Digital Alabama News

Ukrainian Forces Encircle Russian Troops In Lyman, A Day After Annexation Claims https://digitalalabamanews.com/ukrainian-forces-encircle-russian-troops-in-lyman-a-day-after-annexation-claims/ KYIV — Less than 24 hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin proudly proclaimed the illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, thousands of his troops now appear to be trapped there. Ukrainian forces have surrounded Lyman, a key transport hub in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesman for Ukraine’s armed forces, told The Washington Post on Saturday. The counterattack will come as an embarrassment to Moscow, a day after claiming swaths of eastern Ukraine as its own, in the face of widespread international condemnation. Ukrainian forces advanced on the city overnight even as Russia put on a grand ceremony and a pop concert in Moscow’s Red Square celebrating the annexation. Cherevaty said Ukrainian troops had recaptured four villages near Lyman in addition to encircling the city, which is a key supply hub on the western edge of Ukraine’s Donbas region. The pro-Kremlin separatist leader of Donetsk, Denis Pushilin, acknowledged Friday that the city was “semi-encircled,” describing Kyiv’s advances as “very unpleasant news,” which threatened to “overshadow” the annexation celebrations. Unverified social media video footage posted by the head of the Ukrainian president’s office appeared to show Ukrainian troops carrying out celebrations of their own, raising the blue and yellow flag near the outskirts of the city on Saturday. Meanwhile one pro-Kremlin Telegram channel with close ties to the Wagner mercenary group reported that Ukraine had captured five villages in recent days near Lyman and Russian troops there were “now completely surrounded.” It added that it had been impossible to withdraw troops from the city “because of Putin’s upcoming address yesterday” and that “unprecedented” measures were now underway to aid their release. Thousands of Russian troops are in the city, according to Luhansk regional governor Serhiy Haidai, who said “almost all the ways of leaving and transporting ammunition to Russians,” were blocked. The Washington Post could not independently verify his claims. He added bluntly that trapped Russian troops had three options: to try to escape, surrender or risk being killed. The city, home to more than 20,000 people in the Donetsk region before the war, is one of the four territories Russia illegally claimed to absorb this week. A victory would mark Ukraine’s most significant success in the Donbas region since Russia concentrated the bulk of its forces there in the spring. Haidai added the nearby city of Kreminna to the east of Lyman, in the Luhansk region, would be Ukraine’s next military target. Overnight, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky told the nation that troops were making “substantial results” in the east and named Lyman as a key example, thanking fighters there. “These are steps that mean a lot to us,” he added in a nightly address. Ukrainian military spokesman Cherevaty told The Post earlier this week that “almost all logistical routes” to the Lyman area were under Ukrainian control. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said in its Friday night update that Russian forces were continuing to withdraw from positions around the city. In an earlier briefing, it also assessed that Ukrainian had likely “cut critical ground lines of communication” in the area. Despite the patriotic pageantry during Friday’s grand treaty signing ceremony that claimed to annex parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions into Russia, Putin is facing criticism at home for his military mobilization, with thousands of people scrambling to borders and fleeing to avoid being called-up in the war. He has also faced criticism for losing ground in northern Ukraine. Oleg Tsarov, a Ukrainian separatist leader, noted on Twitter that the situation in Lyman is “a bad backdrop,” for the annexation celebrations. The loss of Lyman will also likely reinforce the idea that the annexations may not mirror the reality on the ground, with only a tenuous military hold over them, as Russian forces do not fully control any of the four regions. Nonetheless, Putin made clear in his scathing speech on Friday that he intended for the annexed land to “forever” be part of Russia. He has previously said that any attack on annexed territories would be viewed as an attack on Russia and threatened to “use all the means at our disposal” to defend them — upping the ante of possible nuclear weapon use. On Friday, he made as an ominous reference to the United States’ atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, calling it a “precedent” for use of the devastating weapons. Meanwhile in Ukraine, an adviser to President Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, likened the encirclement of Lyman to the surrounding of the city of Ilovaisk in Donetsk by Russian forces in 2014. Then, “our guys agreed to surrender without weapons. But Russia broke its word. The column was shot,” he wrote on Twitter. The situation today had been reversed with Russian forces having “to ask for an exit from Lyman,” he added. War in Ukraine: What you need to know The latest: Russian President Vladimir Putin signed decrees Friday to annex four occupied regions of Ukraine, following staged referendums that were widely denounced as illegal. Follow our live updates here. The response: The Biden administration on Friday announced a new round of sanctions on Russia, in response to the annexations, targeting government officials and family members, Russian and Belarusian military officials and defense procurement networks. President Volodymyr Zelensky also said Friday that Ukraine is applying for “accelerated ascension” into NATO, in an apparent answer to the annexations. In Russia: Putin declared a military mobilization on Sept. 21 to call up as many as 300,000 reservists in a dramatic bid to reverse setbacks in his war on Ukraine. The announcement led to an exodus of more than 180,000 people, mostly men who were subject to service, and renewed protests and other acts of defiance against the war. The fight: Ukraine mounted a successful counteroffensive that forced a major Russian retreat in the northeastern Kharkiv region in early September, as troops fled cities and villages they had occupied since the early days of the war and abandoned large amounts of military equipment. Photos: Washington Post photographers have been on the ground from the beginning of the war — here’s some of their most powerful work. How you can help: Here are ways those in the U.S. can support the Ukrainian people as well as what people around the world have been donating. Read our full coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war. Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for updates and exclusive video. Read More…

Tua Tagovailoa 'Feeling Much Better' After Horrific Head Injury Thursday https://digitalalabamanews.com/tua-tagovailoa-feeling-much-better-after-horrific-head-injury-thursday/ TUSCALOOSA, AL — Former University of Alabama star and Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa took to social media Friday night to update fans on the status of a head injury on Saturday that sent shockwaves through the football world. Click here to subscribe to our free daily newsletter and breaking news alerts. During a Thursday night primetime game against the Cincinnati Bengals, Tagovailoa was awkwardly dragged to the ground during a sack, hitting the back of his head hard against the turf. Find out what’s happening in Tuscaloosawith free, real-time updates from Patch. The nationally-televised game also captured the moment where Tagovailoa showed the signs of a “fencing response” — defined as an unnatural position of the arms or hands following a concussion. It’s crucial to note that the injury came less than a week after Tagovailoa displayed concussion symptoms on Sunday after a big hit, prompting calls for an investigation into the NFL’s concussion protocol that allowed the quarterback to return on Thursday prior to his most recent injury. Find out what’s happening in Tuscaloosawith free, real-time updates from Patch. Tagovailoa reported having movement in all of his extremities and was discharged from University of Cincinnati Medical Center Thursday night. “I want to thank everyone for all of their prayers and support since the game last night,” Tagovailoa said on Friday. “It was difficult to not be able to finish the game and be there with my teammates, but I am grateful for the support and care l’ve received from the Dolphins, my friends and family, and all the people who have reached out. I’m feeling much better and focused on recovering so I can get back out on the field with my teammates.” Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, told the Washington Post in an interview that a joint review by the league and its NFL Players Association was being undertaken relating to the Dolphins’ handling of Tagovailoa’s injury on Sunday. He also said the quarterback was evaluated every day leading up to Thursday night’s game and reportedly cleared concussion protocol. “Obviously, I am upset and concerned just like any fan — and just like any physician is any time one of our players suffers any type of injury,” Sills said. “We want to be thorough, and we want to be consistent and be fair to everyone involved and make sure that we have all the data on hand before we reach a final determination.” Have a news tip or suggestion on how I can improve Tuscaloosa Patch? Maybe you’re interested in having your business become one of the latest sponsors for Tuscaloosa Patch? Email all inquiries to me at ryan.phillips@patch.com Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts. The rules of replying: Be respectful. This is a space for friendly local discussions. No racist, discriminatory, vulgar or threatening language will be tolerated. Be transparent. Use your real name, and back up your claims. Keep it local and relevant. Make sure your replies stay on topic. Review the Patch Community Guidelines. Read More…

‘Our Entire Community Is Wiped Out’: Low-Income Americans Likely To Be Hit Hardest By Hurricane Ian https://digitalalabamanews.com/our-entire-community-is-wiped-out-low-income-americans-likely-to-be-hit-hardest-by-hurricane-ian/ For Connie Irvin, 82, and her partner, Cheryl Lange, the cost of Hurricane Ian’s devastating tear across Florida was clear. “Our entire community is wiped out,” said Irvin. The pair lost their mobile home on Sanibel Island off the state’s west coast and are now homeless, staying in a motel inland about 35 miles away near Naples, Florida, that currently has no electricity. “It’s been very difficult. I now know what it’s like to be homeless and not have simple things like bathroom availability. We are lucky in that we are alive. There are a lot of people on Sanibel and down in Fort Myers that have lost their lives, and where I’m staying there are a lot of homeless people now,” Irvin added. The damage Ian has inflicted on Florida has been immense. The monster storm made landfall near the state in the Fort Myers/Naples area, then traversed up and across to the eastern part of the state, grazing the St Augustine and Jacksonville area before regaining hurricane strength and heading toward South Carolina. At least 21 deaths have now been confirmed in Florida, with that number expected to rise as emergency crews continue to respond to affected areas, and the extent of the damage is still being assessed, with an anticipated years-long recovery ahead. For Irvin and Lange that recovery looks hard – as it is for many low-income Floridians, who are often hit hardest by the terrible losses that natural disasters can wreak. They had no insurance because of its high cost, as both rely on social security for their income. Irvin still does carpentry work for extra money, although she is not sure if her tools made it through the hurricane. They managed to evacuate with their dog, Charley, and a few belongings onTuesday evening before the storm hit, and they spent the night a few miles inland in a parking garage to ride out the tempest. Because of power outages, businesses that are open accept only cash and maintaining contact with loved ones has been difficult. Irvin and Lange are retired teachers, and Irvin served in the coast guard for more than nine years. They are hoping to be able to return to where their home was soon so they can salvage what they can. But the only bridge to Sanibel Island was destroyed in the hurricane, making rescues difficult and the barrier island accessible only by boat or helicopter. “The enormity of it didn’t hit me until today,” Irvin said. “All we can do is salvage some things like photo albums.” Many others are in the same dire straits. Dwayne Parks of Lakeland, Florida, and his girlfriend experienced significant damage from the hurricane to their home, with flooding through the house of about a foot of water and damage to their roof. They are now trying to secure a loan in order to cover the $500 deductible their insurance requires before they are able to file a claim, and they are still without power. “We weren’t prepared, we didn’t think it was going to hit here,” said Parks. “We had to ride it out. It tore everything off on the roof, flooded the house. This house is her pride and joy – she’s devastated.” Family members pleaded on social media for help in getting in contact with loved ones they couldn’t reach in areas with power outages. Heather Marie lives in California and has struggled to connect with her elderly father, Jesse Forthun, in St James, Florida. She lost contact with him as his house was flooding and he lost power and cellphone service. He has medical problems, and she is trying to get him to California. “I’m not sure of the details about anything. There was supposed to be a crew going to check him this morning, but I’ve heard nothing,” she said. “It’s so hard for me to do anything from California. It’s been horrific. He’s there all alone.” GoFundMe campaigns are being started on behalf of people who have lost their homes, apartments, cars and nearly all their personal belongings. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) has launched a website for individuals to apply for disaster assistance, and the Small Business Administration has launched a website for businesses, homeowners, renters and non-profits in approved Florida counties to apply for individual assistance. Fema has also requested people wanting to volunteer to do so through VolunteerFlorida.org and not to self-deploy to affected areas. Read More…

Alabama Struggles To Keep Child Welfare Workers On Job https://digitalalabamanews.com/alabama-struggles-to-keep-child-welfare-workers-on-job/ Alabama is struggling to keep the state employees who help protect its most vulnerable citizens. For the last few years, child welfare workers are leaving faster than the Alabama Department of Human Resources can hire replacements, a problem that is accelerating. During the 2021 fiscal year, DHR hired 335 case workers and 466 left. The turnover rate for the year was 46 percent. This fiscal year, through August 15, the turnover rate was 54 percent. That means the number of case workers leaving the agency equaled 54 percent of the child welfare staff. “We’re treading water,” said Nancy Buckner, state DHR commissioner for 14 years. “And our nose is still above water. But I’m not going to say that we don’t go under every now and then in certain counties.” DHR provides child welfare services and other programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously called food stamps, through offices in the state’s 67 counties. Buckner said most counties are having staffing problems in child welfare, including Jefferson, Mobile, Montgomery, and some smaller counties. Buckner said the staffing problems are the worst she can recall. “We’ve had to deploy staff from other counties to help counties that were short-staffed, particularly in child welfare,” Buckner said. “So we’ve shifted around a lot. It’s to the point right now where our bench is not very deep anymore. All counties pretty much are experiencing staffing shortages because they can’t find the people to hire. “I lost one worker to a paint store. I lost one to a restaurant. And then we’ve recently lost some to other agencies. Sometimes they pay more but their hours are a whole lot different than these child welfare workers hours. If you can go home at 3:30 every day, you’ve got small children, you’re off a lot more than you are at DHR.” A chart from the Alabama Department of Human Resources showing the rising number of child welfare workers leaving their jobs. (Alabama Department of Human Resources). DHR responds to reports of child abuse and neglect, often from teachers, law enforcement, or health care providers. “They could report that mom’s leaving the kids home alone while she’s going out,” Buckner said. “They could report that the child is running out of the house into the street. A lot of times they report there is a child walking down the highway, the child looks like they’re about 5 years old and nobody is with them, the cars are just going back and forth all over the place. They could report that they think there is something wrong between mom’s 12-year-old daughter and the relationship with uncle so-and-so. They could report that some family member is giving the child alcohol.” Case workers knock on doors to investigate the complaints. They are often, but not always, accompanied by law enforcement. If complaints are substantive, case workers help determine the level of risk for the children and the best course of action, work that requires judgement and courage. “We see families at their worst times,” Buckner said. “Things aren’t going right when DHR gets called. Something is going on, generally. I’m not saying there’s something to everything because sometimes there’s not and we figure that out.” Buckner said the intent is to keep children at home if that’s feasible. “If the child can safely be maintained where the child is, then that’s what we want to do,” Buckner. “But if not we have to find some alternative arrangements. If the child has to come out of her home we always look for family first to see if maybe mom or dad can let the child go stay with grandmother or aunt or something like that. As a last resort we look at foster care.” DHR requires a four-year college degree in any major for an entry-level case workers. Higher-level positions require a degree in social work, but there are not enough licensed social workers to meet the demand for the child welfare case workers, Buckner said. Starting pay is $36,000. Buckner said higher pay would help. The levels of stress and difficulty of the work is a major factor that makes it hard to hire and keep case workers, she said. Case workers confront hostile and sometimes violent parents, biting dogs, the risk of lawsuits, and a more recent job hazard, vicious attacks on social media. “You can’t respond because you can’t win those battles,” Buckner said. “Plus, what you do is confidential. We have workers that have gotten threatened because of social media comments.” Jackie Graham, who works with all Alabama state agencies as director of the State Personnel Department, said child welfare jobs rank among the most difficult positions to hire and retain workers. “That’s an extremely difficult job,” Graham said. “There are a lot of things you can teach someone and train someone but until they actually have to fill one of those positions you just don’t understand the complexity and the difficulty of it.” Other state agencies face serious shortages, including the state prison system and the Department of Mental Health. “I think when you speak of mental health workers and the social service case workers and social workers, as well as correctional officers, those are very difficult jobs,” Graham said. “So agencies such as DHR, Mental Health, and Corrections are going to have a difficult time recruiting those positions.” Graham said there are 507 applicants for case worker jobs on the state Personnel Department’s register. That is a statewide list, so the numbers of candidates are fewer for individual counties, who go through state DHR to hire employees. Buckner said DHR removed one academic requirement about a year ago, a requirement for at least about 20 hours in a social science. “County directors are telling me they’re seeing a few more people on the registers now than they did,” Buckner said. “We haven’t seen the full effect of that yet.” Case workers perform multiple tasks, including managing cases once children enter the foster care system. The goal is stability and ultimately, returning to family if that is feasible. There are other responsibilities, like finding placements for children after natural disasters and, for example, if parents from out of state die on a wreck on an Alabama highway. “We protect a lot of children. And we reunite a lot of children with families,” Buckner said. “Case workers can do intake (take reports), they can do investigations, or they can do foster care. It’s turning and it’s turning so fast we can’t really separate them out and keep it all going. The problem of hiring and keeping case workers is not confined to Alabama. “I can say that retaining new child welfare workers has been a long-time nationwide challenge,” Brenda Smith, a professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Alabama, said in an email responding to questions about DHR’s staffing problems. “Evidence suggests that new child welfare workers are more likely to stay in their positions when they feel supported by supervisors and the organizations. Supportive organizational environments, perceptions of fair treatment, and adequate pay can all promote caseworker retention.” UA is studying an innovative model in which new child welfare workers receive regular sessions with “coaches” from outside their agency. “Most are folks who retired after careers in child welfare,” Smith said. “They have lots of valuable child welfare experience plus substantial training in coaching.” The coaches give support and encouragement. Smith said the early results are promising, suggesting that coaching could support new workers and promote retention. Leah Cheatham, associate professor at the school of social work at UA, said the high turnover rate among child welfare workers has serious consequences. Cheatham has done research on the well-being of transition-age youth leaving foster care, with particular focus on youth with disabilities. “Without enough qualified, caring individuals in these positions, caseloads quickly become unmanageable,” Cheatham said in an email. “High caseloads make it all the more challenging for workers to perform the essential duties of their jobs: ensuring safety, permanency, and well-being of youth. When caseworkers can’t function well in their jobs, it’s understandable that that would consider making a career shift. Unfortunately, caseworker turnover in the child welfare system has outsized consequences for the youth our system aims to protect.” Cheatham said research suggests that case worker turnover leads to more moves for foster children from one foster home to another, instability that can make it harder for children to succeed in school and increase the likelihood of mental and behavioral health problems, and in the worst cases, suicide. “Youth who enter the child welfare system are no strangers to instability in their lives,” Cheatham said. “Yet, the child welfare system that was designed to intervene often perpetuates similar experiences of instability. After suffering abuse or neglect at the hands of trusted adults, youth are thrust into a system where consistently present adults may be scarce. Without stability, youth may never develop supportive relationships that we know are critical to success in early adulthood.” Buckner said DHR is working to boost morale and help with the stress levels. The agency provides a $4 per hour pay supplement for workers when they take their turns in the rotation to be on call after hours and through weekends. DHR is providing some leased cars for case workers to use in some cases when they are called out to investigate a report. Buckner, a former case worker and county DHR manager, said the job of helping children in crises is hard but also rewarding. “We have some folks that stay and retire,” Buckner said. “It’s kind of like a calling especially in the child w...

