The University of Virginia’s McIntire Department of Music is getting ready to welcome a new music chair in the upcoming school year. Matthew Burtner is excited to take the position, and he spoke with the Newsplex about some of the events the department will be holding in the coming months.
The Stem Cell Transplant Program at the University of Virginia Cancer Center has received international accreditation for its use of stem cells and bone marrow to treat patients with blood cancers.
In late June, the court ruled on the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Rule, in a case brought by 21 states, including Arizona, Alaska, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming, as well as by power companies. The 5-4 decision, with the lead opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, says the EPA acted irrationally, unreasonably and illegally when it elected to regulate mercury and other toxic air pollution from power plants based entirely on the public health impact, without weighing the costs to industry. “If you were to plot it against time, you would see that the court is gradually developing more co...
Thursday marks the true opening salvo in the GOP presidential race, as the top 10 candidates are slated to face off in the long-awaited Fox News debate. With just more than half the declared candidates on stage, the event will give voters a chance to see whether the debate gets into policy differences or ends up being a slug-fest. “The expectation is that he is going to be a bull in a china shop, perhaps a lack of specifics on policy, perhaps flouting the debate rules, getting too personal on stage,” said Geoffrey Skelley, a political analyst with the University of Virginia Center ...
Baptists in America have battled over, among other issues, believer’s baptism versus infant baptism, the American Revolution, established state churches, the necessity of missions and revivalism, slavery and the Civil War, cooperation between black and white Baptists, science and modernism, adaptation to culture, segregation and civil rights and, to narrow their latest great conflict down to one point, the Bible. University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock has observed the shifting nature of groups within society, Hankins recalled, saying: “Because we live in this world wh...
The first major Republican presidential candidate debate Thursday is, for now at least, as much about who won’t be included in the prime-time event as the performance of those who will. Of the 17 contenders, only 10 will participate in the first-tier debate, which will be aired on Fox News, relegating candidates with low poll rankings to a second level event that won’t attract nearly as much attention. But Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, asked: “Who would willingly trade a place at the adult debate for the kids table...
Forget about Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The worst scourge on Wall Street is overly chatty traders. Since 2010, the world’s 13 biggest banks have shelled out more than $74 billion to settle probes, ranging from interest-rate rigging to currency manipulation, where incriminating exchanges between traders provided key evidence, according to a Post analysis of data compiled by the CCP Research Foundation. “Those crimes may not have been possible without electronic communication,” said Brandon Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.
The two Texans running for president, Sen. Ted Cruz and former Gov. Rick Perry, need the exposure of this week’s first Republican presidential debate, but for different reasons. If he does make the cut, Perry will need to erase the memory of his debate appearance during the 2012 presidential race when he said “oops” after forgetting the name of a federal agency he wanted to eliminate. Failing that, Perry may find it even harder to get attention. “Anyone put at the kids’ table will have to struggle to survive,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Po...
The script has become a familiar one for consumers. First a company announces that it’s acquiring a rival firm. Both businesses declare this will be great for customers. Federal regulators, in most cases, then say that they’ve looked closely at the deal and don’t see any problem. The buyout goes through and – what do you know? – prices eventually go up and the quality of the product or service shows no improvement. “Regulators typically use concentration or market share as a proxy for ‘harm’ to competition and, by extension, t...
Chalk up another poll win for Donald Trump over his GOP opponents. According to the poll of Republican primary voters, Trump leads with 19 percent, followed by 15 percent for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and 14 percent for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. "You only need a bump of a couple of points and you get in. That's the absurdity of this thing," said Larry Sabato, political analyst at the University of Virginia.
According to Matthew Crawford in his wonderful new book The World Beyond Your Head, we now face a cultural crisis of attention, an inability to focus on the things beyond our heads. While it may at first appear that this crisis has been caused by technology, Crawford, the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, traces the genealogy of this crisis to a source that some readers might find surprising: Enlightenment philosophy—specifically its attempt to free human beings from depend...
For Hillary Clinton, the first GOP debate presents a chance to gleefully watch the fur fly, though the free-for-all may not yield any long-term benefit to her chances to win the White House. Republicans are bracing for a bloodbath with Donald Trump leading the scrum on Thursday at an event that will allow Clinton to seem presidential while the Republicans slug it out. “It could well help her. Too bad that we are 450 days from the election,” said University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato.
A Twitter fight with a Maryland woman has left a Texas Christian University student on probation and banned from most campus activities at a college he considered his new home. Robert O’Neil, former president of the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin system, said public institutions have to tread carefully not to violate students’ First Amendment rights. However, private, religiously affiliated colleges have almost no constraints — other than public, student or alumni backlash — on their ability to punish students for speech.
Northern Virginians applying to state colleges and universities should be concerned about being rejected in favor of an out-of-state student with similar credentials, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said. Last year, in-state students made up 72 percent of University of Virginia’s student body. According to the latest available data from the State Council of Higher Education, 44 percent of the 9,104 in-state, first-year applicants were accepted to U.Va. for the 2014-15 school year. Of those accepted, 63.3 percent, or 2,537, chose to enroll at the school.
Spies are infiltrating Wall Street. A wave of companies with ties to the intelligence community is winning over the world of finance, with banks and hedge funds putting the firms’ terrorist-tracking tools to work rooting out employee misconduct before it leads to fines or worse. Another firm, a small technology company in Tennessee called Digital Reasoning Systems Inc., has counted Swiss bank UBS Group AG, New York hedge-fund firm Point72 Asset Management LLP and Credit Suisse Group AG as customers of data-combing software the U.S. government has been using to track down e...
(By Gerry Warburg and Jeff Bergner, who teach classes on U.S. national security policy in the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia) Throughout our history, the years immediately following military conflicts have often proved rich in reform. Four years after the war for independence, the Articles of Confederation were scrapped for the Constitution, which created a far stronger central government with a clear commander-in-chief.
Two highly regarded Richmond-area pediatric heart doctors are joining a new University of Virginia practice opening in space leased on the Bon Secours St. Mary’s Hospital campus in Henrico County. The new practice, which opens Monday, is affiliated with UVa’s Congenital Heart Surgery Program, led by surgeon Jay Gangemi. The doctors will be employees of the practice, which is owned and operated by UVa.
Brenda and Eddie were the popular steadies who got married in the Summer of '75. They lived for a while in very nice style, but of course got a divorce in the end. Thirty years later, Billy Joel's characters may have an explanation. In a paper entitled "What Ever Happened to the 'Cool' Kids?", researchers at the University of Virginia have found clues as to why kids like Brenda and Eddie don't find success.
Researchers believe they may have found the key to identifying women most at risk for postpartum depression. A study published in the research journal Frontiers in Genetics — co-authored by University of Virginia epigenetics researcher Jessica Connelly — identifies a genetic marker in women who show the effects of postpartum depression.
It is bad news for the rebels without a cause and mean girls. Being a ‘cool kid’ can come back to bite you in later life, researchers have warned. ‘It appears that while so-called cool teens’ behavior might have been linked to early popularity, over time, these teens needed more and more extreme behaviors to try to appear cool, at least to a subgroup of other teens,’ says Joseph P. Allen, Hugh P. Kelly Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, who led the study. ‘So they became involved in more serious criminal behavior and alcohol and drug...