Latest news with #Waller
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
'Waller Creek is a test case': Anti-litter UT students help keep waterway free from debris
Not long ago, Rachel Elsberry, a reliable sharer of stimulating news, told us about Longhorns Don't Litter, a student group dedicated to making and keeping the University of Texas campus beautiful. In particular, Elsberry, who works alongside Amber Matula, a UT Austin communications student, introduced me to Creeky the Creek Monster, the new mascot that the campus anti-litter group has adopted. Emerald green and spotted, Creeky arrives as an upright furry — part plant-y? — with a Bevo-like head and blue-splashed paws. Presumably, it emerged from Waller Creek, which bisects the campus in a generally north-south direction. (I'm imagining a public-service video of the monster terrorizing a serial litterer in the style of "The Legend of Boggy Creek.") The creek's shorter fork emerges at the Texas State Hospital, and, after an underground stretch, winds through elegant Hemphill Park before joining the creek's longer branch near Dean Keaton Street, named for legendary UT Law School Dean, W. Page Keeton, father to the recently deceased former Austin Mayor . The main fork of Waller Creek, named after city founder and plantation owner Edwin Waller, rises from a modest source in the Highland neighborhood not far from Austin Community College's main campus, and meanders through the Hyde Park and Hancock hoods before tumbling into UT along San Jacinto Street. More From the Archives: Who named Onion Creek south of Austin and why? These mingled branches exit UT near the Dell Medical School complex, after which the creek becomes the responsibility of the , a public-private partnership that has already built and manages the Moody Amphitheater in Waterloo Park, and is putting the finishing touches on improvements at the creek's mouth on Lady Bird Lake. (Recently, , former president of Huston-Tillotson University, was appointed to lead the conservancy.) In a sense, Longhorns Don't Litter and the Waterloo Conservancy share stewardship of about two thirds of the creek's run. Along with the city of Austin's diversionary , regularly cleaned by city workers, they help this natural jewel stay free from the mountains of detritus that wash down from the upstream streets, sidewalks and parking lots into the creek's watershed. Their efforts put a dent in the trash from all over the city that lies within the river's watershed and ends up in after every major rainstorm. When laid out by Waller and his team of surveyors in 1839, the city was embraced on three sides by water — Waller Creek to the east, Shoal Creek to the west, and the Colorado River to the south. Therefore, Waller Creek appears in the Statesman archives many thousands of times, including during April 1915, when a devastating flood swept down Waller and Shoal creeks. The homes and businesses of the city's more underprivileged citizens stood in the flood zones; the needy lost more lives and property than those high on the hills. The debris from the two watersheds collided in the Colorado River. More From the Archives: The Lungs were among the earliest Chinese families in Austin As my digital chat with Elsberry and her colleagues, including Professor Valerie Salinas-Davis, former owner of Enviromedia, developed, the subject of deceased English Professor Joseph Jones inevitably arose. Jones visited the creek almost every day. He lunched on its banks and he collected what he found along its waterway. In 1982, Jones wrote a book, "Life on Waller Creek," that is filled with his notes, some inspiring, other mundane. In 2015, when the Waterloo Conservancy was in its infancy, a benefactor, Walter Wilkie, thought about republishing Jones's out-of-print work, but decided instead to publish "Austin's Waller Creek: Promise for Tomorrow" which conveys the geography, hydrology, history and other aspects about the creek and the tunnel meant to free up the flood plain for sensitive parks and developments. "Why a big runoff tunnel?" the Statesman story asks. "The book's historical sections make it clear: Waller Creek flooded badly in 1836, 1843, 1852, 1866, 1869, 1900, 1909, 1915, 1935, 1936 and 1981. Two of the worst, 1869 and 1915, were particularly destructive." To inspire the Longhorns Don't Litter heroes, it seems right to share an excerpt from the 2012 Statesman story and its description of Jones' 1982 book: More From the Archives: Walsh family keeps popping up in compelling Austin history His story starts, rightly, with geology. He recounts Austin's founding on the lower creek in 1839, its Gilded Age in the late 19th century, also its modern evolution in the 20th century. Three chapters deal directly with university history, which returns predictably to Texas governors or their agents trying to dictate campus life. Jones fleshes out the catalytic 1969 protests against Frank Erwin, when the imperial UT regent pushed to demolish old oaks along the creek to make way for a stadium expansion. A good deal of the book is given over to songlike poems and inventories of ephemera fished out of the creek bed. Today's reader might be more drawn to the chapter titled "Drainage Ditch or Garden Park?" It should astonish some Austinites to discover that leaders periodically suggested turning Waller Creek into a concrete canal, especially after bad floods. And yet, that's close to what happened to the uppermost stretches of the creek. Jones opposed such efforts and his words would hearten the backers of the current Conservancy. "Waller Creek is a test case," he writes, "tested now through almost 150 years of use and abuse. It is both a broad symbol and a tangible opportunity to move towards a new promise by redeeming an old promise — the one made by nature herself in 1839, which in far too many ways, we have prevented her from keeping." This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: UT students deploy 'Creeky the Creek Monster' in anti-litter campaign