Lead Your Family In Ownership Transition https://digitalalabamanews.com/lead-your-family-in-ownership-transition/ (Dejan Dundjerski, Getty Images) Multigenerational family farms and ranches face important decisions about their futures. Some decisions focus on how the business will grow or adapt to changing markets or new opportunities. Some decisions have to do with who will eventually lead the business. Yet another set of decisions determines how the business — the land, livestock, inventory and equipment — will be owned in the future. Here are the ownership conversations you should have with your spouse and as a family. 1. Who will own the business? There are two levels upon which to consider this question. The first is on-farm owners versus off-farm owners. Should all siblings inherit business assets equally regardless of their involvement in the enterprise? This may solve the parents’ goal of treating the next generation equally, while simultaneously creating problems and conflict by mandating a business relationship between your adult children who don’t work together. The second level of ownership relates to the differing amounts of time spent by the younger generation working in the family business. Should everyone own equal proportions of the business, even if some have worked there longer than others? Equal ownership may create resentment by those who have invested more time in the business, but a differentiated ownership structure can feel punitive to those who were born later and, by no fault of their own, can’t catch up to their older siblings’ years of service. 2. How will the ownership transfer occur? Outside of agriculture, small businesses are often sold to finance the senior generation’s retirement. But, in agriculture, the capital intensity and generational buildup of wealth, the opportunity for land rent to provide retirement income and the potential estate tax lead most families to gift assets to the next generation. When families don’t specifically talk about this “gift or sale” question, people end up guessing or assuming an answer. The assumption of a gift can give an impression of entitlement. And, with an intended sale of some assets (for example, equipment), a window of time for tax planning and financial preparation is beneficial. A conversation well ahead of a transition is helpful to all. 3. When will the ownership transfer occur? If the ownership transition will happen upon the death of the senior generation, the “kids” who inherit the business may be retirement age before they become owners. Many family members resent the fact that when they inherited the business, it was time for them to consider passing it on to their kids. They never felt like owners. But, if the ownership transition happens before death, the senior generation may find it hard to give up control. Finding the right time to start the transition is hard. 4. How do partners get out of business together? When business ownership transitions from a two-person parent structure to a next-generation sibling partnership (with in-laws nearby), the odds are high that someone will eventually want to exit the partnership. A thoughtful approach to potential exits is one of the best gifts the senior generation can offer. Should a selling partner’s equity be discounted? What terms protect the business while not creating animosity between siblings? How will assets or company shares be valued? There are no cut-and-dried, easy answers to these questions, but there are models and examples that can help you tailor a strategy that fits your goals as a family business. These discussions are difficult but necessary, and a “right” answer is elusive. Your job for many years has been to run the farm or ranch, or to manage the family assets. Now, your job also includes leading your family through an ownership transition. Tackling the four questions mentioned here with help from your professional advisers, if needed, can prepare your family business for a successful transition. ** — Write Lance Woodbury at Family Business Matters, 2204 Lakeshore Dr., Suite 415, Birmingham, AL 35209, or email lance.woodbury@pinionglobal.com [PF_1022] (c) Copyright 2022 DTN, LLC. All rights reserved. Read More…

Donald Trump’s Dangerous Plan To Drain The Swamp – The National Herald https://digitalalabamanews.com/donald-trumps-dangerous-plan-to-drain-the-swamp-the-national-herald/ FILE – Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Road to Majority conference Friday, June 17, 2022, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File) Donald Trump’s threats to American democracy are often bold and flashy. He tried to overthrow a presidential election. He stole classified national-security documents. He promised to pardon January 6 insurrectionists if he retakes the presidency. But one of Trump’s most dangerous initiatives is a rather subtle maneuver: He wants to change the law so thousands of federal-government employees can be fired without cause. The implications of this seemingly innocuous tweak to employment law are profound. Right now, most federal employees can’t be fired absent good cause. That is, they can’t be sent packing unless they actually do something wrong. The employees, moreover, can dispute the basis of their terminations before a neutral judge. Trump wants to eliminate these significant protections – so he can fire whoever he wants, whenever he wants. Late in his presidency, Trump signed an executive order giving himself this authority. Joe Biden promptly repealed it. And this month the House of Representatives approved a bill cementing the federal-employment protections. It’s essential to the vitality of American democracy that this bill becomes law and thus beyond the reach of future executive orders. The only thing that stopped Trump from achieving numerous anti-democratic, anti-constitutional objectives from the Oval Office was a large group of government employees who disobeyed his orders. It happened time and again. Acting Attorney General Sally Yates refused to enforce Trump’s Travel Ban. Attorney General Jeff Sessions declined to close the FBI’s Russia investigation. White House Counsel Don Mcghan ignored Trump’s orders to fire Robert Mueller. Attorney General William Barr stymied Trump’s attempt to overturn the presidential election. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson even explained publicly (after leaving office) how he consistently rebuffed Trump’s attempts to violate the law: “The President would say, ‘here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it.’ And I’d have to say to him, ‘well Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law.’” The pressure Trump put on officials to overthrow the 2020 presidential election was, indeed, so extreme that ten former Secretaries of Defense issued a letter on January 3, 2021, warning federal employees in Trump’s orbit: “Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory,” they wrote. “Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.” While these prominent examples involving high-level officials made headlines, the daily resolve of thousands of federal employees -those who quietly turn presidential orders into concrete government action – consistently protected the country from Trump’s worst instincts. These are the people who Trump wants gone. Trump and his advisers have identified American democracy’s core vulnerabilities – and that’s where they are focused. Instead of simply saying the Democrats stole the 2020 election, Trump wants loyalists to administer the 2024 election in battleground states. Instead of relying on Twitter and Facebook to reach voters, Trump has built his own social-media platform. And, now, instead of simply issuing illegal orders if he retakes the presidency, Trump wants to eliminate the people who would ignore them. Trying to reduce federal-employment protections isn’t as flashy as Trump’s higher-profile initiatives. And it’s certainly not getting the same amount of press. But the change would be enormously consequential. Principled federal employees stood firmly between Trump’s presidential ambitions and America’s empirical reality. This guardrail is essential. American democracy can’t withstand a second Trump presidency if his subordinates actually do what he says. William Cooper is an attorney and the author of Stress Test: How Donald Trump Threatens American Democracy. Read More…

Five Takeaways From The Abbott-O’Rourke Debate Showdown In Texas Pipa News https://digitalalabamanews.com/five-takeaways-from-the-abbott-orourke-debate-showdown-in-texas-pipa-news/ Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Democratic nominee Beto O’Rourke traded barbs and sought to portray each other as naturally out of touch with the state in their first and only televised debate on Friday evening. demanded. The debate — hosted by Nexstar Media Group, which also owns The Hill — gave candidates the opportunity to stake policy positions and address a range of issues from the Uvalde school shooting to teacher retention to border security. While the candidates touched upon some policy stances, the one-hour debate was mostly a civil matter, while the candidates opened old wounds and tried to portray each other as extremists. The debate comes at a crucial time for O’Rourke as recent polls have shown him trailing Abbott, giving him a crucial opportunity to reach voters in the final stages of the race. At the same time, the hour-long sermon comes amid speculation that the governor of Texas may bid for the presidency in 2024. Here are five takeaways from the Texas gubernatorial debate. Barbs fly but debate remains a stifled matter The hour-long debate was mostly stalled; There was no explosion or raised sound. But that doesn’t mean that Abbott and O’Rourke didn’t take advantage of opportunities when they could revisit the past and bring out each other’s shortcomings. “Governor Abbott’s grid failure is part of a pattern over these past eight years. Warning about, for example, school violence and gun violence against children in particular, does nothing,” O’Rourke said. . “Warned about problems within Child Protective Services, our foster care program, does nothing, and it gets worse. Warned before February 2021 that we had a problem with the grid, it did nothing. At the same time, Abbott touched on Democrats’ failed attempts to win a Senate seat in 2018 and the White House two years later. He also argued that O’Rourke was inconsistent in his positions. “He has turned on the border issue. He has flip-flopped on energy issues, such as energy jobs and the Green New Deal. He has turned his back on defaming the police. Whether it is one issue or another, he keeps changing his position,” Abbott said. Candidates label each other as extremists Both the candidates sought to cast each other as extremists in different ways. A major policy area in which the attacks were carried out was abortion. “Beto’s position is the most extreme because not only does he support abortion until the last second before the birth of a full-grown child, he is also against providing medical care for a child who survives the miscarriage. That’s at the taxpayer’s expense. is for unlimited abortion,” Abbott alleged. “That’s not true. It’s completely false,” O’Rourke replied. “I never said that. And no one in the state of Texas thinks so. He’s saying it because he signed the most extreme abortion ban in America. No exception for rape, no exception for incest.” The two men kept each other wildly out of touch over issues like immigration. For example, Abbott claimed that O’Rourke said he would reduce immigration enforcement and ease the situation at the border. Biden emerges as GOP boogeyman Abbott took several opportunities to ding President Biden during the debate as he sought to associate O’Rourke with the president, amid Biden’s lagging approval ratings. Responding to a question about whether more money should be given for Operation Loan, the governor said, “We shouldn’t allocate any money for it because it’s all because of the president’s failure to do the job of securing Joe Biden’s border.” reason.” Star, which was intended to deal with the cross-border between the US and Mexico. “We only have to do this because of the failure of Joe Biden and because this will be the path Beto will take us down,” he said. At one point during the debate, O’Rourke hit back at Abbott’s claim against the president, arguing that he was blaming people like Biden but that “buck stops at your desk.” no mention of trump While the former President Trump and the many state and federal investigations he has been embroiled in have consistently shadowed the midterm race, the former president was not once mentioned during the debate. While a reference to Trump would likely increase the GOP base in Texas, the absence of any mention of the former president allowed Abbott to focus on state-specific issues. And it suggested that O’Rourke also sees that the key to breaking up with Texas voters is to focus on core issues like immigration, abortion and gun violence — not just former White House occupants. O’Rourke’s decision to avoid mentioning Trump also comes after criticism during the last election cycle that Democrats had focused too much on trying to connect Republicans to the former president. probably not a game changer Given the civil nature of the debate and the fact that none of the candidates showed much change in rhetoric or policy stance, voters are unlikely to walk away from Friday night’s event with changed minds. This will likely be an asset to Abbott, as he is leading the polls, and it is likely to be a setback for O’Rourke, as there were no clear moments when he could successfully deliver a damaging blow against the governor. were able to. Instead, O’Rourke will have to rely on whether casting himself as a foil for a two-term term in power and a message of change will be enough to impress voters in November. For the latest news, weather, sports and streaming video, visit The Hill. . Read More…

International 7-Day News Agenda https://digitalalabamanews.com/international-7-day-news-agenda-2/ Please note that all times are in GMT. Major events are listed under ‘Highlights’. For full details of our coverage of top stories, please see our regularly updated News Advisory. (+) : Event added in the last 24 hours. (*) : Event updated in the last 24 hours. CHINA – National Day PICTURE. VIDEO. WELLINGTON (New Zealand) – Te Papa National Museum receives remains of Maori and Moriori, returned by Vienna’s Natural History Museum KOLKATA (India) – Durga Puja festival PICTURE. VIDEO. (To October 5) PARIS (France) – Paris Fashion Week: Womenswear PICTURE. (To October 4) (+) LONDON (United Kingdom) – Protest organized by Enough is Enough (1100 GMT) PICTURE. (+) BERLIN (Germany) – Rally in solidarity with Iranian protesters (1200 GMT) (+) ATHENS (Greece) – Demonstration in support of Iranian women (1500 GMT) GENEVA (Switzerland) – 51st UN Human Rights Council session (To October 7) BUCHAREST (Romania) – UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) holds its quadrennial plenipotentiary conference (To October 14) WARSAW (Poland) – Warsaw Conference on human rights in OSCE area (To October 7) FELIXSTOWE (United Kingdom) – Port workers strike over pay (To October 5) MONACO (Principality of Monaco) – Monaco Yacht Show PICTURE. BERLIN (Germany) – TGEU European and Central Asian Trans Council (To October 2) UNITED KINGDOM – Postal workers strike over pay (*) SOFIA (Bulgaria) – Ceremony marks start of commercial operations of gas pipeline between Greece and Bulgaria PICTURE. VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. LATVIA – Parliamentary elections VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. BONN (Germany) – 40th anniversary of Helmut Kohl’s first election as chancellor BARCELONA (Spain) – Fifth anniversary of self-determination referendum organised by Catalan separatists despite being banned by the courts VIDEO. PICTURE. LIVE VIDEO. BERLIN (Germany) – Gas surcharge to share soaring cost of energy comes into force (+) ROME (Italy) – Mandatory masks in hospitals, care homes extended for one month to fight Covid-19 (+) BRUSSELS (Belgium) – March in support of Iranian women VIDEO. PICTURE. (*) GERMANY – Minimum wage increase to 12 euros-per-hour comes into force LONDON (United Kingdom) – Just Stop Oil ‘occupy’ Westminster, protest calling for end to exploration and production of fossil fuels VIDEO. PICTURE. LONDON (United Kingdom) – Rail workers strike, called by unions Aslef and RMT (+) LONDON (United Kingdom) – “Don’t Pay UK’ protests against rising costs of energy by burning bills VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. PICTURE. CANADA – Anti-Covid border health measures lifted LA GOULETTE (Tunisia) – Stopover of the cruise ship ‘The World’, on which 142 families are travelling around the world (0800 GMT) (To 2) SALÉ (Morocco) – International Women’s Film Festival ABU DHABI (United Arab Emirates) – Abu Dhabi International Hunting and Equestrian Exhibition (ADIHEX) (To October 2) (*) Disah (Jordan) – Camel race in the desert VIDEO. CASABLANCA (Morocco) – L’Boulevard urban music festival PICTURE. (To October 2) TUNIS (Tunisia) – Dream City Tunis, contemporary art biennial (To October 9) GAZA CITY (Palestinian Territories) – Hamas organizes rally to support al-Aqsa mosque during Jewish holidays VIDEO. BAGHDAD (Iraq) – Protest on the 3rd anniversary of the 2019 popular anti-power uprising PICTURE. VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. ALGERIA – Closure of Catholic charity Caritas ordered by the authorities SAO PAULO (Brazil) – President Jair Bolsonaro attends political rally (1100 GMT) PICTURE. VIDEO. SANTIAGO (Chile) – Concert ‘A Thousand Guitars for Víctor Jara’ in homage to the 90th birthday of the Chilean singer-songwriter, assassinated during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (2200 GMT) PANAMA CITY (Panama) – Fashion week PICTURE. (To October 2) CHENGDU (China) – Table Tennis: 2022 ITTF World Team Championships Finals (To October 9) LONDON (United Kingdom) – Football: Premier League – day 9: Arsenal v Tottenham (1130 GMT) VIDEO. PICTURE. MILAN (Italy) – Football: Serie A – day 8: Inter Milan v Roma (1600 GMT) CÓRDOBA (Argentina) – Football: Copa Sudamericana – Final: Sao Paulo v Independiente del Valle (2000 GMT) PICTURE. SEOUL (South Korea) – Tennis: ATP tour 2022 – Seoul Open PICTURE. (To October 2) TEL AVIV (Israel) – Tennis: ATP tour 2022 – Tel Aviv Open PICTURE. (To October 2) PARMA (Italy) – Tennis: WTA tour – Parma Open NEW TAIPEI CITY (Taiwan) – Golf: Asian Tour, Taiwan Masters (To October 2) JACKSON (United States) – Golf: PGA Tour – Sanderson Farms Championship (To October 2) AUCKLAND (New Zealand) – Auto: World Rally Championship (WRC), Rally New Zealand (To October 2) (*) MOROCCO – Auto Rally: Rally of Morocco (To 6) BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA – General elections PICTURE. VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. (*) BRAZIL – Legislative and presidential elections VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. PICTURE. GRAPHIC. WORLD – International Day of Non-Violence BIRMINGHAM (United Kingdom) – Conservative Party conference VIDEO. PICTURE. LIVE VIDEO. (To 5) SOFIA (Bulgaria) – Legislative elections VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. COPENHAGEN (Denmark) – 50th anniversary of Denmark’s vote to join the European Economic Community (*) GENEVA (Switzerland) – Armenian FM Ararat Mirzoyan and Azerbaijani FM Jeyhun Bayramov hold talks (+) PARIS (France) – Rally in support of Iranian women LIVE VIDEO. VIDEO. YEMEN – Two-month ceasefire expires VIDEO. DOHA (Qatar) – 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sports museum holds a press conference ahead of World of Football exhibition (0930 GMT) VIDEO. MEXICO CITY (Mexico) – Demonstration marks 54th anniversary of Tlatelolco student massacre (1700 GMT) (*) SAITAMA (Japan) – Basketball: NBA pre-season game, Golden State Warriors v Washington Wizards PICTURE. SINGAPORE (Singapore) – Auto: Formula One – Singapore Grand Prix, Grand Prix PICTURE. GRAPHIC. BURIRAM (Thailand) – Moto: MotoGP Thailand Grand Prix PICTURE. GUWAHATI (India) – Cricket: India v South Africa, second T20 PICTURE. BRUSSELS (Belgium) – Cycling: Gathering in honour of Remco Evenepoel, new world champion VIDEO. PICTURE. PARIS (France) – Horse racing: Qatar Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe PICTURE. LONDON (United Kingdom) – Athletics: London Marathon VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. MANCHESTER (United Kingdom) – Football: Premier League – day 9: Manchester City v Manchester United (1300 GMT) VIDEO. PICTURE. LAHORE (Pakistan) – Cricket: Pakistan v England, seventh T20 (1430 GMT) PICTURE. STOCKHOLM (Sweden) – Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2022 announced (0930 GMT) LIVE VIDEO. PICTURE. VIDEO. TOKYO (Japan) – Parliament (Diet) in session (To December 10) ISLAMABAD (Pakistan) – Ex-PM Imran Khan appears in high court VIDEO. BRUSSELS (Belgium) – EU-Israel Association Council meeting VIDEO. PICTURE. (+) BIRMINGHAM (United Kingdom) – Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng addresses Conservative Party conference PICTURE. VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. (+) BUDAPEST (Hungary) – PM Viktor Orban, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer press conference on the margins of an immigration summit (1045 GMT) PICTURE. VIDEO. (+) BERLIN (Germany) – Chancellor Olaf Scholz hosts French President Emmanuel Macron for a dinner marking German Reunification Day (1700 GMT) PICTURE. VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. LUXEMBOURG (Luxembourg) – Eurozone finance ministers (Eurogroup) meet VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. PARIS (France) – Government statement and debate on war in Ukraine in National Assembly PICTURE. (+) BUDAPEST (Hungary) – Parliament votes on anti-corruption measures (To 4) BAYEUX (France) – Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for war correspondents PICTURE. (To 9) PARIS (France) – International Energy Agency (IEA) Quarterly Gas Market Report (0500 GMT) ANKARA (Turkey) – September inflation data (0700 GMT) (*) WASHINGTON (United States) – Opening arguments in trial of far-right Oath Keepers members, including founder Stewart Rhodes, accused of sedition over 2021 attack on Capitol MONTREAL (Canada) – Legislative elections in Quebec VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. WASHINGTON (United States) – Supreme Court session opens, new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sits SAN JOSÉ (United States) – Court hears Elizabeth Holmes’ motion for new trial in Theranos case (2030 GMT) BAGHDAD (Iraq) – 90th anniversary of Iraq’s independence KINSHASA (DR Congo) – Pre-COP27 preparatory meeting (0800 GMT) VIDEO. (To 5) (+) BOGOTÁ (Colombia) – US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visits VIDEO. (To 4) TOKYO (Japan) – Tennis: ATP tour 2022 – Rakuten Japan Open PICTURE. (To 9) STOCKHOLM (Sweden) – Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 announced (0945 GMT) VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. PICTURE. WORLD – World Animal Day CANBERRA (Australia) – Tennis player Nick Kyrgios faces assault charge at ACT Magistrates Court (*) PHNOM PENH (Cambodia) – Cuba’s Prime Minister Manuel Marrero visits (0700 GMT) (To 6) (*) BERLIN (Germany) – Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Dutch PM Mark Rutte hold a press conference after climate talks (1200 GMT) PICTURE. VIDEO. LIVE VIDEO. ROME (Italy) – 30th anniversary of peace deal ending Mozambique’s civil war LUXEMBOURG (Luxembourg) – EU finance ministers meet (Ecofin) LIVE VIDEO. VIDEO. LONDON (United Kingdom) – Pre-trial hearing for ex-Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone on fraud charge MANCHESTER (United Kingdom) – Trial expected to start of Nurse Lucy Letby, accused of murder of eight babies and attempted murder of 10 others (To April 30, 2023) (+) LONDON (United Kingdom) – Energy Intelligence Forum (0600 GMT) (To 6) (+) BERLIN (Germany) – OECD report on German innovation policy published (0730 GMT) KOTKA (Finland) – Finland will remove its last public Lenin statue in Kotka (1000 GMT) (+) VIENNA (Austria) – ECB Chairman of the Banking Supervisor Andrea Enria gives a speech (1200 GMT) (+) NICOSIA (Cyprus) – ECB President Christine Lagarde speaks to students at a Central Bank of Cyprus event (1400 GMT) BERLIN (Germany) – Chancellor Olaf Scholz holds talks wit...

