Shira Moolten
Shira Moolten covers breaking news, crime and public safety at the South Florida Sun Sentinel, where she has worked since 2022. She received a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 2021 and a master's degree from Columbia Journalism School in 2022. Before joining the Sun Sentinel, she freelanced for two local newspapers in Northern California, The Union and the Sierra Sun. Her investigative series on lead emissions at South Florida's general aviation airports is a finalist in the Florida Society of News Editors and the Society of Professional Journalists ' Sunshine State Awards. You can reach her at 754-971-0636.
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CBS News
13 hours ago
- CBS News
This Delaware County high school student is getting a full ride to Princeton University
A high school senior in Delaware County is getting the opportunity of a lifetime. Monsignor Bonner & Archbishop Prendergast Catholic High School student Kristen Ogogo is getting a full ride to Princeton University through QuestBridge, a program that supports high-achieving students from underserved communities. Out of more than 25,000 applicants, Ogogo was among 2,627 students to match with a prestigious university. "This has been a long time coming, and it's finally here," Ogogo said after commencement Wednesday morning. "I'm so glad I get to spend this joyous moment with my class." Raised by a single mother from Kenya, Ogogo knows the value of hard work and sacrifice. The 18-year-old salutatorian plans to study molecular biology in hopes of becoming an oncologist after losing her eighth grade teacher, Sue Masciantonio, to pancreatic cancer. "She was a big catalyst for all of my determination, all my motivation to have now, and after her passing, it only fueled me to strive harder," Ogogo said. Masciantonio's sister, Maureen Pearlingi, came to graduation to show her support. "For Kristen to use her talents, to want to take her talents, and improve the medical world, especially when it comes to cancer, to me is just a tribute to what my sister meant to her," Pearlingi said. But getting to this point wasn't easy. Ogogo said she wouldn't have been able to attend Bonner Prendie had it not been for generous donors helping cover her tuition. "We're sad to see her go, but we're very fortunate she has high endeavors," Andrea Ciliberti, assistant principal of academic affairs at Bonner Prendie, said. "She's going to reach those dreams." Amid the celebration, Ogogo is grateful to all the people who helped her along the way. "If it weren't for my mom coming here at 19 years old with only $15 in her pocket, she would not have been able to make a way for her two children to live the American dream," Ogogo said. It's a dream she'll continue chasing as she begins the next chapter of her life. "I am so proud of Kristen," Ruth Okello, Ogogo's mother, said. "It's beyond what I can describe."
Los Angeles Times
15 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Edmund White, a groundbreaking gay author, dies at 85
NEW YORK — Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty,' has died. He was 85. White's death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg. Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in New York's Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the recent backlash. A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. 'A Boy's Own Story' was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature's commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet, along with books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates. 'Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,' cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in the New York Times in 1995. 'A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.' White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but at age 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was a psychologist. Feeling trapped and at times suicidal, White sought escape through the stories of others, including Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice' and a biography of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. 'As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,' he wrote in the 1991 essay 'Out of the Closet, on to the Bookshelf.' As he wrote in 'A Boy's Own Story,' he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be 'normal.' Even as he secretly wrote a 'coming out' novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from 'A Boy's Own Story' told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection. 'For the next few months I grieved,' White writes. 'I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?' Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would head out to bars. A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had a crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and 'all hell broke loose.' 'Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,' wrote White, who soon joined the protests. 'Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.' White's debut novel, the surreal and suggestive 'Forgetting Elena,' was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a follow-up to the bestselling 'The Joy of Sex' that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, 'Nocturnes for the King of Naples,' was released and he followed with the nonfiction 'States of Desire,' his attempt to show 'the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren't just hairdressers, they're also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.' His other works included 'Skinned Alive: Stories' and the novel 'A Previous Life,' in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published 'City Boy,' a memoir of New York in the 1960s and '70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels 'Jack Holmes & His Friend' and the memoir 'Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.' 'From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,' he told the Guardian around the time 'Jack Holmes' was released. 'It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.' Italie writes for the Associated Press.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Planet Nine? Not quite, but some astronomers think they've spotted a new dwarf planet
