(Commentary) On April 28, Baton Rouge’s Metro Council agreed to pay $35,000 to Clarence Green. Green, a 23-year-old man, was stopped for an alleged traffic violation with his 16-year-old brother. That stop escalated, and police searched Green and his teen brother’s underwear and groped their genitals on a public street. Then, on May 25, Thomas Frampton, the Green family’s attorney and associate professor of law at the University of Virginia, released the body-worn camera video, with Green, his brother, and his mother’s consent. The case quickly gained national attention.
(Commentary) Asked if the newly configured 16th District might make it more competitive, Dole said political handicapper Larry Sabato might move it to “Lean Republican” rather than “Solid Republican.” Not quite, says Sabato, whose “Crystal Ball” is housed at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “Likely Republican,” he told The Daily Beast. “A little more competitive but they’ve [Democrats] got a long way to go” in Ohio, a state he sees as a lost cause for Dems.
“Republicans believe that they benefit more from the status quo, and Democrats believe that these changes will help them,” said Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball University of Virginia Center for Politics. “Democrats are just a lot more interested these days in various electoral process changes, be it nonpartisan redistricting commissions, ranked-choice voting, mail-in [or] early voting, and other things as compared to Republicans.”
Critical race theory is a once-obscure academic theory that looks at racism not as individual acts, but as a systemic phenomenon baked into the structure of society. “Defining it might be like nailing Jell-O to a wall, but this is a familiar type of argument,” said Kyle D. Kondik, who analyzes elections at UVA’s Center for Politics. “It’s a different version of the same argument that cultural conservatives have made for years, that higher education . . . [is] too liberal, they’re indoctrinating students with left-wing ideas, they’re too critical of the history of the country.”
There is, of course, the small matter of whether the former president wants his old job back. But with DeSantis now topping Trump in conservative polls and already raising millions of dollars on the national stage, some analysts believe a DeSantis run, or even a Trump-DeSantis ticket, to be more likely than not. “He’s not just auditioning for the Trump role, I think he’s ordered Trump masks for the campaign trail,” said professor Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
Barbara Perry, the Gerald L. Baliles professor and director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said, “It reminds us that we are all mortal and that we are all human and that we all share these same feelings, whether you’re red or blue.”
One of those brand new citizens was Barata Hilla. Originally from Ghana, she was naturalized in a ceremony Sunday at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia estate. In an interview before the ceremony, she said she couldn’t wait for the “all-important occasion.” “In a nutshell, I am happy,” said Hilla, who moved to the U.S. in 2014 and works as a certified nursing assistant at the University of Virginia hospital. “I don’t have to be worried anymore about checking my green card, and that alone is a relief.”
The way the Virginia legislation is written, commercialization isn’t expected until 2024. “I would anticipate there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the state government to move that date up, and the question is how quickly can we get there and still think through all the issues that people think are important to Virginians,” Paul Seaborn with UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce said.
On Friday, Jose Gomez, with the University of Virginia’s engineering school, talked with the boys about structural engineering.
Meredith D. Clark, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, said Phylicia Rashad’s original reaction to Bill Cosby’s release shows that “she’s untrustworthy.” Her apology was predictable, while her original tweet reflected her views, Clark said. Clark said she could understand why a university would want to hire an acclaimed actress to lead its arts school. “But I’d want someone who had studied higher education as well,” she said. “And she likely hasn’t.”
“The major change is that we have vaccines, of course, but also we have a sense of how to treat patients with COVID-19,” said Dr. Taison Bell, a UVA assistant professor of medicine in the divisions of infectious disease and pulmonary/critical care medicine. “I wouldn’t say that we completely feel comfortable taking care of patients, because this still is a relatively new disease, but we still have a sense of what we should do.”
(Audio and transcript) NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro and historian Marlene Daut discuss parallels between the Haitian Revolution and the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. for NPR’s series, “We Hold These Truths.”
“Over the 10 years we have been doing this in health care, we’ve seen people start to use the language of ‘I’m in the orange zone’ or ‘I know I’m in the orange zone when I feel like I’m one sleep-deprived moment away from a bad decision.’ We’ve seen people’s increased ability to recognize when they’re significantly stressed, and they are far more likely to recognize the signs of a colleague experiencing a stress injury,” said Richard Westphal, director of Alliance for Compassionate Care at the UVA School of Nursing, a co-creator of the stress first aid toolkit.
The county government acted early to set the tone for how the county would face the pandemic, she said. Meanwhile, the local Blue Ridge Health District, the University of Virginia and Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital all played important roles in delivering both the vaccine and information.
UVA Health held its weekly COVID-19 briefing Friday morning. The Latino community has one of the highest hospitalization rates as well as one of the lowest vaccination rates in Virginia. But in the Blue Ridge Health District, 57% received their first dose.
Dr. Max Luna joined the University of Virginia’s roundtable Friday to discuss coronavirus vaccination rates in the Latinx community. Officials say more than 50% of Latinx in Charlottesville and Albemarle County have received their first dose, making them one of the most vaccinated groups in Virginia.
UVA Health’s move to buy out Novant Health and become the sole owner of Prince William Medical Center, the 130-bed hospital in Manassas, will provide more opportunities for local residents to access specialists and participate in clinical trials while expanding the University of Virginia’s health care footprint and teaching mission across the state, officials said Thursday.
UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute is predicting a surge of COVID-19 cases across the state beginning in August and lasting into the fall, largely because of the Delta variant, which is 2½ times more contagious than the original COVID-19 virus, according to the institute’s latest report.
Until recently, it was thought that the lymphatic system did not reach as far as the brain. But in 2015 a team of researchers at the University of Virginia discovered in the central nervous system lymphatic vessels that drain cerebrospinal fluid into the cervical lymph nodes below. Knowing that the brain interacts with the immune system could open possibilities for new research into neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s.
Our design thinking approach was impacted greatly by Professor Jeanne M. Liedtka of the University of Virginia, who, by her instruction, has enabled our staff to grow in our ability to adapt to new opportunities such as expanding mobilization from the Majority World. She also taught us to respond to church-planting opportunities among the largest movement of people in our lifetime by asking four questions.