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The online version of the classic board game Diplomacy, reportedly favored by John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger and Walter Cronkite, is serving as a fun testbed for University of Maryland computational linguists developing a new way to fight a serious and costly cybersecurity threat.

A bill passed by the Maryland General Assembly this month will establish the first-ever state funding for UMD’s state-wide “greening” program, Sustainable Maryland (SM). SB14, which passed the Maryland’s house and senate April 11, will provide $500,000 annually to UMD’s Environmental Finance Center (EFC), which administers Sustainable Maryland, to expand the no-cost program’s impact and reach across the state.

While a doctoral student researching Black performance and the civil rights movement, Assistant Professor of English Julius Fleming, Jr. discovered a newspaper article about a 1964 performance of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” in the Mississippi Delta. At this performance, the article notes, was acclaimed civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who connected the play's plot line—two characters waiting for a person who never comes—to Black Americans' perpetual wait for freedom.