Property Transfers Published October 1, 2022 https://digitalalabamanews.com/property-transfers-published-october-1-2022/ The following is a list of more real estate parcels valued at $150,000 or more that have been transferred in the past few months in Richmond and surrounding areas. To our readers: Caroline and Louisa listings will not be included until further notice. RICHMOND 613 W 19th St; English Larry F And Sharon L to Laird Elizabeth, $445,000. 1204 N 21st St; Heitman Brian Harrison to Van Essen Kimberly Marie and, $429,900. 817 N 24th St; Baber Marshall B to Hardy William Booth, $258,000. 3318 2nd Ave; Christian John B And to Reyes Giancarlo, $259,900. 601-1/2 N 30th St; Kapetanakis Kendall Harmon And to Boychuk R Peter Vincent and, $412,000. 504 N 33rd St; Seldin Sommer Leah to Eley Candice And Terich Jeffrey, $485,000. 1502 N 35th St; Quality Life Of Virginia Llc to Yanette Terry L And Christina L, $432,500. 3202 3rd Ave; Icf Enterprises Llc to Turner Zachary, $150,000. 601 Arnold Ave; Thg Investments Llc to 601 Arnold Llc, $175,000. 3141 Atlantic St; Stanley Martin Companies Llc to Buchanan Thomas A, $300,604. 5049 W Belmont Road; Oliva Enrique & Irma E to Roldan Oscar L and, $415,000. 2808 E Broad St; Hutter Ian P And Morgan L to Johnston Brian, $565,000. 6530 Buckhill Road; Gorman Roberta Living Trust to Gammons Robert C And Helen S, $527,500. 3318 Carolina Ave; Parker Wendy M to Weidinger Cara, $325,000. 10645 Cherokee Road; Yee Martin Wayne Trustee to Tabassian Ali R, $1,300,000. 1403 Claiborne St; Singleterry Sharon D to Randolph Homes Llc, $222,500. 3112 Cliff Ave; Falcon Transportation Group to Atienza Jessica Roxanne I &, $402,000. 5104 Devonshire Road; Zambriczki Michael J & Brianne to Anoushtunholdings Llc, $508,000. 3611 Enslow Ave; Hhh And Associates Llc to Zheng Andy, $252,000. 3962 Fauquier Ave; Jordan Marshall I to Complete Home Design Llc, $272,850. 7012 Forest Hill Ave; Giant Food Stores Llc to Valv1 Llc, $1,625,000. 10133 Garfield Road; Brooks Alfred T Jr Trustee to Carbonneau James R and, $340,000. 3531 Grove Ave; Albert Charles G And Gretchen L to Sabo David And Mikytuck Alyssa, $525,000. 45 Hampton Commons Ter; Lewis Helen Lewis Revoc Trust & to Ellis Edward S And Karen M, $385,000. 4610 Hanover Ave; Crenshaw Courtland Edward And to Reif Zachary And Emily, $542,000. 2924 Hawthorne Ave; Barham Samuel D Iii & to Fuerte Jimmy and, $299,950. 4210 Hillcrest Road; Modi Sarika to Wisseman Sarah Grace and, $491,000. 1516 Jacquelin St; Dnj Inc to Silas Janey Lynn And Holly Ann, $299,900. 6705 Kensington Ave; Bergman-Massa Mary Noelle to Cfq Llc, $380,000. 1418 W Laburnum Ave; Szurovy Kristina to Donahue Patrick J, $285,000. 104 W Lancaster Road; Xtreme Homes Llc to Coleman Jonathan And Marian, $625,000. 12 W Locke Lane U3; Ashley Michelle E to Watson Pamela J, $315,000. 5408 Marian St; Rva Residential Renovations Llc to Butterworth Stratford W Jr, $290,000. 1705 Maury St; Poe David Allen Ii to Scarsdale Jessica L, $275,000. 3616 Montrose Ave; Jordan Marguerite R to Farneth Jason, $165,000. 1409 Nelson St; Watchtower Homes And to Brown Michael D, $299,950. 1017 Oakwood Ave; Paldino Joanna R to Ross Avery Len and, $275,000. 2912 Parkwood Ave; Shawn Roger J Iii & Christina A to Casavant Blake, $432,000. 714 S Pine St; Vm714 Llc to Sherman Scott Foster and, $590,000. 2918 R St; 2918 R St Llc to Beasley Stephen, $235,000. 1256 Rothesay Cir; Wilbanks Peter T & Kelly J to Farajian Morteza and, $1,050,000. 2511 Seminary Ave; Ellison Angelo to Eberhard Michael And Suzanne, $345,000. 7120 South Dr; Cody Brent M And to Giffen Roderick Kerr, $350,000. 6921 Stratford Townes Way; Evans Winston to Robertson Harrison B and, $295,000. 1900 Texas Ave; Texas Beach Trail Llc to 1900 Texas Pete Llc, $400,000. 2120 Tobacco Mill St; NVR Inc to Thota Kishore Seshu, $410,735. 3507 Warner Road; Babcock Joshua And Erica Mendez to Thurmond Ellen M and, $601,500. 3014 Weymouth Dr; Rudd Bruce A And Henry Marian S to Duncan Hazel P, $350,000. HENRICO 3202 Abelia Rd, Henrico; Tignor Mark L and Keith R Et Al to Buth Dean D, $260,000. 381 Adderbury Walk, Henrico; Eagle Construction Of Va Llc to Mccalla James M and Leslie P , $641,682. 387 Adderbury Walk, Henrico; Eagle Construction Of Va Llc to Brooks Gemma L Trustee, $611,981. 1408 Almondberry Pl, Henrico; Bagby Stacey M to Townes Tamara L , $235,000. 8008 Anoka Rd, Henrico; Kirk Susan P and Kimberly Kirk Facetti to Lbg Llc, $170,000. 10861 Ashton Poole Pl, Glen Allen; HHHunt Homes Lc to Katpally Varun, $413,935. 1800 Bandera Dr, Henrico; Twine Gabriella A to Barvenik Sarah and William and Doreen, $257,500. 108 Beauregard Ave, Henrico; Ahmad Hamad F Bani to Tompkins Abigail and Matthew R Hapanowicz, $325,000. 956 Belva Ln, Glen Allen; Benton Jonathan A and Laura K to Obrien Brenda S , $552,500. 4324 Bon Secours Pkwy, Henrico; Cui Yu Lu to Pogul Sai S and Narmada Dandamudi, $343,000. 11109 Braxton Ave, Glen Allen; Breeden James H Iii to Viles Paul Allen and Ellen Jeana, $340,000. 7203 Brigham Rd, Henrico; Rodrigues Paulo N to Mcquiddy Scott N and Joan B, $285,000. 5901 Brookside Blvd, Henrico; Droski James and Cassidy O to Prescott Samuel Barbour, $334,000. 2851 Byrdhill Rd, Henrico; Houses And Homes Foundation Inc to Olanowski Christian, $299,000. 4401 Carpenter Rd, Henrico; Richards Dorothy M to Kardian Christopher and Karen, $153,750. 4025 Carrie Mill Xing, Glen Allen; Schell Brothers Richmond Llc to Walker Kristi Nicole and Kenneth E Bostic, $542,746. 2413 Cedar Cone Dr, Henrico; Njj Enterprises Llc to Chisholm Sarah Elizabeth, $470,000. 5530 Charles City Rd, Henrico; Rodriguez Alejandro and Larissa to Andrews Jamie, $339,500. 339 Clerke Dr, Glen Allen; Carlton Brian S and Robin L to Mullinix Bret and Jeannine Rosado, $525,000. 4714 Colwyck Dr, Henrico; Mickle Derwin J to Stevenson Tyana A, $195,000. 1318 Connecticut Ave, Glen Allen; Anderson Robert J and Lauren D to Mortensen Jacob, $318,500. 4604 Craddock Ave, Henrico; Gottlieb Barbara L to Pastore Marshall, $205,000. 3304 Croydon Rd, Henrico; Turner Sharon V to Edwards Alvin S Jr, $160,700. 3531 Darbytown Ct, Henrico; Ham Charles E and Dorothy L to Ling Austin J , $270,000. 308 Defense Ave, Sandston; West Douglas L to Lindner Alex, $220,000. 2221 Dickens Rd, Henrico; Buy Abode Llc to Meza Ramona Meza and Jaime Castro Estrada, $268,900. 9718 Drexel Ln, Henrico; Southworth Jordan and Cherie to Tran Tien, $210,000. 7561 Elko Rd, Sandston; Strath Robert J and Rita E to Stidham Kevin B and Lori A, $580,000. 12521 Evansdale Rd, Henrico; Bailey Thomas L Jr and Robbin M to Evancho Ian and Anna, $435,000. 326 Fife Ct, Henrico; Nibishaka Epimaque and Alphonsine Niragire to Viohl Benjamin A, $221,500. 3 Flatwater Row, Henrico; Harris Gregory D and Joycelyn F to Bartee Christopher Lee and Karen C Ames, $447,750. 1408 Fortingale Cir, Sandston; Washington Elana and J A Ford and T A Jr to Bell Vinson, $212,500. 306 N Foxhill Rd, Henrico; Fox Hill Land Trust to Brown Camela , $235,000. 9508 Gaslight Ct, Henrico; Beifield Martin P Jr and Ina C Ginsberg to Oceanscape Llc, $600,000. 2214 Ginter St, Henrico; Austin Stephen M to Wanveer Wylie and Marcia C, $269,950. 6621 Glenwood St, Henrico; Richard T Trainham and D B V and R Burrus to Avellaneda Alexander A, $205,000. 9415 Greenhill Ct, Henrico; Edmunds Anne R to Sla Construction Llc Trustee, $188,000. 7901 Gregg Rd, Henrico; Boothe Floyd Gregory Iv to Grubbs Dandridge B Jr, $160,000. 3916 Grove Point Dr, Henrico; NVR Inc to Poudyal Nita and Prad, $301,410. 10867 Harvest Mill Pl, Glen Allen; Lifestyle Builders And Developers Inc to Azuaje Dair and Kelly Johnson , $599,950. 8025 Heavenly Valley Dr, Henrico; Hubbard Derick John to Jensen Austan C , $366,225. 6920 Holland St, Henrico; Stephen Thomas Corporation to Amg Milton Llc, $300,500. 1500 Honor Dr, Henrico; Clemons Kim A and Edward P Adams to Christian Arabic Church, $155,000. 5180 Hurop Rd, Sandston; Bowes Dorothea C to Burnette Margaret and Adam Eubank, $300,000. 3804 Indigo Run Dr, Henrico; Parker Aaron and Kara M to Tran Thuyen Thanh and Thanh Thien, $820,000. 10702 Keeney Ct, Henrico; Harding Peggy A to Barnes Victoria D , $262,000. 4305 Kidsgrove Rd, Henrico; Style Craft Homes Inc Of Virginia to Williams Reginald Anthony Jr, $254,750. 4325 Kidsgrove Rd, Henrico; Style Craft Homes Inc Of Virginia to Hanger Kevin Bruce and Andre Lewis, $305,000. 8427 Klarey Ct, Henrico; Martin Michael Wayne Jr to Fleming Laverne C , $185,000. 5640 Lake Sharon Dr, Glen Allen; Cranor Paige W to Khalil Samir K and Seham, $400,000. 2604 Lassen Walk, Henrico; Stanley Martin Homes Llc to Darius Francis A D Jr and Shania M Roberts, $385,439. 2525 Lauderdale Dr, Henrico; Grubbs David W and Wanda C to Lerner Carolee Clark, $314,000. 1149 Lee’s Crossing Ct, Glen Allen; Reed Terri Dawn to Miller Brian M and Meggan M Williams, $322,000. 5306 Libbie Mill West Blvd, Henrico; Lisich Elizabeth A to Matthews Lindsey, $394,975. 2615 Linbrook Dr, Henrico; Wine David George and Eunice Rohrer to Judy Andrew L , $385,000. 9397 London Tower Ct U0508, Glen Allen; Woolfolk Judith A Shoup Et Al to Smith Drayton T , $170,000. 9377 Man-O-War Ct U0904, Glen Allen; Ideal Choice Llc to Funk Craig E and Kathryn, $175,000. 1128 Marney Ct, Henrico; Skansi Timothy A and Brenda R to Wells Douglas Keith, $965,000. 16 W Mcclellan St, Sandston; Jones Robert L Jr and Janet to Bennett Joshua M and Taylor S , $193,000. 8801 Midway Rd, Henrico; H H Roberts Llc to 8801 Midway Llc, $259,000. 7600 Montrose Ave, Henrico; Edenstrom Thomas S to Edenstrom Kristen L, $175,000. 12156 Morestead Ct, Glen Allen; Babcock Robert J and Catherine C to Bernier David Folliard and Kristine Hires, $1,200,000. 1904 Navion St, Henrico; Orbit Auto Sales Llc to Kiama Richard and Eddah-Nelly, $280,000. 4141 New Market Rd, Henrico; Kelleher Christopher R to Gillespie Thomas E and Regina K Sen...

Stopgap Spending Bill Signed By Biden https://digitalalabamanews.com/stopgap-spending-bill-signed-by-biden/ The White House in Washington is illuminated at sunset in this undated file photo. (AP/Alex Brandon) WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden signed into law Friday a short-term spending package that would keep the government open through mid-December, staving off a midnight shutdown and sending about $12.3 billion in military and economic aid to Ukraine. The House passed the measure less than 12 hours before funding was set to lapse. It would keep the government open through Dec. 16, giving lawmakers time to iron out their considerable differences over the dozen annual spending bills. The package included a third tranche of aid to Ukraine for its battle with Russia, on top of a total of about $54 billion approved earlier this year. With Friday’s vote, Congress has now committed more military aid to Ukraine than it has to any country in a single year since the Vietnam War. In the end, support for the bill was unanimous among Democratic lawmakers. Only 10 Republican lawmakers joined them in voting yes. The measure passed on a vote of 230-201. Later Friday, former President Donald Trump responded to the bill’s passage with a message on his social media platform, Truth Social, attacking Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and his wife, who also served in Trump’s administration as a Cabinet secretary. Trump ominously wrote that McConnell has a “death wish.” Passage of the bill met the last legislative deadline facing Congress before the November midterm elections. Lawmakers, eager to return to the campaign trail, vowed to address outstanding disputes in the annual legislation as part of an increasingly packed to-do list for when the House and Senate return in November. “The investments included in this bill are urgent and necessary to avoid disruptions to vital federal agencies, to help communities get back on their feet, to ensure we have the time needed to negotiate a final funding agreement that meets the needs of hardworking people,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., chair of the Appropriations Committee. Republican leaders, however, counseled their conference to oppose the package. Although several Senate Republicans supported the package when it passed that chamber Thursday, House Republicans argued that it did little to address their priorities, including providing a substantial increase for the military and shoring up resources at the southern border. “We know we have a crisis on the southern border. You can turn on the television every night. You can look at the fentanyl pouring into the country. You can see the tragedy of human trafficking,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla. “That is a travesty.” Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, the top GOP member on the Appropriations Committee, chastised Democrats for a bill she said was being “rushed through the House today, with just hours to spare to avoid a government shutdown.” “It’s deeply unfortunate that we have once again waited to the last minute to fund the government,” Cole, a longtime member of the appropriations panel, added. “We should not be in this situation. Both sides have done this.” But the desire to avoid a government shutdown and to help Ukraine was enough to rally the support needed to pass the measure. It would allocate $1.5 billion to replenish weapons and equipment previously sent to the country, while allowing Biden to authorize the transfer of up to $3.7 billion of U.S. equipment and weapons. It will also provide $3 billion for military support, as well as $4.5 billion for the Ukrainian government to continue operating throughout the war. “This package comes at a critical moment,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., pointing to Ukraine’s recent success in reclaiming land that had been seized by Russia and commitments of support she and the Biden administration had made. “With this supplemental, we take another strong step toward honoring that pledge, our country’s pledge.” Democrats said passing the bill was important to helping Ukraine as well as victims of recent natural disasters in the U.S., including Hurricane Ian, as it provides a Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster fund with a year’s worth of money up front rather than for 2½ months. “We cannot leave communities behind that are still picking up the pieces from disastrous floods, wildfires and hurricane — and even basic water system failures,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. Domestic needs addressed by lawmakers in the legislation include ensuring the renewal of a five-year “user fee” agreement that the Food and Drug Administration relies on as part of its budget and setting aside $1 billion for a program that will help lower-income families with heating and energy costs in the coming months. The legislation also allows the federal government more flexibility to spend existing disaster relief funds in the coming weeks, even as lawmakers acknowledged that it was likely that a separate round of emergency aid would be needed in the coming weeks to address the devastation left by hurricanes in southwest Florida and Puerto Rico. It would transfer $3 billion from a Pentagon aid program to the State Department for continued Afghan resettlement operations. “This short-term funding bill will keep the government open and meet a range of critical needs — from helping communities recover from extreme weather events, to supporting Ukraine, to helping fulfill our promises and commitments to Afghan allies and partners, and more,” said Shalanda Young, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. To ensure there would be enough Republican support for the measure to pass the Senate, however, Democrats agreed to remove billions of dollars in emergency funds to help address the coronavirus pandemic and spread of monkeypox across the country. Republicans criticized the health spending as unnecessary. The White House said the money would have been used to accelerate the research and development of vaccines and therapeutics, prepare for future covid variants and support the global response. Democrats also dropped an energy infrastructure plan that had initially been included at the request of Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat of West Virginia, as part of an agreement that won his vote in August for the party’s major climate, health and tax package. Dozens of House Democrats had called for the energy plan to be stripped out and considered separately. Senior lawmakers said they would reconsider it once Congress returned in mid-November. Information for this article was contributed by Emily Cochrane of The New York Times and by Kevin Freking of The Associated Press. Read More…

Vote Common Good Campaign Urges Arkansas Evangelicals To Consider Chris Jones https://digitalalabamanews.com/vote-common-good-campaign-urges-arkansas-evangelicals-to-consider-chris-jones/ Chris Jones, the Democratic nominee for governor of Arkansas, spoke with religious leaders Tuesday in North Little Rock, highlighting his faith and his vision for the state. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Frank E. Lockwood) With two preachers’ kids and a pastor in the race, Arkansans are poised to elect a governor who can sing hymns by heart and quote Scripture from memory. While acknowledging that many white evangelicals already have an affinity for Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the daughter of former Southern Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee, leaders of Vote Common Good are urging Christian voters to take a look at Democrat Chris Jones as well, arguing that his priorities better reflect gospel principles. The group held a rally Tuesday at Lindsey’s Hospitality House in North Little Rock, dubbed “Faith, Hope and Love: Not Insurrections and Christian Nationalism.” Preston Clegg, pastor of Little Rock’s Second Baptist Church Downtown, and one of the few white evangelical ministers from Central Arkansas in attendance, led the group in prayer. He thanked God “for Chris, for his heart, for his mind, for his life, for his witness, for his faith to step out and do something bold,” adding, “We see the goodness in it. We see the wonder in it, we see needles moving. We see people reconsidering and we see a little light that’s shining very very, very bright in a state we all love.” Vote Common Good, which launched during the 2018 congressional campaign, focuses on “inspiring, energizing, and mobilizing people of faith” while also helping “train and support Democratic candidates to connect with Evangelical and Catholic voters,” its website states. “There’s kind of this narrative that if you are a person of faith, if you’re a Christian, then you reflexively vote Republican, and we’re trying to communicate that for a lot of us, our faith compels us to vote differently than that,” said Robb Ryerse, Vote Common Good’s political director and a former Republican congressional candidate from Northwest Arkansas. “Our working assumption is that there’s 5% to 15% of evangelicals that are flippable, that are going through some kind of political identity crisis because of Jan. 6, because of Donald Trump, because of the Roe [v. Wade] decision, kids in cages,” Ryerse said. “We’re trying to communicate to the people that are going through that kind of political identity crisis: ‘You’re not alone,'” he said. ‘EXCEPTIONAL CANDIDATES’ Presented with “exceptional candidates,” such as Jones, a significant number of evangelicals can be persuaded to vote Democratic, Ryerse said. Jones, an MIT-educated nuclear engineer whose father is a United Methodist pastor in Pine Bluff, is “a person of faith, but isn’t trying to impose that on everybody else,” he added. Ryerse, co-founder and former pastor of Vintage Fellowship in Fayetteville, challenged 3rd district U.S. Rep. Steve Womack of Rogers in the 2018 Republican primary, capturing 15.8% of the vote. He subsequently published a book about the campaign, titled: “Running for Our Lives: A Story of Faith, Politics and the Common Good.” Now he’s helping campaign for Democratic candidates, not only in Arkansas but around the country. Similar stops are scheduled next week in Dallas and Austin, Texas; and Gardner, Kan. The autumn itinerary, at this point, also includes stops in Iowa, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. White evangelical Christians constitute the largest and most reliable bloc within the Republican Party. ‘EVANGELICAL PROGRESSIVE’ In 2016, Donald Trump received 81% of their votes, but only 76% in 2020, according to exit polling published in the New York Times. Doug Pagitt, founding pastor of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis, is a self-described “evangelical progressive” and Vote Common Good’s executive director. At Tuesday’s event, he questioned the Republican gubernatorial nominee’s leadership abilities, knocking the former White House press secretary without denying her faith. “I believe Sarah Huckabee Sanders is the light of the world and the salt of the earth,” he said. “But not every light of the world should be the governor of the great state of Arkansas, and we have to make sure that she doesn’t take her dim little light and mess up this state,” Pagitt said. Jones alleged that the opposition is “driving us towards division, hate, otherism and chaos.” If elected, Jones suggested he would be guided by his beliefs while also respecting the beliefs of others. “I’m a firm believer that, as a Christian, as a person of faith, as an ordained minister, that I should stand on my faith and live out my values. And I can do that without turning the state into a church,” he said. The Sanders campaign declined to comment on the gathering. ‘A VERY HARD SELL’ Jerry Cox, founder and president of the Arkansas Family Council, said it would be “a very hard sell,” to convince evangelicals to vote for candidates who wholeheartedly embrace positions espoused by the Democratic Party, including abortion and religious liberty. “What you would be asking them to do would be to betray the things that they believe most,” Cox said. In an interview, Ricky Dale Harrington, the Libertarian gubernatorial candidate and pastor of Mount Beulah Christian Church in Pine Bluff, said his faith also guides him. But he cautioned that religion and politics can be a toxic combination, pointing to examples from “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” a 16th-century account of people tortured and killed for their faith. “As a Christian, we strive every day to be our better selves and to walk the line that we are commanded to walk according to our faith. In the Christian faith, love is the center point,” he said.     Robb Ryerse, who once led a Fayetteville congregation, is now political director of Vote Common Good. He ran unsuccessfully against 3rd district U.S. Rep. Steve Womack of Rogers in the 2018 Republican primary. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Frank E. Lockwood)    Read More…

