Three years after Sprint-Nextel spun it off to focus on wireless, landline carrier Embarq has been purchased by CenturyTel in an $11.6 billion deal. The two carriers will become CenturyLink, headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana, and serve 7.5 million customers in 33 states, according to a release. (And we remember the days when the local carrier was called Centel!)

Comments(1)

Congressman Tom Perriello (D-Ivy, left) declined a request for federal funds for Larry Sabato’s Youth Leadership Initiative. Now Senator Mark Warner (D-VA, right) is lobbying his colleagues to save it.
HOOK FILE PHOTOS

Few political scientists are as tapped into the ways of Washington as the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato. For his encyclopedic knowledge and predictive acumen, he has be come the go-to-guy for the national media seeking political analysis. Now, after decades spent watching Capitol Hill, Sabato needs an act of Congress to keep his brainchild alive.

“If we do not receive federal funds,” says Ken Stroupe, chief of staff of Sabato’s UVA Center for Politics, “we do not have a sufficient endowment to continue to operate this program.”

The program is the Youth Leadership Initiative, a national civics education program founded by Sabato in 1998, providing free teaching tools to 50,000 social studies teachers of all grade levels nationwide. Every two years, the program runs mock elections with students voting on the same candidates their parents will on Election Day, making for what the Center for Politics says is the nation’s largest mock election.

Since its inception, the Youth Initiative received most of its funding from a federal earmark introduced annually into the House of Representatives by Congressman Virgil Goode (R-Rocky Mount). After (more)

Comments(9)

Accidents on May 22 and 29 caused 39 injuries. PHOTO BY KATIV

It’s a risk nearly all parents take when they send their children off to school, but on the morning of Friday May 29, risk became unhappy reality for the entire fifth grade of Baker-Butler Elementary School, as they became the second group of area school kids ensnarled in an injury-causing accident. In this case, the bus company involved has seen one of its vehicles, a motorcoach, fail its last three federal inspections and get pulled from service. Could this trip-spoiling incident have been prevented?

Police charged the driver of one of the buses, Samuel Hilton Richard, with following too closely. Richard, 62, a 37-year industry veteran, tells a reporter he’s not at liberty to discuss the accident.

However, another industry player, Dan Goff of A. Goff Limo, calls the bus company involved, Lynchburg Bus Service Inc., the “low-cost carrier for this area.” And SAFER, a website run by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, notes that 75 percent (more)

Comments(5)

The 2009 Emily Couric leadership scholars are: (front) Lily Erb, Tandem; Allie Cooper, Monticello High; Effie Nicholaou, Western Albemarle; Emma Yackso, winner of the $15,000 scholarship, Charlottesville High; Christina Horton, Albemarle High; (back row) Megan Thomas, Murray High; Ladi Smith, $5,000 merit award winner, St. Anne’s-Belfield; Kimberly Dozier; Devon Ryan, Miller School; Madeline Zimmer, Renaissance School, and Brea Thomas, Covenant School.
PHOTO BY MARY JOHNSON

Three years after CBS reporter and UVA alum Kimberly Dozier was seriously injured by a car bomb in Iraq, the journalist talked about her work and recovery to a crowd that included John Grisham and Congressman Tom Perriello at the May 18 Emily Couric Leadership Scholarship Awards luncheon.

“Please don’t risk my life if we’re not going to make air,” Dozier recounted her cameraman, Paul Douglas, saying. The report on what it was like for U.S. troops in Baghdad was supposed to make the airwaves on Memorial Day 2006, but a car bomb killed Douglas and soundman James Brolan, and left Dozier with her legs looking like “hamburger,” she said.

Dozier was presented the Women’s Leadership Award, which has gone to former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Caroline Kennedy, and Dozier’s CBS News colleague Katie Couric.

Comments(1)

Angela Davis wants to dismantle the “prison-industrial complex.”
PHOTO BY STEPHANIE GARCIA

To those of a certain age, “Free Angela Davis” evokes memories of an outspoken Black Panther/Communist with the giant Afro who was incarcerated after a judge was killed with her shotgun.

Sure she’s a noted philosopher, scholar and activist, but UVA is loaded with those. The draw for some to the Carter G. Woodson Institute worthy April 16-17 symposium on why the United States puts so many of its citizens in jail is the ’70s icon-side of Davis. Although celebrated in songs by both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, she isn’t resting on her fame or her notoriety.

It’s been nearly 40 years since the then-UCLA college professor was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. Her hair, no longer in the signature Afro, still looks exuberant at a hastily thrown together April 13 press conference to drum up attention for “The Problem of Punishment: Race, Inequality, and Justice,” where Davis and her hosts (more)

Comments(17)

The rest area on I-64 west is where the teen jumped out the window and escaped.
PHOTO COURTESY VDOT

The teen inmate who escaped from custody at the Ivy rest area March 26 was apprehended on his 17th birthday– March 28– at Fashion Square Mall. The youth, who had been on his way to a behavioral treatment center in Missouri when he bolted from the bathroom on I-64, was picked up in the men’s department at Belk.

“He was located while we were investigating a shoplifting report,” says Lieutenant Todd Hopwood with Albemarle police.