| Tuesday, July 3, 2018 |
| Mississippi State to test siren-activated gates Tuesday | |
 | Mississippi State University will test the campus' siren-activated gates. The test will be on Tuesday, July 3 at 9 a.m. The exercise will include emergency vehicles using a Yelp siren and emergency lights as they approach gated areas around the university. The test is scheduled to be complete by 10 a.m. |
| NIH Grant at MSU: Nicholas Fitzkee Receives National Institutes of Health Grant | |
 | The National Institutes of Health recently awarded Nicholas Fitzkee, an associate professor in Mississippi State University's chemistry department, with a five-year, $1.8 million grant to study how bacterial proteins attach to plastic and glass surfaces, and thus impact public health. A native of York, Penn., Fitzkee received his bachelor's degree in computational physics in 2001 from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He received his Ph.D. in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 2005 and joined the MSU faculty in 2011. He established the Fitzkee Lab research group after coming to MSU and began studying the relationship between protein dynamics and function. |
| Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith tours MSU-Meridian | |
 | U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith made a stop in Meridian Monday to visit Mississippi State University. The senator toured the campus, learning more about the programs and technologies available for students. Smith says she's very interested in the institutions of higher learning across the state. While on recess, she wants to spend her time learning more about the areas where funding is needed. "We're graduating some wonderful people here in Mississippi that are advancing," Sen. Hyde-Smith says. "The unemployment is pretty low right now, which is very good thing. We've got a lot of job openings. We just want to see young people and students succeed and prepare themselves to become productive, tax-paying citizens of Mississippi." |
| Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith cites support for president in upcoming decisions | |
 | During a tour of the Mississippi State University campus in Meridian, U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith highlighted her legislative experience as a plus in the November special election for her seat and discussed the importance of time management for her campaign. Hyde-Smith sits on the Senate Committee on Appropriations as well as the committee for agriculture and rules. The potential appointment of a new justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could be as early as next week, might impact Hyde-Smith's campaign and schedule. "We're obviously very excited that there is a Supreme Court spot coming forward," Hyde-Smith said. "We're anxious and excited to look at who that might be." |
| Golden Triangle wins big for 2018 'Best of Mississippi' | |
 | It's one thing to say to be the best, but receiving recognition in Mississippi Magazine bolsters the claim. Over the weekend, the results of Best of Mississippi 2018 were released, and many Golden Triangle businesses and restaurants found themselves at the top of the various categories. A few of the recipients include Starkville Cafe for "Best Breakfast," Deep South Pout in Starkville and Columbus for "Best Trendy Fashions," and the City of Starkville for "Best Place to Live" in Mississippi. "Using this designation, obviously always just confirms what we already knew, and we know that this is the best place to be. It gives us the opportunity to really put that on the spotlight so that people really look to Starkville, and when they're here they can see the unique assets that we have to offer our community," said Greater Starkville Development Partnership Director of Tourism Jennifer Prather. |
| Golden Triangle gears up for July 4 with fireworks shows | |
 | Starkville's parks and recreation department will again host its annual Independence Day Celebration on Wednesday at the Sportsplex on Lynn Lane. The celebration will begin at 5 p.m., with six bounce houses for children and room available to play with frisbees, soccer balls, footballs and more. A fireworks show, put on by Pyro Shows, is scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. The event will also feature several musical performances. This year's event will feature several food vendors, and Starkville Community Church will be providing free water while supplies last. There will also be face painting for children, for $5. Mayor Lynn Spruill said she's looking forward to this year's celebration, and invited the public to take part. |
| Franklin Corp. investing $2.7M, adding 60 jobs | |
 | Franklin Corp., one of the largest privately owned furniture manufacturers in the U.S., is adding a 60,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art raw materials warehouse and adding 60 jobs over the next four years. Franklin is investing $2.731 million in the project. Construction of the new warehouse began in early June and is expected to be completed this fall. "For nearly 50 years, Franklin has been manufacturing furniture in Northeast Mississippi where the industry is a powerful economic driver for the entire region. The company's decades of success in Chickasaw County prove 'Made in Mississippi' is a stamp of quality known around the U.S. and around the world," Gov. Phil Bryant said. Franklin was founded by Chairman and CEO Hassell Franklin in 1970. The company currently employs about 1,000 workers in Houston. |
| GOP lays out Senate race strategy: Paint David Baria as a liberal, Mike Espy as corrupt | |
| With the primaries officially in the rear view and a Republican majority in the U.S. Senate on the line, Mississippi Republicans have begun rolling out their strategy against two formidable Democratic Senate candidates. Lucien Smith, chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party, laid out the tenets of that strategy in an interview on "The Jungle," Mississippi Today's election podcast. Smith, who took the reins of the party earlier this year, believes it's key to convince voters that sending either state Rep. David Baria or former cabinet Secretary Mike Espy to the Senate would jeopardize the agenda of President Donald Trump, who remains popular in Mississippi. |
| President Trump's Supreme Court Short List Appears at Six or Seven | |
