UA Honors College hosts Town Hall Fall Series
Tuscaloosa News – Oct. 15
The University of Alabama’s Honors College will feature panel discussions of the news media, student debt, and the history and progress of UA and Tuscaloosa during its Town Hall 2013 Fall Series. The free series at the Ferguson Center is open to the public. The first event — “Cronkite to Colbert: What is News to You?” — begins at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 21. The event will feature panelists Jennifer Greer, interim dean of the College of Communication and Information Sciences, and Rick Bragg, the Cason professor of writing in the journalism department, according to a release from UA.
Famed author Rick Bragg to speak Oct. 15 at Tuscaloosa library
Tuscaloosa News – Oct. 15
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Bragg will discuss his books, tell stories and take questions Oct. 15 at the Tuscaloosa Public Library. The program is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. in the Rotary Room of the library, 1801 Jack Warner Parkway. Bragg is best known for his books “All Over but the Shoutin’,” “Ava’s Man” and “The Prince of Frogtown.” Copies of Bragg’s books will be sold by the Alabama Booksmith. The program is sponsored by the Kate Webb Ragsdale Author Series fund. Call 205-345-5820 for more information.
UA sororities to host Halloween events for children
Tuscaloosa News – Oct. 15
The University of Alabama’s Panhellenic Association will host the annual sorority row trick-or-treat event from 6 to 8 p.m. Oct. 29. Children 12 and younger from the Tuscaloosa area are invited to dress up in Halloween costumes and visit the lawns of the campus sorority houses on Magnolia and Colonial drives. UA sorority members from the Alabama Panhellenic Association and National Pan-Hellenic Council, also in costume, will provide candy to area children. In addition to the candy and activities, UA’s Parker Adams program will host a haunted house for all ages on the third floor of Harris Hall, and students will offer face painting and Halloween games in Tutwiler Hall. The event will be canceled in case of inclement weather.
ABC 33/40 (Birmingham) – Oct. 14
UA student researching school’s link to slavery
CBS 12 (Chattanooga, Tenn.) – Oct. 15
A University of Alabama senior is pursuing a research project on the school’s involvement in slavery and says he wants to present his findings during Black History Month. Benjamin Flax told the Tuscaloosa News (http://bit.ly/1bopFH4 ) he feels it’s important to remember and understand the school’s link to the slave trade and not to avoid it because it’s an uncomfortable subject. History professor John Rothman says the point of the project isn’t to shame the university for its involvement in slavery, but to question what it really means that the school owned slaves. Rothman says slaves the university owned centuries ago helped the school achieve success and it’s important to remember them, too. Flax estimates the school owned four slaves and used hundreds for construction and maintenance work on campus.
CBS 42 (Birmingham) – Oct. 15
ABC 33/40 (Birmingham) – Oct. 15
WAKA-CBS (Montgomery) – Oct. 15
An American shutdown reaches the Earth’s end
New York Times – Oct. 15
Joseph Levy was preparing for a season of scientific research in Antarctica last week when he got the call: Stand down. Levy, a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics, is studying the climate history of the dry valleys of Antarctica by analyzing buried ice sheets that have been frozen since the last ice age, and are beginning to thaw…But with the U.S. government partly shut down, federally financed research has come to a halt for Levy and hundreds of other U.S. scientists. Even if a budget deal is struck, these scientists will have less time on the ice, and some will lose a full year’s worth of work as the narrow window of productive time closes…Samantha Hansen, an assistant professor of geological sciences at the University of Alabama, was set to leave for Antarctica on Nov. 4. The government agencies she would normally turn to for information are shut down, and she has graduate students whose theses depend on what emerges from the dirt and snow of Antarctica. “We’re kind of in a holding pattern,” Hansen said. Equipment that she put in place on previous trips needs to be serviced and repaired this year, and the stored data retrieved; by next year, the sensors could be so deeply covered in snow that the data, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, would be lost forever.
NDTV – Oct. 15
WVUA (Tuscaloosa) – Oct. 14
Third party a popular idea; experts say it won’t happen
Anniston Star – Oct. 15
Gerald Willis was an unknown when he ran for president in 1984, and he wasn’t going to risk running for an unknown party. The Piedmont man, then a state representative, who ran as a Democrat in the 1984 election, said even though his own party disowned him at the polls, and several offers from various third parties came his way asking him to be their nominee, he said he was determined to run as a Democrat…Such people are independent of the two political parties dominant in American politics, and also largely independent of one another, said Richard Fording, a political science professor at the University of Alabama. “I think a lot of Republicans in Alabama wouldn’t want to see the Republican Party split up,” Fording said. “But I bet if you asked all those people what party they would want to see, you’d get very different answers.”
US lays down law for municipal-bond advisers
Atlanta-Journal Constitution, via Individual.com – Oct. 15
When Wall Street nearly crashed five years ago, a dozen Atlanta-area governments discovered that some nifty side deals their financial advisers had coaxed them into when they issued bonds a few years earlier weren’t so nifty after all. The side deals _ involving complex packages of bonds and related securities _ were supposed to lower interest costs. But as the financial crisis deepened, they stopped working as expected, and costs soared. The local governments, including the city of Atlanta, had to spend about $400 million unwinding the deals. Now federal regulators have finalized long-delayed rules aimed at protecting taxpayers and communities from a repeat of such costly mistakes … By the time Jefferson County filed bankruptcy, taxpayers owed $3 billion to creditors, including more than $1 billion to JPMorgan Chase, which had helped engineer many of the complex bond deals. “Right now, (local governments) pay for their advice through transactions” with investment banks and other firms, said University of Alabama finance professor Robert Brooks. Brooks said he began to understand how expensive and risky such advice can be when he looked at one deal Jefferson County signed in 1997. He estimated that investment bankers had structured it to boost their own take by about $3 million at the county’s expense.