North State Journal Vol. 8, Issue 23

BRIEF this week

Josh Stein’s gubernatorial campaign says it lost $50,000 through scam that targeted vendor Raleigh

The gubernatorial campaign of Attorney General Josh Stein lost over $50,000 from a “sophisticated scam” that targeted a campaign vendor, a Stein spokesperson said on Monday.

The incident was disclosed after a Stein campaign finance report covering the first six months of the year and filed late last week cited a “fraudulent wire transfer payment.”

The transaction was dated Jan. 25, a week after the Democrat announced his run for governor.

“A campaign vendor fell victim to a sophisticated scam. The vendor has consulted law enforcement, filed a report with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and taken precautionary measures,” Stein campaign spokesperson said Kate Frauenfelder wrote in a text message. She declined to identify the vendor.

Stein’s campaign raised nearly $6 million during the first half of the year and spent over $1.3 million on expenses during that period, according to the campaign finance report. The loss “serves as an important reminder that fraud happens every day and that people and companies should ensure that they know who they are dealing with when exchanging money online,” Frauenfelder said.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Biden belatedly acknowledges 7th grandchild, the daughter of son Hunter and an Arkansas woman Washington, D.C.

President Joe Biden for the first time publicly acknowledged his seventh grandchild, a 4-year-old girl fathered by his son Hunter with an Arkansas woman, Lunden Roberts, in 2018.

Hunter Biden’s paternity was established by DNA testing after Roberts sued for child support, and the two parties recently resolved outstanding child support issues. The president’s son wrote about his encounter with Roberts in his 2021 memoir, saying it came while he was deep in addiction to alcohol and drugs, including crack cocaine. The president, who has made a commitment to family central to his public persona, has faced increasing criticism from political rivals and pundits for refusing to acknowledge the granddaughter.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Moore County school board removes, censures vice chair

Hensley claims Levy scheduled meeting knowing he could not attend

By A.P. Dillon North State Journal

Local areas want say in casino debate

By Matt Mercer North State Journal

RALEIGH — Proposals to add casino gambling in North Carolina are met with anticipation from state leaders and trepidation from some in the expected landing spots of the projects.

Throughout the summer, details of state-sanctioned casino projects trickled out through various news reports, coalescing around a draft bill that would place casino projects in Anson, Nash and Rockingham counties. A fourth project would also be authorized pending federal recognition of the Lumbee Tribe around Robeson County.

Virginia casinos and the total casino gaming potential in the areas within 90 minutes of the casinos, Spectrum estimates a potential leakage to Virginia of $259 million in gross gaming revenue after the permanent Virginia casinos are open,” the study says in its analysis.

That has state leaders concerned, including Senate Leader Phil Berger (R-Eden).

On July 13, Berger said proposals adding casino gaming were “Better than 50-50.”

made both of the motions to remove Hensley from “any and all committees” that he serves on as well as the motion to censure.

Holmes described his colleagues as handling Hensley’s “attacks” with “dignity and grace.”

A study authorized by Greater Carolina, a free-market policy organization, with Spectrum Gaming Group found ample data backing the casino projects as economic boons for the state.

In one statistic, the study found that gross gaming revenue could reach $1.3 billion with casino gaming in the three counties.

In an Associated Press interview, Berger said he estimated nearly 80% of vehicles in the Danville casino parking lot had North Carolina license plates based on a trip he made himself to investigate.

“The gaming is already taking place in North Carolina, and gaming is taking place on the border of North Carolina that is pulling money out of North Carolina,” Berger said to the AP, adding that a new additional revenue stream “has multiple benefits.”

RALEIGH

— At a special meeting on July 19, the Moore County School Board voted 6-0 to remove David Hensley from his vice chair position and all committee assignments.

The board also voted unanimously to censure and remove committee assignments from Hensley, who was absent from the meeting.

Including the removal of Hensley as vice chair, board member Philip Holmes also

Of the censure motion, Holmes said it was “based on inappropriate behavior, his lack of civility which is inconsistent with board policies requiring civil behavior and respectful dialogue with fellow board members on matters being considered by the board at all times.”

Later in the meeting, Robert Levy explained he could have removed Hensley through his powers as board chair, but the board

See MOORE , page A8

One of the core arguments in addition to the economic windfall of the projects is the threat to current revenues from ongoing casino construction in Virginia.

In 2020, four Virginia cities placed referendums on the ballot in Bristol, Danville, Norfolk and Portsmouth. A fifth, in Richmond, could be on the ballot in 2024.

The Greater Carolina study found that the projects specifically in Nash and Rockingham counties would restrict “leakage” of gaming revenues to the Virginia locations.

“Based on the locations of the

Truitt describes NC pandemic recovery successes before congressional committee

By A.P. Dillon North State Journal

RALEIGH — Appearing before a congressional committee on July 26, State Superintendent

Catherine Truitt described some successes the state has had when dealing with learning loss and educational pandemic recovery.

Truitt gave testimony before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education as part of a panel on “Generational Learning Loss: How pandemic school closures hurt students.”

In addition to Truitt, other panel members testifying includ-

ed Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at American Enterprise Institute; Mary-Patricia Wray, parent; and Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN: the 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now. At the onset of the hearing, various lawmakers asked panel members about the impact of school closures and the role of teachers unions in keeping schools closed. Committee Chair Rep. Aaron Bean (R-FL) asked Bradford about “the truth” of teachers unions claiming they had pushed to reopen schools. Bradford responded with “that depends on the definition of true,” before

offering Chicago schools as an example where trying to reopen schools was criticized as “sexism, misogyny and racism,” and where teachers used “coffins” during protests.

Wray called school closures the “least American decision we could make in generations,” while Malkus brought up the point some private schools and countries that stayed open or that opened earlier seem to have had a lesser degree of learning loss issues.

Following those remarks, some Democratic members of the committee complained the hearing

Yet in Berger’s home county and elsewhere, residents are either opposed to the projects or want to decide for themselves whether to move them forward.

A Rockingham County rezoning request in the western side of the county along Highway 220/73 with ties to a Maryland sports and entertainment company has some residents rallying to oppose the project.

A Change.org petition has more than 2,200 signatures and a meeting about how to coordinate

See CASINOS , page A2

North Carolina state Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, speaks with reporters on the Senate floor at

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wasn’t about solutions but political rhetoric.

In her prepared remarks, Truitt outlined ordering the creation of the Office of Learning Recovery (OLR) to effectively manage the millions in federal relief dollars received by the state.

“Knowing of this influx of federal funds about to flow into our state and recognizing, as a parent of three children, how detrimental school closures were for our students, I immediately launched the Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration in February 2021,” Truitt said. “This Office remains one of the first, if not the only, of its kind. When the massive influx of federal funding did come pouring into North Carolina, we were as prepared as we could be.

“My agency was able to provide local education leaders with an office dedicated to recovery and rooted in research and data,” said Truitt. “This was vital because many of our 115 school districts and more than 200 charter schools did not have the central office support or bandwidth to take on the massive exercise in planning and compliance that would be required with ESSER III.”

Truitt went on to talk about the “2022 Lost Instructional Time Report” which she said was used as a benchmark to monitor progress and ensure North Carolina’s students continued to accelerate, our agency produced a second report in April of this year.”

She also said the 2023 report “detailed the significant strides students made in the 2021-22 school year,” and that the “strongest gains were made in middle school math.”

The OLR, part of Truitt’s strategic plan called Operation Polaris, has provided data and white papers on learning loss including a 2022 report that showed K-12 academic achievement in North Carolina fell behind by between two and 15 months across various subjects due to lost instruction time and remote learning of students because of pandemic school closures. Test scores reported later in the year showed students were making moderate gains but achievement in some subjects still had not returned to prepandemic levels.

God’s purposes never miscarry. Paul was to go to Rome. The obstacles appeared insuperable. Even the elements seemed to be in league to prevent his reaching there.

But through all hindrances the way was opened, and at last he entered Rome and spent two years in prison.

A prison life is not an ideal one for a missionary. But Paul’s imprisonment did not limit his usefulness. Indeed, the fact that he was thus under the protection of Rome, made him safe from persecution. That was God’s way of providing for him.

We are apt to think of shut-in days as lost time. One looking

at it only superficially might say, “What a pity Paul had to lose those two whole years in prison.” But perhaps no other two years of Paul’s life yielded better returns. From his prison, he preached to those who came in. Then four of his epistles were written during that time — and they have been blessing the world now for nineteen hundred years.

J.R. Miller was a pastor and former editorial superintendent of the Presbyterian Board of Publication from 1880 to 1911. His works are now in the public domain.

CASINOS from page A1 opposition was held on Aug. 1 at a local Baptist church in the area. Much of the concern from residents about the Rockingham County project has focused on potential impacts on a local camp adjacent to the property for disabled children. Camp Carefree, which hosts

Truitt fielded questions from various committee members including Reps. Virginia Foxx (RNC) and Bobby Scott (D-Virginia).

Foxx prefaced her question by stating that “arguments from the left” included spending even more money, but then noted North Carolina had been successful with existing resources.

“Do we need billions of federal dollars to fix this?” Foxx asked Truitt.

Truitt replied that the OLR was created to be “good stewards” of federal dollars and that most money went to the school districts in the state. She said for rural districts with small staff, dealing with the funding was “daunting” for them and that the OLR was “very unique” and in a short time frame had provided those districts with data they needed to make decisions.

Scott praised Truitt when it came

programs for kids ages 6 to 16 with chronic illnesses and disabilities, would see its surroundings altered significantly.

The rezoning request was denied by Rockingham County Planning Board members but is expected to come to the Rockingham County Board of Commissioners later this month. In Nash County, the board of

time to ask his set of questions.

“You obviously weren’t surprised to find students with a reduced academic achievement when they weren’t in school, but rather than complaining about it and blaming people you focused on actually doing something about it,” Scott said to Truitt. “It sounds like you started with getting data. Can you tell me why it was important to get student-level data?”

“In North Carolina, the 10% holdback from ESSER III was, by law, able to be appropriated by our General Assembly,” said Truitt. “And so we wanted to be able to provide them, as well as districts who — again, got 90% of those funds — the information that they needed to best serve individual students.”

She added taking a “scattershot approach” in her opinion was “not an option.”

“So, in doing a population study,

commissioners met in a special session on July 28 to pass a resolution calling for a referendum on the matter. Board Chairman Robbie Davis said he is not for the casino personally but said the trend has been to leave highly controversial matters to the will of the people, according to a report from the Rocky Mount Telegram.

which means that we looked at the learning loss of every single student, we were able to determine by student and by subgroup which subject suffered the most,” Truitt explained. She went on to say the OLR was then able to recommend where the district might best spend its funding.

Scott asked what resources, programs or interventions were recommended the most. Truitt responded with examples of Summer Bridge Academies and Math boot camps, statewide high-dosage tutoring efforts, as well as teacher professional development.

“Based on what is working and what might not be working, what recommendations can you suggest outside of the pandemic to improve education?” Scott asked Truitt.

“I would say that we need to not run away from accountability; that standardized testing lets us know where we are falling short with

The study from Greater Carolina also included a statewide poll conducted in January. In that poll, a majority of voters across the political spectrum were largely indifferent about gaming policies.

In a summary along with the full poll results, the findings found that voters “generally favor or are neutral on expanding gaming” and “gaming expansion is not

which subgroups,” replied Truitt. “Had it not been for No Child Left Behind, we wouldn’t know that our black and brown students were experiencing the kinds of gaps that they were.

“So, in a time where some states are running away from accountability, North Carolina is running toward accountability. But we need to include other measures of accountability aside from standardized tests,” Truitt said. “And that means things like chronic absenteeism. If children are not at school, they cannot learn.

“We also need to be holding our districts accountable for whether or not students are participating in Career Technical Education so that we can once and for all get rid of the narrative that the only Pathway to the middle class is with the four-year college residential degree.”

a deciding issue for voters.”

Both Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Kings Mountain) said “they have agreed to a tax package and resolved other key differences” and are negotiating other aspects of the budget this week. That is presumed to include final language and tax provisions relating to the casino projects.

State Superintendent Catherine Truitt testifies before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education on July 26, 2023, in Washington, D.C.

TRUITT from page A1

“Saint Paul Writing His Epistles” by Valentin de Boulogne (circa 1618) is a painting in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas.

Firearms advocacy group sounds alarm on proposed concealed carry training changes

By A.P. Dillon

North State Journal

RALEIGH — North Carolina’s largest firearms advocacy group is sounding the alarm on changes to concealed carry training being proposed by NC Attorney General Josh Stein’s Department of Justice.

“Borrowing from the playbook of the Biden administration, which is using the BATFE to circumnavigate Congress and harass gun dealers and owners with abusive rule changes, Attorney General Josh Stein is using the NCDOJ to make it harder for lawful North Carolinians to obtain concealed handgun permits,” Grass Roots North Carolina (GRNC) President Paul Valone told North State Journal.

“Stein’s scheme would not only make it more difficult to obtain required training but would likely violate our First Amendment freedom of association by keeping lists of anyone who takes a concealed

Cahas Mountain looms over the path of the Mountian Valley Pipeline as it crosses the Blue Ridge Parkway at Adney Gap on July 18, 2018.

carry class, even if they never apply for a permit,” said Valone. “Grass Roots North Carolina will oppose Stein’s obstructionism by all available means, up to and including legislative review.”

A press release by GRNC cites a June 23 memo received by N.C. concealed handgun permit (CHP) instructors announcing changes that GRNC says “will make it harder for CHP applicants to receive required training.”

GRNC alleges the notice stated the changes were “already drawn up without public comment as required by N.C.G.S. 150B-21.2.”

According to a public notice on the NC DOJ’s Criminal Justice Education & Training Standards website, amendments to “SUBCHAPTER 09F-SECTION .0100 of the NC Administrative Code” governing concealed carry training.

Under the public notice are three forms, a “pre-delivery report“ of concealed carry training, a

“post-delivery report” of the training and a “concealed carry handgun student roster“ form.

Under the administrative code for CHP training, instructors are already required to file a copy of the proposed firearms “course description, outline, and proof of instructor certification,” making the NCDOJ’s proposed forms seem duplicative.

Per GRNC, the pre-delivery report would “suppress concealed carry handgun permits” by requiring instructors to submit the document 30 days prior to a class and also place an undue burden on instructors, especially for those “who do not conduct training as their full-time occupation.”

Additionally, GRNC says the changes invade the privacy of those seeking training because instructors will have to keep an “auditable roster” of students which the state will be able to keep on record, in essence creating a gun registry to track those individuals.

July Council of State news roundup

By A.P. Dillon North State Journal

RALEIGH — In July, Council of State news included the governor’s continued “education emergency,” an extension request for a pipeline project, updates on the N.C. Mountain State Fair, a lifetime achievement award, a cracked roller coaster, and a meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris.

The North Carolina Council of State (COS) is an administrative body of 10 elected officials who are heads of their departments. Council members include the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, commissioner of agriculture, commissioner of insurance, commissioner of labor, secretary of state, state auditor, state treasurer and superintendent of public instruction.

Gov. Roy Cooper continued to display his “education emergency” banner on his official website. He also kicked off his annual school supply drive while touting his increased education spending within his proposed budget. Lawmakers have already dismissed most of Cooper’s budget proposals as “reckless.” The governor issued his 14th veto of the session on House Bill 219: Charter School Omnibus. Overrides for the bill and four others have already been scheduled for Aug. 7. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who also serves as chairman of the North Carolina Energy Policy Council, issued a statement regarding an extension for the completion date of the Mountain Valley Pipeline Southgate project.

“The Mountain Valley Pipeline Expansion in North Carolina has the potential to secure our regional energy infrastructure by establishing redundancy in our natural gas supply,” Robinson said. “This additional pipeline will promote sustainable growth across our state as citizens look to power their homes and businesses. As recently as 2021, North Carolinians suffered when the Colonial Pipeline was taken offline due to a ransomware attack. My primary concerns for North Carolina’s ratepayers are always the security and affordability of utilities, and the MVP Expansion addresses both.”

Robinson’s remarks follow a letter from Senate Leader Phil Berger (R-Eden) and 28 other state senators to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) request-

ing approval for an extension on the end date for the project.

Attorney General Josh Stein and 31 other attorneys general joined a partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to “tackle anticompetitive practices in the agriculture industry that raise prices and limit choices for customers and producers in order to protect citizens and keep grocery, meat, and poultry prices affordable. Along with other state attorneys general, Stein also traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss the fentanyl crisis.

State Auditor Beth Wood indicated she will run for reelection despite her legal issues following a hitand-run last December in which she left the scene.

An audit report published by Wood’s office reported the N.C. Department of Public Instruction had changed certain vendor information without proper documentation which resulted in an improper disbursement of over $165,000 to a fraudulent bank account. Another audit report cited issues with the monitoring of $635 million in federal recovery funds by the North Carolina Pandemic Recovery Office known as NCPRO.

State Superintendent Catherine Truitt appeared in a panel for a House Congressional Committee hearing on the topic of learning loss due to school closures on July 26. She described the state’s “unique” success in aiding districts in spending federal pandemic relief funding through the Office of Learning Recovery which she established in 2021.

Truitt also promoted the Center for Safer Schools’ annual “RISE Back To School Safety Summit to be held from July 31-Aug. 2, 2023, at the Gastonia Conference Center in Gastonia. The summit will offer training on issues such as bullying, suicide and critical incidents, as well as child abuse prevention, gang awareness, human trafficking, School Risk Management Plans and suicide prevention. To RSVP and for more information, contact communications@dpi.nc.gov.

Early in July, Commissioner

Mike Causey named Angela Hatchell as senior deputy commissioner of the Agent Services, Consumer Services and Regional Director divisions. Near the end of the month, Cau-

sey, in his capacity of State Fire Marshal, presented three Rockingham volunteer firefighters with the Order of the Guardian Award.

Causey also toured tornado-damaged areas in Nash County and a special Victim Assistance Center staffed by representatives from Causey’s assisted victims of the storm with insurance information.

Labor Secretary Josh Dobson worked with Carowinds Amusement Park on an issue with one of its coasters. Earlier this month, a park-goer’s video of coasters rocketing over a cracked support beam on the park’s Fury 375 coaster went viral nationwide and prompted the immediate closure of the ride. Dobson said it will be some time until the situation is resolved, and the park has been transparent in its efforts to rectify the situation and to keep patrons safe.

The North Carolina Mountain State Fair competition entries are now open per a release by Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler’s office. Deadlines to register for general exhibits and livestock competitions are set for Aug. 25. More information on the Mountain State Fair can be accessed at: wncagcenter.org/p/mountainstatefair/competitions.