Business Times
10 hours ago
- Business
- Business Times
Bank of Korea's Rhee says US-China trade talks important for Asia
[SEOUL] Bank of Korea (BOK) governor Rhee Chang-yong said the outcome of trade negotiations between the US and China will have an impact on all of Asia's economies, highlighting their significance beyond the bilateral level. 'When we actually measure the impact of US tariffs on us, the indirect impact through China is very important because we are very much connected with them through supply chains,' Rhee said referring to South Korea at a BOK event in Seoul on Monday (Jun 2). The governor said other economies also needed to factor in the US-China element when assessing the hit from the US levies. 'How the negotiations between the US and China will go is also important for Asian economies in general,' Rhee said. The comments underline the concerns among policymakers throughout the region on the outcome of talks between Washington and Beijing, given the interconnectedness of Asia's economies and the large role China plays in driving regional growth. Rhee was speaking at a BOK conference that also featured US Federal Reserve governor Christopher Waller. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up In his comments, Waller had indicated that 10 per cent tariffs may be manageable for businesses in the US as he talked about the likely scenarios that could play out. 'Many businessmen here also say 10 per cent is manageable,' Rhee said, while flagging the importance of Trump's non-reciprocal levies. Rhee said sectoral tariffs were just as important as reciprocal levies for South Korea given the high levels of its exports of semiconductors, steel, aluminium and cars. items that are all subject to separate duties. 'Sectoral tariffs and what's going to happen after Jul 9 is one of the key issues here,' he said. Inflation expectations Following up on Waller's comment that he focuses on market-based measures of inflation expectations, rather than volatile household surveys, Rhee offered a different view. The BOK governor said that Korea's market-based measures are harder to interpret due to limited market depth. 'Our market measure is quite hard to use directly because our market is quite shallow,' Rhee said, adding that prices often respond more to shifts in liquidity than to actual changes in expectations. BLOOMBERG
Korea Herald
12 hours ago
- Business
- Korea Herald
Tariff-induced inflation not persistent; rate cuts expected later this year: US Fed governor
US Federal Reserve Gov. Christopher Waller said Monday that he sees room for interest rate cuts later this year amid expectations that sweeping US tariffs are likely to raise unemployment and temporarily push up inflation. Waller, a member of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve System, made the remarks in his keynote speech at the 2025 Bank of Korea International Conference in Seoul on structural shifts and monetary policy. "Given my belief that any tariff-induced inflation will not be persistent and that inflation expectations are anchored, I support looking through any tariff effects on near-term inflation when setting the policy rate," Waller said. "Assuming that the effective tariff rate settles close to my lower tariff scenario, that underlying inflation continues to make progress to our 2 percent goal, and that the labor market remains solid, I would be supporting 'good news' rate cuts later this year," he added. His "smaller-tariff" scenario assumed a 10 percent average tariff on good imports, while sector-specific duties would be negotiated lower over time. The "large-tariff" scenario assumed an average trade-weighted tariff on goods imports of 25 percent, and that would remain in place for some time. "In both cases, I assumed that the tariff increases would lead to a one-time boost to prices that would temporarily raise inflation," Waller said. Following the two-day Federal Open Market Committee meeting last month, the Fed held its benchmark interest rate steady for the third consecutive time, pointing to heightened economic uncertainty and increased risks of higher inflation amid Trump's aggressive tariff policy. The official pointed to "downside risks to economic activity and employment and upside risks to inflation" in the second half of this year. "I do expect tariffs will result in an increase in the unemployment rate that will, all else equal, probably linger. Higher tariffs will reduce spending, and businesses will respond, in part, by reducing production and payrolls," Waller said.
Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
The peak before the fall: Jazz, glamour, Gatsby and a short-lived Golden Age
One of the most consequential figures of the Jazz Age, arguably, was a now-forgotten man named Wayne Bidwell Wheeler. He was the driving force behind the National Prohibition Act of 1919. When the consumption of alcohol was made illegal, prohibitionists argued this would help cure a host of ills ranging from domestic violence and political corruption to alcoholism itself. What the Act famously did was help shape crime in the United States, and create a new and profitable field of business: the covert distillation, transport and distribution of alcohol. The most famous of these bootlegger-millionaires was Al Capone, who controlled much of the illegal activity conducted in Chicago between the years of 1925 and '31. He ran breweries and brothels, but was also hailed as a modern-day Robin Hood for his charitable contributions. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, Capone organised one of the city's biggest soup kitchens, feeding about 2,200 people three times a day. Capone was unique among the mobsters of his era for a couple of other reasons too: he readily employed black people; and he was a fan of jazz. There is a story about how he once asked Johnny Dodds to play a song. When the clarinetist said he didn't know it, Capone reportedly tore a $100 bill in two, gave one half to Dodds, and said he would get the other half when he learnt to play it. Another time, a group of Capone's henchmen more-or-less kidnapped the jazz pianist and singer Fats Waller as a birthday present for their boss. Waller stayed with Capone for three days. He was given all the food he could eat, plied with endless glasses of champagne, and was reportedly paid $100 a song. Waller left Capone's company unharmed, and thousands of dollars richer. The eccentricities and the sense of excess and debauchery in F Scott Fitzgerald's classic, The Great Gatsby (1925), draws directly from this world. Fitzgerald was about 22, a young soldier on leave for the weekend, when he visited the Seelbach hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, in the late-1910s. There he met a man named George Remus, who had started out as a criminal lawyer (in both senses of the phrase), and was now a millionaire bootlegger. Remus bought bonded liquor from before Prohibition and distributed it under the guise of medicinal use. His men then staged hijackings of their own delivery trucks, so they could resell the same alcohol at a much higher price. Remus also ran his own distilleries in Cincinnati, moving this booze around through tunnels. And he threw lavish parties, featuring scantily clad dancers and gifts of diamond stick pins and new cars for guests. In that other classic, Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film The Godfather, one sees more of how Prohibition changed the face of organised crime in the US. Salvatore Maranzano organised the Italian-American mob into five families: the Maranzano, Profaci, Mangano, Luciano and Gagliano. He then declared himself 'the boss of all bosses'. He was promptly murdered in a hit ordered by Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, who then set up The Commission, a governing body made up of members of the five families of New York, and representatives from other parts of the country. Meanwhile, crime was merging with a new wave of music in New York City. The original bootlegger of the era wasn't Capone. It was likely a man named Arnold Rothstein. When Prohibition hit, he invested in speakeasies, and smuggled Scotch whisky into the country in his own fleet of freighters. The character Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby was based on Rothstein. The speakeasy was where one went to have a drink. Some of these establishments were seedy, others were fashionable. Some managed to be both. New York's 21 Club saw visitors such as Humphrey Bogart and Joan Crawford. It remained fashionable even after Prohibition ended, in 1933. Similarly, Harlem's Cotton Club started off as an outfit where the gangster Owney Madden could sell liquor to the people of Harlem and ended up being one of the most fashionable places in New York — and the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. New Yorkers, regardless of race, crowded there to see the likes of Duke Ellington (1899-1974) and Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) perform. These