Woodward, Lemon to speak at Alabama
Tuscaloosa News – Feb. 15
Two award-winning journalists are coming next week to the campus of the University of Alabama. Don Lemon, a CNN newsroom anchor, and Bob Woodward, associate editor of the Washington Post, will speak at separate events that are free and open to the public. Lemon will speak at 6 p.m. Feb. 21 at the Ferguson Center theater. Guests can register for free tickets online at uaferguson.tix.com. After his speech, Lemon will sign copies of his book, “Transparent,” which will be available for purchase. Lemon began working for CNN in 2006 and anchors the CNN Newsroom during weekend prime time. He has won an Emmy for a report on real estate, an Edward R. Murrow Award for coverage of the Washington, D.C., snipers and other awards for his reporting on the AIDS epidemic in Africa and Hurricane Katrina. Woodward’s speech will be at 6 p.m. Feb. 22 in the Sellers Auditorium at the Bryant Conference Center, 240 Paul W. Bryant Drive. Woodward has worked at the Washington Post since 1971 and has written or co-written 17 books, all of them nonfiction best sellers. He and Carl Bernstein teamed up to cover the Watergate scandal, which earned the Post the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. He was also the lead reporter for the Post’s Pulitizer Prize winning coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Woodward is the speaker in the Gloria and John L. Blackburn Academic Symposium Lecture under the auspices of UA’s Blackburn Institute, a leadership development organization.
Al.com – Feb. 15
Engineering student to travel to China for competition
Crimson White – Feb. 18
A University of Alabama engineering student will spend his summer designing a bridge in a city more than 7,000 miles from Tuscaloosa. Thomas Moat, a senior majoring in construction engineering, will travel to Beijing, China this July to participate in the 2013 International Summer School of Structural Engineering at Tsinghua University. Moat will team up with two Chinese students to compete against about 30 other students to produce the best design for a pedestrian over crossing. Thomas said he heard about the program from Wei Song, assistant professor in the civil, construction and environmental engineering department. “I’m from China, so I have several connections there,” Song said. “The professors at Tsinghua University, I know their work, and they visited me while I was at Purdue working for the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Program. We kept the contact, and they mentioned that they had this summer school opportunity.”
‘Bittersweet Harvest’ exhibit comes to Gorgas
Crimson White – Feb. 18
After two and a half years of waiting, the American studies department will display the traveling Smithsonian exhibit, “Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program 1942-1964” in Gorgas Library. The Bracero Program was a guest worker program sanctioned by the U.S. government to address labor shortages across the country after World War II. Mexican nationals were given farming jobs and exploited for more than 20 years for cheap wages under harsh working conditions. The Bittersweet Harvest exhibit aims to humanize the workers by telling their stories.
UA students to travel to University of Southern Miss during spring break to help with tornado relief (no video available)
WBTV-CBS (Charlotte, N.C.) – Feb. 15
Students at the University of Alabama are planning a trip to help another college campus recovering from a tornado. You remember a tornado killed 50 people in Tuscaloosa in April of 2011. The survivors of that storm are going to the University of Southern Mississippi to help with recovery there. USM was hit by an EF-4 tornado Sunday afternoon.
Our View: Remembering the past
Talladega Daily Home – Feb. 17
The University of Alabama is planning a year-long observance of Gov. George C. Wallace’s infamous stand in the schoolhouse door in a futile attempt to prevent integration of the University. The dramatic event occurred on June 11, 1963, and it is entirely appropriate that it be remembered…Arthur Dunning, a professor and senior research fellow at the University of Alabama, along with his wife Professor Karen Baynes Dunning cochairs the 50th anniversary committee. They are exactly the right people to lead this effort. Arthur Dunning was one of the first black students at the university, enrolling in 1966. Malone and Hood had already led the way, and others had also been there. But the atmosphere was still tense. “You could still feel it in the community. You could feel it in the state of Alabama and indeed feel it on this campus. I was treated almost as an invisible person. I spent a lot of my free time at Stillman College,” Dunning said. Stillman is a historically black college in Tuscaloosa. So, Dunning was there just after the tense times, and there when black students were still considered a novelty. Thankfully, that is not the case today and African-American students are seen all over the campus at UA, attending classes, playing basketball in the gyms, hanging out and just being college students. But that wasn’t always the case. It took a determined group of black citizens, two brave first students in Malone and Hood, and in the end, a governor who made his political points while giving in to the inevitability of the situation. We look forward to the Dunnings’ plans for remembering those tense days of 50 years ago. Those days are not to be recalled with affection or nostalgia. They are to be remembered as a dark spot in our past that we have thankfully moved past.