Michigan Women Fight To Preserve Abortion, 1 Chat At A Time https://digitalalabamanews.com/michigan-women-fight-to-preserve-abortion-1-chat-at-a-time/ Kelly Dillaha, left, talks with Kathy Nitz during a Red Wine and Blue event in Utica, Mich., Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya) UTICA, Mich. (AP) — At a wine bar in suburban Detroit, about a dozen women strategized about how to preserve the right to abortion in their state. This was not a typical political event; there were no microphones, no literature to hand out and few who would consider themselves activists. Among them was a mother of four whose only previous political experience was pushing for later school start times, a busy medical student and a retired teacher who, at 75, has never felt comfortable knocking on doors or cold calling for a candidate. “But I feel strongly about abortion,” said Mary Ann Messano-Gadula. “Women should be able to take care of their own bodies.” Messano-Gadula, who attended the late September “Vino the Vote” event with two friends, described herself as the most shy of the bunch. But she said she planned to do what organizers asked of attendees — post some Facebook messages and text some friends to try to get them to support an amendment to the state constitution guaranteeing abortion rights. “I’m going to give it a shot,” she said. Across Michigan this year, similar, more intimate events are playing out alongside the larger, traditional get-out-the-vote efforts, with major stakes for both abortion rights and the candidates — mostly Democrats — who support them. Michigan is one of a handful of places where abortion rights will be on the ballot in November, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June and left the issue to states to decide. A ban approved in 1931 was suspended, then struck down by state court rulings, but it is no guarantee that the procedure won’t one day be outlawed. That has mobilized people in Michigan, as it has done in previous elections this cycle, including in Kansas and New York. And it could have major implications beyond the state. Michigan is one of the country’s most competitive presidential battlegrounds. It was also among the states where former President Donald Trump and his allies tried to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, falsely claiming the election was stolen. Voters this fall also will decide statewide offices, including governor and secretary of state, who will be in place for the 2024 election. The race for governor already has centered around abortion. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer filed a lawsuit prior to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling seeking to overturn the 1931 ban and said she “will continue using every tool in my toolbox to fight like hell for women and health care providers.” Republican Tudor Dixon, who opposes abortion except to save the life of the mother, has criticized Whitmer for supporting abortion without limits, and suggested voters who support the constitutional amendment could vote in favor of it and still support her campaign for governor. The issue already has generated intense interest among voters and pushback from Republicans and abortion opponents. Reproductive Freedom for All, the coalition supporting the abortion-rights amendment, collected over 750,000 signatures on petitions to put the question on the ballot — more than any other ballot initiative in Michigan history. Opponents turned out in force for a meeting of the Board of State Canvassers, the once-staid panel that decides what questions and candidates qualify for the ballot. With anti-abortion protesters outside the building audible inside the hearing room, the board split along party lines, with two Republicans voting no and two Democrats voting yes. That meant the measure didn’t qualify for the ballot, but Reproductive Freedom for All appealed to the Michigan Supreme Court, where justices — a majority of whom were appointed by Democrats — ordered it be put on. Red, Wine & Blue, the organization that held the wine bar gathering, is among the members of the RFFA coalition in Michigan. Their strategy is to ask suburban women — a key swing demographic in recent elections — to reach out to and talk with friends, family members and other acquaintances and ask them to vote. The model, known as relational organizing, was used successfully by candidates such as Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, who won a runoff election to help Democrats win control of the U.S. Senate, and Pete Buttigieg, who went from little-known mayor of South Bend, Indiana, to a top candidate for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination. Greta Carnes, who led the effort for Buttigieg’s campaign, said it is particularly effective in turning out suburban women and on the often sensitive and personal issue of abortion. The approach is also more efficient and effective, because people can contact dozens of people in a matter of minutes via text, and a voter receiving a message from someone they know is more likely to read and consider, rather than delete it. “Especially on an issue like abortion, we can’t just have activists” knocking on doors, Carnes said. Lakshmi Vadlamudi, a medical student from Franklin, Michigan, saw firsthand the power of using her personal network when she helped gather signatures to put the abortion question on the ballot this summer. She told a few friends she would be in a parking lot one day collecting signatures, and word spread like wildfire, she said. Vadlamudi started getting text messages from people wanting her to come to their house so they could sign. Her Indian “aunties” — women with whom she is close but not related — wanted to circulate their own petitions. Some had family members in the medical profession and feared legal repercussions of performing an abortion if the 1931 ban takes effect, while others worried for their daughters or granddaughters. They ended up with 20 filled petitions. “We got as many as we could get our hands on,” Vadlamudi recalled. “People kept asking,” she said, and interest in the issue hasn’t stopped. Red, Wine & Blue’s Michigan group is aiming to reach 157,000 voters in the state through these “relational” contacts, according to Katie Paris, the organization’s national director. The group’s leader in Michigan, Kelly Dillaha, said they are recruiting 5,000 women to contact their networks and report back to the group on their progress via an app. Kathy Nitz, a mother of four from Rochester Hills, started working with Red, Wine & Blue after volunteering at her kids’ schools, leading the PTA and spearheading an effort to start schools later in the morning. Those issues always felt like “safe” topics, she said. Talking about abortion, on the other hand, was a bit like saying the word “Voldemort” — the name that characters in the “Harry Potter” books fear would bring great danger if uttered. But Nitz has grown more comfortable with the topic, even discussing the nuances with her very Catholic and anti-abortion mother. And she believes these small conversations among women like herself could add up. “What I’ve come to realize as a suburban woman and mother myself is that we’re undervalued. We are underappreciated and under estimated, but we’re also strong,” Nitz said. “We build communities, we make networks. That’s what we’ve always done.” ___ Associated Press reporters Aaron Kessler in Washington and Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, contributed to this report. ___ For AP’s full coverage of abortion, go to https://apnews.com/hub/abortion Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics Read More…

Russia’s Annexation Puts World ‘two Or Three Steps Away’ From Nuclear War https://digitalalabamanews.com/russias-annexation-puts-world-two-or-three-steps-away-from-nuclear-war/ LONDON — President Vladimir Putin’s declaration of the annexation of four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine signals the onset of a new and highly dangerous phase in the seven-month old war, one that Western officials and analysts fear could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons for the first time in 77 years. Putin has previously threatened to resort to nuclear weapons if Russia’s goals in Ukraine continue to be thwarted. The annexation brings the use of a nuclear weapon a step closer by giving Putin a potential justification on the grounds that “the territorial integrity of our country is threatened,” as he put it in his speech last week. He renewed the threat on Friday with an ominous comment that the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a “precedent” for the use of nuclear weapons, echoing references he has made in the past to the U.S. invasion of Iraq as setting a precedent for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. U.S. and Western officials say they still think it unlikely that Putin will carry out his threats. Most probably, they say, he is hoping to deter the West from providing ever more sophisticated military assistance to Ukraine while the mobilization of an additional 300,000 troops allows Russia to reverse or at least halt its military setbacks on the battlefield. But the threats appear only to have strengthened Western resolve to continue sending weapons to Ukraine and the Ukrainian military is continuing to advance into Russian-occupied territory. Even as Putin was announcing the annexation in Moscow on Friday and newly conscripted Russian troops were arriving in Ukraine, Ukrainian troops were in the process of encircling Russian soldiers in the eastern city of Lyman, extending their reach from their recent advances in Kharkiv into the newly annexed region of Donetsk. In all four regions that Putin said he was annexing — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — Russia only controls part of the territory. Now that the areas being fought over are regarded by Moscow as Russian, it is possible to chart a course of events toward the first use of a nuclear weapon since the 1945 atomic bombing of Japan. “It’s a low probability event, but it is the most serious case of nuclear brinkmanship since the 1980s” when the Cold War ended, said Franz-Stefan Gady, a senior fellow with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “It is a very dangerous situation and it needs to be taken seriously by Western policymakers.” U.S. and European officials say they are taking the threats seriously. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Sunday that there would be “catastrophic consequences” if Russia resorts to the use of nuclear weapons. He refused to specify what those would be but said the precise consequences had been spelled out privately to Russian officials “at very high levels.” “They well understand what they would face if they went down that dark road,” he said. European officials say the threats have only strengthened their resolve to support Ukraine. “No one knows what Putin will decide to do, no one,” said a European Union official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject. “But he’s totally in a corner, he’s crazy … and for him there is no way out. The only way out for him is total victory or total defeat and we are working on the latter one. We need Ukraine to win and so we are working to prevent worst case scenarios by helping Ukraine win.” The goal, the official said, is to give Ukraine the military support it needs to continue to push Russia out of Ukrainian territory, while pressuring Russia politically to agree to a cease-fire and withdrawal, the official said. And the pressure is working, “slowly,” the official said, to spread awareness in Russia and internationally that the invasion was a mistake. India, which had seemed to side with Russia in the earliest days of the war, has expressed alarm at Putin’s talk of nuclear war and China, ostensibly Russia’s most important ally, has signaled that it is growing uneasy with Putin’s continuing escalations. But the annexation and the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of extra troops have also served as a reminder that the Western strategy hasn’t yet worked enough to convince Putin that he can’t win, said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who was based in Moscow until earlier this year. The West had been hoping that Ukrainian successes would force Putin to back down, but instead he is doubling down. “Time and again we are seeing that Vladimir Putin sees this as a big existential war and he’s ready to up the stakes if he is losing on the battlefield,” Gabuev said. “At the same time I don’t think the West will back down, so it’s a very hard challenge now. We are two or three steps away” from Russia failing to achieve its goals and resorting to what was once unthinkable. Those steps to secure its positions include Russia pushing hundreds of thousands more men onto the battlefield; escalating attacks on civilian targets and infrastructure in Ukraine; and perhaps also embarking on covert attacks on Western infrastructure. Although the United States and its European allies have refrained from making direct accusations, few doubt that Russia was behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, said the E.U. official. “I don’t think anyone has doubts. It’s the handwriting of the Kremlin,” he said. “It’s an indication of, ‘look what is coming, look what we are able to do.’ ” Nuclear weapons would only likely be used after mobilization, sabotage and other measures have failed to turn the tide, and it’s unclear what Putin would achieve by using them, Gady said. Despite some wild predictions on Russian news shows that the Kremlin would lash out at a Western capital, with London appearing to be a favored target, it is more likely that Moscow would seek to use one of its smaller, tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield to try to gain advantage over Ukrainian forces, said Gady. The smallest nuclear weapon in the Russian arsenal delivers an explosion of around 1 kiloton, one fifteenth of the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which would inflict massive destruction but on a more limited area. Because the war is being fought along a vast, 1,500-mile front line, troops are too thinly spread out for there to be an obvious target whose obliteration would change the course of the war. To make a difference, Russia would have to use several nuclear weapons or alternatively strike a major population center such as Kyiv, either of which would represent a massive escalation, trigger almost certain Western retaliation and turn Russia into a pariah state even with its allies, Gady said. “From a purely military perspective, nuclear weapons would not solve any of Vladimir Putin’s military problems,” he said. “To change the operational picture one single attack would not be enough and it would also not intimidate Ukraine into surrendering territory. It would cause the opposite, it would double down Western support and I do think there would be a U.S. response.” That’s why many believe Putin won’t carry out his threats. “Even though Putin is dangerous, he is not suicidal, and those around him aren’t suicidal,” said Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe. Pentagon officials have said they have seen no actions by Russia that would lead the United States to adjust its nuclear posture. War in Ukraine: What you need to know The latest: Russian President Vladimir Putin signed decrees Friday to annex four occupied regions of Ukraine, following staged referendums that were widely denounced as illegal. Follow our live updates here. The response: The Biden administration on Friday announced a new round of sanctions on Russia, in response to the annexations, targeting government officials and family members, Russian and Belarusian military officials and defense procurement networks. President Volodymyr Zelensky also said Friday that Ukraine is applying for “accelerated ascension” into NATO, in an apparent answer to the annexations. In Russia: Putin declared a military mobilization on Sept. 21 to call up as many as 300,000 reservists in a dramatic bid to reverse setbacks in his war on Ukraine. The announcement led to an exodus of more than 180,000 people, mostly men who were subject to service, and renewed protests and other acts of defiance against the war. The fight: Ukraine mounted a successful counteroffensive that forced a major Russian retreat in the northeastern Kharkiv region in early September, as troops fled cities and villages they had occupied since the early days of the war and abandoned large amounts of military equipment. Photos: Washington Post photographers have been on the ground from the beginning of the war — here’s some of their most powerful work. How you can help: Here are ways those in the U.S. can support the Ukrainian people as well as what people around the world have been donating. Read our full coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war. Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for updates and exclusive video. Read More…

Death Toll Rises From Post-Tropical Cyclone Ian; Storm Crawls Across Carolinas, Virginia https://digitalalabamanews.com/death-toll-rises-from-post-tropical-cyclone-ian-storm-crawls-across-carolinas-virginia/ A weakened Ian continues traveling north through the Carolinas, where it is expected to dissipate over Virginia late Saturday. Fox News is updating with the latest news surrounding the storm, its impact, travel and emergency updates. incoming update… The U.S. death toll from Hurricane Ian and its subsequent weather effects rose to at least 27 late Friday night as authorities have been able to confirm additional drownings and other fatalities. Just hours earlier, the death toll was recorded as 17, but the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said later that evening that other deaths in the state have been confirmed. One of the deaths was a 22-year-old woman who was fatally ejected from an ATV because of a road washout and a 68-year-old woman who drowned after she was swept into the ocean by a wave. An elderly couple died after their oxygen machines shut off when they lost power, authorities said.  Authorities expect the death toll to rise further as emergency officials are able to assess damages properties. Hundreds of rescues have already taken place across the state. Three people reportedly died to the storm in Cuba. Ian, officially a post-tropical cyclone with 55 mph sustained wind speeds, is estimated to be one of the costliest hurricanes ever to hit the U.S. According to the disaster modeling firm Karen Clark & Company, the storm has likely caused “well over $100 billion’’ in damage, including $63 billion in privately insured losses. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Posted by Lawrence Richard The latest update from Dominion Energy, which serves electricity to several states including Virginia and North Carolina, shows as of 5:15 a.m. Saturday morning that over 44,000 Virginia customers are without power in its service area. The outages include: Chesapeake — 908 customers City of Richmond — 146 customers Henrico — 110 customers Chesterfield — 893 customers Dinwiddie — 132 customers James City — 234 customers Gloucester — 1,578 customers Halifax — 2,371 customers Hampton — 4,445 customers Isle of Wight — 1,243 customers Matthews — 245 customers Newport News — 4,658 customers Norfolk — 11,336 customers Portsmouth — 427 customers Suffolk — 676 customers Virginia Beach — 7,711 customers York — 1,633 customers According to Poweroutage.us, nearly 98,000 Virginians in total are without power. Posted by Lawrence Richard The National Hurricane Center released an advisory early Saturday morning warning of flash flooding risks over portions of North Carolina and Virginia still posed by post-tropical cyclone Ian. The center of the storm is about 50 miles south-southeast of Greensboro, North Carolina, the weather service said. Ian, once a Category 4 hurricane with 150 mph wind speed, maintains a maximum sustained wind speed of 40 mph. It continues to travel north at 13 mph. Ian’s remnants are expected to continue weakening as it moves further inland across central North Carolina on Saturday. It will then enter Virginia, where it is expected to dissipate by early Sunday. Posted by Lawrence Richard After making its final U.S. landfall, Ian will continue to bring tropical storm-force winds and torrential rain to the I-95 corridor through the weekend. Ian made landfall in South Carolina Friday afternoon as a Category 1 hurricane. The storm brought 85 mph winds to Georgetown, South Carolina, around 2 p.m. And while Ian no longer holds hurricane strength, the storm’s lasting effects will be felt through the weekend. The remnants of Hurricane Ian will bring widespread rain and strong winds along the I-95 corridor from North Carolina to Rhode Island. The storm is expected to weaken to an extratropical low-pressure system over North Carolina before dissipating Saturday night. Between 3 and 6 inches of rain is possible along the Appalachian Mountains from North Carolina into the Virginias. Persistent rain will also lead to rainfall totals between 2 and 4 inches from the Delmarva Peninsula to parts of New Jersey. On Sunday, soaking rains will continue to be the issue for a wide swath of the mid-Atlantic as the remnants of Ian slowly move away from the U.S. Between 2 and 4 inches of rain is possible in this region, with some places potentially receiving up to 5 inches. Click here to read more on Ian’s potential path from FOX Weather: Ian to impact I-95 corridor after leaving behind path of destruction from Florida to South Carolina Posted by Lawrence Richard A South Florida healthcare system is stepping up to assist the smallest patients at a Fort Myers hospital significantly affected by Hurricane Ian. On Friday, Memorial Healthcare System in Broward County announced three of its Neonatal Intensive Care Units will be accepting NICU patients from Lee Health. The system is expecting to receive 22 newborns over the next few days. The most critical patients will be transferred by helicopter and the rest will travel via ambulance, FOX 7 Miami reported. The babies will be placed in the care of Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, Memorial Hospital West or Memorial Hospital Miramar. “It’s bad enough to have the stress of a sick baby in the hospital, and then with having a catastrophe of this size on top of that, it’s unthinkable,” Dr. Ronald Ford, the chief medical officer at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, told FOX 7 Miami. Posted by Elizabeth Pritchett President Joe Biden declared that an emergency exists in the state of North Carolina on Saturday, following Ian’s impact and has ordered federal agencies to help in state and local disaster relief efforts.   The president authorized the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to help alleviate the “hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, and to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in all 100 North Carolina counties and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians,” the White House said in a statement. “FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency,” the White House added. Nearly 360,000 people are without power in North Carolina due to Ian, now a post-tropical cyclone. Posted by Lawrence Richard Posted by Lawrence Richard Posted by Lawrence Richard A steeple blew off a church in Virginia Beach, Virginia on Friday as Ian, now a post-tropical cyclone, battered the Hampton Roads area with 45-55 mph winds Friday. The steeple of Galilee Episcopal Church, located on 41st Street and Pacific Avenue, is currently wedged between facility and the neighboring Holly Hill Apartment complex, WAVY reported. Some scattered power outages and other minor damage has been reported across the area. High wind warnings remain in effect for Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Suffolk, Newport News, Hampton, Portsmouth, and Chesapeake through Saturday morning. Posted by Lawrence Richard Post-tropical Cyclone Ian continues to weaken as it crosses the Carolinas and weather models predict it will continue traveling north before it wholly dissipates over Virginia late Saturday. After regaining strength over the Atlantic, Ian made landfall near Charleston, South Carolina on Friday as a Category 1. The storm’s 60 mph winds and major flooding continues to impact local communities and about 2 million people across Florida, the Carolinas, and Virginia are without power. As of 11 p.m. Friday, just under 1.4 million energy consumers in Florida are without power — a sizeable decline from the 2.7 million people that were without power earlier this week. About 400,000 people in North Carolina, about 80,000 people in South Carolina and 100,000 people in Virginia are without power. Extreme flash flood warnings are in place for several North Carolina cities including Lexington, Asheboro, Sanford, Raleigh, and parts of Dunn. High surf advisories or coastal flood warnings are still in place along the East Coast, from Conway, South Carolina to Long Branch, New Jersey. Posted by Lawrence Richard Live Coverage begins here Read More…

