UA students part of NASA project to capture solar eclipse from near space
Alabama News Center – Aug. 17
A group of students at the University of Alabama plan to launch a balloon to take video of the solar eclipse next week as part of a nationwide science project led by NASA. Similar to a weather balloon, the UA balloon should rise 100,000 feet in the air, high enough to see the curvature of the Earth, and send live video of the eclipse to a website as part of the NASA Space Grant network’s Eclipse Ballooning Project.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to speak at University of Alabama
Al.com – Aug. 17
Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, will participate in a conversation with Dean Mark E. Brandon and Judge William Harold Albritton III at the University of Alabama School of Law for the Fall 2017 Albritton Lecture Sept. 12, the school announced on Thursday.
 
Rick Scott Won’t Talk About Removing Florida’s Factually Inaccurate Confederate Monument
Miami News Times – Aug. 17
Yesterday, in the wake of the Charlottesville violence, Tallahassee mayor and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum begged Gov. Rick Scott to take down a Confederate memorial in Tallahassee’s Old Capitol … In 2014, University of Alabama historian Glenn David Brasher recounted the battle in a New York Times blog post. According to the post, Abraham Lincoln wanted to take Florida to try to capitalize on the relatively large number of Union loyalists there. Eventually, Union and Confederate troops met near Olustee Station in the North Central part of the state — the Union troops were relatively inexperienced and were largely decimated by the Confederates.

UA Law Professor comments on Confederate monuments and President Trump’s tweets (Live Interview)
CNN Tonight with Don Lemon – Aug. 17
President Trump is condemning the removal of Confederate monuments as sad and foolish. I want to discuss this now with Alfred Brophy. He’s a law professor at The University of Alabama and author of “University, Court & Slave: Pro-slavery thought in Southern colleges and courts and the coming of Civil War.”

Confederate Monument Removal Faces Legal Hurdles (Audio)
Bloomberg – Aug. 17
Alfred Brophy, a professor at the University of Alabama Law School, discusses the legal restrictions facing cities and towns that want to remove confederate monuments and memorials. He speaks with June Grasso on Bloomberg Radio’s “Bloomberg Law.”

UA Law School offers free legal advice
WVUA (Tuscaloosa) – Aug. 17
Only approximately 17 percent of low income people in the state of Alabama have access to free legal help for civil legal needs. That leaves a huge portion of people unserved and underserved, so the Tuscaloosa County Bar, the Alabama State Bar, the volunteer lawyers program and The University of Alabama Law School started partnering in 2013 to provide this service.

Don’t stand so close to me – or my fruit flies
Inside Halton (Canada) – Aug. 17
Have you ever wondered what determines your comfort zone — that invisible line that when crossed may cause you to feel uncomfortable — bordering on threatened? … “Each animal has a preferred social bubble, a preferred personal space,” said Simon, whose research also included collaborators from the University of Alabama and a number of undergraduate students who conducted research over several years.

White Nationalist Groups Hone Narrative of Victimization, Point to Virginia Rally
Skamaa (Indonesia) – Aug. 17
Amid a tidal wave of public indignation over last weekend’s deadly protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, organizers of the white nationalist rally have taken to social media to argue that they not the one woman killed and nearly two dozen counterdemonstrators injured should be seen as the real victims … “That is difficult to say,” said George Hawley, author of Making Sense of the Alt-Right and a professor at the University of Alabama. “The images from Charlottesville were probably quite alienating to a lot of people who might have otherwise been sympathetic to the alt-right. “On the other hand, people have declared the alt-right a dead brand before, and it has survived,” Hawley said.
 
Should Boston Remove Its Confederate Monument?
WBUR.org (Boston, Massachusetts) – Aug. 17
Today, President Trump sent out a series of tweets saying, “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can learn from it … guests: Al Brophy, professor of law at the University of Alabama and author of “University, Court, and Slave: Proslavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War.”

‘WHAT ABOUT THE ALT-LEFT?’
Apps for PC Daily – Aug. 17
White nationalist William Johnson said he was thrilled by what Trump said. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now”, Trump said … George Hawley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama, said the “alt-left” term has been most aggressively pushed by Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, but it’s not a label anyone or group has adopted for themselves.

SMART Clinic heads into its second year
Daily Mountain Eagle – Aug. 18
The SMART Student Health and Wellness Center had a good first year at Oakman Elementary/Middle School, seeing hundreds of students and several faculty members, according to a year-end report from clinic partners … This school year, Oakman has a family nurse practitioner or doctor in the SMART Clinic five days a week, as well as a full-time clinical social worker, a larger mental health team and two interns from the University of Alabama, according to Ginn.

White woman, reject racism
Mail and Guardian (South Africa) – Aug. 17
The world is reeling from the events that took place in Charlottesville in the United States this past weekend … The idea that black people are inherently mindless beasts committed to defiling white women fuelled lynching in the Jim Crow South, according to Lisa Lindquist-Dorr, a history professor at the University of Alabama. In her book, White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960, Lindquist-Dorr writes: “The myth insisted that black men were driven to assault white women, and that, as a deterrent, ‘black beast rapists’ should pay with their lives.”

Fallout from modern protests: naming and shaming online
Christian Science Monitor – Aug. 17
When hundreds of white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend in their largest public appearance in decades, it put faces to ideologies that have become increasingly high-profile over the past year … George Hawley, a political science professor at the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa and author of the upcoming book “Making Sense of the Alt-Right,” notes that the doxxing of white supremacists began around the turn of the year, with some of the movement’s once-incognito leaders – including “Mike Enoch” (actual name Mike Peinovich) and “Millennial Woes” (real name Colin Robertson) – becoming household names.
Yahoo! – Aug. 17
 
UA College of Nursing receives mental health grant
NBC (Montgomery) – Aug. 17
The University of Alabama has received a mental health grant. It’s a $1 million grant to provide behavioral mental health services to the Capstone Rural Health Center in Walker County.