fashionable clubs attracted a new kind of woman: the Flapper. She challenged ideas of what a woman should be — in her clothing, behaviour, attitudes to sex and liquor. She had her own slang in which a divorced woman was a fire alarm, and engagement rings were handcuffs. The Jazz Age may have come to an abrupt halt in 1929, with the great Wall Street crash and the onset of the Great Depression (which would drag on for 10 years, and be followed by World War 2). But by this time, culture had become a thing of the masses. Gender roles had been altered forever. So had art. Music. Movies. The world had changed. And would change again. (K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)
The Age
3 days ago
- Sport
- The Age
Kiwi jockey Wiremu Pinn ready for fresh Sydney start after injury woes
'It's been a shame. I would have ridden a lot more winners this season, the way I was riding. I've just had so many injuries and I've had a lot of time off.' His focus was now building connections and momentum in Sydney. 'I'm fit, healthy and ready to go,' he said. 'I want to make a good impression and if I do get the support, hopefully I'll stay for longer. I believe 90 per cent of being a good jockey is riding good horses. It doesn't matter if you're James McDonald or an apprentice who hasn't had a ride before, if you are on a good horse, you are more of a chance to win. 'It's just about getting support, and I'll spread my wings and work hard, and see who wants to give me rides.' Pinn starts his push with Lenape Vibe ($41) in the sixth and Speycaster ($61) in the feature Lord Mayors Cup, both for Waller. He also picked up the ride on Matt Dale-trained Acappella Sun ($19) in the last. 'On these wet tracks, anything can happen,' he said of Speycaster, one of three Waller runners in the listed race. 'I've very competitive and I'll be trying, don't worry about that. Lenape Vibe, it will probably need the run, but the one in the last is probably my best chance. 'I'm looking for a manager, so it's been a bit of a slow start, but I'm sure it will only take that one winner for trainers to see how I ride and hopefully I'll get a few more. Especially with these better riders heading to Queensland for the carnival, there are more opportunities for us young fellas.' Trainer Tom Charlton hopes Derby contender can prove him wrong Randwick trainer Tom Charlton didn't imagine Maison Louis joining main stable hope King Of Thunder as a chance in the Queensland Derby (2400m). That was before the pair hit the line strongly together in third and fourth last start in the group 3 Rough Habit Plate (2000m). Now Charlton believes Maison Louis could prove him wrong. Charlton, a co-trainer with John O'Shea, will chase his third group 1 win when King Of Thunder ($9.50 Sportsbet) and Maison Louis ($19) tackle the staying test on Saturday at Eagle Farm. King Of Thunder has long been on a path to the race for three-year-olds after finishing a close third in the group 2 Tulloch Stakes and fifth in the group 1 ATC Derby over the Sydney autumn. Maison Louis, though, jumped into consideration off a 1900m benchmark handicap win at Canterbury on April 21, which followed maiden and class 1 wins at Goulburn over 1500m and 1600m. He should hold a forward position under Ben Melham with a draw in gate four. 'King Of Thunder obviously has had a lot more racing experience at this level,' Charlton said. 'He probably seems like the more natural stayer out of the two and Maison Louis, it's all sort of happened in his first campaign. He's taking his racing very well, but we're yet to try him at this trip. 'Off his last run, you'd be very confident that he would handle the distance. I personally thought he was never going to be a strong stayer, so let's hope he can prove me wrong. I thought he was more a 2000m horse, but I guess three-year-olds at this grade, they can probably get a bit more forgiveness at that trip. 'He's just progressed more and more with each race. We gave him a little break after he went to Canterbury, and he's answered all the questions he's been asked.' King Of Thunder (Mark Zahra), third in the Rough Habit, has barrier 14. Charlton and O'Shea also have Candlewick in the group 3 Fred Best Classic (1400m). 'She probably showed a bit of inexperience in the Hawkesbury Guineas [when sixth],' he said. 'Just probably took the wrong option of going inside the eventual winner, and she ended up rolling down off the fence to the inferior ground.'
