The U.S. Senate has confirmed President Joe Biden’s choice to be the top federal law enforcement officer in Arizona. Gary M. Restaino was confirmed as the United States Attorney for Arizona on Friday. He has been a federal prosecutor in Arizona since 2003 and was previously the chief of the criminal division and the white collar crime section. He has also worked as a trial attorney for the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. He is a 1996 graduate of the University of Virginia law school.
Members of the first Black fraternity on University of Virginia grounds honored its Founders’ Day on Friday by paying homage to the enslaved people who built the university. Omega Psi Phi brothers and others made their way from The Lawn at UVA to the newly-constructed Memorial to Enslaved Laborers in a silent march. There, song and prayer filled the cold November air as the fraternity celebrated Founders’ Day 110 years after its founding, and nearly five decades since a chapter was formed at the University of Virginia.
Darden students at the University of Virginia gathered for a good cause Saturday afternoon. The Darden Military Association held a clothing collection for Afghan families. The students who hosted it are veterans in the business school and say they felt close ties to the refugees in need right now. They gathered clothing, shoes and toys for families who are settling into Charlottesville, at The Park on North Grounds.
More than a hundred people gathered at the University of Virginia on Saturday to protest the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. They started from the UVA Police Department, then marched along the Corner while chanting before stopping and giving speeches.
The UC Santa Barbara’s Women’s Center hosted a lecture from Tiffany Lethabo King, assistant professor of women, gender and sexuality at the University of Virginia, titled “Black Aesthetics: Representing Relations of Bodies, Land and Ecologies” on Nov. 10. The lecture explored the representation of Black and Indigenous peoples in relation to physical landscapes in North America.
The foundation’s newly elected board members bring far-ranging expertise to the panel. Dr. Beverly Colwell Adams is a retired associate dean and assistant dean in the University of Virginia’s College of Arts & Sciences, and associate professor emeritus of UVA’s Department of Psychology. Her research includes the examination of microaggressions as one of the contributors to the decline of physical and mental health in strong Black women.
Experts from the University of Virginia are hard at work helping people knock addictive habits. Mimicking the hand to mouth contact that vapes or cigarettes require can be helpful. For example, some UVA patients looking to stop smoking snack or chew a toothpick when they have a nicotine craving. “One of the big things that we recommend people doing is first of all if they smoke in the house, go outside. That’s the best thing you can do to cut the amount that you smoke,” said Neely Dahl, UVA tobacco treatment specialist.
J. Miles Coleman, associate editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan election prognosticator at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said the 8th District is the only U.S. House district in Colorado that his organization rates as a toss up. “If this type of national environment persists (with President Joe Biden’s approval in the low 40s), it could be closer to ‘leans Republican,’” he said.
“O’Rourke’s problem is going to be that by every indication, nearly a year in advance, it looks like the 2022 elections are going to be substantially Republican-leaning,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and a keen observer of national elections. “And Texas has proven beyond any doubt it is still a Republican state.”
Americans are by far the world’s heaviest consumers of gasoline, thanks to big cars, long driving distances and little public transportation in many areas. “Americans expect the president to do something about this,” said Larry Sabato, political scientist at the University of Virginia. “We need to have a national conversation about the law of supply and demand. Inflation is so cutting, and can really destroy a presidency,” Sabato added, citing Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, who both tried unsuccessfully to encourage Americans to curb gasoline consumption as prices jumped.
Larry Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said voters notice when inflation rates increase by even 4% to 5% when the prices of food, gas and other needs increase. “The lack of inflation can help to put people in a good mood,” he said. “The presence of substantial inflation can put them in a bad mood. When they’re in a bad mood, they tend to turn on the incumbents.”
The sheer scale of the project means better maps could still be far off, experts say. “The FCC is a deliberative federal agency, so it’s moving slowly,” said Christopher Ali, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. “I think their heart is in the right place in terms of wanting to produce the best maps. But it’s probably going to take another two years.”
Even though AI isn’t core to the law, today’s technology landscape demands that AI play a role, said Anton Korinek, a Brookings Institution fellow and professor in the Department of Economics and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia who studies the implications of AI for labor markets. “Nowadays you wouldn’t be able to make a significant investment anywhere without touching on machine learning, AI and automated systems,” he said. But overall, the legislation “is not a concerted push for AI,” he said.
“I would say sending a demand letter of this sort is exceptionally common. Indeed, it’s the norm. That’s the way these disputes get kicked off typically,” said Rip Verkerke, professor of law and director of the Program for Employment and Labor Law Studies at the University of Virginia. However, Verkerke said there are some distinct aspects of Brackney’s demands letter that aren’t necessarily typical.
For some of the city’s progressive activists, though, the trial is more of a hum in the background. Kathryn Laughon, a University of Virginia nursing professor involved with anti-fascist and anti-racist community efforts, told HuffPost that it’s “just one part of the larger work that’s gone on” in recent years.
(Commentary) Supreme Court advocate Douglas Laycock helped craft today’s First Amendment law. Yet in the COVID-19 cases, the Court’s conservative majority risks turning the free exercise of religion into something Laycock never imagined: a right to kill people. Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, was the victorious attorney in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah (1993), persuading the Supreme Court to invalidate a ban on animal sacrifice. To understand where the law is now, one must understand that decision, and how the Court has abused it.
As Thanksgiving approaches, Dr. Costi Sifri, UVA Health’s director of hospital epidemiology, said there are ways you can reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19 when at gatherings. “For example, even if you’ve been vaccinated, to be tested if you’re going to a family gathering, particularly a family gathering where there may be unvaccinated people,” he said. “So maybe some children who have not yet had a chance to complete their vaccine series or perhaps some family members who may be at more risk for COVID.”
With Thanksgiving right around the corner, experts at UVA Health are offering some advice before you gather around the table with friends and family. “If you’re high risk, if you’re older, if you have high risk medical conditions, I really strongly encourage those people to get a booster, especially as we head into the holiday season,” UVA Health’s Dr. Costi Sifri said.
(Co-written by Kerem Cosar, professor of economics) Paving dirt roads and building highway networks, unsurprisingly, have been shown to produce substantial economic gains, but what is the impact on domestic trade from improving existing road networks? Using spatially disaggregated data on major capacity upgrades of existing road networks and domestic transactions in Turkey, this column estimates a large positive impact of reduced travel times on trade and regional employment, and long-run aggregate real income gains of 2-3%.
(By Boris Kovatchev, founder and director of UVA’s Center for Diabetes Technology, and Anna Koatcheva, his daughter) The artificial pancreas is finally at hand. This is a machine that senses any change in blood glucose and directs a pump to administer either more or less insulin, a task that may be compared to the way a thermostat coupled to an HVAC system controls the temperature of a house. All commercial artificial pancreas systems are still “hybrid,” meaning that users are required to estimate the carbohydrates in a meal they’re about to consume and thus assist the system with glucose cont...