Lights have been a very important element of many festivals. Even before the discovery of electricity, rather more so because of the lack of it, lighting lamps or lanterns was a significant part of celebrations. In fact, some festivals are known as festivals of lights. There are many such light festivals across various cultures in the world, which have been illuminating our surroundings year after year. From Berlin to Bangkok, cities across the world have different festivals of light through the year. Lights and fireworks not only dispel darkness, they also hold different meanings in various cultures. Further more, many of them are celebrated even outside the countries of their origins.
On April 26, 1896, in Chihuahua, Mexico, Marcelino Serna was born into a very poor family. He left home at the age of twenty, and crossed the border into the United States, traveling to El Paso, Texas to find a job and improve his life. Since he didn’t speak English, he had to take low-paying jobs and was soon working in Denver, Colorado on a sugar beet farm. When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, Serna was in Denver working with a group of men who were picked up by federal officers checking the draft status of potential soldiers. To prevent his deportation to Mexico, Serna volunteered to join the Army.
NASA’s revolutionary, long-delayed $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope has produced its first full-color image, and it’s a doozy: a glimpse deep into space and back in time, capturing the faint light of galaxies forming in the infancy of the cosmos. The image, revealed Monday in a White House ceremony by President Biden and top NASA officials, shows a cluster of galaxies, called SMACS 0723, that functions as a massive lens, magnifying the extremely faint and cosmically distant objects behind it.
The 74th annual Emmy Awards are in the books following a tight three-hour telecast on NBC that saw several repeat winners, along with quite a few surprising upsets. During Monday’s Kenan Thompson-hosted ceremony, Apple TV+’s “Ted Lasso” won best comedy series for the second year in a row, HBO Max’s “The White Lotus” took top limited series and HBO’s “Succession” grabbed the highest honor of the night with outstanding drama series.Earlier in the show, Netflix’s “Squid Game” star Lee Jung-jae became the first Asian actor to ever win lead actor in a drama, and the fourth Asian person ever to win an acting Emmy, while HBO’s “Euphoria” star Zendaya became the first Black woman to win lead actress in a drama, and the youngest two-time winner of any Emmy in history.