 | President Donald Trump appears to have a short list of six or seven as he tries to put a second justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump told reporters he met with four U.S. Supreme Court nominee candidates Monday morning and intends to meet with two or three more potential high court picks before he announces a nominee on July 9. "I had a very, very interesting morning," Trump said of those initial meetings. The president is slated to announce his pick the day before he leaves for a lengthy trip to a NATO summit in Belgium, a "working visit" to the United Kingdom and a one-on-one with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland. Trump has said he intends to select a nominee much like Neil Gorsuch, the solidly conservative justice he nominated to fill the vacancy left by Antonin Scalia's death. |
| President Trump goes to war with corporate America | |
 | President Donald Trump is now at full-scale war over trade policy with some of the Republican Party's staunchest allies in big business, including executives at iconic American brands such as General Motors and Harley-Davidson who previously shied away from criticizing an often irascible president. Trump's approach has created a high-stakes showdown without recent political precedent: A Republican president betting that his populist approach to trade will thrill his working-class base and blow away any short-term economic fallout or reduced political support from the nation's largest business organizations. His message to corporate America so far: I don't care what you say, my base is with me. On the other side, corporate titans and market analysts fear Trump is on the cusp of damaging the American economy -- and that he will not recognize the failure of his approach until it's too late. |
| Trump tariffs could add $5,000 to price of new vehicle in U.S. | |
 | Prices of new cars and trucks could jump by several thousand dollars in the U.S. if President Donald Trump follows through on his threat to raise tariffs on imports. The same likely would hold true even if a particular car is made in the U.S. because analysts believe automakers would spread the cost of tariffs among many different vehicles to avoid putting at a disadvantage any of their models made in foreign markets. Automakers, including U.S. companies, are trembling at the prospect of increased tariffs on imported vehicles, which could range up to 25 percent based on the president's threats. The U.S. has 45 automotive assembly plants, each of which typically employs thousands of workers, in 14 states. If auto sales drop because of higher prices, or auto companies are forced to reduce their work forces because of lower profits, it could undermine those factories. |
| Coffee Drinkers Are More Likely To Live Longer. Decaf May Do The Trick, Too | |
 | Coffee is far from a vice. There's now lots of evidence pointing to its health benefits, including a possible longevity boost for those of us with a daily coffee habit. The latest findings come from a study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine that included about a half-million people in England, Scotland and Wales. Participants ranged in age from 38 to 73. "We found that people who drank two to three cups per day had about a 12 percent lower risk of death compared to non-coffee drinkers" during the decade-long study, says Erikka Loftfield, a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute. In the U.S., there are similar findings linking higher consumption of coffee to a lower risk of early death in African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Latinos and white adults, both men and women. |
| Texas A&M researcher: Waterways and their environmental impact underestimated | |
 | Rivers and streams cover more of the Earth than previously thought, and therefore have a larger impact on concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to a study led by a Texas A&M hydrologist. George Allen, assistant professor of geography in the College of Geosciences at Texas A&M, alongside Tamlin Pavelsky at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, used satellite images from NASA and built on previous research to develop a comprehensive global map of river lengths and widths. Their database includes more than 2 million kilometers of rivers wider than 30 meters. The study, published last week in Science magazine, found that Earth is covered by just under 300,000 square miles of rivers and streams, not including glacier-covered areas. |
| Trump Administration to Rescind Obama Guidelines on Race in College Admissions | |
 | The Trump administration is planning to rescind Tuesday a set of Obama-era policies that encourage the use of race in college admissions to promote diverse educational settings, according to two people familiar with the plans. The move comes as the Justice Department is investigating whether Harvard University is illegally discriminating against Asian-American students by holding them to a higher standard in its admissions process. The administration revived the probe last year after Obama civil rights officials dismissed a similar complaint. Trump administration officials plan to argue that the documents, published in 2011 and 2016, go beyond Supreme Court precedent on the issue and mislead schools to believe that legal forms of affirmative action are simpler to achieve than what the law allows. |
| Competitions push researchers to hone real-life solutions | |
 | For decades, professors whose research held promise for practical applications had to search largely on their own for investors. But a growing number of efforts are bringing to academe the same kinds of opportunities once available only to young app developers and business school graduates. Perhaps most notably, SPARK, a project that began at Stanford University's medical school in 2006, has spread to more than a dozen universities worldwide, including the University of Vermont, where since 2013 it has handed out grants of $50,000 to small companies based on professors' research to help them attract investors. Dryver Huston, a longtime UVM engineering professor, helped create a group at UVM and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga that proposed a way to collect better data on ground-penetrating radar, doing it more quickly but with fewer radio waves. The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the practice, has raised alarms that traditional methods can interfere with air traffic control systems. |