The Notary Public Administrators (NPA) Section of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) presented Secretary Elaine F. Marshall and former North Dakota Secretary of State Al Jaeger with the first annual NPA Achievement Award at NASS’s Summer Conference. In addition to being the inaugural awardee, the Award itself will be known going forward as the Jaeger-Marshall NPA Achievement Award.

On July 25, it was reported that Marshall’s husband, Tommy Bunn, who left a significant mark on the state’s agricultural sector, had passed away at the age of 79.

Troxler issued a statement on Bunn’s passing offering condolences to Marshall and her family.

“North Carolina farmers and our agriculture industry have lost a great champion with the passing of Tommy Bunn,” Troxler said. We have been friends for over 30 years through our work in the tobacco industry and agriculture and I greatly respected his insights, experience and advice on ag policy and the future of the industry.”

A public meeting on the proposed amendments will be held at 10 a.m. on Aug. 9 at the Wake Tech-

Brief filed with NC Court of Appeals over forced vaccination of Guilford teen

By A.P. Dillon North State Journal RALEIGH — Guilford

County mother Emil Happel has filed a motion with the N.C. Court of Appeals over her lawsuit that alleges her son was forced to get a COVID-19 vaccination without the written parental consent required by law at that time.

Happel filed the lawsuit against the Guilford school board and Old North State Medical Society in 2022, however, this past March a trial judge dismissed the case.

party ran the clinic. In a 2021 interview with Happel, she told North State Journal that the clinic staff did not ask for the letter from the school directing a test and not a vaccination that clearly stated that minors under the age of 17 must have written parental consent to receive the vaccine.

“He came home. He handed me the card and I lost my mind.”

Emil

Happel

The new brief was filed by attorney Steven Walker on behalf of Happel. The filing cites five instances where the trial court erred in its decision to dismiss the case including dismissing the plaintiff’s state constitutional violation claims and ruling the district and the Old North State Medical Society were immune from liability.

“The clinic workers were present at the vaccine clinic to carry on and further the business of the partnership that had been formed by defendants,” states the brief in addressing one of the liability issues. “They were there to administer vaccines. The scope of their employment was to administer vaccines. When they administered the vaccine to Tanner, they were doing so in furtherance of their employer’s business and within the scope of their employment. That they did so without consent does not move them outside the scope of their employment.”

Happel’s lawsuit contends that her 14-year-old son Tanner was given the COVID-19 vaccination without written parental consent. At the time Tanner was inoculated, North Carolina law stated that written parental consent was required for administering the vaccine to minors.

At that time her son was vaccinated, Tanner was playing football for Western Guilford High School and the district sent a letter to them indicating he was required to get a COVID-19 test after it was determined some of the other players had been exposed to the virus. The letter directed the family to a clinic being held at Northwest Guilford High School run by Old North State Medical Society “in partnership” with Guilford County Public Schools.

The brief says the judge erred in his ruling that the school board was immune from liability because a third

“The facts as stated in the complaint make it clear that Tanner went to the clinic at the direction of Guilford County Schools, and when he ended up in a vaccine clinic, it was a clinic that was operated with two partners — the defendants,” the brief states.

In a 2021 interview with North State Journal, Happel said her son was asked to fill out a form which she admitted he did not fully read but that the clinic staff asked for his parent’s phone number. Happel said she missed the call and that she called back within minutes but no one picked up.

“My son told me that the lady who was helping him said they had tried to call his mother, but that she didn’t answer and said, ‘Let’s just give it to him anyway.’ I still had no idea that he was going to be getting a vaccine; I was still waiting for a test,” Happel told North State Journal. She added that the clinic staff member then brought him a shot which he rejected but “before he knew it, he had the shot in his arm.”

“He came home. He handed me the card and I lost my mind,” Happel said.

When she finally connected with a school administrator, the official dismissed Happel’s concerns and acted like it was “not a big deal.”

The school officials compared it to her son getting an HIV test without parental consent, according to Happel.

Happel said she was “irate with this man,” and the official “completely downplayed my feelings for what happened and that has pretty much been the end of it.”

When North State Journal reached out to Guilford County Schools, the district’s media relations specialist, Janson Silvers, said he was not aware of any other incidents and that “direct patient-doctor interactions” inquiries should be directed to Old North State Medical Society.

Additional inquiries on the matter directed to Old North State Medical Society went unanswered.

nical Community College Public Safety Training Center located at 321 Chapanoke Rd. in Raleigh.

AP PHOTO

Attendees look at handguns during the National Rifle Association Convention, Saturday, April 15, 2023, in Indianapolis.

FILE PHOTO

north STATEment

Neal Robbins, publisher | Frank Hill, senior opinion editor

EDITORIAL | FRANK HILL

The Taxpayer Benefit License (TBL)

TAXPAYERS of Charlotte and North Carolina ― don’t fall for any new taxpayer-funded professional sports stadiums.

With the recent sale of the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets plus the ownership change for the NFL’s Carolina Panthers in 2018, there is going to be a lot of talk about building a new stadium for each franchise in the coming days.

If new owners can buy a professional sports team for $3 billion, they can afford to pay for the construction of a new stadium to showcase their team.

The Hornets were reportedly sold for a valuation of $3 billion ― despite the fact they have been mediocre at best over their history. The Hornets were 423-600 during 13 years under the ownership of Michael Jordan with a mere two playoff appearances and no playoff series wins. The Hornets have won only four first-round playoff series since their inaugural season in 1988.

Panthers owner David Tepper bought the Panthers and Bank of America Stadium for $2.4 billion in 2018. That is beginning to look like the steal of the 21st century so far ― Dan Snyder just sold the Washington Commanders, née “Redskins,” plus the stadium in Landover, Maryland, for $6 billion. They have been far more mediocre (154-214-2) than the Panthers (174-195-1) for the past 22 seasons.

If new owners can buy a professional sports team for $3 billion, they can afford to pay for the construction of a new stadium to showcase their team. Oddly enough, despite vastly different seating capacities, construction costs for both new professional football and basketball teams stadiums have ranged between $1.4 billion to $2 billion based on recently completed projects.

If new owners buy a professional sports team and want to build a new stadium on their own dime, they can do whatever they choose to do. They can put on reenactments of chariot races from ancient hippodromes in Rome or continue to produce more mediocre NFL or NBA seasons as far as anyone else should be concerned. It would be “their” team and “their” stadium ― they should be able to run it freely as any other privately owned business is allowed to do without strings attached.

It is purely a business transaction for an investor group. Any discussion should be separated from sometimes irrational emotional local team attachments which have been used to force tax concessions from cities to keep their beloved “Bills” in Buffalo (which succeeded) or “Raiders” in Oakland (which did not).

However, when the new owners of the Panthers and the Hornets start grousing about the inadequacies of current facilities ― and

EDITORIAL | STACEY MATTHEWS

you know they will very soon ― and start to try to force the city of Charlotte and state of North Carolina to help them build both new stadiums, both sets of owners have the golden opportunity to adopt a revolutionary new way to look at “public/private partnerships.” They could do something as revolutionary as when the Panthers sold “PSLs” (personal seat licenses) to pay off the debt used to construct the new stadium under the ownership of founder Jerry Richardson.

In return for any taxpayer-financed plan to build a new arena, a certain percentage of seats should be made available for free to any fan who wants to use them issued on a per game lottery basis. In a 75,000-seat arena, set aside 20% or 15,000 tickets per game. A middle-income family of four can hardly pay the $500-$1,000 it costs to go to a regular season game nowadays under any circumstance ― but technically, as a partial “owner” who helped finance the stadium through their taxes and guarantees, they can go and enjoy a game just like the main owners.

On top of set-aside seats for local taxpayers who are fans, city government should insist on receiving a small percentage of any upside increase in the value of the franchise when sold in return for guaranteeing any bonds used in the construction of the new facility. A mere 10% of any capital gain of $3 billion on the future sale of the Panthers or the Hornets would yield $300 million to local governments to build new schools, roads or low-income housing ― without raising property taxes or enacting local user fees and excise taxes.

Taxpayers should not bear the burden of helping build a new stadium for any professional sports team ― thereby “socializing” the downside risk for the owners ― without participating in some of the tangible upside benefits of capitalism those same owners will enjoy down the road.

Being a rabid Panthers or Hornets fan isn’t enough in this day and age. Call this the “Taxpayer Benefit License” (TBL) if you will. Taxpayers are not serfs who exist to help wealthy professional team owners get wealthier. Make it truly a team effort in which everyone can take pride.

The renewed debate on age, term limits

AS A GENERAL RULE, I’m not a fan of term limits for elected officials outside of the president because, in my opinion, the voters should decide whether they’ve had enough of their representatives.

Age limits, on the other hand, are something I might be able to get behind considering some recent events that were scary enough to make people revisit the issue.

ones who aren’t don’t seem to want to let go of the reins, as evidenced by Feinstein’s insistence that she will serve out her term until the end of 2024, McConnell not showing any signs that he’s ready to retire, and Biden insisting he’s well enough to serve another four years, though he’d be 86 at the end of his second term if he did so.

America is not past its prime, it’s just that our politicians are past theirs.

Last Wednesday, Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), 81, was holding a press conference when, as he was speaking, he froze for several seconds and looked dazed and unwell. He was led away by colleagues for a short time but then returned later to finish the presser.

No explanation was given outside of a joke about being “sandbagged.” But considering McConnell reportedly suffered three falls earlier this year, including one that required hospitalization — and is also said to use a wheelchair from time to time, it definitely sparked concern on Capitol Hill.

In another concerning moment, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who is 90, had to be prompted numerous times by another Democratic senator and one of her aides to say “aye” last week during a roll call vote on a defense appropriations bill after Feinstein launched into a speech about why she was prepared to vote for it.

Rumors have swirled for over a year now about the state of Feinstein’s cognitive and physical health after a bad bout of shingles she had in the spring and several alarming incidents including interviews where she appeared out of sorts. There have also been situations where Feinstein seemed to not remember on what she just voted or what her office had said on her behalf.

Questions have been raised going back to the days of his 2020 presidential campaign about Joe Biden’s mental and physical health, questions that have only escalated since he took office and voters have gotten to see firsthand why our octogenarian president is kept on a tight leash by his handlers.

There are a lot of people over 70 years of age serving in Congress. As far as I know, most of them are doing just fine, thank goodness. But the

Some have suggested in part that because age limits wouldn’t always be fair considering that many senior members in the House and Senate remain sharp as a tack that perhaps mental competency tests are in order. GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, 51, a former U.N. Ambassador under then-President Donald Trump, has proposed just that for elected officials over 75 years of age, making it one of the cornerstones of her campaign — along with term limits.

“In the America I see, the permanent politician will finally retire,” Haley stated in February at the start of her campaign. “We’ll have term limits for Congress and mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old.”

“America is not past its prime, it’s just that our politicians are past theirs,” Haley also said in a call for a “new generation” of leaders in Washington, D.C.

While I’m on the fence about age limits and mental competency tests, I can’t deny that the idea of a middle ground on the issue interests me. After all, at a certain point, it’s time to admit when your constituents would be better served by someone who is well enough mentally and physically to be able to handle the daily responsibilities of a sitting member of Congress.

North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection

Blahous’ laws of politics

Understanding a handful of rules about American politics can give us a much better sense of how Washington really works.

Editor’s note: Chuck Blahous is a friend of mine with whom I worked on federal budget and entitlement issues starting in 1994. He served in the Bush 43 White House as an adviser on economic issues and was appointed as a trustee to oversee Social Security and Medicare from 2010 to 2015. He is a legitimate “rocket scientist” with a doctorate in computational quantum chemistry from Berkeley ― so if anyone can figure out the federal budget, it is him.

Chuck has 10 simple rules which he uses to teach people how Washington does ― and doesn’t ― work. We will be publishing them in sequence over the next several weeks so you may want to clip these out of the print edition or bookmark them from the online edition and keep them handy to share with your family and friends whenever you need them. His article was in the July 25, 2023, edition of Discourse magazine published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University

FOR SEVERAL YEARS, I have kept a running list of rules of thumb for U.S. politics, rules that I developed to help explain to outside observers how Washington works. Until now, it has always felt like the wrong time to publish them, as doing so might be misconstrued as taking one side or the other in whatever the political controversy of the moment.

I offer them now with the caveat that they were not developed in response to any current subject of partisan dispute but are rather evergreen principles of American politics that will likely remain applicable for the indefinite future, as they have for the recent past.

1st Law: The strongest concerns about the federal deficit are expressed by the political party opposing the president. This law is typically expressed as an accusation against the other side: that the other party only professes to care about the deficit when they can use such positioning to undercut a president, after which they quickly forget such concerns as soon as a president of their own party enters office.

Certainly, there is no shortage of hypocrisy in politics, exhibited by the countless partisans whose alarm about federal deficits rises and falls and rises

again, purely as a function of who is in office at the time. Two important aspects of this phenomenon warrant particular attention. One is that both major parties do it, even though awareness of the other side’s inconsistencies naturally exceeds awareness of one’s own. The second point is that it’s not driven solely by opportunism. Rather, it reflects the realities that a) presidents tend to be judged (fairly or unfairly) on short-term economic performance; and b) the parties genuinely disagree about optimal economic policy.

The president’s party tends to prioritize shortterm economic performance over long-term fiscal prudence and is usually more willing to deficitspend to fuel it. The opposition party’s priorities, by contrast, incorporate more emphasis on the long term — the time when they hope to reclaim the executive branch. Moreover, each party is skeptical of the other’s policy prescriptions, with Democrats more willing to add to the deficit by increasing spending, and Republicans more willing to add to the deficit by reducing taxes. Each party doubts that the other’s preferred form of deficit increase will do enough economic good to justify increasing federal debt. Accordingly, a president usually faces resistance from the opposing party in Congress to both the amount and form of deficit spending he proposes. The fluctuations in the parties’ relative concern about federal deficits is one of the most reliably recurring rhythms in American politics. Democrats worried aloud about deficits in the 2000s when they positioned themselves against President George W. Bush’s tax cuts. In 2009, it was Republicans who fretted about deficits because they disagreed with President Obama’s stimulus spending plan, while at the same time Democrats shifted back to worrying about “mindless austerity.”

These positional fluctuations aren’t mere hypocrisy — they do, in fact, represent a genuine shifting of perspective whenever power and responsibility shift.

Will the Biden Administration ban cigars?

WHAT IS IT with the Left that they want to ban nearly everything that is fun or convenient?

Gas stoves, dishwashers, plastic straws, gas cars, snowmobiles and diving boards. And now the health busybodies want to ban certain cigars.

Recently, a gang of senators led by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) wrote a letter to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf urging the agency to ban (or heavily regulate) flavored cigar sales. Under pressure from the health lobby, the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products said it’s primed to take action in the weeks ahead. They say underage teenagers are smoking these cigars and are at risk of becoming addicted.

This makes as much sense as banning scotch because kids might smuggle a bottle from Dad’s liquor cabinet or outlawing R-rated movies because 14-year-olds occasionally sneak into the theater.

In 2009, Congress and President Barack Obama enacted the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act to give the federal government the tools it needs to keep cigarettes, vapes and other addictive tobacco substances out of our children’s hands. Now, however, the FDA is using this authority to advance its political agenda in ways that exceed the original intent and purpose of the legislation.

The notion that the FDA needs to act to stop teenagers from smoking flavored cigars is simply not true.

Youth smoking of cigars, including flavored cigars, has plummeted to historic lows over the years. The FDA should know these statistics because they were the ones who funded the definitive study published by The New England Journal of Medicine. This study analyzed the tobacco use of 13,651 children, from 12 to 17 years old, and it shows that only 2.3% had ever smoked a traditional cigar, and less than 1% (0.7%) had tried one within the past 30 days. That’s hardly an epidemic of cigar-smoking youngsters.

Last year, a federal judge ruled the FDA’s decision to try to regulate premium cigars was “arbitrary and capricious” because the agency failed to acknowledge data that these products are not used by youth and, due to their usage patterns, have very different health risks. This verdict from the court, questioning the scientific basis of the FDA’s actions, makes the agency’s insistence on finalizing its flavored cigar rule by the fall even more questionable.

More people (are) enslaved now, by sex trafficking, than there were when slavery was legal. BE

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN should watch the new hit movie “Sound of Freedom.”

In fact, he should screen it at the White House and invite his Cabinet and the White House staff to join him.

As Owen Gleiberman wrote in Variety: “Jim Caviezel anchors a solidly made and disquieting thriller about child sex trafficking.” Gleiberman went on to describe it “as a compelling movie that shines an authentic light on one of the crucial criminal horrors of our time, one that Hollywood has mostly shied away from.”

The film decisively drives home the seriousness of the scourge of child sex trafficking.

Tim Ballard was at the screening in Congress I recently attended. He is a former special agent who arrested more than 280 child molesters while serving in the United States government. He then quit to save children in Colombia. He is a genuine American hero.

Ballard’s role is played by Caviezel, the amazing actor who played Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s extraordinary movie “The Passion of the Christ.” Caviezel was at the screening and spoke eloquently about the enormous tragedy of child sex trafficking. Sadly, this is a much greater problem than most Americans are aware.

As Glieberman explained, “It’s the fastestgrowing international criminal network the world has ever seen. A closing title states — accurately — that there are more people enslaved now, by sex trafficking, than there were when slavery was legal. And the nightmare lived by captured children is unspeakable, unimaginable… and all too real. Let’s be clear: This matters more than the cocaine or opioids industry.”

It would be helpful for President Biden to prove that saving children from sexual exploitation and fighting pedophiles and traffickers in human beings is a bipartisan issue. There should be no partisan split over the protection of children.

Ironically, “Sound of Freedom” had been held up by Disney for five years. Whether Disney found the subject of stopping child sex trafficking unacceptable or simply thought the movie would not make money is unclear.

The film eventually was picked up by Angel Studios. This is a small independent studio in Provo, Utah, established by a group of Christian

activists who wanted to bring moral films to the American people that Hollywood liberals reject.

Angel Studios decided Independence Day was the right day to launch “Sound of Freedom” since it is our national birthday as a free country. The two went hand-in-hand.

No one had any idea how the film would do.

It has now passed $125 million in sales and continues to grow. As Adam Aron at AMC tweeted, “Yesterday we showed that movie 3,000 times at our 570 U.S. theaters and more than 100,000 people watched it.”

The success of this movie is growing by word of mouth.

Some left-wing critics have attacked the movie for focusing on only one part of the sexual exploitation of children. They argue that far more children are coerced by their own family or by neighbors and friends than are kidnapped. That criticism is an absurd piety that misses the whole point of arousing public interest in fighting child exploitation. The children depicted in the film are based on real survivors that Ballard and his organization saved in real life. The predators on the screen are based on real, violent and evil criminals. Debating petty storytelling nuance is tone-deaf navel-gazing. It helps nothing and no one.