75+ Things To Do In October: NAS JAX Air Show, Haunted Houses, AEW And More https://digitalalabamanews.com/75-things-to-do-in-october-nas-jax-air-show-haunted-houses-aew-and-more/ Finally, it’s getting cool enough to actually do things in Northeast Florida, and October is coming through in a big way with concerts, art shows, comedy acts, live theater and festivals.   Here’s some of the best of them.  Signature events  • River City Pride, Oct. 1-2 in Riverside. Celebrate the city’s LGBTQ+ community with a park cleanup and comedy show on Oct. 1 and a festival at Riverside Park on Oct. 2, with live music and the River City Pride Cabaret. (A parade planned for Oct. 1 will be rescheduled due to Hurricane I jaxrcpride.org  • Amelia Island Jazz Festival, Oct. 2-9 in Fernandina Beach. Performances by John Pizzarelli, Ken Peplowski, Les de Merle and Bonnie Eisele, UNF Jazz Ensemble 2, Trio Caliente and others at various venues on Amelia Island. ameliaislandjazzfest.com  • Furyk & Friends golf tournament, Oct. 7-9 at Timuquana Country Club, $25-$350. The PGA Tour Champions return to Jacksonville for a 54-hole tournament with a field slated to include Jim Furyk, John Daly, Davis Love III and Bernhard Langer. There’s also an associated concert by Jake Owen and Jordan Davis at Daily’s Place on Oct. 4 ($39.99). constellationfurykandfriends.com  • Jaguars home games. The Jaguars have three “home” games in October, but only two of them are in Jacksonville. They play at TIAA Bank Field against the Houston Texans on Oct. 9 and the New York Giants on Oct. 23, plus an Oct. 30 game against the Denver Broncos in London. $48-$337. jaguars.com    • Wasabi Con, Oct. 15-16 at the Prime Osborn Convention Center, $30-$50. Geeks and nerds take over the Prime Osborn for a weekend of anime, cosplay and gaming, guest panels, costume contests, lip-sync battles and exhibitors. wasabicon.com  • TedXJacksonville, Oct. 22 at the Terry Theater, $125. A dozen speakers, including scientists, students, educators, industrialists and entepreneurs, explore what’s possible during a day-long presentation. tedxjacksonville.com  • NAS JAX Air Show, Oct. 22-23 at NAS Jacksonville. The Blue Angels return to the place of their birth, headlining the annual air show that’s been missing from Jacksonville’s skies for more than two years. Dozens of other aerialists, parachute teams and static aircraft displays will also be at the show. nasjaxairshow.com  • Georgia-Florida game, Oct. 27-29 at TIAA Bank Field. The Bulldogs and the Gators kick off at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, but the game is only part of the festivities. There’s also a big Bold City Bash party, a Hall of Fame induction ceremony, a Georgia-Florida baseball game and a Fan Fare at the Daily’s Place flex field. gafljax.com  Halloween events  • 13th Floor Haunted House Jacksonville, Oct. 1-2, 6-9, 13-16, 19-23, 25-31, at 9230 Arlington Expressway. $19.99-$99.99. Three scare houses (Chop House, All Hallows Eve, Legends of the Deep), plus mini escape games and axe throwing. 13thfloorjacksonville.com  • Haunt Nights, Oct. 7-8, 14-15, 21-22, 28-31, at Adventure Landing, 1944 Beach Blvd. $24.99-$34.99. Two scare houses (Payn Manor, Dark Fables 3D), plus mini-golf, go-karts and video arcade. hauntnightsjax.com • Conner’s A-Maize-ing Acres, open Fridays and Saturdays in October at 19856 Baldwin and St. George Road in Hilliard. $16.99-$35. Corn maze, wagon rides on a working farm. connerscornmaze.com  • Amazing Grace Family Farms, open Fridays and Saturdays in October at 4251 SR 21 in Green Cove Springs. Family-friendly crop maze, cow train, corn crib, farm animals. agcropmaze.com  • “The Rocky Horror Show Live,” 11 p.m. Oct. 14, 15, 21, 22 and 27-31 at Alhambra Theatre & Dining. $42-$58.33. In the evenings, Alhambra is staging “Ghost: The Musical,” but things get a little campier late at night. For ages 18 and over. alhambrajax.com   • Spooktacular, Oct. 14-16, 20-23, 27-31 at the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens. $30-$35. Zoo pathways taken over by themed decorations and mildly scary characters after hours. jacksonvillezoo.org • Halloween Doors and More, Oct. 15 at Jacksonville Fairgrounds. $60-$125. Family-friendly event with superheroes and storybook characters benefitting pediatric palliative and hospice care through Community PedsCare. communityhospice.com • Halloween Doors and More Drive-in Movie Experience, Oct. 16 at Jacksonville Fairgrounds. $25 per vehicle per movie. Showing “Trolls: World Tour” at 5 p.m., “Hocus Pocus” at 7:30 p.m. communityhospice.com • “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Oct. 29 at the Florida Theatre. $15. Karissa Wade returns to host a screening of the classic camp film, complete with costume contests, live music and audience participation. floridatheatre.com  Festivals  • Soul Food & Music Festival, Oct. 1 at Vera Francis Hall Park in Green Cove Springs. Parade, Southern cooking, food competitions, talent show, live music. gcssoulfood.net  • Beaches Oktoberfest, Oct. 7-8 at Seawalk Pavilion. $12-$225. Live music from Inner Circle and Corey Smith, stein-hoisting and bratwurst-eating competitions. beachesoktoberfest.com  • Rhythm & Ribs Festival, Oct. 14-16 at Francis Field in St. Augustine. $5-$30. Live music, regional and national champion barbecue, vendors, games and rides for kids. rhythmandribs.net  • Town of Orange Park Fall Festival, Oct. 15-16 at Park and Kingsley avenues in Orange Park. Free. Artists, vendors, live music, kids’ zone. opfallfestival.com  • Fall Family Festival, Oct. 20 in Green Cove Springs. Flea market, live music, kids’ games, plus candlelight tours of historic jail, courthouse and railroad depot. exploreclay.com • October Gullah Fest, Oct. 26 at the Cookbook Café, 1827 N. Pearl St. Art, storytelling, music, food and dancing. gullahgeecheeglobal.com  • St. Benedict the Moor Blues Fest, Oct. 28-30 at St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church Rectory in St. Augustine. Tenth annual fest with nine blues acts in a historical setting, benefiting the Catholic Mission Rectory Fund. saintbensbluesfest.com  Concerts  • Benise, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 6, at the Florida Theatre. $35-$95. You’ve probably seen the Prince of the Spanish Guitar’s specials on PBS. Expect colorful flamenco dancers and some unlikely cover songs in his show. floridatheatre.com  • Zac Brown Band, 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 7, at Daily’s Place. $79.50-$125. Country and rock collide head-on at a ZBB show, with tight harmonies, chicken-fried rhythms and a fearsome guitar attack. dailysplace.com  • Billy Cobham’s Crosswinds Project, 8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 12, at the Ritz Theatre. $35. The legendary jazz fusion drummer from Miles Davis’ band and the Mahavishnu Orchestra comes to the tiny Ritz Theatre. ritzjacksonville.com   • Yes, 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13, at the Florida Theatre. $49.50-$99.50. The progressive rock band’s 2020 show was one of the first in Jacksonville to be canceled by the pandemic. They’re back, celebrating the 50th anniversary of their “Close to the Edge” album by playing the whole thing. floridatheatre.com  • Chris Stapleton, with Elle King, 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13, at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena. $56.84-$350. Don’t let the mountain man appearance fool you, Stapleton is a master songwriter and performer. jaxevents.com  • Suwannee Roots Revival, Oct. 13-16 at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak. Enjoy live music from JJ Grey & Mofro, the Punch Brothers, Donna the Buffalo, Jim Lauderdale and others then, when the music stops, walk back to your campsite, bed down and get up the next day to do it again. $175-$250. suwanneerootsrevival.com  • Gov’t Mule with Old Crow Medicine Show, 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14, at the St. Augustine Amphitheatre. $44-$81. Old-school rock band led by Warren Haynes, the most versatile musician in the business. theamp.com  • Keith Sweat, with Monica, Tevin Campbell, Tamar Braxton, 112 and Silk, 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14, at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena. $75-$175. That’s an awful lot of R&B firepower for one stage. jaxevents.com  • Greta Van Fleet, 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 21, at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena. $46.59-$275. Young Michigan hard rock quartet that sounds like they time-traveled from the early ‘70s. jaxevents.com • Weird Al Yankovic,  7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 17, at the Thrasher-Horne Center. $39-$329. Is he a musician or a comedian? We’re not sure, but we can hardly wait for the upcoming biopic starring Daniel Radcliffe. thcenter.org  • .38 Special, 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 21, at the Florida Theatre. $42.50-$75. They came out of Jacksonville in the ‘70s as sort of a Lynyrd Skynyrd Jr., but quickly found their own sound and became a huge arena rock act. floridatheatre.com  • Luke Bryan, 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 28, at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena. $56.46-$250. One of country music’s most consistent hitmakers takes the stage the night before the Florida-Georgia game. jaxevents.com  Laughs  • Jerry Seinfeld, 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 1, at the Moran Theatre. Sold out. Is it possible that we’re coming up on 25 years since “Seinfeld” went off the air? Regardless, Jerry’s still a huge draw. jaxevents.com  • Todd Barry, 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 1, at the Ponte Vedra Concert Hall. $33.50. Todd Barry’s not a household name, but maybe he should be, with Netflix specials, late-night talk show appearances and a sneaky sense of humor. pvconcerthall.com  • First Coast Comedy Presents: Improv Comedy Night, 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 7, at the Murray Hill Theatre. $13. No scripts, just making up the laughs as they go along. Plus, it being the Murray Hill, it’s billed as “comedy that’s clean, not mean.” murrayhilltheatre.com  • Royal Comedy Tour 2022, with Sommore, Bruce Bruce, Lavell Crawford and Gary Owen, 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 7, at the Times-Union Center. $59-$125. Expect a ton of laughs with four headliners on the same bill. jaxevents.com   • Jen Fulwiler, 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 8, at the Ponte Vedra Concert Hall. $35-$40. You don’t see a lot of m...

Identity Crisis https://digitalalabamanews.com/identity-crisis/ Chris Jones, the Democratic nominee for governor of Arkansas, spoke with religious leaders Tuesday in North Little Rock, highlighting his faith and his vision for the state. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Frank E. Lockwood) With two preachers’ kids and a pastor in the race, Arkansans are poised to elect a governor who can sing hymns by heart and quote Scripture from memory. While acknowledging that many white evangelicals already have an affinity for Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the daughter of former Southern Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee, leaders of Vote Common Good are urging Christian voters to take a look at Democrat Chris Jones as well, arguing that his priorities better reflect gospel principles. The group held a rally Tuesday at Lindsey’s Hospitality House in North Little Rock, dubbed “Faith, Hope and Love: Not Insurrections and Christian Nationalism.” Preston Clegg, pastor of Little Rock’s Second Baptist Church Downtown, and one of the few white evangelical ministers from Central Arkansas in attendance, led the group in prayer. He thanked God “for Chris, for his heart, for his mind, for his life, for his witness, for his faith to step out and do something bold,” adding, “We see the goodness in it. We see the wonder in it, we see needles moving. We see people reconsidering and we see a little light that’s shining very very, very bright in a state we all love.” Vote Common Good, which launched during the 2018 congressional campaign, focuses on “inspiring, energizing, and mobilizing people of faith” while also helping “train and support Democratic candidates to connect with Evangelical and Catholic voters,” its website states. “There’s kind of this narrative that if you are a person of faith, if you’re a Christian, then you reflexively vote Republican, and we’re trying to communicate that for a lot of us, our faith compels us to vote differently than that,” said Robb Ryerse, Vote Common Good’s political director and a former Republican congressional candidate from Northwest Arkansas. “Our working assumption is that there’s 5% to 15% of evangelicals that are flippable, that are going through some kind of political identity crisis because of Jan. 6, because of Donald Trump, because of the Roe [v. Wade] decision, kids in cages,” Ryerse said. “We’re trying to communicate to the people that are going through that kind of political identity crisis: ‘You’re not alone,'” he said. ‘EXCEPTIONAL CANDIDATES’ Presented with “exceptional candidates,” such as Jones, a significant number of evangelicals can be persuaded to vote Democratic, Ryerse said. Jones, an MIT-educated nuclear engineer whose father is a United Methodist pastor in Pine Bluff, is “a person of faith, but isn’t trying to impose that on everybody else,” he added. Ryerse, co-founder and former pastor of Vintage Fellowship in Fayetteville, challenged 3rd district U.S. Rep. Steve Womack of Rogers in the 2018 Republican primary, capturing 15.8% of the vote. He subsequently published a book about the campaign, titled: “Running for Our Lives: A Story of Faith, Politics and the Common Good.” Now he’s helping campaign for Democratic candidates, not only in Arkansas but around the country. Similar stops are scheduled next week in Dallas and Austin, Texas; and Gardner, Kan. The autumn itinerary, at this point, also includes stops in Iowa, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. White evangelical Christians constitute the largest and most reliable bloc within the Republican Party. ‘EVANGELICAL PROGRESSIVE’ In 2016, Donald Trump received 81% of their votes, but only 76% in 2020, according to exit polling published in the New York Times. Doug Pagitt, founding pastor of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis, is a self-described “evangelical progressive” and Vote Common Good’s executive director. At Tuesday’s event, he questioned the Republican gubernatorial nominee’s leadership abilities, knocking the former White House press secretary without denying her faith. “I believe Sarah Huckabee Sanders is the light of the world and the salt of the earth,” he said. “But not every light of the world should be the governor of the great state of Arkansas, and we have to make sure that she doesn’t take her dim little light and mess up this state,” Pagitt said. Jones alleged that the opposition is “driving us towards division, hate, otherism and chaos.” If elected, Jones suggested he would be guided by his beliefs while also respecting the beliefs of others. “I’m a firm believer that, as a Christian, as a person of faith, as an ordained minister, that I should stand on my faith and live out my values. And I can do that without turning the state into a church,” he said. The Sanders campaign declined to comment on the gathering. ‘A VERY HARD SELL’ Jerry Cox, founder and president of the Arkansas Family Council, said it would be “a very hard sell,” to convince evangelicals to vote for candidates who wholeheartedly embrace positions espoused by the Democratic Party, including abortion and religious liberty. “What you would be asking them to do would be to betray the things that they believe most,” Cox said. In an interview, Ricky Dale Harrington, the Libertarian gubernatorial candidate and pastor of Mount Beulah Christian Church in Pine Bluff, said his faith also guides him. But he cautioned that religion and politics can be a toxic combination, pointing to examples from “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” a 16th-century account of people tortured and killed for their faith. “As a Christian, we strive every day to be our better selves and to walk the line that we are commanded to walk according to our faith. In the Christian faith, love is the center point,” he said.     Robb Ryerse, who once led a Fayetteville congregation, is now political director of Vote Common Good. He ran unsuccessfully against 3rd district U.S. Rep. Steve Womack of Rogers in the 2018 Republican primary. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Frank E. Lockwood)    Read More…

Kellyanne Conway Says Trump 'wants His Old Job Back' And Would Like To Announce 2024 Run Within Weeks https://digitalalabamanews.com/kellyanne-conway-says-trump-wants-his-old-job-back-and-would-like-to-announce-2024-run-within-weeks/ Former President Donald Trump would like to announce his 2024 run within weeks, Kellyanne Conway told CBS News. He “wants his old job back,” Conway, a top advisor to the former president, said.GOP figureheads, including Kellyanne Conway, have advised him to wait until after the midterms. Former President Donald Trump is eager to get back into the White House, and wants to announce his 2024 run in the coming weeks, said his 2016 campaign manager and close ally Kellyanne Conway. Speaking on Friday with CBS News, Conway was asked by senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge whether Trump would announce his candidacy after the midterm elections and before Thanksgiving. “Well, he would like to,” said Conway, per CBS News. “He’s as active as anybody in these midterm elections. That’s important to the calculus also, Catherine, because we have the most ironic, if not unprecedented situation right now,” Conway continued. “We have a president, a current president, whose party doesn’t really want him to campaign with them.” Trump will assess the timing of his announcement after the midterms, which take place on November 8, Conway said. “I will tell you why he wants to run for president,” she said. “Donald Trump wants his old job back.” In July, Conway described Trump as “champing at the bit” to announce his third presidential bid. Speaking to CBS News, she said she advised him to wait until right after the midterms. FOLLOW BUSINESS INSIDER AFRICA Our newsletter gives you access to a curated selection of the most important stories daily. Thanks for signing up for our daily insight on the African economy. We bring you daily editor picks from the best Business Insider news content so you can stay updated on the latest topics and conversations on the African market, leaders, careers and lifestyle. Also join us across all of our other channels – we love to be connected! Unblock notifications in browser settings. Read More…

