UA’s women’s wheelchair basketball team wins national championship
WBRC-Birmingham — March 23
How about the University of Alabama women’s wheelchair team? Stephanie Wheeler and the gals won the national championship in Denver this past weekend by beating Illinois.
WVUA-Tuscaloosa – March 23
Volunteer work vital to Moundville
Tuscaloosa News – March 24
It is entirely fitting that a nine-member team from the National Civilian Community Corps has come to Moundville Archaeological Park to help repair the 1,200-foot boardwalk that winds through the park and was damaged by hurricanes Ike and Kartrina in 2005. After all, the NCCC is a branch of the AmeriCorps service program and was modeled after the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps, which did much of the original work at the park in the 1930s. That included much of the initial excavation of the prehistoric Native American mounds and construction of many of the buildings and infrastructure that remains at the University of Alabama-administered park.
Longtime teacher inspired many
Tuscaloosa News – March 24
After 46 years in teaching, it would be hard to determine the number of lives Bessie Asbury impacted. Even if one could go back into school records and pinpoint how many students she taught each year, math alone would fail to communicate Asbury’s love of people and learning. But before her death Friday at the age of 104, it would have been a problem the long-time math teacher would probably have loved to solve. After graduating from the University of Alabama, Asbury spent all 46 of her teaching years in the halls and classrooms of Holt High School where she was known simply as ‘Mrs. A.’…One of those ‘children’ was Alabama football great Joe Namath, said Asbury’s pastor and friend Phil Boils. Namath attended Asbury’s funeral on Monday…Boils said. ‘Joe was a great football player but his grades weren’t so great.’ That’s when Asbury, an avid Alabama fan, stepped in. ‘So she took Joe under her wing and helped him get back on the team,’ Boils said.
Tuskegee Institute photographer subject of lecture
Tuskegee University – March 23
Dr. Amalia Amaki, professor at the University of Alabama, will present “P.H. Polk’s Images of Alabama will be held Thursday, March 26 at 6 p.m. at the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care. The lecture is part of the 2009 New Perspectives lecture series, “Art and the Academy: Views from Alabama Historically Black Colleges and Universities.”
Vaccine holds promise in stopping CMV
Wane.com (Fort Wayne, Indiana) – March 23
Each year, approximately 8,000 infants in the United States develop severe hearing, mental or movement impairments after becoming infected with cytomegalovirus (CMV), a common virus passed onto them while still in the womb. Now, published results of a trial involving 441 CMV-negative women give rise to optimism that a vaccine to prevent congenital CMV may be closer. Women who received the trial vaccine were 50 percent less likely to later become infected with CMV than were women who received a saline injection. . . . The clinical team invited healthy women between the ages of 14 and 40 who had given birth at the University of Alabama at Birmingham or at the University of Alabama College of Community Health Sciences in Tuscaloosa to participate in the trial.