Further, the novel which set the stage for the Civil War, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” had an amazingly emotional scene in which Eliza escapes across the half-frozen Ohio River. Purists could argue that that scene was not the way most slaves escaped. Yet, the emotional power of the scene moved millions toward support for abolition of slavery. The book was so powerful that when its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, met President Lincoln he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”

Just like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “Sound of Freedom” carries a large emotional truth in a story about real people. It is true morally and in historic terms — even if some quibble that there are alternative ways to tell the story.

President Biden has an opportunity to prove that fighting sexual exploitation of children is a bipartisan issue that should unify all Americans. It would be in President Biden’s best interest to show “Sound of Freedom” at the White House.

What is clear is we have here a case of regulatory overreach by a nonelected federal bureau. Back in 2009, opponents of the new law warned that the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act would become a slippery slope toward bans on smoking products even for adults. The bill’s advocates promised on a stack of Bibles that the law wouldn’t interfere with adults’ freedom to choose; rather, it would merely keep minors from smoking.

We now learn that this was a classic bait-andswitch move by the anti-smoking brigades. The anti-smoking lobby in Congress assigned new powers to regulators and the advocates all along, knowing this day of a ban would be coming.

I should say that I don’t smoke — except on very rare occasions, such as at a wedding. But even if you hate cigars or smoking in general, we should all recognize the danger here of letting unelected bureaucrats make these decisions. Who are they accountable to?

If Congress wants to ban vaping, smoking or certain types of cigars, they should vote on it. I suspect that few members of Congress would dare vote to outlaw cigars. It would create such a backlash from people who enjoy smoking that many in Congress would be tossed out of office.

What is doubly ironic and hypocritical here is that the real health hazard to America’s youth is the proliferation of toxic drugs — from fentanyl to opioids to cocaine. Abuse of these drugs has made drug overdoses a leading cause of death for Americans under 18. What is Congress’ reaction to that genuine killer epidemic?

Not a thing. They do nothing to stop the drug runners from crossing the border with their addictive and dangerous arsenal. They slap the wrists of the offenders when they are caught. Where is the FDA’s campaign to stop the killing? Flavored cigars aren’t good for our children, but they don’t turn our children into zombies or corpses.

If the FDA wants to improve public health, it could save tens of thousands of lives by speeding up the drug approval process so we can win the race to cure cancer, heart disease, epilepsy and diabetes. Let parents regulate what their teenagers are doing.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.

Letters addressed to the editor may be sent to letters@nsjonline.com or 1201 Edwards Mill Rd., Suite 300, Raleigh, NC 27607. Letters must be signed; include the writer’s phone number, city and state; and be no longer than 300 words. Letters may be edited for style, length or clarity when necessary. Ideas for op-eds should be sent to opinion@nsjonline.com.

COLUMN | NEWT GINGRICH

COLUMN | CHARLES BLAHOUS

Charles Blahous is the J. Fish and Lillian F. Smith chair and senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University

President Biden should see “Sound of Freedom”

NATION & WORLD

Chapel Hill native launches free college planning mobile app

By Griffin Daughtry North State Journal

DURHAM — You never know when or where a good idea will grab ahold of you. For Henry Woodbridge, his good idea — a mobile app that could make affordable college planning accessible to all students regardless of their socioeconomic background — came to him in the middle of the woods.

Woodbridge can recall the exact moment the idea for the Undecided app blossomed in his mind. He was thru-hiking southbound on the North Carolina portion of the Appalachian Trail when he caught a glimpse of the illuminated Fontana Dam through the trees, and everything fell into place.

“I remember that being a really special moment and thinking to myself that I couldn’t go back to society after hiking the AT and hitting an office job that I didn’t feel passionate about,” said Woodbridge, founder and CEO of Undecided. “In that moment, I decided I wanted to take this next chapter in my life to do something valuable for society, and I thought that making a mobile app to help students better plan for college was the best way.”

Before striking out on the Appalachian Trail, the Chapel Hill native worked as a customer success manager and product consultant for an education technology company. In these roles, Woodbridge worked di-

MOORE from page A1

has chosen to do it instead. He also clarified with Holmes that the censure applied to statements made by Hensley inside of the board and not outside remarks he may have made.

Board member Pauline Bruno remarked after the votes were taken that the actions were “very difficult” for the board to take.

The three votes were taken following the conclusion of a closed session.

“I am very proud of this board; that this board recognizes the need for civility and the need to get along with each other and to remember that our number one priority are our students,” Levy said as the meeting resumed.

Levy went on to speak about the importance of the district’s strategic plan of raising grade-level performance before addressing policy 1419 regarding board conduct.

“We have a policy and that policy is called 1419. That policy basically says that we have to conduct affairs of the board in an open and public manner and that we also have to model civility and integrity,” said Levy. “Because, after all, we are the models for our students.”

In his remarks, Levy described the “turmoil all around us in daily life” and that he believes the public wants to see the board conduct business with the “utmost respect” for each other.

As he ended his remarks, Levy asked if anyone had a motion to make.

Holmes spoke up and made a motion to remove Hensley as vice chair of the board.

“He has continuously and flagrantly attacked individuals, constituents, teachers and members of this board. He has failed to recognize that his words do have impact,” Holmes said of his motion to remove Hensley as vice chair. “His words are harsh, unwarranted and disruptive. His vile conduct does not reflect good leadership.

“David is a very intelligent man and has great ideas, but how can we expand on those ideas when the vice chair continues unwanted banter and unilateral thinking while at the same time crucifying members of this board and the public,” said Holmes. “This does not reflect leadership. And, with that being said, I do make a motion to remove David Hensley as vice chair.”

Ken Benway seconded the motion and also made a brief statement about the role of the board and restoration of academic performance and order in their schools.

“In the last few weeks, however, we have been diverted from our mission by statements made by Mr. Hensley, vice chair of this board, creating entirely avoidable distractions,” said Benway. Benway went on to say we now have “chaos in public meetings” and

taking on risky debt, Woodbridge realized, was ensuring that high school students have the necessary guidance when deciding to apply for college and picking the right school. Unfortunately, there is only one guidance counselor for every 500 public school students, and private college consultants charge at least $200 an hour. Some consulting packages even cost more than $3,000.

Henry Woodbridge

rectly with the admissions department of several prominent universities, learning firsthand how schools recruit and market to potential students. He also became increasingly aware of what is driving the current student loan crisis.

“A large part of what makes up the student loan bubble and the inflating cost of education is that these universities are businesses that are trying to get as many people to come there and pay as possible, especially the lower nonelite institutions,” explained Woodbridge. “This becomes a problem when students take out loans, go to a school that isn’t a good fit for them and then drop out, which about 40% do. Now they don’t have a degree, they still have loans, and it’s even harder to pay them back.”

The best way for students to avoid

that the “toxic pursuit of antagonism and character assassination of the elected chair of this board as well as the gratuitous and unfounded attacks on the superintendent show no signs of remorse on the part of Mr. Hensley.

“This board cannot and will not operate under those conditions,” Benway added.

“A singular point of no return was reached earlier on. Mr. Hensley’s statement in June on WEEB radio that Mr. Robert Levy, a practicing Jew, a highly competent lawyer, and proven public servant is, quote ‘a Nazi,’ unquote,” said Benway. “That statement is freighted with profound malice and attempted character assassination that cannot be ignored nor will be tolerated by this member of the board of education or by the citizens of Moore County.”

The statements made by Hensley on WEEB radio occurred on June 13, the day after the board had held a meeting in which Levy and Hensley had a heated exchange over some of Hensley’s items being removed from the agenda. Some of the items were referred back to being heard by committees, which Hensley pushed back on since at least one of them had already been approved by a committee he sat on.

During the interview Hensley remarked that Levy had “used a parliamentary trick to make it clear that he is going to remove things. ... He and only he will decide what’s on the agenda.”

In the second half of the interview, the Hensley, apparently frustrated with the removal of the agenda items, joked about past comments by former board member Pam Thompson in which she had allegedly referred to Levy as a “Nazi.” The host of the show seemed to acknowledge such a comment was made, laughed, and then moved on.

The same day the interview aired Levy wrote a lengthy Facebook post about Hensley’s remarks and characterizing Hensley as holding the agenda “hostage” over items he wished placed on the June 12 agenda.

“A Nazi?” wrote Levy. “I recently listened to WEEB, a radio station in Southern Pines, North Carolina.

On their air I heard David Hensley, a fellow member of our school board and my now former friend, call me a ‘Nazi.’ I’ve heard it before. I just never thought that this friend would infuse his radio show with such abject bigotry.

“If I was not Jewish, do you think he would have used that slur? Of course not. But it was not to be unexpected,” Levy wrote. “When a person is mad at someone else… really mad… he or she reach deep inside to find the most offensive and vulgar phrase possible. The hurt becomes more important than the issue. The hurt even obscures the issue itself. And, it worked.” In a June 21 Facebook post on

er’s likelihood of acceptance; guided journaling prompts to help students internalize their goals and reasons for pursuing a college education; and an advanced AI chatbot named Deci that enables students to ask questions and receive immediate responses.

In mid-July, the Undecided team also launched a freemium subscription model for students and parents interested in paying to chat with a real certified admissions adviser, which just happens to be Woodbridge himself. Undecided’s optional fee is only $8.99 a month.

Trump’s defamation lawsuit against CNN over ‘Big Lie’ dismissed in Florida

Miami

Woodbridge’s understanding of the importance of college fit is also founded on his personal experience, having based his decision to attend Guilford College as a young adult solely on something a professor said. Though the small liberal arts college ended up being the perfect school for him, he later struggled after transferring to UNC Chapel Hill, where the class sizes were larger and he had less access to his professors.

But now, thanks to Woodbridge, his team of software engineers, and a $10,000 MICRO grant from the NC IDEA Foundation, students from all walks of life have access to free college admissions planning, something Woodbridge wishes he had when he was applying to college.

Though still in its beta-testing phase, the Undecided app offers college-bound students several features, including guided college plans, which allow them to navigate the admissions process with ease; a college list manager that finds schools and categorizes them based on the us-

Hensley’s official school board page, Hensley posted an image of himself and Levy with a sign pointing to each of them along with the word “besties.”

“An occasional fight doesn’t mean you aren’t Besties,” Hensley wrote in the post. “Perhaps next time, Bob and I will just work things out in the boxing ring. Imagine how much the ‘Pay Per View’ would raise for MCS Fine and Performing Arts Programs.”

On July 20, Hensley responded to the events of the special called meeting on his official Hensley School Board Facebook page.

“Some people may have noticed that I was uncharacteristically missing at Wednesday’s Special Called session and thought it odd why, the guy who has only missed one meeting in over two years, did not attend to defend himself?” asked Hensley in the post. “The answer is that Chair Levy intentionally scheduled the meeting on a day which he knew I would be unable to attend.”

Hensley’s post goes on to describe he had notified the board “several weeks ago” that he had scheduled treatments on July 18-19 for an ongoing issue with his vocal cords.

“Armed with this knowledge, Levy scheduled the special session when he knew I had an unmovable appointment,” wrote Hensley. “The notification went out via e-mail. Since I don’t routinely check my MCS e-mail, I did not know about the meeting until I saw the meeting notice posted on Facebook mid-morning on Monday.”

Hensley went on to say the board scheduled the meeting when “while both the Superintendent and the Superintendent’s Assistant were on vacation,” noting that the superintendent’s assistant is the person “who reaches out via phone call and/ or text to notify board members of emerging events.”

“If you are going to make accusations and pass judgement on someone, you could not have done it in a more cowardly way then Levy and Holmes did this,” Hensley wrote. “They ensured I wouldn’t be there to counter their accusations and that they would be free to say whatever they wanted without any rebuttal. That is 100% what they did.”

Hensley reaffirmed the main points of his July 20 post to North State Journal.

In an interview with North State Journal, Levy responded to some of Hensley’s claims, noting that he had sent the board an email on July 13 that the special meeting had been set for July 19.

Levy reiterated that he did not call the meeting; Holmes did. He also cited the response from Hensley on July 17 in which Hensley said he “just saw” the notice of the meeting.

“OK, before the Wednesday meeting…Well into the day… this is his words, ‘I just saw this meeting’ and he attaches my email from the 13th,”

“Getting my certification to be a college admissions adviser and working with students is what’s kept my spirits high while building this app over the last year,” Woodbridge said. “At first, it was shocking how many basic questions we received, everything from ‘How do I apply to college?’ to ‘How do I find scholarships?’ It’s a great reminder of why we are building this app, and it keeps our team focused on our mission.”

In the future, Woodbridge plans to expand the app and offer guided personality and intelligence-type quizzes that will help students determine potential college majors. Undecided will also offer portals for direct parental access. But for right now, Woodbridge’s focus is on helping his users and actively fundraising, which he is doing with the help of several angel investors.

“Applying to colleges and doing the financial planning necessary to go is a real undertaking,” Woodbridge added. “Right now, the standards are so low for college planning that we can do some good almost no matter what, especially for public high school students who aren’t getting the attention they need.”

Levy said. “[It] said ‘I just saw this. As I do not routinely check my MCS e-mail.’ Let me repeat that – ‘I just saw this as I do not routinely check my MCS e-mail.’

“So he’s not checking his e-mail,” said Levy. “Now, we have meetings which could be called on 48 hours’ notice. He not only had notice of it one day, but he had the notice the following day when I chose the date.”

Levy also noted that planning for the special meeting had more than 48 hours’ notice with a window of five days’ notice from start to finish.

A copy of the email provided to North State Journal confirms Levy’s account.

“I just saw this, as I routinely do not check my MCS email,” Hensley wrote on July 17. “I have my semi-annual voice treatment at Duke Medical Clinic on Wednesday morning. That appointment cannot be rescheduled, as they do that treatment monthly and I must stick to my schedule.”

Levy said Hensley did not make any further replies about the meeting and that “after the work had been done, he then says, ‘I can’t make it.’”

Levy called Hensley’s inability to attend “unfortunate” and said “I knew nothing about any of his doctor’s appointments at any time” before the July 17 response.

He also said he and Hensley had “not been in communication for many weeks” other than in board meetings.

Given the time span between July 13 when the meeting date was decided and announced as July 19 along with the proper publication of the meeting date, it would appear Levy and the school board followed state statute with regard to holding the special called meeting.

The board acted “with unanimity” on the matter, Levy told North State Journal.

“What we have here is a situation where we must work for the students and for the kids,” said Levy. “We need to get this behind us. This is a message that was set by the entire board, not just by me.”

Levy added “I could have removed Mr. Hensley from his committee positions simply on my own accord. I elected not to do that because I wanted the message to come from the board.

“The message is Hensley needs to join us in concentrating on the needs of the students and the efficient running of the school district and the accomplishment of our strategic plan,” said Levy. “It is not to make accusations against fellow board members. It is not to make accusations against previous board members.

“We have been on the board for almost 2 years now. What happens at the schools right now we are responsible for,” Levy added. “And it is our responsibility to educate these students. The people of Moore County have given us that responsibility and we have to work together.”

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit Donald Trump filed against CNN in which the former U.S. president claimed that references in news articles or by the network’s hosts to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election as “the Big Lie” were tantamount to comparing him to Adolf Hitler.

Trump had been seeking punitive damages of $475 million in the federal lawsuit filed last October in South Florida, claiming the references hurt his reputation and political career. Trump is a candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination in what is his third run for the presidency as a major-party candidate.

U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal, who was appointed by Trump, said Friday in his ruling that the former president’s defamation claims failed because the references were opinions and not factual statements. Moreover, it was a stretch to believe that, in viewers’ minds, that phrase would connect Trump’s efforts challenging the 2020 election results to Nazi propaganda or Hitler’s genocidal and authoritarian regime, the judge said.

“CNN’s use of the phrase ‘the Big Lie’ in connection with Trump’s election challenges does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people,” the judge wrote in his decision.

Email messages seeking comment were sent to Trump’s attorneys in South Florida and Washington, D.C. CNN declined to comment.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tesla opening more showrooms on tribal lands to avoid state laws barring direct sales

Tesla is ramping up efforts to open showrooms on tribal lands where it can sell directly to consumers, circumventing laws in states that bar vehicle manufacturers from also being retailers in favor of the dealership model.

Mohegan Sun, a casino and entertainment complex in Connecticut owned by the federally recognized Mohegan Tribe, announced that the California-based electric automaker will open a showroom with a sales and delivery center this fall on its sovereign property where the state’s law doesn’t apply.

The news comes after another new Tesla showroom was announced in June, set to open in 2025 on lands of the Oneida Indian Nation in upstate New York.

Over the years in numerous states, Tesla has sought and been denied dealership licenses, pushed for law changes and challenged decisions in courts. The company scored a victory earlier this year when Delaware’s Supreme Court overturned a ruling upholding a decision by state officials to prohibit Tesla from selling its cars to directly customers.

Tesla opened its first store and repair shop on Native American land in 2021 in New Mexico. The facility, built in Nambé Pueblo, north of Santa Fe, marked the first time the company partnered with a tribe to get around state laws, though the idea had been in the works for years.

FILE PHOTO

COLLEGE BASKETBALL

Duke hiring OU’s Dildy as men’s basketball assistant

Durham Duke is hiring Oklahoma’s Emanuel Dildy as an assistant coach after Amile Jefferson’s departure to the NBA, according to reports. The 42-year- old Dildy has spent the past two seasons with the Sooners and has a reputation as a strong recruiter. Before that, he spent three seasons at Northwestern. Dildy also had stints at Valparaiso, Missouri, Loyola Chicago — working there under current Sooners coach Porter Moser — and his alma mater Eastern Illinois. He was all- Ohio Valley Conference performer as a senior with the Redbirds and had a brief professional playing career, including two seasons in Germany.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

Northwestern hiring Holtz as temporary special assistant

Evanston, Ill.

Northwestern is hiring veteran college football coach Skip Holtz, who has won two straight USFL championships with Birmingham, to a temporary role as special assistant to interim head coach David Braun, according to reports. Braun was named interim head coach earlier this month to replace Pat Fitzgerald, who was fired after an investigation into hazing allegations in his program. Holtz, the son of former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz, has 17 years of experience as a major college football head coach with East Carolina, South Florida and Louisiana Tech. He is 119 -98 overall and was 64 -50 with six straight bowl victories at La Tech before stepping down after the 2021 season. He also coached UConn for five years before the program made the jump to the top tier of Division I. Holtz’s job with Northwestern is expected to run through the season and not interfere with his USFL job.