Letters: Confederate Statue Removal Won’t Take Us Forward https://digitalalabamanews.com/letters-confederate-statue-removal-wont-take-us-forward/ After reading the Sept. 23 article about a lawsuit over taxpayer money used to maintain tributes to the Confederacy, I wonder when this attempt will cease to remove any evidence of the history of our nation. I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, in the time of Martin Luther King’s righteous marches for freedom. I applauded the civil rights laws that came from that era.    I have watched and lived through years of improved relationships for all people, though I realize that we still need to improve. We have been moving forward every year to leave behind those dark days in our history. Our nation has been evolving through mistakes, trial and error over time to improve life in this country.   Until the past few years, the nation seemed to improve life in most areas. However, it appears that the individual bringing the lawsuit somehow wishes to remove all historical evidence of those dark days of the Civil War. As the only conflict fought among our own people, the outcome of that war was freedom and the formal end of slavery in this nation. Those memorials to both the North and South following that war were to remember those who served; not slavery.    The lawsuit states that these memorials are violating the Constitution’s 13th and 14th Amendments, as well as equal enjoyment of public accommodations (guaranteed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964). I believe many of the memorials can be grandfathered in, as most were placed more than 100 years ago. Also, “full and equal enjoyment” is meant for all people, not just some.    This is not moving forward — only backward. If this lawsuit is honored, what’s next?  Do we remove or change the name of all cities, counties and establishments tied to any past slave owners, including presidents and the Founding Fathers?    Slavery was accepted in those days as part of the culture of the time. Although it is totally unacceptable in the present day, I think most people really don’t know (or care) where place names originated. We all have to accept that and move on, not stagnate in the wrongs of our past or attempt to remove what we don’t like in our history.  Margaret Wright, Jacksonville  Rubio strong on inflation The greatest threat facing American families today is inflation. For the first time in a generation, families are struggling to pay for food and gasoline. Grocery prices have had their highest spike in 43 years, and gasoline costs more than doubled since Joe Biden took office. It is a shameful turn of events after many years of low inflation and a strong economy.   The stimulus bill championed by Joe Biden and his cohorts in Congress is said to have cost more than $1.9 trillion, and their “Inflation Reduction Act” more than $700 billion. In addition, my analysis of the Congressional Budget Office report on Biden’s executive orders reveals costs of between $430 billion to nearly $500 billion, while the student loan forgiveness plan is estimated by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn-Wharton Budget Model to cost around $1 trillion.      That means the Biden Administration is responsible for more than $4 trillion in new spending. Economists agree that one of the core causes of inflation is deficit spending by the government; this spending spree is the root cause of our inflation and the pain it causes families in Florida.   Inflation averaged below 3% throughout President Trump’s term in office, and has been climbing consistently since Biden and the Democrats were elected. Rep. Val Demings — now running for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Marco Rubio — celebrated this accomplishment by voting for the Inflation Reduction Act.    To me, the choice couldn’t be clearer when it comes to representing Florida in the U.S. Senate. Sen. Rubio has consistently voted against this unparalleled deficit spending, and he is the only choice that can represent Florida.   Michael Bell, Jacksonville   Get it together, JTA  As one who travels throughout Northeast Florida on a daily basis, I simply do not understand why JTA has lost sight of its core mission. Every JTA vehicle runs around with a license plate that proclaims “Florida” but the condition of the local roads under their responsibility is atrocious.    All over the Jacksonville area we are forced to drive on streets that are full of potholes, filled with hazard cones, blocked by obstructions or bordered by sidewalks in disrepair. They have numerous bus shelters in a storage area on Philips Highway while riders stand in the heat and rain at bus stops. At the same time, JTA leadership wants to spend millions on a Skyway with limited ridership while operating two bus systems with vehicles that are 50% full at best.    It doesn’t take a traffic engineer to visit any part of the city to see the disrepair of our streets. In the Urban Core, Brooklyn, LaVilla, Riverside, Avondale, Ortega, Lakewood, the Northside, Eastside, Westside, Southside or any of the subcommunities within these areas, there are streets that JTA has neglected to the point that they are unsafe to drive. Plus, it’s a constant cost to maintain our family or work vehicles.    Combined with FDOT’s decades-long construction projects on roads and highways under their responsibility, our city has become extremely unsafe for driving. It is time the mayor and governor use the bully pulpit to force both agencies to get their act together and perform the job they receive millions of tax dollars to do.    Eddie Brown, Jacksonville  Many layers to immigration issue How to handle immigration in the United States has long been a point of contention. There are many sides to this issue that can’t be summed up by politicians in news conferences or stump speeches.   Addressing complicated situations requires leadership and collaboration. Being a leader means acknowledging conflict and approaching it with intelligence, ingenuity and integrity. In other words, gathering and analyzing actual data about the situation, not fear-mongering based on inaccurate assumptions and with outdated, cliched buzzwords.  When the issue at hand involves the lives and well-being of our fellow humans, leadership should also include decency and compassion. Being a decent and compassionate leader doesn’t mean always buckling to the demands of opposing forces, but it should include empathy. It can mean taking a step back to look at how a situation developed, acknowledging there is validity to the feelings of others (even if we don’t agree with them) or that we might think differently about the same situation under different circumstances.    Leadership is not staging a ploy or taking advantage of others to make a point. Unfortunately, elected officials often act first as politicians, not as leaders. And politics does not have the same standards or ethics as leadership.    I hope that our current and future state elected officials can start to approach critical issues as leaders, not just as politicians.   Cindy Arco, Jacksonville  PBS series brings comparisons I could not have watched the new six-hour PBS documentary of Ken Burns’ “The U.S. and the Holocaust” without drawing comparisons with Hitler’s far right antisemitism and previous events during Trump’s presidency that occurred in Charlottesville, as well as at the Capitol on Jan. 6. In fact, at the end of the documentary, Burns did the same.   The documentary emphasizes the total unwillingness of the U.S. (and many other countries) to help save the Jews of Eastern Europe by allowing them to emigrate here.  By the late 1930s, newspapers reported Hitler’s desire to exterminate the Jews and his earlier actions taken against them. Americans for the most part knew of the situation and yet did almost nothing to help — particularly the government, which could have increased immigration quotas.   I cannot help drawing parallels between the recent action of Gov. DeSantis sending asylum seekers from Venezuela (who were already in Texas) to Martha’s Vineyard as if they were not humans, but mere political pawns for his re-election campaign.     Once again, to paraphrase the old adage, “if we don’t know history, we are doomed to repeat it.”    Maurine Meleck, Ponte Vedra Beach   Economy and rights need context I am writing in response to the letter writer of Sept. 18, who feels the U.S. economy just naturally rises and falls. The writer also feels a constitutional right has been taken away. First, the U.S. economy does rise and fall, but it can be influenced by events either naturally occurring or resulting from human intervention. Extreme weather like droughts, war or pandemics can affect it, as can variations in supply and demand. Another factor is the injection of too much money into the system (a 40% increase in the last two years), which creates inflation and the corresponding increase in interest rates to subdue it.   Fortunately, we have a Federal Reserve to correct the spikes and dips. Some other countries — such as Cuba, Venezuela and Greece — do not have these regulating bodies.   Second, the Supreme Court deals with matters pertinent to the U.S. Constitution. They did not ban abortion or women’s reproductive issues; they just stated that those issues are not part of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights and remanded these matters to the states, where they belong.   Jerry Miller, Ponte Vedra  Here’s an idea for state surplus The Florida state government is reportedly flush $20 billion in reserve and is anticipating another $13 billion next year, for a total of $33 billion for the rainy-day fund. Historically, $5-10 billion was enough to insure adequate funds for hurricanes and other natural catastrophes.   So, what are elected officials doing with so much money? Those elected officials are so generous with our money that they are reducing or eliminating sales tax on g...

Kentucky Vs. Ole Miss By The Numbers https://digitalalabamanews.com/kentucky-vs-ole-miss-by-the-numbers/ No. 7 Kentucky (4-0, 1-0) at No. 14 Ole Miss (4-0, 0-0) 11 a.m. CDT Saturday (ESPN) Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Mississippi 1 Previous Kentucky-Ole Miss game has featured two ranked teams. On Sept. 27, 1958, No. 9 Ole Miss defeated No. 17 Kentucky 27-6 in Memphis. The teams have squared off 29 times since that contest. 3 TD receptions for Kentucky WR Dane Key, tied for the school freshman record set by Derek Abney in 2000 and equaled by Tommy Cook in 2001. Key has caught 15 passes for 241 yards this season. MORE SEC FOOTBALL BY THE NUMBERS: · TOP 10 FOR WEEK 5 · TOP 10 FROM WEEK 4 4 Consecutive games with a 100-yard rusher for Ole Miss, the first time that has happened for the Rebels since 1999. Ole Miss leads the SEC with 1,123 rushing yards in 2022. RBs Zach Evans and Quinshon Judkins have two 100-yard games apiece and QB Jaxson Dart has one for Ole Miss. Since the start of the 2021 season, only one player has rushed for 100 yards against Kentucky. LSU RB Tyrion Davis-Price had 147 yards and two TDs on 22 rushing attempts in a 42-21 loss to the Wildcats on Oct. 9. 4 200-yard rushing games for Ole Miss in 2022. The Rebels have surpassed 200 yards on the ground in every game this season. Kentucky most recently allowed an opposing team to rush for 200 yards on Dec. 5, 2020, in a 41-18 victory over South Carolina – 18 games ago. 5 Consecutive 100-yard rushing games for Kentucky RB Christopher Rodriguez Jr. Rodriguez ranks second in SEC history among players with at least 400 rushing attempts in career yards-per-carry average. Rodriguez has averaged 6.57 yards on 417 rushing attempts. Auburn RB Bo Jackson averaged 6.62 yards on 650 carries from 1982 through 1985 to set the conference mark. Rodriguez has not played this season. 10 Victories for Kentucky coach Mark Stoops against opponents ranked in the AP Poll, the most among Wildcats coaches. Paul “Bear” Bryant and Fran Curci defeated nine ranked opponents apiece while coaching Kentucky. Stoops passed their mark in Kentucky’s 26-16 victory over No. 12 Florida on Sept. 10. 12 Consecutive victories in home games for Ole Miss, which hasn’t lost at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium since a 35-28 setback against Auburn on Oct. 24, 2020. It’s the Rebels’ longest winning streak in Oxford since a 20-17 loss to Mississippi State on Dec. 5, 1964, ended a 12-game streak. 14 Consecutive losses for Kentucky when playing an SEC West team on the road. The Wildcats haven’t won on an SEC West rival’s home field since Oct. 17, 2009, when Kentucky defeated Auburn 21-14 at Jordan-Hare Stadium. 29 Victories for Ole Miss, 14 victories for Kentucky and one tie in the Rebels-Wildcats series. The official record is 28-14-1 because Ole Miss vacated a 2010 victory due to NCAA sanctions. The teams met for the first time in 1944 and squared off annually through 1971. Ole Miss has an 8-2 record against Kentucky in Oxford. 30 Consecutive games with a reception for Kentucky WR Tayvion Robinson, who has 106 catches for 1,637 yards and 10 TDs during the streak. The first 26 games of the streak occurred while Robinson played for Virginia Tech. 45 Years since Kentucky had a winning streak longer than the Wildcats’ current eight-game run. The current winning streak is tied for the fourth-longest in school history and dates from a 45-42 loss to Tennessee on Nov. 6. In 1977, Kentucky won nine consecutive games. The Wildcats had a 12-game winning streak during the 1909 and 1910 seasons, a 10-game streak in 1950 and a nine-game streak during the 1898 and 1899 seasons. 117 Passes have been thrown by both Kentucky and its opponents this season. The Wildcats have 79 completions for 1,185 yards. Kentucky’s opponents have 59 completions for 655 yards. 303 Passing yards in a 31-23 victory over Northern Illinois on Sept. 24 and 377 in a 31-0 victory over Youngstown State on Sept. 17 for Kentucky QB Will Levis. He became the first Kentucky player with 300 passing yards in back-to-back games since Patrick Towles in 2015. Levis also became the 11th player to reach 4,000 career passing yards in last week’s game. 655 Passing yards for Kentucky’s opponents this season. The Wildcats have held each of their first four opponents to fewer than 200 passing yards, the first time that’s happened for Kentucky since 1989. FOR MORE OF AL.COM’S COVERAGE OF THE SEC, GO TO OUR SEC PAGE Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1. If you purchase a product or register for an account through one of the links on our site, we may receive compensation. Read More…

Why Most Twitter Users Don't Follow Political 'elites' But Celebrities https://digitalalabamanews.com/why-most-twitter-users-dont-follow-political-elites-but-celebrities/ New York: Most Twitter users don’t follow political elites and they are much more likely to follow celebrities than an elected official, suggest researchers. Despite the prominence and impact of presidents, congressmen, journalists, pundits and the news media, researchers found that only 40 per cent of Twitter users follow one or more political “elites” and the remaining 60 per cent follow no political actors at all, according to the study published in the journal Science Advances. “Those users who do follow political accounts on Twitter, however, stick to insular online communities and mostly follow and share information from their political in-group,” said Magdalena Wojcieszak, lead author and professor of communication at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Amsterdam. In other words, speaking to ongoing debates about so-called “echo chambers” on social media platforms, the small group of users who do follow political elites display clear political biases and engage with these elites in a very one-sided way. The findings come after researchers analysed four years’ worth of data from a sampling of 1.5 million Twitter users. Researchers concluded that even though the group of social media users who display political biases in their online behaviours is small, it is nevertheless consequential. “Given that we analysed over 2,500 American political elite accounts including Donald Trump, Joe Biden, prominent pundits including Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity, and the most popular media outlets such as MSNBC and Fox News, the fact that only 23 per cent of the representative sample of over 1.5 million users follow three of more of such elite accounts is revealing,” Wojcieszak informed. The research also reveals important ideological asymmetries: conservative users are roughly twice as likely as liberals to share in-group versus out-group content, as well as to add negative commentary to out-group shares. “Overall, the majority of American Twitter users are not sufficiently interested in politics to follow even a single political or media elite from our list,” Wojcieszak said. Given a growing radicalisation in America, decreasing support for democratic norms, and rising support for political violence, concerns about political biases on social media platforms are valid, no matter how small the groups displaying those biases may be. Read More…

Trump Gives Racist Nickname To Ex-Transport Secretary In Rant About Mitch McConnell https://digitalalabamanews.com/trump-gives-racist-nickname-to-ex-transport-secretary-in-rant-about-mitch-mcconnell/ Former president Donald Trump lashed out at Mitch McConnell and his wife in a rant on social media by saying the Republican had a “death wish” for supporting “Democrat sponsored bills”. In a post on his Twitter-like social media platform Truth Social, Mr Trump wrote on Friday night: “Is McConnell approving all of these Trillions of Dollars worth of Democrat sponsored Bills, without even the slightest bit of negotiation, because he hates Donald J Trump, and he knows I am strongly opposed to them, or is he doing it because he believes in the Fake and Highly Destructive Green New Deal, and is willing to take the Country down with him?” He also mocked Mr McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who served as the secretary of transport in his administration by giving her a racist nickname. “In any event, either reason is unacceptable. He has a DEATH WISH. Must immediately seek help and advise from his China loving wife, Coco Chow!” The former president’s attack on the senate minority leader came hours after Congress approved and president Joe Biden signed a stopgap funding bill to avert a federal government shutdown. The bill cleared was cleared in the House by a 230-201 vote on Friday and on a 72-25 vote in the Senate on Thursday, reported CNN. The latest attack on Mr McConnell comes just days after excerpts from Maggie Haberman’s new book Confidence Man published in The Atlantic on Sunday said the former president had called his fellow Republican “a piece of s***”. He also accused other Republican senators of treating him like a “schmuck”. Mr McConnell had criticised the former president in the aftermath of the attack on the US Capitol last January, but refused to impeach him the following month. It is not, however, clear which bills Mr Trump was referring to and criticising on Friday, or what he meant as he accused McConnell of believing in the Green New Deal. The deal includes a package of progressive proposals that Mr McConnell had blocked from coming to the Senate floor for a vote when he was majority leader. On Tuesday, Mr McConnell said he will “proudly support” legislation to overhaul rules for certifying presidential elections. Read More…

Analysis | The Biggest Threat To Democracy And Peace Is Thuggishness https://digitalalabamanews.com/analysis-the-biggest-threat-to-democracy-and-peace-is-thuggishness/ Democracy is in a worldwide slump. So is peace — both the international and the domestic sort. There are lots of reasons. What’s the biggest? Many pundits blame various kinds of polarization: Left against right, elitist versus populist, blue against red, educated or rich against uneducated or poor, nativist versus cosmopolitan, Sino-Russian autocratic against “Western” democratic, and so forth.  I’ll argue that the dichotomy that matters more than any of these is civil versus thuggish. And our problem — in the US, Europe, Russia, Brazil, China, the United Nations — is that, lately, the thugs have been winning almost everywhere. “Thug” comes from Hindi and originally referred to violent gangs of robbers. Nowadays we use the word for hooligans, bullies or other brutes. Among rappers, the term has taken on an ironic twist, but we’ll leave that usage to them. In essence, thuggishness is intimidation with the threat of violence. It spreads wherever civility breaks down. In places like Germany or Italy after World War I, thugs took to the streets, beating up or shouting down anybody they didn’t like. They called themselves Blackshirts, Brownshirts, Free Corps, Red Fronts and what have you. Contemporary analogs include Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Night Wolves (a Russian motorcycle club) and other packs. But whether they adulate Mussolini, Lenin, Trump, Putin or any other leader, politics is arguably only a veneer. The underlying phenomenon is thuggishness. Thugs don’t have to be physically pugnacious to vandalize the public square. It suffices for the violence to be implied, verbal or even subliminal. That’s because aggression in any form ruins the things that make civilized society possible: civics and conversation. The words “civil” and “polite” both come from Latin and Greek roots that also gave us such words as “city” and “politics.” To “converse” originally meant “to turn toward” one another, with the motivation to connect — and ideally to inch closer to the truth of something, perhaps even to find solutions to common problems. Nuance, contradiction, subtlety, ambivalence and humor are features of such congregating, not bugs. But when thugs show up for colloquy, they’re not there to converse, connect, learn, understand or listen. They’re in it to dominate. Winning is all, truth irrelevant. This is bad faith, the malware that corrupts civics. The result is fake “debates” and “conversations.” They typically descend into belligerent whataboutism. I lied? Well, what about all those lies your people told? The merit of any argument becomes irrelevant. The only thing that counts is the ammo the thugs can fire ad hominem — “at the person” across from them — and the artillery cover they get from their mob. Whataboutism and other forms of verbal thuggishness are hardly a recent invention. They were already a major theme in the Socratic dialogues (at that time the so-called Sophists were the rhetorical thugs), and then in the trial that ended in a jury of 500 Athenians condemning Socrates to death.  But modern media have made the pathogen more virulent. In the US, Fox News and its clones on talk radio and TV in effect honed and perfected verbal thuggishness over decades. Social media picked up the baton. Twitter threads routinely deteriorate into digital shouting matches and name-calling. If last century’s Brownshirts or Blackshirts bludgeoned people, modern trolls “cancel” or “doxx” their victims.  Verbal thuggishness is problematic for two reasons. The first is that atmospherics matter. When thugs or their leaders prime a mob long enough with truculent rhetoric, the violence can easily turn physical. The result is outrages such as the attack on the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.  The second reason is that verbal thuggishness is a form of “epistemic vice.” Rather as bad money drives out good, it displaces “epistemic virtue,” a term academics use to refer to intellectual humility — the ability to recognize our cognitive limits, to admit when we’re wrong, to change or adjust our opinions, to keep our minds open. What happens when thugs take over — as in Weimar Germany — is that civil people get scared and retreat into their private spheres, leaving the public square to the ruffians. The public and epistemic virtues that America’s Founding Fathers cared so deeply about wane; the vices wax. Symptoms include the spread of conspiracy theories and a cynical disdain for truth. The only value left is power. If thuggishness is a virus that compromises the operating systems of open societies, is there an anti-malware patch? Not really, I fear. Our only defenses are our holdouts of civility. People who are reasonable and intellectually humble — “virtuous” — may still be in the numerical majority. But they’re too often inaudible. For democracy and peace to have a chance, they must start voting with their behavior — swaying TV ratings, rejecting lies and manipulations and more. The thugs must start losing. History suggests these struggles can go either way. More From Bloomberg Opinion: • Let’s Dare to Have Deeper Conversations, Even With Strangers: Andreas Kluth • The Jan. 6 Committee Should Keep Calling It an Attempted Coup: Timothy L. O’Brien • Why Putin Can’t Tap Fascism’s Greatest Resource: Leonid Bershidsky This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics. A former editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist, he is author of “Hannibal and Me.” More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion ©2022 Bloomberg L.P. Read More…

