The Teklehaimanot family (center) hears their name called at Tuesday's housing lottery. Seven-year-old Meklit and five-year-old Bethlehem ran around the empty rooms of 455 Howard Ave., dodging the legs of parents and realtors and city workers. This two-family home would soon be theirs. “We always wanted a big house,” Meklit said, minutes after her father won the Livable City Initiative’s (LCI’s) latest affordable housing lottery. ​“I always wanted this to happen.”  Meklit and Bethlehem are the daughters of 57-year-old Konstantinos Teklehaimanot, who is now set to buy his fi ..read more

Qinxuan Pan. A state judge sentenced Qinxuan Pan to 35 years in prison after the former MIT artificial intelligence researcher pleaded guilty to the 2021 murder of Yale graduate student Kevin Jiang. State Superior Court Judge Gerald Harmon handed down that sentence on Tuesday, according to the state criminal convictions database and a press release sent out by the state’s attorney’s office. The sentence comes roughly two months after Pan, 33, pleaded guilty in late February to the murder of Jiang, 26, who was shot to death at Lawrence and Nicoll streets near Jiang’s fiancee’s ap ..read more

New Haven Counts ED Ronald Coleman (center) and New Haven Reads ED Kirsten Levinsohn on Tuesday. A citywide math and literacy tutoring effort has reached 1,700 New Haven elementary school students since launching nearly a year ago — and is now on the lookout for 100 more volunteer tutors this summer, on top of the 240 who are currently signed up, to keep the program growing.  Mayor Justin Elicker and representatives from various partnering nonprofit organizations delivered those updates Tuesday afternoon during a press conference at Wexler Grant School at 55 Foote St ..read more

Parent Raquel Sanchez checks out the headlines during PLTI media literacy lesson. Raquel Sanchez paged through recent issues of the New Haven Register and La Voz Hispana, on the lookout for opinion essays and articles about families — as part of a class teaching parents about the importance of media literacy for themselves, their kids, and others. Sanchez and her classmates of fellow parents met last Wednesday afternoon and evening during the latest session of the Parent Leadership Training Institute (PLTI), run by United Way of Greater New Haven.  PLTI is a 20-week tr ..read more

Trekking towards Morris Creek. About 30 people took a walk through Morris Cove, from Lighthouse Point Park to East Shore Park and back again, to see for themselves the route the city has proposed for the Shoreline Greenway Trail — and to see what other routes, or detours off the main route, might be possible.  The Saturday morning walk, organized by the New Haven Bioregional Group, was led by Aaron Goode of the group and Chris Ozyck, associate director of Urban Resources Initiative, along with representatives from Shoreline Greenway Trail as well as Doug Hausladen, executive dir ..read more

Robles-Rivas: "You don't have to lose your identity to be successful." Thirty three years ago, Evelyn Robles-Rivas moved to Connecticut from Puerto Rico to find a career despite not knowing how to speak English. Now, the former Worthington Hooker School principal is returning to New Haven to lead the public school district’s work supporting multilingual learners.  The New Haven Public Schools’ (NHPS) Board of Education approved the hire of Robles-Rivas Monday afternoon during its hybrid Board meeting held in-person at Ross Woodward School and online via Zoom.  Sup ..read more

Hossna Samadi. “Twenty years of women’s hopes and dreams collapsed in one day.”  That’s how New Havener and Afghan refugee Hossna Samadi described the 2021 fall of Kabul. She wasn’t in her home country at the time, having left Afghanistan with her family five years earlier. But the shock of seeing the Taliban return to power reverberated thousands of miles away — and sticks with Samadi as she gets to know her New Haven neighbors and explains what it’s like to be Afghan today. Samadi was the featured speaker last Thursday at the Fair Haven public library on Grand Avenue for ..read more

Mel Defilippo, a prevention services manager with A Place to Nourish Your Health (APNH), explains healthcare offerings to event attendees. “I’ve never, ever gone to a place like this before,” said Darnell Ray, taking in the flurry of queer-affirming healthcare and self-care opportunities that filled the New Haven Pride Center. Ray first came out as gay at the age of 19. Now, at 51, he’s recently built up the courage to attend LGBTQIA+ community gatherings. He had never been to the Pride Center before Friday’s ​“Pride In Balance” event, a five-hour health-themed festival featurin ..read more

Chetrick. Composer and violinist Alyssa Chetrick was taking a solo as part of her vertiginous piece, sardonically titled ​“Equilibrium.” If some of the previous passages had offered a sense of calm, Chetrick was now going for chaos, spurring the ensemble around her to join her. Her phrasing pushed the musicians around her to dig deeper into the music she’d written, as if they were looking to break it. Would they? Lewis. Chetrick’s composition was part of the inaugural New Haven Composers Spotlight, held Saturday afternoon at NXTHVN on Henry Street in Dixwell and, as stated on it ..read more

No word yet on the cheesesteaks: Grace-Flood. You can still read what Nora Grace-Flood is finding out — now from Philadelphia rather than New Haven. Nora, a reporter for the New Haven Independent the past three years, has taken up residence as the Philadelphia bureau chief of the Independent Review Crew, a new national network of locally based in-person arts reviewers. The nonprofit Online Journalism Project — which publishes the New Haven Independent and the Valley Independent Sentinel and operates WNHHFM — launched the Review Crew to fill a gap: Local arts scenes are ..read more