University of Alabama summer commencement: Full list of graduates
Tuscaloosa News – Aug. 1
The ceremony can be viewed online at ua.edu/commencement/, for 30 days. Graduates include …
Tuscaloosa News (gallery) – Aug. 1
University of Alabama expects to complete Bryce road work in summer 2016
Tuscaloosa News – Aug. 2
The University of Alabama expects to complete work on a new academic building and road, both currently under construction on the historic Bryce Hospital campus, by next summer. The $31.4 million academic building on the west side of the Bryce Lawn is scheduled to be completed and ready to open by August 2016, Assistant Vice President for Construction Tim Leopard said. Crews now are putting up the structural steel for the building. The building sits near the future intersection of Peter Bryce Boulevard and Hackberry Lane. The new boulevard, named after the hospital’s first superintendent, and North Campus Way are part of a $24 million road project on the Bryce campus that would connect Fifth Avenue, Hackberry Lane and Jack Warner Parkway. Peter Bryce Boulevard is scheduled to be completed next summer, Leopard said.
In Wall Street versus Mississippi county, the underdog won
New Zealand Herald – Aug. 3
All signs pointed to a Mississippi county’s bet with Wall Street going south. Officials in Hinds County, where one in four residents live in poverty, didn’t know what they were getting into, according to an independent audit. They couldn’t explain the mechanics of the interest-rate swaps they negotiated with Rice Financial Products Co., a New York derivatives dealer. They couldn’t say how semi-annual payments on the leveraged bets were determined. Yet, in the decade since the contracts were first signed, Hinds County netted US$6.7 million on the deal due to collapsing short-term rates in the municipal bond market. That bucks the trend of cities, states and localities exiting interest-rate swaps on much less favourable terms. “It’s like walking out of the casino with $6 million,” said Robert Brooks, a finance professor at the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Commerce in Tuscaloosa. “It could’ve gone the other way.”
THE PORT RAIL: America, where the commoners are the kings
Tuscaloosa News – Aug. 1
Not too long ago, we began a little series on the “way we were,” kind of an exploration of who we are as a people. I mentioned that a French traveler to the U.S. in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, left us an amazingly clear and pungent picture in words, Democracy in America, which still informs us. One of his most astute observations was that “among a democratic people, where there is no hereditary wealth, every man works to earn a living….” Indeed, “labor is held in honor; the prejudice is not against, but in its favor.” I was reminded of this a few weeks ago when I received a letter from a friend of mine nominating me to be inducted into Spain’s Imperial Order of Charles V. I told my wife, and she listened dutifully, thinking for a second, before adding, but “when are you going to fix the holes in my cubby at the horse barn where the mice are getting in and eating my tack?” (Larry Clayton is a retired professor of history at the University of Alabama. Readers can contact him at larryclayton7@gmail.com.)