Young shoulders: Panthers forge ahead with rookie QB

A look at what first-year QB1s have done in recent history

By Shawn Krest North State Journal

WHEN IT COMES to elapsed time, the Great Carolina Panthers’ Quarterback Competition of 2023 will go down in history with some of Mike Tyson’s early fights and the tenure of many Yankees managers that George Steinbrenner hired.

The Kentucky Derby may be the greatest two minutes in sports, but the battle to be Panthers’ QB1 didn’t go much longer than that.

Three months after the Panthers selected him first overall in the NFL Draft, trading up to land the pick, Bryce Young was crowned as the opening-day starter before bags were even unpacked at preseason training camp.

“I just think Bryce has proved what he put on tape in college, that he has what it takes to be QB1,” Carolina coach Frank Reich said.

“The way he handled the offseason program, just seeing how he’s responded and how he’s continuing to grow. We’ve got a long way to go, he’s got a long way to go. Seeing how the team’s responded to him, everything’s made this decision very easy.”

Now, the question turns from “Who will start?” to “How will he do?” Panthers coaches, players and fans hope Young’s term as starter lasts significantly longer than the quarterback derby did.

Regardless of how his competition with veteran offseason acquisition Andy Dalton had turned out, the odds were overwhelmingly in favor of Young starting at some point this season.

Young will be the first Panthers rookie to start on opening day since Cam Newton in 2011. Since Newton, like Young, was picked first overall, a total of 38 quarterbacks have been taken in the first round of the NFL Draft.

Out of that group, 36 started games as a rookie — all but Jake Locker and Jordan Love. Twen-

“He has what it takes to be QB1.”

Panthers coach Frank Reich on Bryce Young

ty-eight of the 38 draftees started at least half of the year, and 22 started 12 or more games. Eight — Newton, Andrew Luck, Ryan Tannehill, Jameis Winston, Carson Wentz, Kyler Murray, Trevor Lawrence and Mac Jones — started every game of their rookie year, an accomplishment that is on the table for Young.

So the odds are good that Young will put in a full season, or at least a good portion of it, as starter. And how will he do? That is still very much up in the air.

The 38 first-rounders started an average of 10.7 games as rookies and, rounding things up, had an average record of 4-7. For the full season, the team that drafted the

quarterback in the first round improved by an average of 0.7 wins.

The higher a quarterback went in the draft, the bigger the impact he had in his first year. Top-10 quarterbacks went 5-8 as starter and saw their teams improve by 1.4 wins. Top-five draftees produced a 2.6-win improvement, and first overall picks went 4-9 with a 3.5win improvement.

The eight rookies who started every game as a rookie went 7-9 and boosted their team’s win total by 3.2.

The Panthers were 7-9 last season and only drafted so high because of a blockbuster trade. That means that, based on history, Young will be hard-pressed to match last season’s Panthers’ record. Only seven quarterbacks had seven-win seasons as rookies: Locker (who didn’t start), Luck, Robert Griffin III, Tannehill, Wentz, Jones and Kenny Pickett.

There’s also no guarantee the team will improve with a rookie taking snaps. Fourteen of the 38 first-rounders saw the team post fewer wins than the previous year. That includes eight of the 25 top10 draftees, However, only three of the 17 top-five quarterbacks and one of the eight taken first overall saw their teams take a step back.

As for Young’s performance on

See PANTHERS, page B4

Keep going: Bulls slogan keeps Hess fighting

The former Durham reliever is battling cancer for the second time

By Shawn Krest North State Journal

DAVID HESS knew something was wrong. He just self-diagnosed the wrong thing.

Hess spent most of the 2021 season with the Durham Bulls, who were winning their first of back-to-back Triple-A titles. His Bulls tenure was interrupted by a pair of MLB promotions — one to the Miami Marlins and one to the Rays.

His velocity was up. He was winning games, going 6-2 with the Bulls and 2-2 in MLB. Something, however, wasn’t right.

“Things started to get toward the end of the year,” he starts, struggling for words. “I just haven’t … I started having a lot of shortness of breath. I would get really tired really easily. I started losing weight. Looking back now, those are signs … and I guess symptoms of something bigger going on.”

In 2021, however, shortness of breath meant something else en-

tirely.

“We were coming out of COVID, you know?” he said. “And so I thought maybe, just somehow, I had gotten COVID, and I was just trying to kind of get through it. And my wife was constantly tell-

ing me something was wrong. I finally told her when we get to the offseason, and when we get home in October, I’ll go to the doctor and get everything checked out.”

He never made it to the doctor’s office.

“Things progressively got worse and worse,” he said. “We finally did get home, and I went for a walk. … I was trying to go for a run, and I just couldn’t do it. It ended up being a walk, and I ended up coming back home quicker than expected. And I said, ‘OK, I’ll go to the doctor tomorrow.’”

“Well,” he continued. “I woke up the next morning, hopped in the shower and coughed up blood. So I went to the emergency room.”

Hess had a rare form of cancer known as a germ cell tumor.

“We found out that I had a tumor in my chest that was about the size of a cantaloupe, maybe even bigger than that,” he said. “It was pressing on my heart, my lungs, my windpipe. I was breathing at like 15% capacity.”

He was diagnosed in October and had the cancer treated with chemotherapy. He was pronounced cured in late January and able to resume his career.

“I went through all the treatment and thought everything was in the clear, and I went back to baseball,” he said. “I thought everything was great.”

See BULLS, page B3

JACOB KUPFERMAN | AP PHOTO

Panthers quarterback Bryce Young greets young fans Saturday at Carolina training camp in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

JOHN BAZEMORE | AP PHOTO

Fomer Bulls pitcher David Hess is battling cancer for a second time.

TRENDING

Bryan Kim:

The incoming Duke freshman won the U.S. Junior Amateur championship, winning the final two holes for a 2‑up victory over Joshua Bai. Kim led when the 36‑hole final was suspended Saturday, fell behind when the players returned Sunday and then went back ahead for good by winning the 35th hole. The 18‑year‑old from Brookeville, Maryland, earned an exemption into the 2024 U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2 next June.

Tommy McClelland:

The Vanderbilt deputy athletic director was named athletic director at Rice. Before moving to Vanderbilt, he served as the athletic director at Louisiana Tech from 2013‑20. McClelland will begin his new job with the Owls on Aug. 14. McClelland, who has a degree from UNC Chapel Hill’s Kenan‑Flagler Business School, replaces Joe Karlgaard, who left Rice last month for a position in the private sector.

Sony Michel: The two‑time Super Bowl champion running back has decided to retire on the opening weekend of training camp with the Los Angeles Rams.

Coach Sean McVay announced Michel’s decision Saturday after the third practice of camp for the Rams, who re‑signed Michel last month. McVay said they had a conversation on Saturday morning in which Michel reached his decision. The 28‑year‑old Michel was entering his sixth NFL season. He won a Super Bowl ring in his rookie season with the New England Patriots, and he earned a second championship with the Rams three years later.

Beyond the box score

POTENT QUOTABLES

Chris Buescher pulled away on a restart with three laps to go and won at Richmond Raceway, earning a spot in the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs. Buescher was ahead by nearly six seconds when a caution came out with under 10 laps to go. That erased his sizable lead over Denny Hamlin, but Buescher pulled away easily on a restart. Hamlin, finished second, followed by Kyle Busch, Joey Logano and Ryan Preece.

Denny Hamlin on how the Cup Series’ point system is leading to urgency and necessary aggression.

The Rangers acquired three‑time Cy Young Award winner Max Scherzer in a blockbuster trade Sunday with the Mets, an all‑in move for the AL West leaders. Scherzer will make his Texas debut Thursday against the White Sox.

The trade netted the Mets infielder Luisangel Acuña, the younger brother of Atlanta star Ronald Acuña Jr.

Terence Crawford knocked down Errol Spence Jr. three times Saturday night before finally ending the fight at 2:32 of the ninth round on a technical knockout to cement himself as one of the greatest welterweights in history. Crawford became the first undisputed champion in the 147‑pound division in the four‑belt era that began in 2004.

Panthers outside linebacker Brian Burns on why he didn’t sit out training camp while he waits on a long‑term contract extension.

PRIME NUMBER

1.6M

Number of tickets sold at the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, surpassing expectations for the tournament.

Céline Boutier carded a final round 3‑under 68 to win the Évian Championship by six shots for her first major title. The 29‑year‑old Duke standout finished at 14‑under 270 overall and became the first Frenchwoman to win the tournament, which became a major in 2013. Boutier had never finished better than 29th in six previous appearances in the tournament.

GOLF

NASCAR

SKIP ROWLAND | AP PHOTO

BOXING

JOHN LOCHER | AP PHOTO

MLB

FRANK FRANKLIN II | AP PHOTO

“I missed being with my defense.”

JACOB KUPFERMAN | AP PHOTO

LEWIS JOLY | AP PHOTO

“Aggressive will win every time.”

DERIK HAMILTON | AP PHOTO

Brown assembles dream staff to work with Maye

The star quarterback may spurn the NFL to learn from quarterbacking gurus in Chapel Hill

By Shawn Krest North State Journal

DRAKE MAYE has already turned down untold riches from the transfer portal to stay at UNC. Now he’s hinting he may also press pause on cashing NFL paychecks.

A Heisman candidate last year and one of the shortlisters for the award this year, Maye reportedly was offered millions in NIL cash to transfer to various unnamed football factories across the NCAA. That’s the charge leveled by coach Mack Brown earlier this year. Maye, whose father quarterbacked the Tar Heels and brothers have played for the UNC basketball team, with Luke winning a national title in 2017, decided to stay at Carolina.

The decision was a mild surprise last year, but with Maye expected to be one of the top quarterbacks in college and a potential high draft pick in 2024, it would be a shock if he doesn’t enter the draft when he’s first eligible.

“I think coming back is definitely not out of the question,” Maye said at last week’s ACC Football Kickoff in Charlotte. “Third year. I want to obviously graduate and however the year plays out, hopefully we win all the games we can. But staying at this great university,

playing another year, you can’t say no to that. It’s an awesome university.”

Before Tar Heels fans start planning a parade in Maye’s honor, however, it’s still only a possibility.

“At the same time, my dream is to play in the NFL,” he cautioned.

“So I’ll let this year play out itself, but North Carolina is a special place to me. And I could imagine myself playing five years here.”

Making his potential decision to stay easier is Brown, who re-

placed offensive coordinator Phil Longo — who left following last season to take a job at Wisconsin — with several big names in the quarterback molding business.

If you don’t want your quarterback to go to the NFL, Brown seemed to reason, then why not bring the NFL to him?

The UNC staff now features coaches who have worked with quarterbacking royalty.

“I’ve got him a lot of manpower in that room,” Brown told ESPN last week, “and now what we’ve got

UNC coach Mack Brown on Drake Maye’s quarterback advisers

to do is make sure all of them do what’s best for him, that is, therefore, best for our offense.”

The first hire was Chip Lindsey to replace Longo as offensive coordinator. Lindsey has run an Air Raid offense similar to Longo’s at each stop on his coaching journey, and Brown said Maye was one of the interviewers Lindsey had to face.

“He was involved in the hiring of Chip Lindsey,” Brown said, going as far as to admit that if Maye had vetoed the move, Carolina probably wouldn’t have hired Lindsey.

Brown then hired Freddie Kitchens, a former NFL head coach, and brought in former UNC quarterback Clyde Christensen as an analyst.

“We have Clyde Christensen there, who coached the best quarterbacks in the NFL,” Brown said. “We’ve also got Freddie Kitchens, who coached two No. 1 draft choices at quarterback. We have a lot of great help around Drake.”

Maye seems duly impressed with his new staff’s NFL pedigree.

“Coach Christensen, he has coached Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck and Tom Brady,”

he said. “So just sitting there with some tape watching old drills of them, picking up little things. He has coached the best, so just trying to pick up whatever I can from him.

“Coach Kitchens was just a few years back the head coach of the Browns. I think he knows a few things, and having him in there, you have a great room in there. So just, like I said, trying to soak it all up. Just ask all the questions. I was asking the other day about Baker (Mayfield) and some of those guys he coached, their mentality and (competitiveness). I think you can never — no question is a bad question with guys like them.”

The moves also show how dialed in Brown is with his star quarterback. He knows that Maye likes nothing better than learning football and working to get better.

“After the season Drake came in to me and said, ‘Help me with these things. These are things I need to improve.’ That’s who he is,” Brown said. “He was raised in a family of athletes. So he is always looking at what I can do better instead of patting himself on the back. … We have to be careful with him because he is too hard on himself, and he is always ‘I didn’t do this right.’ Well, let’s talk about what you did right too, so we can do that.”

So Brown has assembled a master class in quarterbacking for the hungry young prodigy.

It’s the type of move that might just keep Maye in light blue for another year.

NC State aims for consistency on D, rebound on offense

Coach Dave Doeren enters his 11th season in Raleigh

By Ryan Henkel North State Journal

NC STATE had a volatile football season last year, starting four different quarterbacks in an 8-5 record that included wins over rivals UNC and Wake Forest.

“I think we performed really well last year considering four quarterbacks had to play,” said coach Dave Doeren at last week’s ACC Football Kickoff in Charlotte. “There’s never been a team in the history of college football that’s won eight games with four quarterbacks. When we sat in this meeting a year ago, we’d have all said that eight wins was not what we were hoping for.

“The team changes a lot when you lose a quarterback, another quarterback and another quarterback. I look at last year as a huge success with the difficulties we faced. Would have loved to not have those challenges and been at the championship game and all that, but it’s not the reality of sports.” NC State will be hoping for a bit more stability this season with 11 starters returning and the infusion of some new blood too.

A key question for the team though will be how the quarterback room shakes out. Last season, freshman MJ Morris was forced into action and showcased his talent, but the Wolfpack brought in former Virginia quarterback Brennan Armstrong from the transfer portal this offseason.

“From my standpoint, I liked how he just came in, put his head down and went to work,” Doeren said of Armstrong. “You see how he cheers on his teammates when they win things, his excitement level for that, how hard he competed in spring ball and seeing him coaching guys and just the way he goes about his business is where the respect for me is.”

The Wolfpack made another addition from the Cavaliers during the offseason, bringing in Robert

Anae as offensive coordinator.

“[Anae] just lets me be me,” Armstrong said of his former coordinator at UVA. “I don’t feel confined or that I’m locked up at all. I’m just allowed to play how I want to play. I think that he’s got a good idea on how I play and my thoughts, and I have a good idea on how he thinks. Everyone talks about the running quarterback and he lets me run the ball, he doesn’t care. He designs things for those things too, and I think I’m at my best when I’m able to just play free and not worry about those types of things.”

While the offense is hoping to bounce back, NC State was again carried last season by its defense, led by defensive coordi -

nator Tony Gibson.

“[Gibson]’s system is unique,” Doeren said. “Not a lot of people run the 3-3-5. He understands the ins and outs of it really, really well. He knows how people are going to attack him, he knows what the answers are before they happen. He has a good progression, not just in teaching, but when to add things in and when it’s time to change things up.

“He’s a great chemistry guy, not just with players but with staff. The chemistry on that side of the ball, Tony deserves a lot of credit for that. When he was promoted four years ago to defensive coordinator, he changed a lot of things, and those things have paid off for us.”

Isaiah Moore, Payton Wilson and Drake Thomas made up one of the best linebacking groups in the country, but with Moore and Thomas having moved on to the NFL, the defense will have to rely on the experience of its backfield more this season.

“I expect our defense to be No. 1 in passing defense throughout the whole league,” said cornerback Aydan White. “We just have a lot of depth coming back and experience. For example, our corners, safeties and nickels, we all watch film together and keyed in on things that we need to do for the season. Definitely having that experience all around can help. If a man goes down, we have that next

man coming up.”

Even though NC State is looking for a more balanced approach this season, the odds are that it will once again be the defense leading the charge.

“As a defense, everyone said it was a good year, but we didn’t meet our requirements,” said Wilson. “We didn’t win every game and we put that on ourselves because people were able to score. So just getting back to that mentality of nobody scores a point on us. It doesn’t really matter what happens on the offensive side of the ball because if our opponents can’t score, they can’t win. Just trying to carry that intensity and violence over the year that we played with last year.”

He didn’t return to the field until June, and it didn’t go well. After appearing in four games for Tampa’s extended spring training team — made up mostly of low-level minor leaguers and rehabbing injured players, he returned to Durham. Hess appeared in four games for the Bulls in June and July. He didn’t have the same effectiveness, however, giving up as many runs as he recorded outs (13 each). The Rays released him from the organization on July 11. It turned out his tumor had one last surprise for him, however.

In May of this year, Hess posted on social media, “The last couple weeks have been a whirlwind for us with this cancer journey that seems to never want to end. We found out that inside my tumor was [a] very rare and very aggressive type of cancer called angiosarcoma.”

Also a rare form of cancer, angiosarcoma develops in the lining of blood and lymph vessels throughout the body. Hess had nodules in his lungs.

“We don’t know if the angiosarcoma initially started as a germ cell tumor,” Hess said two months later, “and those are kind of known

for having different components kind of inside of them. We weren’t sure if the angiosarcoma was laying dormant and we couldn’t see it or if it had been mutated by the chemo. But one way or another, it started to kind of latch onto my lungs.”

Hess had to have a lung removed, and he’s undergoing treatment for the angiosarcoma. He faces another surgery to remove the tumor, but he’s hopeful everything will be in remission by the fall.

“If all goes according to plan,” he added. Hess is leaning on his Durham

experience to help him through his battle with the disease. While he was with the Bulls, fellow reliever Tyler Zombro was hit in the head by a 106-mph line drive and underwent emergency surgery.

Zombro is currently attempting a comeback in the Texas Rangers organization. “It was one of the scariest moments of my life,” Hess said. “(Zombro) was one of my best friends, and there was a lot of scary stuff that came from that. But our team rallied behind him. Our team slogan was, ‘Keep going,’ and that was a big thing that inspired us. And that’s something I’ve kind of

adopted going into this.

“You’re going to have good days and bad days,” he continued. “The treatment you’re going to have will have a lot of rough moments. You have to find the small victories that are going to help you keep going.”

David Hess is fighting the toughest battle of his life, but he isn’t giving up any time soon.

“As humans, we’re very resilient,” he said. “We can keep going. We can push through a lot more than we think. So even when it seems really dark, there’s always a light at the end. You just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

BULLS from page B1

AP PHOTO

UNC coach Mack Brown looks on as Tar Heels quarterback Drake Maye responds to a question during ACC Football Kickoff last week in Charlotte.

“I’ve got him a lot of manpower in that room.”

Quarterback Brennan Armstrong, who transferred to NC State from Virginia during the offseason, responds to a reporter’s question during ACC Football Kickoff last week in Charlotte.