COLUMN: Exposing false ‘martyrs’ as suicidal
Jerusalem Post – Feb. 16
‘These are not suicide operations,” explained Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar on Al-Arabiya television in 2006. “This is a despicable term used by the Israelis in order to say that these are suicide operations, knowing that suicide is forbidden in Islam…. These are martyrdom seeking operations, approved by all the authorities of the Islamic nation.” Al-Zahar’s claims were not surprising. He was neither the first, nor the last, to make that argument. But it is shocking that the rest of the world essentially agreed. Although most people still employ the phrase “suicide attack” as the simplest description of this behavior, leading scholars and security officials have spent years insisting that perpetrators are driven by sacrifice, not suicide. In the United States, Europe and elsewhere, students are taught that suicide bombers are psychologically equivalent to a soldier who jumps on a grenade to absorb the blast and protect his comrades. Or as American professor and former adviser for two presidential campaigns Robert Pape asserted, suicide terrorists are “much like ordinary soldiers with a strong sense of duty and a willingness to sacrifice all for the common good.”… Adam Lankford is a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama and the author of The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
The great debate
Florence Times Daily – Feb. 18
A little more than two months after the massacre of 20 children and six adults in a Connecticut school, President Barack Obama is pushing a broad agenda of gun control measures that includes banning AR-15-style rifles and large-capacity magazines…Mark Lanier, chairman of the Criminal Justice school at the University of Alabama, believes most of what the president is proposing will be ineffective and an encroachment on Second Amendment rights. “In New York, everybody followed the law and registered their guns,” he said of the city’s strict laws. “Now, they are going to take them from them.”…Lanier said what’s needed is more access to mental health care and more information about those who have received mental health treatment for certain issues in background checks. “The mother of the guy in Sandy Hook had been trying to get mental health treatment for him for two years,” he said. “If he had gotten it, (the school shooting) might never have occurred.” As for banning weapons and magazines, Lanier said it is impractical. “It’s too late to ban them. There are too many of them out there,” he said.
Women are more jealousy-prone in Facebook relationships than men
Mother Nature Network – Feb. 14
Women are more prone to romantic jealousy spurred by Facebook posts than men, particularly if they think other people can see that their relationship may be in trouble, a new study suggests. During the study, 226 heterosexual college-age men and women were asked to imagine that they had discovered a photo of their significant other with a person of the opposite sex on Facebook…Women rated their level of jealousy as a six out of a possible nine, compared to a four out of nine for men … However, because the scenario was imagined, it’s impossible to know whether the findings would translate into the real world, or actually cause a couple to break up. Future research should examine whether a situation on Facebook, similar to the one used in this study, would hurt a real relationship, the researchers, from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, said.
Times of India – Feb. 18
Arab News – Feb. 18
Campus News: Lauren Hocevar received Presidential Honors at University of Alabama
Willoughby News-Herald (Ohio) – Feb. 16
Lauren Hocevar, a 2012 graduate of Perry High School, received Presidential Honors for the fall semester at the University of Alabama, with a 4.0 grade-point average. She is a freshman majoring in pre-medicine neuroscience.
Children’s Hands-On Museum presents 7th Annual Duck Derby March 17
Al.com – Feb. 15
The Tuscaloosa Children’s Hands-On Museum will host its seventh annual Duck Derby on March 17 from 1-4 p.m. at the University of Alabama Student Recreation Center outdoor pool. Join the rubber duck races at 2 p.m.
Russian meteorite makes people think about the Hodges meteorite
Fox 6 (Birmingham) – Feb. 15
The Russian meteor got us thinking about Alabama’s own cosmic history, one of the most famous incidents happened in Sylacauga in 1954. A meteor that’s now on display at the museum of natural history at the University of Alabama, fell through a home, bounced off a radio and hit Mary Ann Hodges.