Bank’s effort part of Iowa City area’s continuing efforts to better welcome Chinese students. Hills Bank and Trust has become the first Corridor bank to offer Mandarin as a language option on automated teller machines. The Hills-based bank updated the ATM in the lobby of its Old Capitol Town Center office in mid-December. The bank plans to install Mandarin on other ATMs across the University of Iowa campus as part of software upgrades.

Since the start of the protest movement widely known as the Arab Spring, in 2011, conditions in most Arab countries have spiraled out of control. With the notable exception of Tunisia, which just held its last round of successful parliamentarian and presidential elections, other Arab countries that were affected by the protest movement have fallen into a vicious cycle of violence that is threatening other countries in Africa, Asia and Europe.

A store clerk in the Central Services Section at the Ankeny lab, Lovan was among employees who participated in a program to promote cultural understanding among the diverse staff at the lab. University of Iowa’s Human Resources/Staff Language and Culture Services funded the project, “Collaboration between the Lines: Connecting Cultures to Build Bridges between Work Shifts, Management and Staff at the University of Iowa State Hygienic Laboratory."

The next WorldCanvass will explore the complicated and controversial issues surrounding the legality and use of tobacco and marijuana with a special focus on the tension between personal liberty and the public good. Host Joan Kjaer will moderate the conversation with guests from the fields of dentistry, psychiatry, pharmacy, public health, and law. The February 3 program begins at 5 p.m. at FilmScene and is free and open to the public

Students on the six-week summer Irish Writing Program program have the extraordinary opportunity not only to study the history and culture of Ireland through its literature, but also to begin the discovery of their own identities as writers. It’s an experience with transformative results for many. This is one of many short-term and faculty led programs that will be represented at this spring's Study Abroad Fair on Thursday, Jan 29.

On Monday, the University of Iowa hosted its second-ever International Welcome Night in an effort to integrate new international students, which has proved difficult after a rise in the international population over the past few years. Though hundreds of students attended the fall welcome night, the event’s organizer, Joelle Brown, anticipated various challenges for the spring welcome night. These included smaller enrollment of first-time international students and January’s uninviting temperatures preventing some students from traveling to the event.

The University of Iowa’s Food for Thought Theme Semester is a program that will launch Tuesday and run throughout the spring semester. It will connect academics, local communities and individual Iowans through something we can all relate to: food.

Fifteen small businesses in Iowa opened their doors to University of Iowa students to find out how they could market their products to Chinese consumers. Tippie College of Business Professors Lon Moeller and Jay Christensen-Szalanski decided to add a bilingual hoop for students to jump through with this semester's online Introduction to Law course. "We were trying to make the course more accessible to (UI's Chinese students) so they could better understand it and then in the process take advantage of the skills that they have and have them work together with the native English-speaking students," Christensen-Szalanski said.

For the past seven summers, the University of Iowa's Between the Lines programs has been bringing high school-age writers from Russia and Arabic-speaking nations to Iowa City for a two-week, summertime residency.This year's program — which is hosted by the International Writing Program — will be offering a special summer session that will include about two dozen 17-to-20-year-old writers from two nations that have had been at odds for for generations: Turkey and Armenia. The international writers will be joined by a smaller cohort of similarly aged writers from the U.S.

In a guest opinion column for the Iowa City Press-Citizen, UI graduate student Eli Asikin-Garmager reflects on his two months living in a village in Indonesia where he conducted research on a local language and completed requirements toward his graduate degree in linguistics. The language found on Lombok Island in Eastern Indonesia — called Sasak — is spoken by some 2.5 million people, but relatively little documentation of the language exists.

Kelsey Frisk, a senior at the University of Iowa, lived in Malå from January through July as part of the study abroad program. There, she researched policies and cultural issues affecting the Sámi people. Her research included investigations of herders practicing reindeer husbandry, who she said make up about 10 percent of the Sámi people.