JEFF SINER / THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER VIA AP

Poggi, Charlotte look to silence doubters in new conference

The 49ers were picked by media members to finish last in the AAC standings

By Jesse Deal North State Journal

CHARLOTTE — Biff Poggi left quite a mark at last week’s American Athletic Conference Media Days — a symbolic one but also possibly an actual mark as he pounded his hand on the lectern, frustrated at what he perceived as a lack of respect for his team.

The first-year Charlotte football coach wasn’t exactly thrilled that the conference’s media members had just picked his team to finish dead last in the 2023 AAC media preseason poll.

He also wasn’t too pleased with the limited questions he received from the press.

“That’s it? Three questions?

Maybe that’s because you have us ranked last, that’s all what you think of us. So, we get that message, thank you,” the impassioned 63-year-old told reporters, slapping the lectern a few times before giving it a final, defiant knock and walking away.

Poggi’s press conference reaction was more than just a coach sticking up for his players. It was the sound of a culture shift and the changing of the guard for a football team that has limped to an unsightly 29-62 record in nine years as a program.

While former coach Will Healy was affable and mild-mannered, Poggi is a boisterous and commanding presence with fiery confidence that the Niners will make some noise in the AAC this fall.

C oming off a 3-9 record in Conference USA, Charlotte is now one of six new teams in the AAC, joining fellow newcomers UAB, Florida Atlantic, North Texas, Rice and UTSA, as well as continuing members East Carolina, Memphis, Navy, South Florida, SMU, Temple, Tulane and Tulsa.

The 49ers are now led by the former Pitt player (and teammate of Dan Marino) who spent the past few seasons as an associate head coach at Michigan under Jim Harbaugh.

Before joining the Wolverines, Poggi built up a reputation as a premier high school coach at Baltimore’s Gilman School and Saint

Frances Academy while also managing a separate career as a successful hedge fund manager.

For the Niners, it doesn’t hurt that Poggi already has the lived experience of building a football team from the ground up. As the founder of Saint Frances Academy’s football program, he personally funded 65 scholarships as the school became a regional powerhouse that was chronicled in the HBO documentary “The Cost of Winning.”

At this point, Poggi is all-in on the idea of giving Charlotte football a fresh reboot and a launchpad on which to build.

He has made a verbal distinction between the 49ers of last

Biff Poggi, Charlotte football coach

year and this year.

“We’re not some Conference USA team coming into this league. We’re a totally different team,” Poggi said at AAC Media Days. “We brought in 52 players. After spring practice, we kept 52

that we really liked off our team. We think we’re prepared for this conference, but we’ll let our play speak for itself.” There is also a lot of familiarity between Charlotte’s new coach and new players.

“I think 24 of our 52 new guys actually played for me at St. Francis and have come from Power Five schools. These are, in my opinion, some of the finest players around,” Poggi added.

Poggi has said he intends to make Charlotte a physical, runheavy football team that can also stop the run. The Niners finished 10th in C-USA last season in both rushing yards per game (116.1) and rushing yards allowed per

Hurricanes lock up Aho with 8-year extension

Carolina’s franchise center will earn an average of $9.75 million annually

By Cory Lavalette North State Journal

RALEIGH — On his 26th birthday, Sebastian Aho committed to playing in Raleigh at least until he will turn 35.

Aho and the Hurricanes agreed to an eight-year, $78 million contract extension last Wednesday that will start in the 2024-25 season and carry through until the summer of 2032.

“This is the place I want to play,” Aho said during a video call with the media on Wednesday. “Starting from the front office, the organization has taken huge steps over the over the course of last five years, and we feel like we’re building every year.”

The deal is the richest contract in franchise history and will cost $9.75 million against the salary cap annually — just shy of a $1.3 million yearly raise from the fiveyear offer sheet Aho signed with Montreal in 2019 that Carolina matched.

Aho is entering the final year of a contract that has a $8,460,250 cap hit in 2023-24, 50th highest in the league, according to CapFriendly. com. Fifteen players will cost more than $10 million against the salary cap next season — a number that is sure to rise as the NHL’s salary cap gets a boost as the players pay off debt from the seasons impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Carolina, however, kept Aho under that threshold on his new deal. The 35th overall pick by Carolina in the 2015 NHL Draft, Aho has

PANTHERS from page B1

the field, history indicates he’ll be productive and leave room to improve in the interceptions category. The past rookies on average completed 60% of their passes for

will start with the 2024-25

blossomed into the Hurricanes’ best player, leading the team in scoring in five of his seven NHL seasons and totaling 218 goals, 250 assists and 468 points in 520 career regular season games. “We all know Sebastian as a great player, but he’s a great person too,” Hurricanes president and GM Don Waddell said during the media availability. “And those are the kinds of people you want to surround yourself with because when times get tough, these kinds

2,400 yards, 13 touchdowns and 10 picks, producing a quarterback rating of 78.3, about seven points lower than their career rating. Top overall picks threw for 3,400 yards with 18 touchdowns, 13 interceptions and a rating of 81.5, eight

of players dig down and make it happen for you. So this was an easy decision for us to sign Sebastian to eight years and we’re very pleased.”

The negotiations for this contract went much smoother than his last, when an impasse led to Aho signing a five-year, $42.295 million offer sheet with the Canadiens. The Hurricanes immediately indicated they would match the offer sheet and did, triggering a rivalry with the Original Six franchise that included Carolina poaching Jesperi

points lower than their career mark. As for his Panthers career, the history isn’t as optimistic as many might hope. The average first-rounder started 43 games for the team that drafted him, or

Kotkaniemi from the Habs via of-

fer sheet and Montreal reporting the Hurricanes to the NHL for not playing enough preseason games before the 2021-22 season.

Aho and the Hurricanes were quick to extinguish any suggestion of a schism between the player and team after the offer sheet, and negotiations on his latest extension went much smoother.

Aho said the decision to re-sign was a “pretty easy decision for me. Actually, the only choice I had in

fewer than three full seasons. Topfive picks started 54 games and top overall picks started 67, or just under four seasons. Cam Newton’s 124 starts for the Panthers are the most by any of the quarterbacks taken in the first round since 2011.

game (205.8). Redshirt junior and projected starting running back Shadrick Byrd impressed in the team’s Green vs. White spring game. After leading the 49ers in rushing yardage last season, he looks to be a primary ball carrier yet again on a young running back corps that also includes freshmen Durell Robinson and Terron Kellman.

Dual-threat quarterback Jalon Jones is one of eight transfer additions who have already earned a starting role on offense, per an offseason depth chart. The theme extends to the defense, where seven new players appear to be in starting roles.

“I want to take that next step and be more of a leader and be an even better player and help the team win the Cup.”

Sebastian Aho,

center

my mind was to have another contract with the Canes.”

Now the Finnish center and the Hurricanes continue their quest for the one thing that has eluded them — a Stanley Cup title.

“I want to take that next step and be more of a leader and be an even better player and help the team win the Cup,” Aho said.

The signing is the latest move in Carolina’s continued push to win a championship. The Hurricanes landed two big names in free agency — defenseman Dmitry Orlov and winger Michael Bunting — and also brought back defenseman Tony DeAngelo on a discount $1.675 million contract.

The additions of Orlov and DeAngelo clutters Carolina’s defense, which has eight NHL players after re-signing restricted free agent Dylan Coghlan. Brett Pesce continues to be at the center of trade rumors as he and the team are at a crossroads in contract negotiations — Pesce’s contract is up after this coming season.

The league-wise cap crunch has certainly contributed to Pesce not yet being moved, but the Hurricanes are also in the enviable position of being salary cap compliant. That gives Waddell the luxury of waiting for a deal that makes sense or, if that doesn’t surface, simply keeping Pesce on the arguably the NHL’s best and deepest defense.

Carolina would be more than happy for lightning to strike a second time.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” Reich said. “You know, it’s Day 1, and I know you guys all understand that, but I like where we’re at.”

“We think we’re prepared for this conference, but we’ll let our play speak for itself.”

Hurricanes

FRANK FRANKLIN II | AP PHOTO

The Hurricanes signed star center Sebastian Aho to an eight-year, $78 million contract extension that

season.

AP PHOTO

Charlotte running back Shadrick Byrd, center, is expected to be the 49ers’ top ball carrier in the team’s first year under new coach Biff Poggi.

$2,481,477,415

$113,498,562

$193,470,916

$125,000,000

$6,379,824,404

LABOR from page B5

this we’re not going to be able to pay our bills.”

Then there’s the rising use of “mini rooms,” in which a handful of writers are hired to work only during pre-production, sometimes for a series that may take a year to be greenlit, or never get picked up at all.

Sanchez-Witzel, co-creator of the recently released Netflix series “Survival of the Thickest,” said television shows traditionally hire robust writing teams for the duration of production. But Netflix refused to allow her to keep her team of five writers past pre-production, forcing round-the-clock rewrites with just one other writer.

“It’s not sustainable and I’ll never do that again,” she said.

Sanchez-Witzel said she was struck by the similarities between her experience and those of UPS drivers, some of whom joined the WGA for protests as they threatened their own potentially crippling strike. UPS and the Teamsters last week reached a tentative contract staving off the strike.

Jeffrey Palmerino, a fulltime UPS driver near Albany, New York, said forced overtime emerged as a top issue during the pandemic as drivers coped with a crush of orders on par with the holiday season. Drivers never knew what time they would get home or if they could count on two days off each week, while 14-hour days in trucks without air conditioning became the norm.

“It was basically like Christmas on steroids for two straight years. A lot of us were forced to work six days a week, and that is not any way to live your life,” said Palmerino, a Teamsters shop steward.

Along with pay raises and air conditioning, the Teamsters won concessions that Palmerino hopes will ease overwork. UPS agreed to end forced overtime on days off and eliminate a lower-paid category of drivers who work shifts that include weekends, converting them to full-time drivers. Union members have yet to ratify the deal.

The Teamsters and labor activists hailed the tentative deal as a game-changer that would pressure other companies facing labor unrest to raise their standards. But similar outcomes are far from certain in industries lacking the sheer economic indispensability of UPS or the clout of its 340,000-member union.

Efforts to organize at Starbucks and Amazon stalled as both companies aggressively fought against unionization.

Still, labor protests will likely gain momentum following the UPS contract, said Patricia Campos-Medina, executive director of the Worker Institute at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, which released a report this year that found the number of labor strikes rose 52% in 2022.

“The whole idea that consumer convenience is above everything broke down during the pandemic. We started to think, ‘I’m at home ordering, but there is actually a worker who has to go the grocery store, who has to cook this for me so that I can be comfortable,’” Campos-Medina said.

Lawmakers press for more scrutiny over China’s ‘malign influence’ at development bank

The Associated Press WASHINGTON, D.C. — Lawmakers intent on reducing China ‘s influence on the U.S. economy are pushing the Treasury Department to help curb the outsized role of Beijing at the Inter-American Development Bank, which supports economic and social development in Latin America and Caribbean.

The bipartisan group of lawmakers say Beijing is using the bank as a tool to expand its influence in the region. And they want the U.S., the biggest voice at the bank, to do more to rein in the awarding of projects to Chinese firms and to block Chinese attempts to acquire more shares at the bank.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of a new House select committee focused on China, is the lead sponsor of the legislation, which is being introduced Tuesday, seeking to understand and reduce Beijing’s power at the bank.

The Inter-American Development Bank Transparency Act would require the Treasury to issue a report every two years on the scope and scale of Chinese influence and involvement in all aspects of the bank, including a list of Chinese-funded projects and an action plan for the U.S. to reduce Chinese involvement at the bank.

“For too long, the Chinese Communist Party has exploited its presence in the Inter-American Development Bank to advance its own geopolitical, economic, and technological goals,” Gallagher said in a statement. “Latin American citizens deserve to have the IDB serve their economic development, not as a vector of CCP malign influence.”

The IDB is a non-commercial

development bank made up of member countries. The bank, for instance, disbursed a record $23 billion last year intended to alleviate poverty made worse by the coronavirus pandemic in the region. The U.S. is the largest shareholder, with a roughly 30% voting share. At issue is the number of contracts the IDB awards to Chinese firms relative to its meager share of the bank, which hovers around 0.1%.

China formally joined the bank in 2009 as its 48th member nation, and its influence in Latin America, both economically and diplomatically, has grown exponentially in the past two decades.

In 2022, Latin American and Caribbean trade with China rose to record levels, exporting roughly $184 billion to China and import-

“For too long, the Chinese Communist Party has exploited its presence in the Inter-American Development Bank to advance its own … goals.”

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.)

ing an estimated $265 billion in goods, according to a Boston University Global Development Policy Center analysis.

More than a dozen Republican and Democratic lawmakers have signed on with Gallagher as co-sponsors of the legislation, in-

DeSantis unveils new economic policy that targets China, taxes and regulations

The Associated Press ROCHESTER, N.H. — In a new policy plan unveiled Monday, Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis took aim at China with a “Declaration of Economic Independence” that also targets taxes, regulations and “elites” he blames for the nation’s decline.

Speaking in a New Hampshire warehouse, the Florida governor promised to diversify and expand the economy by fighting for the middle class.

“Revitalizing economic freedom and opportunity will require building an economy where the concerns of average citizens are elevated over those deemed too big to fail,” he said at Prep Partners Group, which coordinates warehousing, distribution and other logistics for other companies.

“We are a nation with an economy, not the other way around,” DeSantis said. “We are citizens of a republic. We are not cogs in a

global economic empire.”

DeSantis said his top priority would be wresting economic control from China by ending the nation’s preferential trade status, banning imports of goods made from stolen intellectual property and preventing companies from sharing critical technologies with China. Current polices, he said, have created an “abusive relationship” between the two countries.

“The elites sold us a bill of goods when it came to China. They were wrong, and we need to get it right,” he said.

The 10-point economic plan is the third major policy proposal put forth by DeSantis, who remains a distant second to former President Donald Trump in most polls and is fighting for momentum in the midst of a campaign reset. He recently shed more than one-third of his staff as federal filings showed his campaign was burning through cash at an unsustainable rate.

cluding Sen. Robert Menendez, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Menendez said in a statement that “as China continues to use economic tools to advance its coercive economic agenda across the Western Hemisphere, it’s more important than ever that we protect the integrity of the IDB and ensure its critical work can continue unhampered by Beijing’s interference.”

Diplomatic relations between Latin American and China have also increased. In March, Honduras cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan in favor of China, following the steps of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and the Dominican Republic in turning their backs on Taiwan.

Enrique Dussel Peters, a professor and coordinator of the Center for Chinese-Mexican Studies at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, said the U.S. effort to compete with China in Latin America “comes 20 years too late.”

“In many cases in many countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru,” he said, “China is already the most important trading partner and it has become a very dynamic investor in these countries, from lithium to raw materials to oil to gas to whatever issue you can image.”

The House formed the new China committee in January to focus on improving U.S. competitiveness with China economically and militarily. The committee’s early work has included investigations into partnerships that American companies and universities have entered into with Chinese entities as lawmakers take a harder look at efforts that could benefit Beijing at the long-term expense of the U.S.

Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gestures during a campaign event, Monday, July 31, 2023, in Rochester, N.H.

“The elites sold us a bill of goods when it came to China. They were wrong, and we need to get it right.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis

But on Monday, his focus was on reckless federal government spending. His plan describes him as a “new sheriff in town” who will veto wasteful spending and mandate work requirements for welfare programs. He also claimed he could achieve 3% annual economic growth by keeping taxes low, eliminating bureaucracy and incentivizing investment.

On the education front, DeSantis said he will stop incentivizing “useless degrees” by making universities responsible for the loans their students accrue.

“It’s wrong to say that a truck driver should have to pay off the debt of somebody who got a degree in gender studies,” he said.

After the speech, in what was billed as a news conference, DeSantis sidestepped a question about Trump’s mounting legal fees. That’s even as the DeSantis campaign has been attacking Trump for devoting much of his political fundraising to his legal entanglements.

“We’re here to talk about restoring this economy. We’re here to talk about uplifting the middle class,” DeSantis said. “To me, if you ask voters, are they more interested in hearing about that or the process stories about politics? I think that they want to hear about the country’s future so that’s what we’re going to talk about.”

A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee said DeSantis should be talking about the economic woes he created in Florida including the rising costs of housing, property insurance and health care.

“It remains a mystery why DeSantis would try to reboot his dumpster fire of a campaign by promising to bring his failures as governor nationwide,” Ammar Moussa said.

AP PHOTO

AP PHOTO

The flags of the U.S. and Chinese are displayed together on top of a trishaw in Beijing on Sept. 16, 2018.

COUNTY NEWS

Stanly County Chamber holds ribbon-cutting ceremony for Luna’s Taqueria Y Tequila

On July 14, the Stanly County Chamber of Commerce officially held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new restaurant in Albemarle. Luna’s Taqueria Y Tequila, an authentic Mexican restaurant, is in the Stanly County Plaza, located at 636 NC 24-27 Bypass E. The family-owned restaurant is open Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m., as well as on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. For additional information about Luna’s Taqueria Y Tequila, please call (704) 550-9280 or visit their Facebook page at https://www. facebook.com/lunastaconc/.

Budd leads effort to protect religious liberty of federal contractors

Last week, Senators Ted Budd (R-NC) and James Lankford (R-OK) led a collation of 25 senators to introduce a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act to overturn a rule from the Department of Labor, which according to the coalition, threatens religious liberty protections for faith-based organizations. According to a press release from Budd, the Department of Labor under former President Donald Trump issued a rule clarifying protections for faith-based federal contractors, but this rule was later rescinded during the Biden Presidency. “President Trump’s rule was an important step to strengthen religious liberty protections for faith-based contractors,” said Budd. “The Biden Administration’s reversal of this rule needlessly targets faith-based organizations that simply want to serve our communities alongside their secular counterparts without violating their religious beliefs.”

Roller coaster with big crack has a second structural issue, inspectors say

The Associated Press CHARLOTTE — Another structural issue has been located with a large roller coaster that’s been closed for weeks since a large crack in a support column was discovered, a North Carolina agency confirmed on Friday.

A Swiss-based engineering company that designed and built the Fury 325 roller coaster at Carowinds, which sits along the North Carolina-South Carolina border, replaced that steel support column earlier this month, news outlets reported. But the North Carolina Department of Labor, which inspects the ride and decides whether it can

operate, said in an email that the agency has now been notified of a separate “weld indication,” which “could be either a break or a crack.”

“No certificate of operation has been issued nor do we have a timeline of when the certificate of operation will be issued for the Fury 325,” department spokesperson Meredith Watson said, referring other questions to Carowinds.