Ian Downgrades To Cyclone After South Carolina Landfall; Death Toll At 33, Rescues Continue https://digitalalabamanews.com/ian-downgrades-to-cyclone-after-south-carolina-landfall-death-toll-at-33-rescues-continue/ CHARLESTON, S.C. — The Florida death toll from Hurricane Ian rose to 33 Friday afternoon, ABC News reports, as Florida authorities on Friday afternoon confirmed several drowning deaths and other fatalities. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said the deaths included a 22-year-old woman who was ejected from an ATV rollover on Friday because of a road washout in Manatee County and a 71-year-old man who died of head injuries when he fell off a roof while putting up rain shutters on Wednesday. Many of the other deaths were drownings, including a 68-year-old woman who was swept into the ocean by a wave. Another three people died in Cuba as the storm made its way north earlier in the week. The death toll was expected to increase substantially when emergency officials have an opportunity to search many areas hardest hit by the storm. Ian made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane with winds at 85 mph near Georgetown, South Carolina, just after 2 p.m. Friday. It was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone hours later. Click here for live radar and the latest forecast on Ian’s path. PHOTOS: Haunting aerial images show Hurricane Ian’s aftermath in Fort Myers, Sanibel Island Damaged homes and debris are shown in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022, in Fort Myers Beach, Fla. AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee A revived Hurricane Ian battered coastal South Carolina on Friday, ripping apart piers and filling neighborhoods with calf-high water, after the deadly storm caused catastrophic damage in Florida and trapped thousands in their homes. Ian’s center came ashore near Georgetown with much weaker winds than when it crossed Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday as one of the strongest storms to ever hit the U.S. As it moved across South Carolina, Ian dropped from a hurricane to a post-tropical cyclone. Sheets of rain whipped trees and power lines and left many areas on Charleston’s downtown peninsula under water. Four piers along the coast, including two at Myrtle Beach, collapsed into the churning waves and washed away. Online cameras showed seawater filling neighborhoods in Garden City to calf level. Ian left a broad swath of destruction in Florida, flooding areas on both of its coasts, tearing homes from their slabs, demolishing beachfront businesses and leaving more than 2 million people without power. At least nine people were confirmed dead in the U.S. – a number that was expected to increase as officials confirm more deaths and search for people. Rescue crews piloted boats and waded through riverine streets Thursday to save thousands of people trapped amid flooded homes and shattered buildings. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that crews had gone door-to-door to over 3,000 homes in the hardest-hit areas. “There’s really been a Herculean effort,” he said during a news conference in Tallahassee. Among those killed were an 80-year-old woman and a 94-year-old man who relied on oxygen machines that stopped working amid power outages, as well as a 67-year-old man who was waiting to be rescued and fell into rising water inside his home, authorities said. Officials fear the death toll could rise substantially, given the wide territory swamped by the storm. Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said responders have focused so far on “hasty” searches, aimed at emergency rescues and initial assessments, which will be followed by two additional waves of searches. Initial responders who come across possible remains are leaving them without confirming, he said Friday, describing as an example the case of a submerged home. “The water was up over the rooftop, right, but we had a Coast Guard rescue swimmer swim down into it and he could identify that it appeared to be human remains. We do not know exactly how many,” Guthrie said. Desperate to locate and rescue their loved ones, social media users shared phone numbers, addresses and photos of their family members and friends online for anyone who can check on them. MORE: Chunk of Sanibel Causeway falls into sea during Ian, cutting off Florida island where 6.3K live A damaged causeway to Sanibel Island is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022, near Sanibel Island, Fla. AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee Orlando residents returned to flooded homes Friday, rolling up their pants to wade through muddy, knee-high water in their streets. Friends of Ramon Rodriguez dropped off ice, bottled water and hot coffee at the entrance to his subdivision, where 10 of the 50 homes were flooded and the road looked like a lake. He had no power or food at his house, and his car was trapped by the water. “There’s water everywhere,” Rodriguez said. “The situation here is pretty bad.” University of Central Florida students living at an apartment complex near the Orlando campus arrived to retrieve possessions from their waterlogged units. Deandra Smith, a nursing student, was asleep when others evacuated and stayed in her third-floor apartment with her dog. Other students helped get her to dry land Friday by pushing her through the flooded parking lot on a pontoon. She wasn’t sure if she should go back to her parents home in South Florida or find a shelter so she can still attend classes. “I’m still trying to figure it out,” she said. RELATED: Hurricane Ian leaves trail of destruction in Florida, with estimates of billions in damage The devastating storm surge destroyed many older homes on the barrier island of Sanibel, Florida, and gouged crevices into its sand dunes. Taller condominium buildings were intact but with the bottom floor blown out. Trees and utility poles were strewn everywhere. Municipal rescuers, private teams and the Coast Guard used boats and helicopters Friday to evacuate residents who stayed for the storm and then were cut off from the mainland when a causeway collapsed. Volunteers who went to the island on personal watercraft helped escort an elderly couple to an area where Coast Guard rescuers took them aboard a helicopter. Hours after weakening to a tropical storm while crossing the Florida peninsula, Ian regained strength Thursday evening over the Atlantic. Ian made landfall in South Carolina with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph (140 kph). When it hit Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday, it was a powerful Category 4 hurricane with 150 mph (240 kph). After the heaviest of the rainfall blew through Charleston, Will Shalosky examined a large elm tree in front of his house that had fallen across his downtown street. He noted the damage could have been much worse. RELATED: Hurricane Ian could cause $65 billion in damage “If this tree has fallen a different way, it would be in our house,” Shalosky said. “It’s pretty scary, pretty jarring.” In North Carolina, heavy rain bands and winds crept into the state Friday afternoon. Gov. Roy Cooper warned residents to be vigilant, given that up to 8 inches (20.3 centimeters) of rain could fall in some areas, with high winds. “Hurricane Ian is at our door. Expect drenching rain and sustained heavy winds over most of our state,” Cooper said. “Our message today is simple: Be smart and be safe.” In Washington, President Joe Biden said he was directing “every possible action be taken to save lives and get help to survivors.” “It’s going to take months, years to rebuild,” Biden said. “I just want the people of Florida to know, we see what you’re going through and we’re with you.” ___ Gomez Licon reported from Punta Gorda, Florida; Associated Press contributors include Terry Spencer and Tim Reynolds in Fort Myers, Florida; Cody Jackson in Tampa, Florida; Freida Frisaro in Miami; Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida; Seth Borenstein in Washington; and Bobby Caina Calvan in New York. ABC News contributed to this report Copyright © 2022 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. Read More…

Ukraine Troops Approach City That Lies In A Region Putin Illegally Annexed https://digitalalabamanews.com/ukraine-troops-approach-city-that-lies-in-a-region-putin-illegally-annexed/ Image Ukrainian soldiers near the city of Lyman in the eastern Donetsk region. The Ukrainian administrative leader of Donetsk said on Friday that the city was “half encircled.”Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Even as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia illegally moved to gobble up sovereign land in four territories of Ukraine on Friday, Ukrainian forces appeared to be edging closer to encircling Lyman, a strategic rail hub in the country’s east that lies within the territory Mr. Putin is claiming. Denis Pushilin, the leader of Russia’s proxy administration in the Donetsk People’s Republic, where Lyman is located, said on Friday that the town was “half encircled.” “This is very unpleasant news, but we must look soberly at the situation and draw conclusions from our mistakes,” he said. Mr. Pushilin also said on Telegram that Russia had lost control of Yampil and Dobryshev, villages north and east of Lyman. The advance of Ukrainian forces in disregard of Mr. Putin’s attempt to redraw the map of Ukraine underscored the huge challenges he faces to solidify Russia’s control over Russian-occupied territory. It also appeared to illustrate that for all of Mr. Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling, Ukraine remained unbowed and that the fronts in the war had not altered. The Ukrainian military has closed in on Lyman from the west and south, aiming to envelop the city and cut off the remaining Russian troops, according to the Institute for the Study of War, an American analytical group. The routes out of Lyman appear to be controlled by Ukraine or within its artillery range, complicating a potential Russian withdrawal. Control of Lyman is seen as a test of whether Ukraine can build on military gains made in recent weeks, but the exact status of the battle was not immediately clear. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, said on Telegram that Russian forces “will have to ask for an exit” from Lyman. Donetsk Province, where Russia holds significant territory, is one of four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine that Russia is illegally annexing after staged referendums in recent days that Ukraine and Western governments have denounced as fraudulent. On Friday, Mr. Putin signed decrees to declare the four regions part of Russia. Fighting for Lyman, which is in the northern part of Donetsk Province, has intensified over the past few weeks after Ukraine made a series of gains during a rapid counteroffensive in Kharkiv Province in the country’s northeast. If Ukraine were to recapture Lyman, it would not only increase its chances of regaining more land in Luhansk and Donetsk, but also put additional pressure on the Kremlin as it has been facing blowback at home over its conscription of hundreds of thousands of men to fight in Ukraine. Mr. Putin’s war of words against Ukraine and the West escalated on Friday, when he criticized the United States for “Satanism.” Even by Mr. Putin’s increasingly antagonistic standards, the speech he gave in announcing the annexation of the Ukrainian regions was an extraordinary combination of bluster and menace. He mixed conspiratorial riffs against an American-led “neocolonial system” with an appeal to the world to see Russia as the leader of an uprising against American power. He referred to “the ruling circles of the so-called West” as “the enemy.” And he again raised the specter of nuclear weapons, which the Kremlin has made veiled threats about using, noting in a cryptic aside that the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan in 1945 had “created a precedent.” Marco Hernandez and Josh Holder contributed reporting. Image The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in August. The plant was taken by Russian forces in March but is run by Ukrainian engineers.Credit…David Guttenfelder for The New York Times Russia detained the director general of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant on Friday, and his location was not known, the company that operates the plant said in a statement. The site’s director general, Igor Murashov, is responsible for nuclear and radiation safety, according to the statement from Energoatom, the Ukrainian national energy company. His detention poses a threat to the facility’s operation, the company added. The plant was taken by Russian forces in March but is run by Ukrainian engineers. Fighting near the nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, has raised international concern about an accident. Shelling has at times caused the plant to be disconnected from Ukraine’s power grid, which Ukraine’s energy minister has said put critical cooling systems at risk of relying solely on emergency backup power. The car that Mr. Murashov was in was stopped on the road leading to the plant around 4 p.m., and he was blindfolded and taken to an unknown location, the statement said. Energoatom called on Russia to return Mr. Murashov and urged nuclear security officials including Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to work on his release. The agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, has had two inspectors at the plant since September. It said in a statement Friday that there had been a series of land mine explosions near the plant in recent days that was jeopardizing safety and security at the facility. The latest blast, the sixth reported in a week, damaged a low-voltage cable outside the fence perimeter, according to the agency. The explosion was close to a nitrogen-oxygen facility and indirectly damaged a voltage transformer at one of the reactors, the statement said. Earlier in the week, the agency said the land mines appeared to have been set off by animals. Both Ukrainian and Russian military forces have accused each other of using the specter of nuclear disaster in brinkmanship in the war by waging attacks around the plant. Mr. Grossi said in a statement that he was continuing efforts to establish a security zone around the nuclear plant. The nuclear agency did not immediately comment on Mr. Murashov. The plant is in the region of Zaporizhzhia, which is part of the area of eastern and southern Ukraine that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia moved to illegally annex on Friday. Ukrainian officials have noted the fatigue and stress of Ukrainian control room employees, saying that Russian soldiers have subjected them to harsh interrogations, including torture with electrical shocks, suspecting them of sabotage or of informing the Ukrainian military about activities at the plant. — Erin Mendell Image Residents casting their votes in a referendum on Sunday in Donetsk, a province of eastern Ukraine that Russia has claimed as part of its territory.Credit…Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters WASHINGTON — President Biden condemned Russia’s claimed annexation of captured Ukrainian territory on Friday, responding to Moscow’s latest escalation with a range of sanctions and a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin that the United States would defend “every single inch” of NATO territory from a potential attack. Hours after Mr. Putin gave a speech asserting Russian control over four eastern Ukrainian regions, Mr. Biden called the action a “fraudulent” violation of international law that showed “contempt for peaceful nations everywhere.” “The United States is never going to recognize this, and quite frankly the world is not going to recognize it either,” Mr. Biden said from the White House. “He can’t seize his neighbor’s territory and get away with it. It is as simple as that.” World leaders rallied around Mr. Biden in a forceful collective denunciation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. President Emmanuel Macron of France said Russia had committed a “serious violation of international law and Ukrainian sovereignty” and vowed on Twitter to help Ukraine “recover its full sovereignty over its entire territory.” Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, called Mr. Putin’s move “an illegal and illegitimate land grab” and pledged to continue assisting Ukraine until it defeated the aggressor. Even among Russia’s traditional allies, no country stepped forward to recognize the annexation. Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, issued a statement before Mr. Putin’s speech calling for “respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and the noninterference in the internal affairs of other states.” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine responded to Russia’s claims by announcing that he was fast-tracking his country’s application to NATO. In a video, he accused the Kremlin of trying to “steal something that does not belong to it.” “Ukraine will not allow that,” he said. But Mr. Zelensky’s request to join the alliance drew a less resounding response. “Right now, our view is that the best way for us to support Ukraine is through practical, on-the-ground support in Ukraine,” said Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser. Video The leaks from the Nord Stream undersea pipelines, hit by explosions in recent days, could be among the largest-ever human-caused releases of planet-warming methane gas into the atmosphere, scientists say — equal to the size of a whole year’s emissions from a city the size of Paris, or a country like Denmark. Now, researchers at the Integrated Carbon Observation System, a Europe-wide research network that runs air monitoring stations across the continent have taken readings of methane gas from the leaks and combined them with weather and other atmospheric patterns to model the path of the plume. The gas curled its way north over the Baltic Sea to the Finnish archipelago before swinging west toward Sweden and Norway and reaching the British Isles. The researchers say that the modeling is preliminary; it shows the emissions ending, for example, though methane cont...

Gulf States Rank At The Bottom For Climate-Adapted Housing. Organizers Want To Change That. – BirminghamWatch https://digitalalabamanews.com/gulf-states-rank-at-the-bottom-for-climate-adapted-housing-organizers-want-to-change-that-birminghamwatch/ Members of the housing advocacy group Housing Louisiana say climate change is making already poor housing conditions worse. They hope a new scorecard can encourage policymakers to act faster. (Courtesy of Housing Louisiana) It’s been over two years since the home Cynthia Thomas shared with her mother was destroyed, and the main thing that sticks with her is how fast it all happened. When an EF-3 tornado touched down in Monroe, Louisiana in April 2020, Thomas said she had only seconds to find shelter for her and her three children. They hid in her mother’s closet, and even emergency responders were surprised to see that they survived. “Everybody was like, ‘How did you manage to get out of there?’ Because the home was completely destroyed,” Thomas said. “[There] was no roof, our car was in the home and it was tragic.” To make matters worse, Thomas said she barely received any housing assistance during the three months her family was put out of their home. She received nothing from the city of Monroe, the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the Louisiana Housing Corporation. Only the American Red Cross of Northeast Louisiana gave her a $500 stipend for property damage and two weeks to stay in a hotel. Those two weeks ended fast, though, and Thomas and her family needed to find permanent housing quickly. But just when she thought she found more stable housing, she discovered the area she almost relocated to was flood-prone. “That same area that they were going to relocate us in flooded and some roofs were caving in. So those people had to also relocate to a hotel for two weeks,” Thomas said. Thomas and her family were able to stay with an aunt and eventually found permanent housing three months after the tornado. As natural disasters and unpredictable weather in the Southeast become more frequent due to climate change, stories like Thomas’ are becoming more common. A new scorecard wants to measure how prepared states are to deal with it and give tips for how they can improve. Gulf South Ranks Low on Scorecard Today, Thomas is a program coordinator at Housing Louisiana where she assists people who find themselves in the similar situation she did two years earlier. She said one of the most rewarding parts of her job is empowering other Louisianians to hold policymakers accountable. “Something that I learned since starting here is basically, you know, finding a way to find your voice as it relates to your well-being,” Thomas said. “You have to fight for it because sometimes no one else is gonna fight for you.” The information in The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s (ACEEE) “Pathways to Healthy, Affordable, Decarbonized Housing: A State Scorecard” report, released last month, could be a useful tool in that fight. Sara Hayes, the lead author of the report and the director of health and environment at ACEEE, said the scorecard is the first of its kind. “[The scorecard]ranks all the states and the District of Columbia to evaluate the approach states are taking to providing healthy, affordable, and decarbonized or clean energy housing,” Hayes said. In the past, factors like affordable housing and health were looked at separately, but the COVID-19 pandemic made ACEEE realize they needed to take a more holistic approach, she said. The scorecard looks at five categories such as energy, utilities and affordable housing that are worth 20 points each for a total possible score of 100 points. Maryland received the top ranking with a score of 55 points. The Gulf South states all ranked in the bottom 10 — Alabama at 45 with 9.5 points, Louisiana at 47 with 8.5 points and Mississippi at 50 with 6.5 points. Only North Dakota — which scored 1.5 points — ranked below Mississippi. Pathways to Healthy, Affordable, Decarbonized Housing: A State Scorecard Common Housing Issues in Our States “Louisiana’s Louisiana-ness is why we’re in the bottom 10 and it is that failure to address needs from a systemic standpoint that’s the bigger problem,” Morris said. Common housing issues amongst people that Morris’ organization assists include high utility bills, living in flood-prone areas, and the lack of access to many other resources people can take for granted. “Not everybody has running water. Not everybody has a roof that doesn’t leak. Not everyone has their own bedroom for every member of the home,” Morris said. The ACEEE report describes a healthy home as one that is “clean, safe, well ventilated, and free of pests and contaminants.” However, according to the report, Black, Indigenous and other communities of color have historically been denied access to healthy housing. The report also mentions that these communities “already suffer higher rates of health harms — including asthma, heart attack, stroke, and high blood pressure — compared to white communities, and poor housing conditions worsen these health harms.” Morris said it’s disheartening when policymakers don’t seize on opportunities that can benefit their constituents. She points to the more than $30 million in relief funds South Louisiana received for hurricanes Katrina, Laura and Ida in May that are allocated but still sitting. A ‘Hopeful Document’ for Change Although Louisiana and the other Gulf States aren’t ranked higher on ACEEE’s scorecard, Morris views the report as a “hopeful document” that can serve as a roadmap for future improvements. According to the ACEEE report, many states haven’t taken advantage of opportunities that would benefit the people there. The report argues that many housing or energy efficiency policies that already exist in high-ranking states could be expanded nationwide. For example, the report suggests that it should become a common practice for states to specify “health requirements in new construction guidelines for affordable housing.” The organization also suggests that state agencies develop methods for cross-agency data sharing. Morris also believes the report can help policymakers see what to prioritize, so they can make fewer excuses on why change isn’t happening fast enough. “We’ve got achievable goals, even if we’re miles away, we know where we’re going,” Morris said. As the lead author of the ACEEE report, Hayes acknowledges that these kinds of rankings can feel unfair to states in the Southeast as they are constantly contrasted with states with bigger populations in the Northeast or West. But Hayes says that population or size does not dictate a state’s outcome. She points out that a state as big as California and a state as small as Rhode Island both ranked in the top three on the scorecard despite being on opposite ends of the coast and having opposite sizes of populations, and opposite amounts of resources. “It’s not about geography. It’s not about the size of population,” Hayes said. “There is nothing holding the Southeast states back, I just want to make that really clear.” This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration among Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama and WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.   Read More…

