In The News

Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and University of Virginia leaders are discussing their top priorities for the year. It’s all part of the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce’s first-ever “State of the Community” event that will be held Friday morning at the new CODE building downtown.

Attracting and retaining employees is perhaps the biggest challenge for Albemarle County, Charlottesville and the University of Virginia, officials told the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce at its “State of the Community” event on Friday.

The University of Virginia Foundation wants to add a massive new mixed-use development with up to 1,400 homes to its North Fork industrial park property in Albemarle County, but concerns about water infrastructure could stop it in its tracks.

As the city of Charlottesville wrestles with serious budget questions, one city councilor says making the University of Virginia pay its fair share would go a long way to help. Councilor Michael Payne suggested that UVA enter into a "payment in lieu of taxes program" or PILOT for short.

Dr. Carlton Haywood Jr., an assistant professor in the Berman Institute of Bioethics and in the division of hematology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, died Dec. 31 at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Baltimore resident was 45. Despite an unconventional childhood that was shaped by sickle cell disease, Dr. Haywood became a straight-A student, and was accepted to the University of Virginia, where he planned to study medicine. But early that first year, he came to realize that he didn’t like working in laboratories, and his adviser suggested another field of study. “Intro to Bioethics changed...

Yacov Yosseph Haimes, 85, of Charlottesville died Tuesday. In 1986, he took a position in the Engineering School at the University of Virginia. Over his 50-plus-year professional career, Yacov distinguished himself as a global leader in risk management. He was a prolific publisher of both books and professional papers. His most influential work was the textbook “Risk Modeling, Assessment and Management.” He was named a fellow in seven professional societies and was a past president of several of them. He also served on many national advisory boards, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Se...

Less than three months before the Phillies drafted him, Griff McGarry was removed from the University of Virginia’s rotation. He could not throw strikes. Virginia had title aspirations and Drew Dickinson, the pitching coach, could not reconcile how McGarry featured some of the best raw stuff he’s ever seen without the appropriate results.  

University of Virginia fourth-year student Megan Sullivan has advanced to the semifinals in the “Jeopardy National College Championships.” UVA hosted a watch party where more than 100 students came to support Sullivan in her “Jeopardy!” debut.  

The life of an adult amateur is never easy. Between balancing school or work with riding, and factoring in all of life’s other responsibilities, it can be quite a challenge. This year’s USEA Adult Amateur of the Year Award winner, Katie Lichten of Hamilton, Massachusetts, is no stranger to the dedication required to make all of those scales balance equally. As a student in the business school at the University of Virginia and a four-star eventer, Lichten often finds herself juggling a handful of roles and responsibilities as she pursues her degree in IT and business analytics as well as an upc...

(Commentary by Olivia Paschal, Ph.D. student in history) In the aftermath of the anti-racist uprisings of 2020 and the Trump presidency, many American newspapers are reckoning with how their coverage has made them complicit in racism and racial violence. Caught up in the unattainable and relatively recent ideal of journalistic objectivity, which did not take root until the 1930s, the traditional news media has struggled to cover the communities it now claims as its audience. While the historical and contemporary failures of mainstream, historically White newspapers have come to light, the path...

President Joe Biden is expected to make a Supreme Court nomination in the next couple weeks. Although this nomination won’t change the balance of the court, University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato says it will have a lasting impact. “Essentially, Biden’s appointee will be a liberal replacing a moderate liberal - Justice Breyer. So it’s not changing enormously, but every individual on a nine-person court matters,” Sabato said. Sabato brought in former reporter and Yale Professor Linda Greenhouse to share her thoughts Thursday.  

The result of the recall vote is especially significant because San Francisco is a liberal bastion that gave more than 85% of the vote to the Democratic presidential ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 presidential election. According to Rhodes Cook, a senior columnist at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, San Francisco gave the Democrats the sixth highest vote share in the 2020 presidential election out of all the more than 3,100 counties and county-equivalents in the U.S.  

Over a 30-year period, when income inequality has moved up and down, mobility has remained more or less constant, with virtually no correlation to the tax code. Bradford Wilcox, who leads the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia said, “Inequality itself is not a particularly potent predictor of economic mobility.” Wilcox studied the Harvard and Berkeley data and concluded that “high percentages of two-parent families and high local government spending — which may be a proxy for good schools — are the most likely to help poor children relive the Horatio Alger story.” &nbsp...

University of Virginia law professor Margaret Foster Riley told CNN that the new law could be “fatal for much of the litigation currently pending. But the new law is quite vague in some areas and possibly overbroad -- and that might provide some potential opportunities,” she told CNN in an email.  

Defendant Michael Alexander Brown’s account of blacking out during the murder of his mother’s live-in boyfriend was deemed credible by a clinic with the University of Virginia’s Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy. The institute diagnosed him with dissociative amnesia that would leave him unable to remember what had happened during an episode. “He was physically present, but not conscious,” Sharon Kelley, a clinical psychologist, testified.  

Another reason Washington is doing okay, could have to do with the state’s relatively low COVID-19 case counts. “Some jobs, especially those that are public-facing, are perceived to be so hazardous or unpleasant that workers are no longer willing to stay, even at higher wages,” said University of Virginia Professor Teresa A. Sullivan. “Fear of contracting COVID, abuse from customers, frustration over unavailable inventory, and other supply-chain issues have all made retail, hospitality, and some health care jobs much less attractive.”  

When it comes to cardiac arrest, timing is everything, because it can be the difference between life and death. “Improvement in survival is seen when we have people responding to the patient’s side within the first couple minutes of cardiac arrest,” said Dr. William Brady, from UVA Health. He says giving CPR within the first two minutes significantly improves survival rates, stating it’s “a factor of three to six times more likely to live than somebody that doesn’t receive this care.”  

(Commentary by Rhodes Cooks, senior columnist at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a publication of UVA’s Center for Politics) Nearly 15 years ago, journalist Bill Bishop wrote a provocative book entitled “The Big Sort.” Its thesis was that Americans were increasingly clustering into communities of like-minded folk — by religion, lifestyle, and politics. That clustering, at least at the political level, has only increased since then.  

In 2021, the University of Virginia women’s team won the NCAA title by 137 points over the closest competitor, securing the national crown that most assumed the Cavaliers would win in 2020 before the cancellation of the NCAA Championships. Paige Madden was the top swimmer of the meet, while sophomore Kate Douglass won the 50 free and finished second in two other events and Alex Walsh won the 200 IM. This year, Madden has graduated, and the competition on the national level will be more formidable, but this Virginia team looks so much more complete. Through nine out of 18 swimming events at the...

5. “On Winter,” by Matt Dinan in the Feb. 1 edition ofThe Hedgehog Review (a UVA publication).