In a statement released Friday, Carowinds said it was conducting a full maintenance review of the ride while test runs are performed.

“During such reviews, it is not uncommon to discover slight weld indications in various locations of a steel superstructure. It is import-

ant to note that these indications do not compromise the structural integrity or safety of the ride,” the statement reads. “Once a repair is completed, it undergoes inspection and approval before the ride is deemed operational.”

Park staff closed Fury 325 on June 30 after a visitor pointed out the sizable crack. State Labor Commissioner Josh Dobson said earlier this month that the crack had been visible for at least a week before it was shut down.

Video of the coaster, which reaches 325 feet in height, had showed a key support beam bending with the top visibly detached as cars with passengers barreled by. The roller coaster runs at

Duke Energy introduces new district manager for Stanly County and surrounding areas

By Jesse Deal Stanly County Journal

ALBEMARLE —

The

largest electric power provider in North Carolina now has a new district manager in charge of supervising its operations in Stanly County.

Joe Crapster is now a week into his new role as Duke Energy’s government and community relations manager for Stanly, Cabarrus, Davidson, Davie, Iredell, and Rowan Counties. The Salisbury native is taking over for Angie Bittle, who served in an interim role, and for the previous district manager Randy Welch.

“I’m excited about the new opportunity that was just announced earlier last week,” Crapster told SCJ on July 31. “I’m a long-term Duke Power/Duke Energy employee. It all goes back to when I was at Catawba College in the mid-to-late 1980s. But I’m really excited about it, and it’s kind of all around where I started.”

Crapster began his career with Duke Power, as it was formerly known, in 1984 as a summer student while attending college. He then joined the company full-time in 1987 as a retail assistant in the marketing department and has served in a variety of roles leading

up to his previous position as Duke Energy’s manager of shareholder communications on the company’s Investor Relations team.

He stated that he is excited to serve the local area and that he feels that he has come “full circle” with Stanly County, recalling his early days on the job where he sold load control power manager devices throughout the county and surrounding areas.

“Going into the coming weeks and months ahead, my job is that I want to learn the faces,” Crapster said. “I enjoy working with people, and I want to get involved with the community. I want to know — from a community relations perspective — the nonprofits in Stanly County. We also have a line workers

program through Stanly Community College. I think it’s important for me to get involved with the local government and town managers.”

He added that he feels strongly about building personal relationships with both his clients and customers because those bonds can add a layer of stability in the instance of an emergency regarding electric power or natural gas services.

“I want to represent Duke Energy. I want to know the local managers and the local politicians because we don’t know when the next significant event will come up. I want to be the face of Duke Energy throughout the county.”

Crapster also has a full resume of experience as president and zone chairman of the Lion’s Club, as well as a chairman stint with the Chamber of Commerce Executive Sales Team. In the higher education field, he earned a Bachelor’s degree in business administration from Catawba College and later received a Master’s degree in business administration from Queens University.

While Duke Energy provides electricity and natural gas to the local areas, it also holds many connections and services with Lake Tillery.

Duke Energy Progress — a sub-

speeds of up to 95 mph.

The department’s Elevator and Amusement Device Bureau said it had conducted its annual inspection of Fury 325 in February and only found a few signage issues, which the park quickly corrected. Inspections by the park, the engineering company, a third-party testing firm and the Department of Labor have been ongoing. Carowinds has said it’s changing how it inspects rides daily, including the use of drone cameras to examine areas.

While the park straddles the border between the two states, North Carolina regulators inspect Fury 325 because its nearby entrance is in North Carolina.

sidiary of Duke Energy — owns and operates the Yadkin-Pee Dee Hydro Project, which includes the Tillery Hydroelectric Development located in Stanly and Montgomery counties (around four miles west of Mount Gilead). Along with the Blewett Falls Hydroelectric Development, the two projects have operated for over 80 years with an emphasis on providing a renewable electrical generation source for customers in the Duke Energy service territory.

The Fury 325 roller coaster at Carowinds amusement park is seen on Monday, July 3, 2023, in Charlotte.

COURTESY PHOTO Joe Crapster

WEDNESDAY 8.2.23 #298

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The first US nuclear reactor built from scratch in

The Associated Press

ATLANTA — The first new U.S. nuclear reactor to be built from scratch in decades is sending electricity reliably to the grid, but the cost of the Georgia power plant could make it a dead end instead of a path to a carbon-free future.

Georgia Power Co. announced Monday that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, has completed testing and is now in commercial operation, seven years late and $17 billion over budget.

At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity, Unit 3 can power 500,000 homes and businesses. A number of other utilities in Georgia, Florida and Alabama are receiving the electricity, in addition to the 2.7 million customers of Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power.

“This hadn’t been done in this country from start to finish in some 30-plus years,” Chris Womack, CEO of Atlanta-based Southern Co. said Monday in a telephone interview. “So to do this, to get this done, to get this done right, is a wonderful accomplishment for our company, for the state and for the customers here in Georgia.”

A fourth reactor is also nearing completion at the site, where two earlier reactors have been generating electricity for decades. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Friday said radioactive fuel could be loaded into Unit 4, a step

expected to take place before the end of September. Unit 4 is scheduled to enter commercial operation by March. The third and fourth reactors were originally supposed to cost $14 billion, but are now on track to cost their owners $31 billion. That doesn’t include $3.7 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the owners to walk away from the project. That brings total spending to almost $35 billion.

The third reactor was supposed to start generating power in 2016 when construction began in 2009. Vogtle is important because government officials and some

utilities are again looking to nuclear power to alleviate climate change by generating electricity without burning natural gas, coal and oil. But most focus in the U.S. currently is on smaller nuclear reactors, which advocates hope can be built without the cost and schedule overruns that have plagued Vogtle. In Georgia, almost every electric customer will pay for Vogtle. Georgia Power currently owns 45.7% of the reactors. Smaller shares are owned by Oglethorpe Power Corp., which provides electricity to member-owned cooperatives, the Municipal Electric Au-

thority of Georgia and the city of Dalton. Oglethorpe and MEAG plan to sell power to cooperatives and municipal utilities across Georgia, as well in Jacksonville, Florida, and parts of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle.

Georgia Power’s residential customers are projected to pay more than $926 apiece as part of an ongoing finance charge and elected public service commissioners have approved a monthly rate increase of more than $4 a month for residential customers as soon as the third unit begins generating power. That could hit bills in August, two months after residential customers saw a $16-a-month increase to pay for higher fuel costs. The high construction costs have wiped out any future benefit from low nuclear fuel costs in the future, experts have repeatedly testified before commissioners.

“The cost increases and schedule delays have completely eliminated any benefit on a life-cycle cost basis,” Tom Newsome, director of utility finance for the commission, testified Thursday in a Georgia Public Service Commission hearing examining spending.

The utility will face a fight from longtime opponents of the plant, many of whom note that power generated from solar and wind would be cheaper. They say letting Georgia Power make ratepayers pay for mistakes will unfairly bolster the utility’s profits.

stanlyjournal.com

CRIME LOG

♦ BUCKINGHAM, DAVAUN DENZELL (B /M/25), POSSESS STOLEN MOTOR VEHICLE, 07/31/2023, Stanly County Sheriff’s Office

♦ BUCKINGHAM, LADORIAN (B /M/23), BREAK OR

ENTER MOTOR VEHICLE, 07/31/2023, Stanly County Sheriff’s Office

♦ KHAN, JEFFREY JABBAR (W /M/54), OBTAIN PROPERTY

FALSE PRETENSE, 07/31/2023, Stanly County

Sheriff’s Office

♦ SMITH, DONJUAN NMN (B /M/53), MAINTAIN VEH/ DWELL/PLACE CS (F), 07/31/2023, Stanly County

Sheriff’s Office

♦ HELMS, LARRY MAC (W /M/46), BREAKING AND OR ENTERING (F), 07/29/2023, Stanly County Sheriff’s Office

♦ RILEY, CODY DYLAN (W /M/24), RESISTING PUBLIC

OFFICER, 07/29/2023, Stanly County Sheriff’s Office

♦ EFIRD, RALPH JUNIOR (W /M/61), DV PROTECTION ORDER VIOLATION, 07/28/2023, Stanly County

Sheriff’s Office

♦ PEGUES, IMANI NICOLE (B /F/23), SIMPLE ASSAULT, 07/28/2023, Stanly County

Sheriff’s Office

♦ HOLLAR, TAMMY RENEE (W /F/41), PROBATION VIOLATION, 07/26/2023, Stanly County Sheriff’s Office

♦ SCOTT, DEVONTE EUGENE (B /M/25), BREAKING AND OR ENTERING (F), 07/25/2023, Stanly County Sheriff’s Office

The Associated Press WASHINGTON, D.C. — X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has threatened to sue a group of independent researchers whose research documented an increase in hate speech on the site since it was purchased last year by Elon Musk.

An attorney representing the social media site wrote to the Center for Countering Digital Hate on July 20 threatening legal action over the nonprofit’s research into hate speech and content moderation. The letter alleged that CCDH’s research publications seem intended “to harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away from the platform with incendiary claims.”

Musk is a self-professed free speech absolutist who has welcomed back white supremacists and election deniers to the platform, which he renamed X earlier this month. But the billionaire has at times proven sensitive about critical speech directed at him or his companies.

The center is a nonprofit with offices in the U.S. and United Kingdom. It regularly publishes reports on hate speech, extremism or harmful behavior on social media platforms like X, TikTok or Facebook.

The organization has published several reports critical of

Musk’s leadership, detailing an increase in anti-LGBTQ hate speech as well as climate misinformation since his purchase. The letter from X’s attorney cited one specific report from June that found the platform failed to remove neo-Nazi and anti-LGBTQ content from verified users that violated the platform’s rules.

In the letter, attorney Alex Spiro questioned the expertise of the researchers and accused the center of trying to harm X’s reputation. The letter also suggested, without evidence, that the center received funds from some of X’s competitors, even though the center has also published critical reports about TikTok, Facebook and other large platforms.

“CCDH intends to harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away from the platform with incendiary claims,” Spiro wrote, using the platform’s former name.

Imran Ahmed, the center’s founder and CEO, told the AP on Monday that his group has never received a similar response from any tech company, despite a history of studying the relationship between social media, hate speech and extremism. He said that typically, the targets of the center’s criticism have responded by defending their work or promising to address any problems that have been identified.

Ahmed said he worried X’s response to the center’s work could

have a chilling effect if it frightens other researchers away from studying the platform. He said he also worried that other industries could take note of the strategy.

“This is an unprecedented escalation by a social media company against independent researchers. Musk has just declared open war,” Ahmed told the Associated Press. “If Musk succeeds in silencing us other researchers will be next in line.”

Messages left with Spiro and X were not immediately returned Monday.

It’s not the first time that Musk has fired back at critics. Last year, he suspended the accounts of several journalists who covered his takeover of Twitter. Another user was suspended for using publicly available flight data to track Musk’s private plane; Musk had initially pledged to keep the user

on the platform but later changed his mind, citing his personal safety. He also threatened to sue the user before allowing him back on the platform under certain restrictions.

He initially had promised that he would allow any speech on his platform that wasn’t illegal. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk wrote in a tweet last year.

X’s recent threat of a lawsuit prompted concern from U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who said the billionaire was trying to use the threat of legal action to punish a nonprofit group trying to hold a powerful social media platform accountable.

“Instead of attacking them, he should be attacking the increasingly disturbing content on Twitter,” Schiff said in a statement.

decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

Musk threatens to sue researchers who documented the rise in hateful tweets

AP PHOTO

Reactors for Unit 3 and 4 sit at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle nuclear power plant on Jan. 20, 2023, in Waynesboro, Ga.

AP PHOTO

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors Inc., introduces the Model X car at the company’s headquarters Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2015, in Fremont, Calif.

Neal Robbins, publisher | Frank Hill, senior opinion editor

The proximal origin of a scientific fraud

The COVID origins story has also been a journalistic fiasco.

“WE DO NOT BELIEVE that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” That’s the key sentence in an article published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.”

It’s also a prime example of eminently credentialed and government-subsidized scientists saying the exact opposite of what they believed, in an attempt — successful at the time, but now, three years later, exposed — to deceive the public.

The article appeared, as the date indicates, just as the spread of COVID was becoming apparent. It also appeared after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said in January 2020 that the virus could have leaked from “China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens” in Wuhan.

Cotton was careful to say that a lab leak was not proven and that the virus could also have been transmitted through an animal, and he dismissed the possibility of an intentional leak.

A lab leak origin was quickly dismissed as a “fringe theory” by The Washington Post and a “conspiracy theory” by The New York Times. Those characterizations were attributed to government and government-financed scientists — the same bunch who would shortly produce the “Proximal Origin” paper.

The pushback against the lab leak theory has now been revealed as a fraud, thanks to the work of journalist Matt Taibbi, academic Roger Pielke Jr. and the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

The real conspiracy had roots in a February 2020 conference call led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time, and Dr. Francis Collins, his boss as head of the National Institutes of Health, and including the four scientists who would co-

COLUMN | DAVID HARSANYI

author the “Proximal Origin” paper.

In February, as the House subcommittee documents reveal, all four were expressing thoughts directly contrary to what they put their names to in March.

-”I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario,” wrote Dr. Robert Garry. “In the lab it would be easy.”

-”The only thing here that strikes me as unusual,” wrote Dr. Andrew Rambaut, “is the furin cleavage site,” something much more likely to be produced by a lab than by natural transmission.

-Dr. Edward Holmes wrote he was “60-40 lab.”

The main work over the last couple of weeks, wrote Dr. Kristian Andersen, “has been focused on t(r)ying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say we have high confidence in any of the three main theories.”

Not exactly “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” eh?

Why the change? As one conference call participant put it, “further debate about” a lab leak would “do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”

Unstated, but known to every one of the scientists, was that Collins and Fauci had approved cooperation with the Wuhan lab and controlled millions in research dollars coveted by every scientist.

Their intentions were not in doubt.

On April 16, Collins told Fauci he hoped “Proximal Origin” would put down “the very destructive conspiracy” of the lab leak theory, and on April 17 Fauci recommended it to reporters as the product of a “group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists,” without mentioning his own role.

That same month, Andersen in emails

admitted that a lab leak was possible and bragged about misleading New York Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr.

I found the cynicism revealed in these emails shocking, even though I have written critically, in July 2021 and March 2023, about government scientists’ attempts to discredit the lab leak theory. I note that statistics guru Nate Silver, not a member of any right-wing conspiracy, is now similarly appalled.

“I’m deeply disappointed by the scientists’ conduct here and how unmoored they were from any attempt at truth-seeking,” he wrote last week. “The COVID origins story has also been a journalistic fiasco,” he added, opining that “journalists are more prone toward being manipulated by bad apples in academia and science than they were ten or twenty years ago.”

Evidence for that predilection comes from New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who last week tweeted that a House Republican hearing “raised thorny questions about free speech in a democratic society: Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?”

Leave aside the deliciously Orwellian flavor of her verb “tamp down” and her astonishing ignorance of First Amendment law, and reflect on how “Proximal Origin” suggests that the government and governmentfinanced credentialed experts are often better at generating misinformation and falsehoods than at detecting them.

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

Ignore President Biden, here’s what is really happening in Israel

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN has reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop pushing through a “divisive” judicial overhaul bill amid protests.

This is the same Biden, incidentally, who crammed through a massive, highly “divisive,” generational spending bill with zero votes from the opposition; the same guy who regularly rules by unconstitutional executive diktats; and the same guy who has done more to delegitimize the Supreme Court than any president in modern history. In any event, the president is concerned. As is The New York Times, which reports, “The Israeli Parliament passed a deeply contentious law limiting the Supreme Court’s ability to overturn decisions made by government ministers.” What the Times means is that there is a new law limiting the judiciary’s ability to unilaterally declare legislation “unconstitutional” without using any legal justification whatsoever.

Because, as it stands, Israel has a strong anti-democratic system overseen by a high court that is probably the most powerful judiciary in the free world. Netanyahu’s judicial reforms — only a small piece has passed — would bring Israel back all the way to 1995, when “judiciary revolution” imbued the court with supreme power over legislation. The alleged authoritarian “backsliding” by Israel’s “farright” government would likely create a far more “democratic” system.

The judiciary primacy might work if the Israeli court’s decisions were grounded in some kind of statutory authority, traditional legal framework, or even existing regulation and law. But there is no Israeli constitution. The court’s decisions are often arbitrary, politically expedient, constantly evolving and sometimes contradictory. The court regularly blocks laws passed by center-right governments simply because judges claim policy is unreasonable.

Why only center-right governments? Because the entrenched judges (with their allies in the Israeli bar) appoint their own successors in perpetuity. Imagine the American left’s outlook if the Supreme Court’s originalists could simply tap their own replacements without any input from senators or the president.

The system is so insane that not only can the court lord over the legislative branch without explanation, but it can remove ministers and elected officials at will. The attorney general is empowered to bar officials — even the prime minister — from participating in national debates. This is not, by any real standard, “democratic” governance. It is illiberal.

Perhaps there is no good way to balance what is effectively two branches of the Israeli government. It’s a complicated issue. Reforms

are no panacea. But judicial reform is hardly a new idea, and reforms are not being “rushed.” They have been debated within Israeli politics for decades, with numerous moderate legal voices proposing changes over that time. In many ways, the freakout reminds me of the American left’s alarmism over tax cuts and net neutrality. It is largely a political effort to undermine Netanyahu.

The media likes to claim that the protests in Israel are a “grassroots” effort, as if this imbues a mob with a moral high ground or the authority to dictate government policy. In truth, many of the marches — and threats to shut down Israeli society — are organized by Israel’s biggest and most powerful unions and egged on by foreigners. If the prime minister lets these protestors blackmail him, he might as well resign right now. It’s going to incentivize anarchy.

Every time Israel has a contentious internal debate, concerntrolls such as New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman emerge to lament the coming end of Israeli democracy. You will notice that, according to the media, legislative proposals, domestic or foreign, are only “divisive” and “deeply contentious” when conservatives support them. The reality is that virtually everything we do in politics is “divisive” and “deeply contentious.” That’s why politics exists. And in Israel, the time of day is a deeply contentious issue.

Moreover, for the left, “democracy” can mean hypermajoritarianism or judicial tyranny. Whatever works. Depends on the day. What am I saying? Democrats will argue that limiting judicial supremacy in Israel is an attack on “democracy” while at the same time claiming SCOTUS is engaged in judicial supremacy for showing deference to the Constitution and handing back issues like abortion to voters. Calvinball all the way down.

