals available online free of cost to over 6000 institutions in the country and the new scheme of YUVA of J&K government which is in the pipeline and for which more than 1800 crore have been reportedly earmarked by the government as its share apart from the credit that will flow from the financial institutions to enable the educated youth to set up their own enterprises and startups. The seminar at KU was attended by the university and college faculty, researchers and students. Ganai was one of the key speakers to take part in the seminar today which started yesterday.Analyst Expectations For Bank of America's Future