| New U. of Oklahoma president wastes no time with administrative overhaul | |
| The University of Oklahoma's new president waited out the weekend before shaking up the leadership team he inherited. Six top administrators were laid off or retired Monday, the first workday Jim Gallogly was on the job as president. The university also announced a reorganization cutting the number of administrators reporting directly to the president from 25 to 17. The changes were swift, even for a university that was clearly in line for a significant overhaul as it faces a multimillion-dollar budget gap while installing a new president for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century. Although some expected the new president to sweep in and clean house, Gallogly's background as a business leader and the suddenness of his broad staffing moves mean Oklahoma is now a prime example of issues arising when a university hires a president from a nontraditional background who goes on to execute the leadership transition in a way perceived as unusual. |
| Marshall University president to give lecture Friday at National Youth Science Camp | |
| Marshall University President Jerome A. Gilbert has been invited to speak later this week to aspiring young scientists at the annual National Youth Science Camp in Pocahontas County. He will give a talk titled "Biomedical Engineering: Are We Redefining What It Means to Be Human?" on Friday, July 6. As a high school senior in 1973, Gilbert first visited West Virginia as one of two delegates to the camp from Mississippi. He says he fell in love with the state and its people during the weeks he spent at the camp, which is located in the Monongahela Forest near Green Bank. "I tell people that destiny bent my path back to West Virginia. I always thought I would return," he added. "The National Youth Science Camp brought me the first time to the Mountain State and Marshall University gave me the opportunity to return. The camp has even become a family tradition. In 2002, Gilbert's son, Peter, was selected to represent Mississippi as a delegate to the camp. |
| America was designed to be a work in progress | |
| Longtime Mississippi journalist Charlie Mitchell writes: "Did a teacher make you memorize the Declaration of Independence, or at least the first few paragraphs? With apologies, here's an update ...if written by today's political leaders: 'When in the course of human events it becomes expedient to exploit people for purposes of power and to forsake the principles of good government at the altar of maximum self-preservation, our method will be to deceive and disregard the betterment of mankind through tactics to create and maintain division. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are susceptible to manipulation, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable vulnerabilities and among these are fear, complacency and competitiveness, and by that preying on these vulnerabilities, gridlock will keep us in office." |
| Farm bill supports American agriculture | |
| U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, writes: "In the late 1970s, radio broadcaster Paul Harvey delivered what would become a famous speech about farmers. He began by saying, 'And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." So God made a farmer.' Harvey then described the hard work, long hours, strength, compassion, and resourcefulness that characterize a farmer. Many years later, those powerful lines would again capture audiences as part of a popular Super Bowl commercial. They still apply today, underscoring the importance of our farmers to our nation and the world. Because of U.S. farmers, consumers here at home and in distant places have access to the nourishment they need to keep themselves and their families healthy." |
SPORTS
| Alex Wilcox memorial service postponed to fall semester | |
| Mississippi State has postponed a memorial service for softball player Alex Wilcox that was originally scheduled for later this week. The school says the service is being moved to the fall semester to allow members of the softball team to return to town. More information on the service will be released in the coming weeks. Wilcox passed away June 25 after battling ovarian cancer. The Brantley, Ala., native was diagnosed in 2015, but played for state championship teams in high school and in eight games this past season for the Bulldogs. |
| LSU football: Ed Orgeron's wife Kelly has inspiring story | |
| The hard exterior of the barrel-chested, red-blooded Cajun coach turned soft in a Los Angeles hospital room. His wife laid on a gurney, medical staff hurriedly wheeling Kelly Orgeron to emergency surgery, the infection in her lower abdomen serious enough that it came with a warning. Kelly might not make it, a doctor told Ed Orgeron, pulling aside the brawny husband out of earshot, so he thought, from the sickly wife. From her fast-moving gurney, her stomach churning with pain, Kelly heard the doctor's troubling words, and she responded with a gesture meant for her soulmate, flinging into the air an index finger and shaking it like a first-grade teacher does at a mischievous student. "As if to say," Kelly recalls the intention of her finger wag, "'Don't listen to him. I'll be back.'" |
| When Sports Betting Is Legal, the Value of Game Data Soars | |
 | Every weekend during soccer season in Britain, security personnel find them in stadiums, tapping furiously at their phones or talking nonstop into a mic -- mysterious customers often wearing hoodies to conceal earpieces and their identity. While focused with unwavering intensity on the action of the game, they show none of the engagement and excitement of the ordinary fans around them. The unofficial data scouts -- or data thieves, depending on who is describing them -- are quickly ejected once they are discovered. The fleeting data they are collecting -- the minutia of what is happening in the game -- is the lifeblood of sports betting, perhaps the most crucial and valuable element of the entire industry. That shadowy cat-and-mouse game in Britain gives a small preview of battles to come in the United States. |
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