Of course, if the Israeli Supreme Court were packed with rightwingers instead of left-wingers, American media, the Democratic Party and the protestors would be on the reform side. None of this has anything to do with governing principles or justice or norms or “democracy.” Like those destroying the American judiciary at home, it’s about power. The Israeli right is also about power. I’m not naive. But right now, the reforms they support are far better aligned with the norms of a functioning “democracy” than the ones in place. That’s something a person reading headlines in the American press might not know.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books — the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.”

COLUMN | MICHAEL BARONE

SIDELINE REPORT

MLB Braves acquire veteran infielder Lopez in trade with Royals

Atlanta

The Atlanta Braves have added veteran infielder Nicky Lopez in a trade with the Kansas City Royals. The major league-leading Braves sent left-hander Taylor Hearn to Kansas City for the 28-year-old Lopez, who can play shortstop, second base and third. Hearn was designated for assignment by Texas on July 19. He was traded to Atlanta last week for cash, and he got one out in his only appearance with the Braves on Saturday. Lopez hit .213 with 13 RBIs in 68 games with Kansas City this season.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

Nebraska DB Farmer suspended indefinitely by Rhule

Lincoln, Neb.

Nebraska defensive back

Myles Farmer wasn’t on the 120-man roster when the Cornhuskers opened practice and his return is uncertain.

First-year coach Matt Rhule said he suspended Farmer indefinitely, saying it had to do with failure to adhere to team standards. Farmer was Nebraska’s second-leading tackler last year. Rhule also announced that wide receiver Josh Fleeks reported to practice significantly overweight. The Baylor transfer will be held out until he makes weight. Backup defensive lineman Brodie Tagoloa probably is out for the season because of injuries sustained in a car accident.

NFL Bengals QB Burrow could miss ‘several weeks’

Cincinnati Bengals coach Zac Taylor says quarterback Joe Burrow could miss “several weeks” with a right calf strain. The 26-year-old franchise quarterback hobbled on one leg and then went to the ground after a scramble play near the end of practice

Thursday. Backup QBs Jake Browning and Trevor Siemian took the snaps on Friday. Preseason practice was truncated in Burrow’s rookie year in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, he was still rehabbing after knee surgery the previous December. On the first day of camp last year, he was stricken with appendicitis.

CYCLING

17-year-old American cyclist killed while training

Colorado Springs, Colo.

U.S. national team cyclist Magnus White was killed over the weekend when he was struck by a vehicle on a training ride near his home in Boulder, Colorado. USA Cycling announced his death in a statement Sunday. The 17-year-old was on a final training ride before competing in the junior mountain bike world championships in Glasgow, Scotland. He is survived by his parents, Michael and Jill, and his brother, Eero. White was a rising multidisciplinary star, winning a junior national championship in cyclocross in 2021 and earning a place on the U.S. national team. He had begun to dabble in road racing and mountain biking this year.

Buescher wins at Richmond, secures playoff spot

The Associated Press

RICHMOND, Va. — Chris Buescher pulled away on a restart with three laps to go to win at Richmond Raceway on Sunday and snag one of the final spots in NASCAR’s playoff field.

Buescher led 88 laps and was ahead by nearly six seconds when a caution came out with under 10 laps to go. That erased his lead over Virginia native Denny Hamlin, who was booed by his hometown crowd in before the race.

But Hamlin got a poor final restart and Buescher easily pulled away for his first Cup Series win of the season, third of his career.

“I knew that last restart was going to be tough, but I knew we had the speed in this thing,”

Buescher said.

He and RFK Racing teammate Brad Keselowski led a combined 190 of the 400 laps in their Fords. Keselowski, now a part owner of the team, led 102 laps on the 0.75mile oval.

Buescher started 26th and had to drive the field for the win that locked him into the 16-driver playoff field with four races remaining in the regular season. Buescher became the 13th race winner this year and there are three playoff spots up for grabs over the next month.

It was the 139th Cup win for primary team owner Jack Roush, second since Keselowski joined the ownership group.

Ford now has 723rd wins in NASCAR’s top Cup Series.

“Everybody at RFK Racing who has worked so hard to get us to this point,” said Buescher.

Hamlin, winner last week at Pocono, finished second in a Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing. Kyle Busch was third in a Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing, followed by the Fords of Joey Logano from Team Penske and Ryan Preece of Stewart-Haas Racing.

“One win is good, but you get three or four or five and then you feel a lot better,” said Keselowski. “It sure beats not having any at all, but we want to keep going. It’s nice to have one car locked in the playoffs. We need to get both cars locked in the playoffs. We have a good points gap, but we want wins and this is where we need to be.”

Keselowski, despite being winless this season, is still mathematically in contention for the playoffs.

The race was slowed just three times by caution flags, with the final yellow sending the leaders to pit road for four tires with eight laps to go. When the green flag was shown again, Buescher used the inside line to pull away for his third career victory.

Hamlin’s bid for the victory ended on the second lap of the final sprint when he drove in too deep in the first turn and slid up the track. He finished 0.549-seconds behind Buescher.

The series moves to Michigan where Kevin Harvick, winless so far in this his final season, is the defending champion.

USC prepares for European tour as Bronny recovers

The Associated Press

THE SON OF LEBRON JAMES is at home after going into cardiac arrest last week

“We have our family together, safe and healthy, and we feel your love.”

LeBron James, in part of a tweet, following his son’s discharge from a Los Angeles hospital after he went into cardiac arrest during a USC practice

By Joe Reedy, The

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — As Bronny James continues to recover after going into cardiac arrest, his Southern California teammates have been at practice to prepare for a 10-day exhibition tour of Greece and Croatia that begins next week.

The tour will run from Aug. 5-15 and see the Trojans visit Athens and Mykonos, Greece, and Dubrovnik, Croatia. Teams are allowed to go on a foreign tour once every four years under NCAA rules.

James was discharged from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Thursday and is resting at home, according to a statement from the hospital. His father, Lakers superstar LeBron James, also posted on social media that his family is “safe and healthy.”

Bronny James will continue to undergo tests to determine the cause of his cardiac arrest, which occurred Monday morning during a workout at USC’s Galen Center.

Cardiac arrest occurs when the heart abruptly stops beating because of a problem with its electrical activity. While uncommon in young people, sudden cardiac arrest is the leading medical cause of death in young athletes. Some studies have estimated one sudden cardiac death in 50,000 to 80,000 young athletes each year.

No information has been made public about what may have caused Bronny James’ cardiac arrest. But

one of the most common causes in young athletes is an underlying problem with the heart’s structure, such as a genetic condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that leads to a thickened heart muscle more prone to irregular electrical activity. A more rare cause is commotio cordis, which occurs when someone receives a sharp blow to the chest during a specific part of the heartbeat’s cycle — what happened to Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin earlier this year.

James was the second high-profile USC basketball recruit to go into cardiac arrest in the last year. Vin-

cent Iwuchuwku also was stricken during a workout last July, but the 7-foot-1 center returned to the court six months later and appeared in 14 games. It’s too soon to know how James’ playing career could be affected, especially without a lot of information being made public. Various experts point to James’ quick move out of intensive care and being released three days later as encouraging. The upcoming trip is important for the Trojans as James recovers. USC had the nation’s fourthranked recruiting class, including the top-rated player in guard Isa-

iah Collier.

James committed to the Trojans in May after the 6-foot-3 18-yearold became one of the nation’s top prospects as a two-way point guard for Sierra Canyon School in Chatsworth, California. He is the sixth McDonald’s All-American to come to USC since Andy Enfield became coach in 2013. With his family fame and huge social media following, Bronny James also has the top name, image and likeness valuation in sports at $6.3 million, as estimated by On3. com. He is the oldest of LeBron and Savannah James’ three children.

AP PHOTO

Chris Buescher raises the Cook Out 400 Trophy in Victory Lane after winning Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Richmond.

AP PHOTO

Bronny James, right with his father LeBron James, was hospitalized after going into cardiac arrest while participating in a practice at Southern California last Monday.

Pfeiffer announces 2023 class for its Sports Hall of Fame

The Falcons will induct three players and a

title-winning team

By Jesse Deal North State Journal MISENHEIMER — Pfeiffer

University’s athletic department

NFL teams adapting to unrelenting heat

The Associated Press

HENDERSON, Nev. — The sight of wide receivers Keith Kirkwood and Shaq Davis leaving practice early this week because of heat-related symptoms was nothing new for the New Orleans Saints, with the hot and humid Louisiana weather a test for even the best-conditioned athletes.

The unrelenting, record-breaking heat across the nation this year has made the opening of training camps even more challenging than usual, however, not only for the Saints but teams throughout the NFL.

Scientists have already calculated this will be the hottest July on record, with the Southwest and parts of the South especially hit hard. Most of the Midwest and East also have been affected. That means NFL teams must be even more mindful than usual about keeping players safe while also getting as much work done as possible before the season begins in September.

Safety has been a centerpiece of the preseason since Minnesota offensive tackle Korey Stringer died

on Aug. 1, 2001, after slipping and falling the previous day after a Vikings training camp practice. NFL teams at the time didn’t have medical training for exertional heat stroke.

Some teams are taking extra precautions this year, including more water breaks and early practice times.

“I don’t know all the science and all that stuff, but I do my best to understand it,” Saints quarterback Derek Carr said. “I’ve seen growth ... from when I first came in the league to what we talk about now. It’s definitely a difference on the things we talk about, the way we practice, how long we do something … how much time you’re actually accumulating outside during the week.”

Carr is in his first season in New Orleans, so he’s acclimating to the wet, muggy conditions. He spent the previous three seasons with the Raiders in Las Vegas, where the air is dry but temperatures are considerably higher.

“It just feels like your skin is going to fall off,” Carr said of playing in Las Vegas. “It feels like it’s boiling.”

For their part, the Raiders have begun practicing at 8:30 a.m. to avoid the hottest parts of the day but still must contend with temperatures in the triple digits by the time they walk off the field.

The Raiders have an indoor facility but usually practice outside because it’s more spacious and the fields are grass rather than turf. Cool boxes are set up just off the 50-yard line near one of the three practice fields that players use, and coach Josh McDaniels said the team met before camp opened to discuss coping with the conditions.

McDaniels said the key was listening to medical professionals.

“They have a very scientific way to measure (weather and safety conditions) that I’m not really qualified to speak intelligently about,” McDaniels said. “But I understand when they tell me that we’ve entered into a zone where it’s dangerous to be out there with helmets, pads, etc., then we’ll do the right thing.”

Much is at stake in camp, so players want to be on the field far more than in the cooling box or on the trainer’s table. They’re fighting for starting jobs and roster spots, and those players know that coaches and general managers are watching to see who best battles through adversity.

“The job’s got to get done,” Miami Dolphins offensive tackle Kendall Lamm said, “with or without the heat.”

recently announced that its Sports Hall of Fame 2023 class will be inducted during the university’s homecoming festivities on Sept. 23.

The Falcons Hall of Fame will soon include a trio of former star student-athletes who graduated from Pfeiffer — Jerry Bryson (baseball, ’60), Andrea Nachtman Blair (volleyball, ’92), Nathan “Sasa” Regis (soccer, ’17) — along with the Falcons’ championship-winning 2002 men’s cross-country team.

Bryson was a star catcher for two seasons under coach Joe Ferebee, who became the winningest baseball coach in North Carolina college and American Legion history with 677 wins between 1956 and 1987.

Bryson later became a successful coach in his own right and was inducted into Gardner-Webb’s Athletics Hall of Fame in 1992 with a 305-87 coaching record between 1966 and 1980.

Blair was the Lady Falcons’ volleyball star in the early 1990s and a key component of their Conference Carolinas Tournament victory in 1991. Additionally, she made the All-District 26 team and became the NCAA’s 1992 Woman of the Year for Pfeiffer College.

“Our team played great, and our fans got to see us win. I was honored to receive Conference Carolinas Player of the Year after that game. I still remember receiving that award,” Blair stated in a university press release, reflecting on her latest athletic honor. “It is an

amazing surprise. Pfeiffer has always held a special place in my heart and for Pfeiffer to feel this way about me, I feel doubly blessed.”

Regis played a key role as the undefeated Falcons won the 2015 NCAA Division II men’s soccer championship. He was a two-time National Offensive Player of the Year as well as the 2015 NCAA II Tournament MVP.

He also set new program records for career goals (85), single-season goals (32 in 2015), single-season points (32 goals, 7 assists in 2015) and career points (85 goals, 29 assists).

“The University has changed my life as a student as well as an athlete,” Regis said. “It has taught me discipline, perseverance, sacrifices and respect for the game of soccer. And it has added some amazing people (teammates, coaches and faculty) to my family — people who have shaped my life in ways I can’t begin to explain.”

In a special team honor, the Pfeiffer Sports Hall of Fame is honoring the 2002 men’s cross-country team, which was the only Falcon cross-country team to win the CVAC Championship during the university’s time in NCAA Division II.

That particular roster — coached by Bob Marchinko — had four all-conference runners and was undefeated against conference schools that year. The team also earned runner-up honors at the NCAA Southeast regional meet and finished 24th at the national championships in Ashland, Ohio.

“We are very proud of what we were able to accomplish together,” said Michael Whitley, a member of the 2002 squad. “Having this enshrined in the Hall of Fame forever cements what we did in Pfeiffer history, and that is insanely cool. I’m very humbled and extremely honored by this recognition.”

Verstappen’s dominance makes 3rd straight F1 title look like formality

The Red Bull driver has won 10 of 12 races so far this season

The Associated Press

PARIS — Max Verstappen’s dominance is so total that it already feels like he’s won his third straight Formula One title, even with 10 races remaining following the midseason break. With a lead of 125 points over his nearest rival, the Red Bull driver is already in position to watch a highlights reel of his season and list his favorite wins. There have been 10 out of 12 races so far, plus a further two victories when including sprint

races. After winning the Belgian Grand Prix with another emphatic drive on Sunday, Verstappen was asked which of the victories he likes the most.

“It’s difficult to choose. There have been a lot of nice ones,” he said.

“I think the one actually which I really enjoyed was like back in time in Miami.”

Back in time?

May 7, to be precise, although it may seem long ago in Verstappen’s world considering he has won every race since.

At that point in the season, however, his Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez was a self-declared title contender and still actually looking like

one.

The Mexican driver had just done the main race-sprint race double at Azerbaijan, and his confidence was boosted further when he took pole position for Miami with Verstappen qualifying in a lowly ninth. “Tough qualifying,” Verstappen said. “So probably for me, that was a very enjoyable one.”

Not for Perez, who finished second behind Verstappen and has not won since. He’s acknowledged that his confidence was badly shaken, and it showed in the results after Miami: Perez was 16th in Monaco, fourth in Spain and sixth in Canada. He also went five straight races without qualifying in the top 10 despite Red Bull having easily the best

car in F1.

“It’s been a bit of a rough patch,” Perez said after finishing second in Belgium. “I really look forward to not leaving the podium anymore from now until the end of the year.”

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, who was third on Sunday, is also contending himself with podiums.

“This was the best we could achieve today, no doubt,” said Leclerc, who has not won a race since July 10 last year.

Verstappen is the youngest driver to win an F1 race, doing so when he was 18 years old on his Red Bull debut in 2016.

Now he’s racing in his own world, alone in front as he chases more milestones and records.

If Verstappen wins on his home track at the Netherlands GP on Aug. 27, then he will equal Sebastian Vettel’s record of nine straight wins from 2013, which was during Vettel’s heyday with Red Bull.

Verstappen’s own F1 record of 15 wins from last year also looks to set to be crushed.

Despite being only 25, he’s already on 45 F1 wins overall.

Next on the list is four-time F1 champion Alain Prost, who is fourth all-time with 51 wins.

Such is Verstappen’s intensity and thirst for victory that even Vettel’s tally of 53 might even be within his reach this year.

It’s increasingly hard to back against Verstappen.

AP

Browns linebacker Jeremiah OwusuKoramoah cools off following a drill at Cleveland’s training camp last week in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

and Democrats raised

The Associated Press

WILMINGTON, Del. — President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee raised more than $72 million for his reelection in the 10 weeks since he announced his 2024 candidacy, his campaign announced Friday, in a strong but not record performance by an incumbent.

That is all the money raised between April 25, when Biden made his announcement, and the end of June, and includes donations to his campaign and to a network of joint fundraising arrangements with the national and state parties. By comparison, President Barack Obama raised $85.6 million during the April-to-June quarter in 2011 when he launched his campaign for a second term, though he announced his candidacy three weeks earlier that April than did Biden.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee raised a combined $105 million in the second quarter — about $80,000 per day more than Biden took in this year, when Biden was benefiting from higher campaign finance donation limits due to inflation. Biden’s campaign still celebrated the haul, noting they were looking to avoid maxing out their most enthusiastic donors, as Trump did in 2020 when he faced fundraising shortfalls in the final months of the campaign.

The campaign said Democrats have $77 million on hand — the highest total ever by a Democrat at this point in an election cycle.

Biden, who has cleared the field of any serious rivals for the Democratic nomination, has nevertheless been confronting persistent concerns from within the par-

ty about voter enthusiasm for an 80-year-old candidate. The fundraising number is likely to quiet but not eliminate some concerns about whether Biden can assemble the support necessary for a successful campaign. His 2020 effort topped $1 billion in donations. Surveys show Democrats would prefer another candidate to run, but there is no consensus within the party about an alternative.

“This is fantastic,” said Democratic donor Robert Wolf. “The calls I was getting before they announced were: ‘Is he going to beat Trump? Is he going to beat (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis?’ And he blew them out of the water.”

Biden’s sum is more than double Donald Trump’s during those three months for his 2024 effort, though the former president and other Republicans in the race are

not jointly raising money with the GOP and therefore face lower federal contribution limits for top donors. Biden’s campaign did not detail the total raised directly by his campaign, which would allow a more direct comparison with the Republican candidates, or how much it spent in the opening months, though the campaign staff remains relatively small.

“While Republicans are burning through resources in a divisive primary focused on who can take the most extreme MAGA positions, we are significantly outraising every single one of them -– because our team’s strength is our grassroots supporters,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez in a statement.

Biden, first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, all stepped up their fundraising in the closing weeks of the quarter as the reelection campaign looked to put up a strong showing, holding 38 fundraisers since the campaign launch — with the pace expected to increase as the campaign grows.

“There’s going to be a lot more early electricity for those in the primary season than the incumbent, so the idea that he did this with very few fundraisers and still kind of a skeleton crew is just great,” said Wolf, the former chairman and CEO of UBS Americas. He predicted that fundraising would escalate dramatically once Biden has a GOP rival. “A lot of people will get more engaged as soon as they know who they’re against.”

The campaign said the total came from nearly 400,000 donors, and that 97% of donations were under $200 and more than 30% of donors had not given to Biden in 2020. It added that the campaign email list now reaches nearly 25 million subscribers.

