Conn. Girl Wins National Google Doodle Contest

Conn. Girl Wins National Google Doodle Contest

Chosen from among about 4,200 entries, a Connecticut teenager's doodle went up on Google Friday afternoon.

Sarah Harrison, of Stratford, won the national Doodle 4 Google contest with her illustrated vision of acceptance and respect.

Inspired by the prompt, "What I see for the future ..." Sarah, 15, drew kids of various skin hues lined up with arms over each others' shoulders. Six of the eight wear T-shirts that together spell "Google," with religious and other symbols promoting equality and tolerance substituted for letters. The drawing also includes a child in a wheelchair and another holding a cane.

"My future is a world where we can all learn to love each other despite our religion, gender, race, ethnicity, or sexuality," Sarah said. "I dream of a future where everyone is safe and accepted wherever they go, whoever they are."

Ultimately, Sarah's doodle captured the best of everything we saw, representing values like diversity, inclusion and respect in an inspiring and creative image," Google's head of external affairs, William Floyd, said.

The Bunnell High School sophomore had traveled to California with her family as a finalist. On Friday, she received a $30,000 college scholarship, and her doodle was to be showcased on the homepage through Saturday at 3 a.m. Sarah also will have the chance to work with the Doodle team at the Googleplex in Mountain View.

Google regularly updates the logo on the company home page to mark holidays, anniversaries and other notable events. A team of illustrators has created about 2,000 Google doodles since 1998, according to the company.

Sarah said her inspiration was the many divisions among people around the globe.

"When I started, I was thinking of how there's a lot of animosity toward diverse communities of people in the world right now," she said. "So I wanted to draw something that I hoped would show that we can all get along well, and that it's possible for us to be happy with each other."

The celebration was on at Bunnell High School, which is to receive a $50,000 Google for Education grant to advance STEM education.

"The email is blowing up; the phone is blowing up," school Principal Nancy Dowling said.

Dowling said she and some staff members celebrated after seeing Sarah's win announced at 1 p.m., but she could not tell students until 1:30 p.m. because testing was in progress.

"This could not happen to a nicer young woman/artist and her family," she said.

The Doodle 4 Google competition gives K-12 students across the country the opportunity to have their artwork featured on the Google homepage. This year, a panel of judges, including Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles, selected the winners from the 50 states and three territories. Public voting over the course of two weeks then determined national finalists.

Google was the most visited website in the world in 2016, according to web traffic data and analytic company Alexa Internet Inc.

A HOSPITAL in Lincolnshire his understood to have been evacuated this morning after a ‘major incident’ broke out on site.

Emergency services were called to Pilgrim Hospital in Boston shortly before 6am this morning.

Fire crews sent eight vehicles to the scene.

A fire broke out at Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, Lincs, this morning

All day case appointments and elective operations have been cancelled for the day

Posting on Twitter this morning, the hospital said that due to a fire “day case appointments and elective operations have been cancelled today”.

According to Licolnshire Police, who are also at the scene, the fire was reported at 6.15am today and appears to have started on the 9thfloor of the hospital

Cops say early indications are it could have been caused by a kitchen microwave.

The Trump administration won't ban a common pesticide used on food, reversing efforts by the Obama administration to bar the chemical based on findings it could hinder development of children's brains.

In announcing the decision late Wednesday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said that by not banning chlorpyrifos, he was providing "regulatory certainty" to thousands of American farmers that rely on the pesticide.

"By reversing the previous administration's steps to ban one of the most widely used pesticides in the world, we are returning to using sound science in decision-making — rather than predetermined results," Pruitt said Wednesday.

In approving the continued use of chlorpyrifos on citrus fruits, apples, cherries and other crops, Pruitt is overriding the scientific findings of his own agency's experts. Pruitt, a Republican lawyer who took the lead at EPA last month, gave no indication of what process he used to determine chlorpyrifos is safe.

Environmental groups accused Pruitt of putting the profits of big business over public safety.

"EPA's refusal to ban this dangerous pesticide is unconscionable," said Patti Goldman, an attorney at Earthjustice. "EPA is defying its legal obligation to protect children from unsafe pesticides."

Goldman said her group will seek a court to order to countermand Pruitt's decision.

First developed as a chemical weapon prior to World War II, chlorpyrifos has been sold as a pesticide since 1965 and has been blamed for sickening dozens of farmworkers in recent years. Traces have been found in waterways, threatening fish, and experts say overuse could make targeted insects immune to the pesticide.

U.S. farms use more than 6 million pounds of the chemical each year — about 25 percent of it in California.

Under pressure from federal regulators over safety concerns, Dow withdrew chlorpyrifos for use as a home insecticide in 2000. EPA also placed "no-spray" buffer zones around sensitive sites, such as schools, in 2012.

But environmental and public health groups said those proposals don't go far enough and filed a federal lawsuit seeking a national ban on the pesticide.

In October 2015, the Obama administration proposed revoking the pesticide's use in response to a petition from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pesticide Action Network North America.

EPA's subsequent findings relied on three, peer-reviewed human health studies indicating that even minuscule amounts of chlorpyrifos, sold by Dow Chemical, can interfere with brain development of fetuses, infants and children.

"There is a breadth of information available on the potential adverse neurodevelopmental effects in infants and children as a result of prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos," said a risk assessment memo issued in November by nine EPA scientists.

The EPA said then that its analysis did not suggest risks from residual exposure to chlorpyrifos in food. But when those exposures are combined with estimated exposure from drinking water in certain watersheds, "EPA cannot conclude that the risk from aggregate exposure meets the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act safety standard," it said.

Now under new management, the EPA said Wednesday that the previous administration's proposal relied on a study "whose application is novel and uncertain, to reach its conclusions."

"The public record lays out serious scientific concerns and substantive process gaps in the proposal," the agency said. "Reliable data, overwhelming in both quantity and quality, contradicts the reliance on — and misapplication of — studies to establish the end points and conclusions used to rationalize the proposal."

The Dow Chemical subsidiary that sells chlorpyrifos quickly issued a statement praising Pruitt's decision.

"Dow AgroSciences remains confident that authorized uses of chlorpyrifos products offer wide margins of protection for human health and safety," the company said in a statement.