41 Can't Miss Family-Friendly Events Happening In October https://digitalalabamanews.com/41-cant-miss-family-friendly-events-happening-in-october/ Fall is in full swing and there’s tons of ways to get in the spirit this October! We’ve rounded up 41 events to enjoy together this month and 23 are 100% FREE. Better yet, that doesn’t even include all of the trick or treat & trunk or treat events happening across town. Be sure to check out that list here for even more spooky and fall fun! As always, there are MANY more events on our calendar so be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter delivered to your inbox each Thursday morning so you never miss out. No more scrolling on social media, fun is delivered directly to you. Even More Family-Fun Trick or Treats & Trunk or Treats North Alabama Pumpkin Patches, Corn Mazes, & Hayrides Where Witches Ride in Huntsville & North Alabama Explore Huntsville App Madison Street Festival Time: October 1 | 9 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Cost: Free Location: Downtown Madison More Info Enjoy food, fun, music, art, and more at the Madison Street Festival. The mission of the Madison Street Festival is to provide a free, fun day of family entertainment that unites the community as they enjoy arts and culture, interactive exhibits, and entertainment. Attractions include: Children’s Area Crafters Cove Community Showcase Car Show Student Art… Cullman Oktoberfest 2022 Time: October 1 | 7 a.m. – 9 p.m. Cost: Free Location: Downtown Cullman More Info Cullman’s German heritage comes to life with a Southern Style during this annual week-long festival. Enjoy traditional German music, authentic German food, dancing, carriage rides, beer and wine, a classic car show, arts & crafts, guided walking tours, shopping, music and so much more. Rocket City Toy and Comic Expo Time: October 1 @ 10:00 AM Cost: $5 Location: Huntsville Jaycee’s Building More Info Join for the Rocket City Toy and Comic Expo 2022. Find toys from all your childhood favorites and comics from golden age to modern. There will be over 50 vendor booths with a great mix of toys and comics. When: October 1 | 10 AM-5 PM Cost: $5; Kids 12 and under are free For… North Alabama Trails & Recreation Expo Time: October 1 @ 10:00 AM Cost: $10 Location: Point Mallard Park More Info The North Alabama Trails & Recreation Expo brings all things recreation in North Alabama to you. Exhibitors, classes, activities and more! When: October 1 | 10 AM-6 PM Cost: $10/person, Free for ages 12 and under For details, updates and tickets, please visit the event’s website. Huntsville Comic Convention Time: October 1 @ 11:00 AM Cost: $10 Location: Lowe Mill More Info Since 2017, the Huntsville Comic Convention has provided an affordable, fan-friendly show with great guests, amazing dealers and artists bringing thousands of comic books, toys, J-POP, Manga & Anime Items, T-Shirts, jewelry, posters, collectibles, and more! All in one of the most unique venues ever to host a convention – Lowe Mill! While there is… Honey Festival Time: October 2 @ 1:00 PM Cost: Free Location: Hampton Cove Community More Info The 4th Annual Alabama Honey Festival is happening in Hampton Cove! Hosted this year by Artisans Cove, A&M University Small Farms Research, Auburn Bees, Sweet Grown Alabama, MCBA, JCBA and Under Clover Apiaries, this well attended annual festival includes specialty vendors, food trucks and will feature honeybees behind a viewing area. Want to talk bees? Come relax and chat at our DCA with beekeepers. They have plenty of stories to tell… it’s not just for drones! This family friendly event is free but parking and bathroom facilities are extremely limited. Please plan appropriately. Educational programs will feature honeybees behind viewing glass, beekeepers, specialty vendors, food demos and food trucks. Fall Break Fun at Hays Nature Preserve Date/Time: Monday, October 3 – Wendesday, October 5 | 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. Cost: Free Location: Hays Nature Preserve More Info Enjoy the outdoors at Hays Nature Preserve during Fall Break! Join at the pavilion on the natural playground from 10am-12pm on Monday, October 3 through Wednesday, October 5. Drop in during the time to enjoy a different animal themed craft and a self-led scavenger hunt each day! There will also be a Nature Art Poster Contest… Fall Break Craft & Coloring Series Date/Time: October 4, 6, 8, & 10 Cost: $15 – $20 Location: Cook Museum of Natural Science More Info Stop by the Cook Museum for different children’s craft and coloring activities on select dates during Fall Break Schedule Tuesday, October 4 from 1:30 – 3:30 pm Thursday, October 6 from 1:30 – 3:30 pm Saturday, October 8 from 10 am – Noon Monday, October 10 from 1:30 – 3:30 pm Cost: FREE for Members… Advertisement. Content Continues Below. Fall Break Wacky Wednesday! Time: October 5 @ 12:00 PM Cost: $12 – $17 Location: Huntsville Botanical Garden More Info Join in the Children’s Garden from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. for sidewalk chalk, games, bubbles, a fall-themed craft, and snacks! Play with hula hoops, cornhole, and other yard toys. Venardos Circus Date/Time: October 6 – 16 | Various Times Cost: $16 – $26 Location: MidCity Huntsville More Info The Venardos Circus, a unique broadway-style Circus, is returning to Huntsville at MidCity District from Oct 6th to 16th. Boaz Harvest Festival Date/Time: October 7 – 8 | 8 a.m. – 6 p.m. Cost: Free Location: Downtown Boaz More Info The 58th Annual Harvest Festival celebrates the wonderful fall season and all that makes the Boaz Area great. The two-day celebration will include food, arts & crafts vendors, entertainment, Miss Harvest Festival Pageant, a corn hole competition, pumpkin decorating contest, classic car show, cosplay, and more. Lake City Fallfest Date/Time: October 7 – 8 | 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. Cost: Free Location: Downtown Guntersville More Info Don’t miss the Lake City Fallfest! There will be train rides, pumpkin bowling, live music, games, hay rides, outdoor market place, food trucks and more! Scarecrow Trail Night Hikes Date/Time: October 7 & 14 | 6:30 & 7:30 p.m. Cost: $15 – $80 Location: Huntsville Botanical Garden More Info As shadows dance across the Garden, see the Scarecrow Trail come alive! Scarecrow Trail Night Hikes are an opportunity to visit with the scarecrows after sunset and explore the nighttime activities of the Garden. Bring your flashlight and join on this guided hike to see evening creatures such as bats, owls, frogs…and scarecrows, of course! Edgemont Neighborhood Cleanup Day Time: October 8 @ 9:00 AM Cost: Free Location: J.F. Drake State Community and Technical College More Info Join for the Edgemont Neighborhood Cleanup Day.Meet at Drake State Community & Technical College at 3421 Meridian Street North and follow the signs to the Green Team tent. All supplies provided. All ages and experience levels welcome. When: October 8 | 9-11 AM For details and updates, please visit the Facebook event. Downtown Open 2022 Date/Time: October 13 – 23 Cost: Free Location: Downtown Huntsville More Info Mark your calendars because The Downtown Open 2022, presented by Crunkleton Commercial Real Estate Group, returns to Downtown Huntsville from September 22nd through October 2nd! Play putt-putt on this unique, urban course with 30 holes over the 10-day period for FREE! Gem, Jewelry, and Mineral Show Date/Time: October 13 – 23 Cost: $1 – $5 Location: Huntsville Jaycee’s Building More Info The Gem, Jewelry, and Mineral Show will feature National and International exhibitors offering a full spectrum of precious and semiprecious stones, beads, fossils, minerals, custom jewelry and art objects. Something for everyone! Kids will have educational opportunities, hands-on activities and can look for treasures in the mining flume and opening geodes. Charlotte’s Web Date/Time: October 14 at 7 p.m. | October 15 & 16 at 1 & 6 p.m. Cost: $16 – $21 Location: VBC Playhouse More Info Get ready for the first production of Fantasy Playhouse’s 62nd Season! All productions will be performed at the VBC Playhouse. Fantasy Playhouse is thrilled to present Charlotte’s Web adapted by Joseph Robinette and based on the Book by E.B. White. Suitable for all ages! Feed the City Time: October 15 @ 8:30 AM Cost: Free Location: Mellow Mushroom- Village of Providence More Info Volunteer with Feed the City and make meals for people in need! Punkin’ Pickin’ Extravaganza Train Ride Date/Time: October 15 at 11:30 a.m., 1 p.m., & 2 p.m. Cost: $20 – $25 Location: North Alabama Railroad Museum More Info Punkin’ Pickin’ Extravaganza – this train ride in October is a great success each year, so get your tickets early! The train goes down the hill and when we reach our western terminus at Normal, Alabama (near Alabama A&M University), the train will stop and the passengers will deboard the train and walk over to the “pumpkin patch” and the youngsters will be able to pick out the pumpkin of their choice (included in the price of their ticket). Chalktoberfest Time: October 15 @ 11:00 AM Cost: Free Location: Belk at Bridge Street More Info Join for the 3rd annual “Chalktoberfest” chalk art festival! The event area will be located around the Belk Courtyard and throughout Bridge Street at participating retailers and restaurants. There will be live music, balloon artist, face painting and more. Bluegrass & BBQ Festival Time: October 15 @ 2:00 PM Cost: Free Location: Southside Park More Info Join South Huntsville Main and Commissioner Phil Riddick for an afternoon full of lively Bluegrass music at Southside Park on Chaney Thompson Road! This year’s event will feature one of Alabama’s most cherished bluegrass bands, Three on a String. The group Another Town will perform again at this year’s event, with Justin & Angelica Branum added to the lineup. Grab your picnic blanket or chair and enjoy some amazing music in South Hu...

Brazil Kit Becomes Key Issue In Bolsonaro https://digitalalabamanews.com/brazil-kit-becomes-key-issue-in-bolsonaro/ Brazilians will vote tomorrow with supporters of the incumbent president accused of co-opting famous shirts and making it a symbol of far-right politics ( Image: AFP via Getty Images) Brazilians head to the polls tomorrow for the opening round of a polarising presidential election in which left wing candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, is expected to secure a victory over the incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. But football, the South American country’s greatest passion, finds itself locked in the middle of a divisive campaign with the national team’s iconic yellow jersey at the heart of it and flashiest player Neymar backing far-right Bolsonaro in a TikTok video on Thursday. The Paris Saint-Germain forward’s post, featuring a dance to a Bolsonaro jingle, arrived 24 hours after the current president visited a charitable institute near Sao Paulo belonging to the footballer. Neymar was widely criticised online for his support but doubled down with a response on Friday afternoon. “They talk about democracy and a lot of things, but when someone has a different opinion he is attacked by the very people who talk about democracy,” he said. “Go figure.” But the divisive debate around the meaning of the famous yellow shirt is even more significant with Bolsonaro’s supporters accused of co-opting it as a symbol of far-right nationalism. Jair Bolsonaro presents Donald Trump with a Brazil shirt in Washington in 2019. ( Image: Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images) “Football is something iconic for Brazil, it is what brings everybody together most of the time,” a 25-year-old named Isabela Guedes told Al Jazeera about the fight for the shirt’s identity. “When they [right-wing supporters] take something so meaningful for the country and use it with political intentions, it is like they are stealing it from us. I don’t feel comfortable hanging a flag on my window during the World Cup because I will be mistaken for people with completely different political views. They have taken the flag and yellow jersey and turned them into political symbols.” When the Selecao’s new shirt for November’s World Cup was released, sales were below what would normally be expected but the blue away strip sold out. Some football fans have said they feared going to buy the new strip because they do not want to appear associated with Bolsonaro but his backers claim they are also concerned about wearing the kit – because of a supposed fear of violence from Lula’s supporters. Bolsonaro has long used football as a campaigning tool. A Palmeiras fan, he has regularly appeared at stadiums and gifted a Brazil kit to US president Donald Trump during a visit to Washington DC in 2019. Critics fear Bolsonaro could take a similar approach to Trump if he loses the election by making baseless fraud claims. His supporters last year trying to occupy the Supreme Court in a move inspired by the 2021 assault on the US Capitol. He was also one of the last world leaders to recognise Joe Biden as the new American president. Several other footballers have publicly backed Bolsonaro in the past, including Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson Becker. “We have lived years where the left-wing has economically sunk the country,” Alisson said in 2020. “They did good things, they mainly helped the poorest, but what was the goal? What they did badly was much more serious than the positive things. “You don’t have to put it on a scale. He did something wrong, he stole, but he helped so-and-so, the poor. It’s not like this. “I see people who didn’t vote for Bolsonaro hoping he does something wrong to be right. It’s not a question of being right. If he’s a good president, it will be good for everyone, even those who didn’t vote for him.” Read more Mirror Football’s top stories Read More…

Trump Launches Direct Attack On McConnell A Month Out From Midterm Elections – KESQ https://digitalalabamanews.com/trump-launches-direct-attack-on-mcconnell-a-month-out-from-midterm-elections-kesq/ By Eric Bradner, CNN Former President Donald Trump on Friday night directly ridiculed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, saying on his social media platform that the Kentucky Republican had a “death wish” for supporting “Democrat sponsored bills.” Trump, in his Truth Social post, also mocked McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao — who was born in Taiwan and served as Trump’s secretary of transportation — referring to her as McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow!” Trump’s broadside at McConnell and mockery of Chao came hours after Congress approved and President Joe Biden signed a stopgap funding bill to avert a federal government shutdown. The bill cleared the Senate on a 72-25 vote Thursday and the House on a 230-201 vote Friday. In addition to money to keep government agencies afloat, the short-term funding measure provides around $12 billion for Ukraine, and it includes funding for disaster relief. The measure funds the government through December 16. “Is McConnell approving all of these Trillions of Dollars worth of Democrat sponsored Bills, without even the slightest bit of negotiation, because he hates Donald J. Trump, and he knows I am strongly opposed to them, or is he doing it because he believes in the Fake and Highly Destructive Green New Deal, and is willing to take the Country down with him?” Trump wrote. “In any event, either reason is unacceptable. He has a DEATH WISH. Must immediately seek help and advise from his China loving wife, Coco Chow!” Trump has described congressional Republicans as having a “death wish” before. In late 2020, he backed Democrats’ push for $2,000 coronavirus stimulus checks instead of the $600 checks Republicans had sought. He said on Twitter then: “Unless Republicans have a death wish, and it is also the right thing to do, they must approve the $2,000 payments ASAP. $600 IS NOT ENOUGH!” It was not clear what bills Trump was criticizing on Friday, or what he meant as he accused McConnell of believing in the Green New Deal, a package of progressive proposals that McConnell blocked from coming to the Senate floor for a vote when he was majority leader. McConnell this week said he would support legislation that would make it harder to overturn a certified presidential election, an endorsement that will bolster its chances for passage in his chamber and puts him at sharp odds with Trump. McConnell’s office did not comment on Trump’s remarks on Truth Social. CNN has reached out to representatives for Trump for comment. The former President’s attack on McConnell comes just weeks away from the midterm elections, with early voting already underway in some states. McConnell’s hopes of becoming Senate majority leader depend on whether the candidates Trump endorsed in Republican primaries in several key states — including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania — win in November. In a veiled jab at the GOP nominees Trump helped elevate, McConnell at an August event in Kentucky cited “candidate quality” as he downplayed the party’s chances of winning control of the Senate. Still, McConnell’s political arm, including a McConnell-affiliated super PAC, has pumped tens of millions of dollars into those races, while Trump has largely refrained from spending money to help the candidates he endorsed. The-CNN-Wire & © 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved. CNN’s Manu Raju contributed to this report. Read More…

Jill Biden: GOP Leaders Underestimate The Power Of Women https://digitalalabamanews.com/jill-biden-gop-leaders-underestimate-the-power-of-women/ WASHINGTON (AP) — Jill Biden told a Democratic women’s group Friday that Republicans underestimated the power of women but that, together, they will “make sure that they never make that mistake again.” The first lady said that when “extremists attack rights that a vast majority of Americans support, like a woman’s right to choose, or when they stand in the way of affordable prescriptions or clean energy, they are letting down all Americans.” She also said “it makes me angry” to see politicians who “treat government like a sport” and “perform political stunts” to score a few more points against the other side. “There are no teams to root for or against. Just people,” Biden said at a luncheon during the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum’s annual conference. “There are real lives at stake here. You know that, and I know that it makes you angry. It should make you angry,” she said. She described new laws enacted by President Joe Biden as “some of the most transformational legislation in generations.” “And we did it with only 50 votes in the Senate,” the first lady said. “Just imagine what Joe and his administration could do with just a few more partners in the House and the Senate.” “We could restore women’s rights to make our own choices about our own bodies,” she said, referencing the decision by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion, leaving individual states to decide the issue. In response, the Republican Party said women are suffering in “Joe Biden’s America.” “From skyrocketing crime, to a rainbow fentanyl crisis, to historic inflation and a baby formula shortage, women cannot afford Joe Biden’s America,” said Emma Vaughn, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. Vaughn said the party has been working to empower women voters and recruit a record number of female candidates, and that the party, which is led by a woman, Ronna McDaniel, “stands for all women and we look forward to earning their vote in less than 40 days.” Biden said Democrats can’t decide what Republicans do, “but we can decide what we’re going to do, and what women do is win.” She said women helped elect her husband “and we will decide what happens in November in races up and down the ballot, because we don’t just get angry, we get to work.” Women voting in 2020 broke for Democrat Biden over Republican Donald Trump, 55% to 43%, according to AP VoteCast. “Republican leaders have underestimated the power of women, but we’re going to make sure that they never make that mistake again,” Jill Biden said. Today’s breaking news and more in your inbox Read More…

First Down Friday Night Week 6 – September 30, 2022 https://digitalalabamanews.com/first-down-friday-night-week-6-september-30-2022/ HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — First place was on the line for many of the teams in the area during Week 6 of the AHSAA season. See highlights and scores on the latest episode of First Down Friday Night. The following games were featured on the latest episode of First Down Friday Night: – James Clemens vs Sparkman – Huntsville vs Albertville – Florence vs Bob Jones – Lee vs Fort Payne – Scottsboro vs Guntersville – Hatton vs Tanner – Fairview vs Ardmore – West Morgan vs Deshler – Hartselle vs Muscle Shoals – Cullman vs Athens AHSAA FOOTBALL SCOREBOARD Week 6 Results CLASS 7A Auburn 51, Opelika 29 Austin 22, Grissom 0 Baker 27, Alma Bryant 6 Central-Phenix City 35, Dothan 28 Hoover 40, Oak Mountain 0 Huntsville 34, Albertville 7 James Clemens 41, Sparkman 17 Prattville 42, Enterprise 26 Thompson 14, Hewitt-Trussville 12 Tuscaloosa County 38, Spain Park 28 Vestavia Hills 52, Chelsea 10 CLASS 6A Benjamin Russell 48, Chilton County 0 Buckhorn 58, Mae Jemison 12 Catholic, Baton Rouge (LA) 42, Carver-Montgomery 36 Center Point 36, Shades Valley 20 Cullman 35, Athens 23 Decatur 65, Columbia 0 Fort Payne 56, Lee-Huntsville 12 Gadsden City 37, Hazel Green 7 Gardendale 40, Jackson-Olin 6 Hartselle 29, Muscle Shoals 26 Helena 31, Briarwood Christian 21 Hillcrest-Tuscaloosa 63, Central-Tuscaloosa 19 Hueytown 75, Paul Bryant 7 McGill-Toolen Catholic 27, Baldwin County 9 Minor 56, Mortimer Jordan 20 Murphy 47, Robertsdale 20 Northridge 21, McAdory 14 Oxford 38, Pell City 13 Pelham 31, Calera 14 Pike Road 52, Park Crossing 8 Saraland 35, Blount 0 Spanish Fort 41, St. Paul’s Episcopal 38 (3 OT) Wetumpka 21, Stanhope Elmore 16 CLASS 5A Arab 48, Crossville 7 B.C. Rain 41, Citronelle 6 Beauregard 38, Sylacauga 7 Central, Clay County 12, Valley 6 Charles Henderson 27, Rehobeth 15 Demopolis 48, Shelby County 6 Douglas 49, Sardis 8 Eufaula 43, Carroll 19 Faith Academy 30, Vigor 6 Jasper 25, Hayden 13 Leeds 24, Southside-Gadsden 6 Moody 53, Springville 14 Pleasant Grove 48, John Carroll Catholic 13 Ramsay 41, Wenonah 6 Russellville 58, Brewer 0 Scottsboro 17, Guntersville 14 Selma 30, Marbury 14 Tallassee 26, Elmore County 20 West Point 21, Lawrence County 7 CLASS 4A American Christian 35, Dallas County 10 Andalusia 69, Geneva 19 Anniston 32, Handley 7 Bibb County 49, Hale County 6 Brooks 59, East Lawrence 14 B.T. Washington 54, Bullock County 6 Deshler 21, West Morgan 6 Dora 42, Cordova 21 Etowah 31, Oneonta 7 Fairview 42, Ardmore 12 Good Hope 26, Hanceville 20 Haleyville 60, Oak Grove 29 Hamilton 40, Curry 24 Jackson 49, Escambia County 21 Jacksonville 41, Cleburne County 15 Montgomery Catholic 72, Montgomery Academy 15 Munford 42, Lincoln 9 New Hope 14, North Jackson 0 Priceville 55, St. John Paul II Catholic 10 Rogers 41, Central-Florence 21 Sipsey Valley 33, Montevallo 14 Slocomb 27, Dale County 12 St. Michael Catholic 49, Orange Beach 41 T.R. Miller 28, Bayside Academy 3 West Blocton 57, Holt 0 West Limestone 34, Wilson 26 Westminster Christian 53, DAR 7 White Plains 48, Talladega 14 CLASS 3A Ashford 38, Daleville 22 Colbert Heights 28, Elkmont 8 Dadeville 55, Beulah 0 Excel 63, Monroe County 14 Fayette County 35, Oakman 7 Gordo 56, Carbon Hill 14 Hillcrest-Evergreen 29, Mobile Christian 28 Houston Academy 33, Straughn 27 J.B. Pennington 41, Vinemont 6 Lauderdale County 36, Phil Campbell 12 Greensboro 28, Midfield 24 Madison Academy 56, Asbury 0 Piedmont 34, Westbrook Christian 0 Pike County 38, New Brockton 0 Providence Christian 17, Northside Methodist 14 Randolph County 42, Saks 41 Saint James 35, Alabama Christian 20 Southside-Selma 34, Prattville Christian 31 Susan Moore 71, Brindlee Mountain 0 Thomasville 28, Flomaton 20 Trinity Presbyterian 1, Sumter Central 0, forfeit Winfield 43, Tarrant 0 CLASS 2A Abbeville 53, Samson 22 Ariton 40, Cottonwood 6 B.B. Comer 52, Isabella 22 Clarke County 19, Chickasaw 0 Fyffe 61, Collinsville 0 Gaston 28, Holly Pond 26 Goshen 64, Barbour County 19 GW Long 42, Zion Chapel 7 Highland Home 41, Luverne 14 J.U. Blacksher 47, McKenzie 24 LaFayette 26, Horseshoe Bend 8 Locust Fork 21, Pleasant Valley 14 North Sand Mountain 49, Sand Rock 13 Pike Liberal Arts 32, Danville 0 Pisgah 41, Whitesburg Christian 7 Red Bay 54, Tharptown 14 Reeltown 12, Lanett 0 Sheffield 54, Cherokee 6 Southeastern 48, Cleveland 26 Sulligent 34, Greene County 0 Thorsby 22, Fayetteville 18 Vincent 54, Ranburne 21 Wicksburg 23, Geneva County 14 Winston County 24, Cold Springs 0 CLASS 1A Appalachian 16, Decatur Heritage 12 Berry 35, Holy Spirit Catholic 21 Brantley 40, Georgiana 0 Choctaw County 22, Southern Choctaw 16 Donoho 28, Winterboro 20 Elba 42, Red Level 6 Florala 27, Houston County 0 Gaylesville 54, Woodville 6 Hubbertville 42, Brilliant 8 Keith 38, A.L. Johnson 0 Kinston 47, Pleasant Home 13 Leroy 61, JF Shields 0 Loachapoka 50, Calhoun 0 Lynn 21, Pickens County 20 Maplesville 36, Autaugaville 0 Marion County 22, Clements 16 McIntosh 14, Fruitdale 0 Meek 44, Addison 24 Phillips 46, Vina 0 Ragland 46, Victory Christian 7 R.C. Hatch 54, University Charter School 28 Spring Garden 44, Talladega County Central 12 Verbena 32, Notasulga 14 Read More…