A weekly update from the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute, which has tracked COVID trends throughout the pandemic, reported on Friday that nine health districts are in slow growth trajectories. UVA researchers acknowledged the risk the Delta variant poses for unvaccinated residents and areas with lower vaccination rates, but noted the projected bump in cases in the next few weeks remains minimal.
Charlottesville has updated information regarding overnight closures of part of Emmet Street. The full nighttime closure will be near Ivy Road on July 9 and 10 and again from July 12 to 16. The road will be closed between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m. while work is underway to relocate a natural gas pipeline. This is part of the ongoing work on the University of Virginia Ivy Corridor Project. A partial lane closure will also remain in place between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.
People at the University of Virginia will see fewer plastics soon, because the university is cutting back on its use of single-use plastics. This action will go into effect on July 21.
Albemarle County publicly bid out for the removal of its Confederate soldier statue, as did the University of Virginia for the future removal of its monument to George Rogers Clark. On Wednesday, UVA awarded the contract to remove the Clark statue to Team Henry Enterprises, a Newport News-based contracting firm owned by Devon Henry that removed Confederate statues in Richmond last summer.
Virginia’s flagship university also joined in, confirming it would on Sunday begin a project to remove a statue of George Rogers Clark. George Rogers Clark was William Clark’s older brother and fought against the British army and its Native American allies during the Revolutionary War, seizing swaths of Native territory for the young nation. “The statue will be placed into storage as the University (of Virginia) continues to work with a committee to determine a suitable location,” a school spokesman told AFP.
(Transcript) The city of Charlottesville has taken down statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It was almost four years ago that demonstrations over plans to remove the statue of Lee turned deadly. Among those interviewed are UVA professor Jalane Schmidt and third-year student Zyahna Bryant.
There is another contested statue still standing in Charlottesville on grounds at the University of Virginia: the George Rogers Clark statue. It is set to come down sometime Sunday morning, making it the fourth statue to be relocated in just 24 hours.
The George Rogers Clark statue at the University of Virginia will come down Sunday from its pedestal in a park at the intersection of West Main Street and Jefferson Park Avenue, officials confirmed Saturday.
(Editorial) In less than 48 hours, Charlottesville’s – and UVA’s – agonized relationships with their McIntire-legacy statues were largely severed. All that remains now is to tie up some loose ends. But that rapid denouement followed literally years of argument, anger, division and, yes, death.
Sunday morning, when the day was still new, a crew removed the bronze statue of George Rogers Clark from its pink granite plinth on West Main Street, on University of Virginia Grounds near the Corner.
The removal of the George Rogers Clark statue at the University of Virginia on Sunday was for some a symbolic first step toward repairing the harm the monument represented over the course of its 100-year history.
Shortly after the city carted away a monument to Confederate general Stonewall Jackson and a statue of Robert E. Lee that triggered a deadly weekend of violence in 2017, workers carried off two more statues that critics said depicted Native Americans in a racist and disparaging manner. One statue, which sat in a grassy park on the University of Virginia campus, showed Revolutionary War general George Rogers Clark riding a horse toward three unarmed Native Americans as two frontiersmen waited behind him, one of them in the act of raising his rifle. The pedestal declared in engraved letters, “CO...
The Republican Party of Virginia has publicly criticized the social media posts of UVA politics professor Larry Sabato as partisan lambasting of former President Donald Trump and requested the University investigate them. Sabato called the criticism “silly but predictable,” and a University spokesman said the professor’s opinions are protected free speech.
(Commentary co-written by Laurent DuBois, co-director of UVA’s Democracy Initiative and author of “Haiti: The Aftershocks of History”) The assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse on Wednesday was the first slaying of a Haitian leader in more than a century. But the scripts that dominate interpretations of Haitian politics, with its cycles of political upheaval abetted by foreign actors, can seem relatively unchanged over time. Often lost in this narrative are the root causes of the alienation of the Haitian people from their government.
(Commentary by Elizabeth R. Varon, Langbourne M. Williams professor of American history and author of “Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War”) On Saturday, Charlottesville will remove two equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from the city’s public squares. That removal will not “erase history,” as the statues’ defenders have repeatedly charged. It will instead allow us a clearer view of the complex Southern past.
Smith Mountain Lake Democrats hosted Allison Carter, operations director of the University of Virginia Center for Effective Lawmaking, at its general meeting June 28. Carter, who is a native of SML, introduced the club to the work of the center, which seeks to advance new knowledge about the effectiveness of individual lawmakers and U.S. legislative institutions.
Observers say voters are unlikely to base their decision at the ballot box based on who endorsed the candidate. Unless it's Trump. "I can guarantee you that Trump’s name ID is better in this district than Stivers’ is," said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
It’s not clear that Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet is vulnerable. University of Virginia’s Sabato’s Crystal Ball lists Bennet’s seat as safely Democrat and a June poll from research firm Global Strategy Group had Bennet leading a Republican challenger 48-40%.
Experts say the data dramatically underlines how crucial vaccines are, even as officials scramble to convince more people to receive the shots. “I mean, gosh, get vaccinated,” said Dr. Bill Petri, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Virginia. “But it also shows we should continue to make big outreach efforts to get to these populations that, in many cases, have historically not received adequate medical care.”