A possible new dwarf planet has been discovered at the edge of our solar system, so far-flung that it takes around 25,000 years to complete one orbit around the sun. The object, known as 2017 OF201, was found by researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University who were searching for 'Planet Nine,' a hypothetical planet larger than Earth that is thought to orbit beyond Neptune. Some astronomers theorize that a mysterious ninth planet, which so far remains undetected, could explain an unusual clustering of objects and other anomalies observed in the outer solar system. In searching for the elusive Planet Nine, researchers instead turned up a different resident in our cosmic backyard. 'It's not very different from how Pluto was discovered,' said Sihao Cheng, a member at the Institute for Advanced Study who led the research team. 'This project was really an adventure.' If confirmed, the newfound dwarf planet would be what Cheng calls an 'extreme cousin' of Pluto. The findings were published on the preprint website arXiv and have not yet been peer-reviewed. Cheng and his colleagues estimate that 2017 OF201 measures about 435 miles across — significantly smaller than Pluto, which measures nearly 1,500 miles across. A dwarf planet is classified as a celestial body that orbits the sun that has enough mass and gravity to be mostly round, but unlike other planets, has not cleared its orbital path of asteroids and other objects. Eritas Yang, one of the study's co-authors and a graduate student at Princeton University, said that one of 2017 OF201's most interesting features is its extremely elongated orbit. At its farthest point from the sun, the object is more than 1,600 times more distant than the Earth is to the sun. The researchers found the dwarf planet candidate by meticulously sifting through a huge data set from a telescope in Chile that was scanning the universe for evidence of dark energy. By cobbling together observations over time, the researchers identified a moving object with migrations that followed a clear pattern. 2017 OF201 is likely one of the most distant visible objects in the solar system, but its discovery suggests there could be other dwarf planets populating that region of space. 'We were using public data that has been there for a long time,' said Jiaxuan Li, a study co-author and a graduate student at Princeton University. 'It was just hidden there.' Li said the object is close to the sun at the moment, which means the researchers need to wait about a month before they can conduct follow-up observations using ground-based telescopes. The scientists are also hopeful that they can eventually secure some time to study the object with the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope. In the meantime, Cheng said he hasn't given up searching for Planet Nine. The new discovery, however, may throw a wrench into some long-standing theories of the planet's existence. The hypothesis behind Planet Nine is that a planet several times the size of Earth in the outer solar system could explain why a group of icy objects seem to have unusually clustered orbits. 'Under the influence of Planet Nine, all objects that do not have this specific orbital geometry will eventually become unstable and get kicked out of the solar system,' Yang said. 2017 OF201's elongated orbit makes it an outlier from the clustered objects, but Yang's calculations suggest that the orbit of 2017 OF201 should remain stable over roughly the next billion years. In other words, 2017 OF201 likely would not be able to remain if Planet Nine does exist. But Yang said more research is needed, and the discovery of the new dwarf planet candidate is not necessarily a death knell for Planet Nine. For one, the simulations only used one specific location for Planet Nine, but scientists don't all agree on where the hypothetical planet lurks — if it's there at all. Konstantin Batygin, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology, proposed the existence of Planet Nine in a study published with his Caltech colleague Mike Brown in 2016. He said the discovery of 2017 OF201 doesn't prove or disprove the theory. The objects in the outer solar system that are likely to show a footprint of Planet Nine's gravity, Batygin said, are the ones where the closest points on their orbits around the sun are still distant enough that they don't strongly interact with Neptune. 'This one, unfortunately, does not fall into that category,' Batygin told NBC News. 'This object is on a chaotic orbit, and so when it comes to the question of 'What does it really mean for Planet Nine?' The answer is not very much, because it's chaotic.' Batygin said he was excited to see the new study because it adds more context to how objects came to be in the outer solar system, and he called the researchers' efforts mining public data sets 'heroic.' Cheng, for his part, said he hasn't abandoned hope of finding Planet Nine. 'This whole project started as a search for Planet Nine, and I'm still in that mode,' he said. 'But this is an interesting story for scientific discovery. Who knows if Planet Nine exists, but it can be interesting if you're willing to take some risks.' This article was originally published on
