Diversity

The Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Delaware Minority Supplier Development Council , the Philadelphia affiliate of the National Minority Supplier Development Council, has elected the following to its board: Jessica Choi, director of supplier diversity at Aramark Strategic Assets; Rajil Chopra, manager of supply operations at Peco Energy Co.; Sherry Nacci, diversity manager at Skanska USA Building Inc.; Sherry A. Robison, supplier diversity program...

The most worthless thing one can do at Niagara Falls is merely stop and look at the falls. If you don't get wet, you haven't gotten your time or money's worth out of your trip. For those who don't know their way around this world wonder, here is a Niagara Falls primer. Where exactly is Niagara Falls? There is a two-part answer to this question since there are the cities and the water. First, the cities. Niagara Falls, N.Y., sits across the Niagara River from Niagara Falls, Ontario.

It's good to see Gov. Christie consider diversity in making his nominations to the New Jersey Supreme Court. But that hardly makes up for the way he treated John E. Wallace, an esteemed jurist and the court's only black justice, who deserved another term. Christie made a historic and bold move with two nominations this week - Bruce Harris, an openly gay African American, and Phillip Kwon, who would become a Korean American on the court if confirmed. Both men are lawyers.

Baltimore-based singer/songwriter Cass McCombs is renowned for his bleak, urbane lyrics and melancholy musicality. There's a cool sense of distance to some of his saddest, smartest songs. There's ambition beneath the laconic surface, though. McCombs is driven enough to have released two albums in 2011, Humor Risk and Wit's End ; energetic enough to write complicated, cosmopolitan, humorous songs that plumb valuable emotional depths; and calculating enough to plan a wildly entertaining tour with one-man-jug-band opening act Frank Fairfield.

WOODCHOPPERTOWN, Pa. - Up here in the wooded hills of Berks County, boys are more likely to go hunting after school than play street hockey, as they might do in Essington or Secane. If they take in a ball game, it's more likely the Reading Phillies than the Philadelphia Phillies. And when they eat a big sandwich, they call it a sub, not a hoagie. They make it on a doughy soft roll, not an Italian hard roll. Culturally, rural Woodchoppertown is a world apart from the dense, twin-house neighborhoods of eastern Delaware County down by Philadelphia International Airport.

Parents often start a new year resolved to take steps to improve their families' well-being: more fruits and vegetables and less junk food, more exercise and less TV. But there is a danger in our homes that parents can do little to address: Toxic chemicals in toys, electronics, cleaning supplies, cookware, and other everyday products that can find their way into small mouths and bodies. Doctors and scientists increasingly point to toxic chemicals in consumer products as contributing to serious diseases and disabilities, especially when developing fetuses, infants, and young children are exposed to them.

NEW YORK - There's a new reality show star on the tube Sunday night. Suehaila Amen doesn't drink, prays daily, and wears a head scarf in public to preserve her modesty. I don't think we're at the Jersey Shore anymore, Snooki. Suehaila is one of the cast members of TLC's new series All-American Muslim . While most of the women on the show, set in Dearborn, Mich., choose to wear the hijab (traditional scarf), there are some startling exceptions. Glamorous blonde Nina Bazzi, for instance, appears to have wandered over from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills set by mistake.

Several weeks ago, I got a question via voice mail that reflected an issue Charles Darwin himself raised: "I was curious about the situation with dogs," this reader said. ". . . Some look entirely different from others. They say all dogs came from the wolf. " While he understood that dogs were shaped by breeding, he wondered whether the diversity of dogs could be considered a form of evolution. Dogs do hold the record as the world's most diverse land mammal, said Elaine Ostrander, a geneticist who studies dogs at the National Institutes of Health.

TRENTON - Groups representing minorities in New Jersey have asked Gov. Christie to make the state Supreme Court more diverse. The Legislative Black Caucus sent a letter this month urging Christie to use his next appointment to nominate a member of a minority group. The NAACP, Latino Action Network, and others wrote to Senate lawmakers in September asking that they approve only nominees who would increase the court's diversity and independence. Christie, a Republican, is to make two nominations to the court in March.

IN THEORY, AMERICANS like diversity. We try to see the world through Captain Noah multicolored glasses. But when we actually get down to practicing what's preached, the fallacy of social pluralism emerges in all its sordid hypocrisy. Take Sarah Palin. (And don't say "Please!") For all their admirable rhetoric about the value of being an independent woman with strongly held convictions, the professional feminists were appalled at the rise of this pro-life, pro-gun female pit bull. Ever since she roared onto the scene in 2008, Palin has been ridiculed and vilified for many things, not the least of which are her decidedly anti-liberal-establishment positions on "women's issues" like abortion (and abortion and abortion)