The campaign said a grassroots fundraising pitch offering the chance at meeting the president raised nearly $2 million from small donors, and that merchandise featuring “Dark Brandon” — a meme featuring Biden with lasers for eyes — has driven half of its online store revenue.

automaker complies with EPA’s yet-to-be-finalized greenhouse gas emissions rules, they shouldn’t be at risk of violating CAFE rules (from NHTSA) and subject to civil penalties,” John Bozzella, CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, said in a statement.

The Associated Press DETROIT — The U.S. government wants to raise the fuel economy of new vehicles 18% by the 2032 model year so the fleet would average about 43.5 miles per gallon in real world driving.

The proposed numbers were released Friday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which eventually will adopt final mileage requirements.

Currently the fleet of new vehicles must average 36.75 mpg by 2026 under corporate average fuel economy standards adopted by the administration of President Joe Biden, who reversed a rollback made by former President Donald Trump.

The highway safety agency says it will try to line up its regulations so they match the Environmental Protection Agency’s reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But if there are discrepancies, automakers likely will have to follow the most stringent regulation. In the byzantine world of government regulation, both agencies essentially are responsible for setting fuel economy requirements since the fastest way to reduce greenhouse emissions is to burn less gasoline.

“I want to make clear that EPA and NHTSA will coordinate to optimize the effectiveness of both agency standards while minimiz-

ing compliance costs,” NHTSA Acting Administrator Ann Carlson said. A large auto industry trade

group which includes General Motors, Toyota, Ford, Stellantis and others said requirements from the agencies should be lined up. “If an

However, the alliance has said the EPA’s proposed cut in carbon emissions will require a huge increase in electric vehicle sales that’s not attainable by 2032. The EPA says the industry can reach the greenhouse gas emissions goals if 67% of new vehicles sold in 2032 are electric. Currently, EVs make up about 7% of new vehicle sales.

NHTSA said its proposal includes a 2% annual improvement in fuel mileage for passenger cars, and a 4% increase for light trucks. It’s proposing a 10% improvement per year for commercial pickup trucks and work vans. Automakers can meet the requirements with a mix of electric vehicles, gas-electric hybrids and efficiency improvements in gas and diesel vehicles.

The agency says the new regulations will save more than $50 billion on fuel over the vehicles’ lifetimes and save more than 88 billion gallons of gasoline through 2050 if NHTSA’s preferred alternative is adopted. The standards would cut new-vehicle fuel consumption nearly in half by the 2035 model year, and benefits will exceed costs by $18 billion, the agency said. NHTSA will take comments from the public for 60 days before drafting a final regulation.

AP PHOTO

People cheer during a political rally for President Joe Biden at the Philadelphia Convention Center in Philadelphia, Saturday, June 17, 2023. Biden struck an economic populist message during the first rally of his reelection campaign.

AP PHOTO

A customer puts gas in their vehicle, June 28, 2016, in Miami.

Biden

$72 million-plus for his 2024 race since he opened campaign in April

US proposes 18% fuel economy increase for new vehicle fleet from 2027 through 2032

STATE & NATION

Members of Congress break for August with no clear path to avoiding a shutdown this fall

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Lawmakers broke for their August recess with work on funding the government largely incomplete, fueling worries about whether Congress will be able to avoid a partial government shutdown this fall.

Congress has until Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year, to act on government funding. They could pass spending bills to fund government agencies into next year, or simply pass a stopgap measure that keeps agencies running until they strike a longer-term agreement. No matter which route they take, it won’t be easy.

“We’re going to scare the hell out of the American people before we get this done,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. Coons’ assessment is widely shared in Congress, reflecting the gulf between the Republican-led House and the Democratic-led Senate, which are charting vastly different — and mostly incompatible — paths on spending.

The Senate is adhering mostly to the top-line spending levels that President Joe Biden negotiated with House Republicans in late May as part of the debt-ceiling deal that extended the government’s borrowing authority and avoided an economically devas-

tating default. That agreement holds discretionary spending generally flat for the coming year while allowing increases for military and veterans accounts. On top of that, the Senate is looking to add $13.7 billion in additional emergency appropriations, including $8 billion for defense and $5.7 billion for nondefense.

House Republicans are going a different way.

GOP leaders have teed up bills with far less spending than the agreement allows in an effort to win over members who insist on

rolling back spending to fiscal year 2022 levels. They are also adding scores of policy add-ons broadly opposed by Democrats.

At a press conference at the Capitol this past week, some members of the House Freedom Caucus, a conservative faction within the House GOP, said that voters elected a Republican majority in that chamber to rein in government spending and it was time for House Republicans to use every tool available to get the spending cuts they want.

“We should not fear a government shutdown,” said Rep. Bob

Good, R-Va. “Most of the American people won’t even miss if the government is shut down temporarily.”

Many House Republicans disagree with that assessment. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, called it an oversimplification to say most Americans wouldn’t feel an impact. And he warned Republicans would take the blame for a shutdown.

“We always get blamed for it, no matter what,” Simpson said. “So it’s bad policy, it’s bad politics.”

But the slim five-seat majority Republicans hold amplifies the power that a small group can wield. Even though the debt ceiling agreement passed with a significant majority of both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives opponents were so unhappy in the aftermath that they shut down House votes for a few days, stalling the entire GOP agenda.

Shortly thereafter, McCarthy argued the numbers he negotiated with the White House amounted to a cap and “you can always do less.” GOP Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, followed that she would seek to limit nondefense spending at 2022 budget levels, saying the debt agreement “set a top-line spending cap — a ceiling, not a floor.”

The decision to cut spending

The UFO congressional hearing was ‘insulting’ to US employees, a top Pentagon official says

The Associated Press

A top Pentagon official has attacked this week’s widely watched congressional hearing on UFOs, calling the claims “insulting” to employees who are investigating sightings and accusing a key witness of not cooperating with the official U.S. government investigation.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick’s letter, published on his personal LinkedIn page and circulated Friday across social media, criticizes much of the testimony from a retired Air Force intelligence officer that energized believers in extraterrestrial life and produced headlines around the world.

Retired Air Force Maj. David Grusch testified last Wednesday that the U.S. has concealed what he called a “multi-decade” program to collect and reverse-engineer “UAPs,” or unidentified aerial phenomena, the official government term for UFOs.

Part of what the U.S. has recovered, Grusch testified, were non-human “biologics,” which he said he had not seen but had learned about from “people with direct knowledge of the program.”

A career intelligence officer, Kirkpatrick was named a year ago to lead the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was in-

tended to centralize investigations into UAPs. The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies have been pushed by Congress in recent years to better investigate reports of devices flying at unusual speeds or trajectories as a national security concern.

Kirkpatrick wrote the letter last Thursday and the Defense

Department confirmed Friday that he posted it in a personal capacity. Kirkpatrick declined to comment on the letter.

He writes in part, “I cannot let yesterday’s hearing pass without sharing how insulting it was to the officers of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community who chose to join AARO,

many with not unreasonable anxieties about the career risks this would entail.”

“They are truth-seekers, as am I,” Kirkpatrick said. “But you certainly would not get that impression from yesterday’s hearing.”

In a separate statement, Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough denied other allegations made by

below levels in the debt ceiling deal helped get the House moving again, but put them on a collision course with the Senate, where the spending bills hew much closer to the agreement.

“The way to make this work is do it in a bipartisan way like we are doing in the Senate. If you do it in a partisan way, you’re heading to a shutdown. And I am really worried that that’s where the House Republicans are headed,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters.

McCarthy countered that people had the same doubts about whether House Republicans and the White House could reach an agreement to pass a debt ceiling extension and avoid a default.

“We’ve got ‘til Sept. 30. I think we can get this all done,” McCarthy said.

In a subsequent press conference, McCarthy said he had just met with Schumer to talk about the road ahead on an array of bills, including the spending bills.

“I don’t want the government to shut down,” McCarthy said. “I want to find that we can find common ground.”

In all, there are 12 spending bills. The House has passed one so far, and moved others out of committee. The Senate has passed none, though it has advanced all 12 out of committee, something that hasn’t happened since 2018.

Grusch before a House Oversight subcommittee.

The Pentagon “has no information that any individual has been harmed or killed as a result of providing information” about UFO objects, Gough said. Nor has the Pentagon discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

Kirkpatrick wrote, “AARO has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of any reverse engineering program for non-human technology.”

He had briefed reporters in December that the Pentagon was investigating “several hundreds” of new reports following a push to have pilots and others come forward with any sightings.

Kirkpatrick wrote in his letter that allegations of “retaliation, to include physical assault and hints of murder, are extraordinarily serious, which is why law enforcement is a critical member of the AARO team, specifically to address and take swift action should anyone come forward with such claims.”

“Yet, contrary to assertions made in the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with AARO,” Kirkpatrick said. He did not explicitly name Grusch, who alleged he faced retaliation and declined to answer when a congressman asked him if anyone had been murdered to hide information about UFOs.

Messages left at a phone number and email address for Grusch were not returned Friday.

AP PHOTO

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., talks to reporters outside his office about calls for an impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

AP PHOTO

Ryan Graves, Americans for Safe Aerospace Executive Director, from left, U.S. Air Force (Ret.) Maj. David Grusch, and U.S. Navy (Ret.) Cmdr. David Fravor, testify before a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee hearing on UFOs, Wednesday, July 26, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

Randolph record

Governor

VinFast breaks ground on automotive manufacturing facility in Chatham County

Randolph County

Sheriff’s Office to host

‘Operation School Supplies’ drive

This month, the Randolph County Sheriff’s Office will be conducting its “Operation School Supplies” drive to fill several law enforcement vehicles with school supplies for local students. This event will begin August 21 through August 25 and will be held in front of the Asheboro Walmart from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. each day. Donations of pencils, pens, notebooks, paper, crayons, markers, calculators, erasers, binders, rulers, and glue are all encouraged. For those interested in making a donation before the drive begins, supplies can also be dropped off at the front desk at either the sheriff’s office location in Asheboro (727 McDowell Rd.) or in Archdale (9305 Balfour Dr.). For additional details, please contact Deputy Martin at (336) 628-2443.

Budd leads effort to protect religious liberty of federal contractors

Last week, Senators Ted Budd (R-NC) and James Lankford (R-OK) led a collation of 25 senators to introduce a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act to overturn a rule from the Department of Labor, which according to the coalition, threatens religious liberty protections for faith-based organizations.

According to a press release from Budd, the Department of Labor under former President Donald Trump issued a rule clarifying protections for faith-based federal contractors, but this rule was later rescinded during the Biden Presidency. “President Trump’s rule was an important step to strengthen religious liberty protections for faith-based contractors,” said Budd. “The Biden Administration’s reversal of this rule needlessly targets faith-based organizations that simply want to serve our communities alongside their secular counterparts without violating their religious beliefs.”

Factory to bring in thousands of local jobs

By Ryan Henkel North State Journal

MONCURE – VinFast, a Vietnamese electric vehicle manufacturer, broke ground on their proposed billion dollar facility in Chatham County Friday, July 28.

In an event attended by VinFast executives, the Vietnam Ambassador to the United States, Gov. Roy Cooper as well as various government officials, VinFast laid out their future plans and goals regarding the factory located in the Triangle Innovation Point megasite.

“Just over a year ago, Vinfast announced the plan to build our first North American manufacturing facility and today we are here to start the construction of the first EV factory in North Carolina which will

have an annual production capacity of 150,000 vehicles,” said VinFast Global CEO Le Thi Thu Thuy.

The plant, which will be the first ever automobile factory in the state of North Carolina, aims to create thousands of jobs and is just the latest example of the economic and business boom the state has been experiencing.

“I’m so happy to be here because I’m thinking about the great paying jobs that are going to be created right here in North Carolina,” Cooper said. “They’re going to put money in the pockets of working families and that’s a great thing.”

“Vinfast is leading an army of clean-energy companies coming to our state. It has helped us to set records for job growth and economic expansion over the last few years. When you talk to CEOs of automakers and truck makers, the private sector is moving away from gas and diesel and into the EV market

at breakneck speed. The competition is fierce, so it’s important that we’ve been able to pull together to harness the economic windfall that is coming from that, to make sure that money goes into the pockets of North Carolinians.”

The process has been an allhands-on-deck approach that has encompassed support from the federal government to the state all the way down to local authorities.

“This was a true bipartisan effort,” Cooper said. “We’re grateful to have everyone here working on this. Our entire team from transportation to environment to commerce to our community colleges, we have all been working on this.”

“We are well on the way to being the greatest state in this country and the most progressive state in the south in showing what you can do when you have great vision, not just taking what comes, but knowing what we need to look

like,” said Chatham County Rep. Robert Reives II. “We didn’t just take anything that came. We wanted to make sure that the people of Chatham County and all of our surrounding counties had an opportunity for good jobs. Jobs that their children will have.”

VinFast, which is a member of

the VinGroup conglomerate, was established in 2017 and currently boasts a selection of electric cars, luxury cars, scooters, motorcycles and fully electric SUVs and according to Madam Thuy, recently had its business combination cleared by the US Securities and Exchange Commission brining, it one step closer to its listing on the stock market.

“With the factory that we are building here today, VinFast wants to strongly contribute to the goal of establishing robust, clean ener-

See VINFAST, page 2

McGlohon’s story to be revisited at library event

Randolph Record

ASHEBORO — Many Asheboro residents are aware that former fire chief John McGlohon, who was an aerial reconnaissance photographer in World War II, snapped images of the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima during World War II.

What they may not know is that as McGlohon began to tell his story, doubters arose — and because his images were classified “top secret” until 1995, proving it was problematic.

McGlohon’s friend and oral his-

torian Ken Samuelson will share the photographer’s unique story, as well as detail his own research of archives, museums and service members’ memories to substantiate it. The talk is set to take place at 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 10 at the Asheboro Public Library.

A large crowd is expected to attend this session based on interest when McGlohon spoke on the subject during an August 2016 presentation. An overflow crowd was on hand for that event.

Although only the three B-29 bombers assigned to the Hiroshima mission — including the “Eno -

la Gay,” which dropped the bomb — were supposed to be in the area, a misunderstood order put McGlohon’s reconnaissance aircraft nearby. McGlohon captured images of the explosion and its aftermath.

After the war, McGlohon returned home and operated a photography business. In 1955, he joined the Asheboro Fire Department and served as Chief from 1961 to 1985. After retirement, he served on the city council from 1987 to 2005 as mayor pro-tem.

Samuelson, from Moline, Ill., graduated from George Washing-

ton University and served in the U.S. Navy as a supply officer. He later worked in financial management.

He has a long and deep interest in the Second World War and has conducted oral histories with veterans for the North Carolina Museum of History, The National World War II Museum and the University of Florida Oral History Collection. He has published numerous articles on veterans he has interviewed. His oral history work led him to McGlohon.

Here’s the late John McGlohon speaking at the Asheboro Public Library in August 2016 about his experience photographing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II.

PJ WARD-BROWN | NORTH STATE JOURNAL

Roy Cooper and members of VinFast break ground during the VinFast Groundbreaking Ceremony in Moncure, NC on July 28, 2023.

♦ Timothy Ray Styles, age 54 of Sophia, died July 21, 2023 at his home.

♦ Melissa Sue Tilley Catron, age 32 of Randleman, died July 16, 2023 at Randolph Hospice.

Randolph Health adds inpatient services

By Bob Sutton Randolph Record ASHEBORO

— TeleNe -

phrology consultations and dialysis for inpatient hospitalizations are being added as part of expanded services at Randolph Health.

The hospital has partnered with Renasolve and nephrologist Dr. Rubin Chandran to provide inpatient nephrology services. Renasolve specializ-

es in providing daily 24-hour inpatient nephrology and TeleNephrology services to rural communities, according to Randolph Health. This is the first time the hospital has offered these services even when the hospital was under different ownership, spokeswoman Paula Richards said. The hospital’s announcement said this will “allow patients to remain in their local

community – close to family and close to home. Our goal is to improve patient care and bring necessary access to nephrology specialists to our inpatient population, eliminating the need for patients and their families to travel long distances.”

Randolph Health’s nephrologists and kidney care team have extensive clinical expertise in all aspects of nephrology, according to information from the hospital.

Richards said the services don’t extend to outpatient levels at this time.

Repeated interview requests during the past week to further discuss the program with hospital officials were unfulfilled.

Roller coaster with big crack has a second structural issue, inspectors say

The Associated Press CHARLOTTE — Another structural issue has been located with a large roller coaster that’s been closed for weeks since a large crack in a support column was discovered, a North Carolina agency confirmed on Friday.

A Swiss-based engineering company that designed and built the Fury 325 roller coaster at Carowinds, which sits along the North Carolina-South Carolina border, replaced that steel support column earlier this month, news outlets reported.

But the North Carolina Department of Labor, which inspects the ride and decides whether it can operate, said in an email that the agency has now been notified of a separate “weld indication,” which “could be either a break or a crack.”

“No certificate of operation has been issued nor do we have a timeline of when the certificate

VINFAST from page 1

gy supply chains throughout the US,” Thuy said. “We have been hard at work to cultivate an ecosystem of suppliers in North Carolina that will complement our facility and create cutting edge industrial processes here.”

Along with the manufacturing of EVs, Gov. Cooper expressed his desire and goal to expand the network of electric charging stations across the state as well.

“In North Carolina, we are moving fast on infrastructure,” Cooper said. “We have a coordinated effort competing for every single federal dollar. One of the main things we’re trying to do is to make sure we have charging stations all over the state to make sure we are ready for this EV revolution and that will be part of the infrastructure effort that we are putting forward.

“We want to make a real public effort here. Already, we’re get-

of operation will be issued for the Fury 325,” department spokesperson Meredith Watson said, referring other questions to Carowinds.

In a statement released Friday, Carowinds said it was conducting a full maintenance review of the ride while test runs are performed.

“During such reviews, it is not uncommon to discover slight weld indications in various locations of a steel superstructure. It is important to note that these indications do not compromise the structural integrity or safety of the ride,” the statement reads. “Once a repair is completed, it undergoes inspection and approval before the ride is deemed operational.”

Park staff closed Fury 325 on June 30 after a visitor pointed out the sizable crack. State Labor Commissioner Josh Dobson said earlier this month that the crack had been visible for at least

ting $100 million from the federal government with the plan that we’re working on with our transportation plan. We’re also applying for significantly more federal dollars that we think can help us do this. What we want to do is to coordinate with the private sector here to make sure there are charging stations in as many places as possible to continue to encourage the purchase of EVs and make sure everybody is comfortable having one. We know how important and how critical this is to the EV market making sure there are chargers everywhere.”

VinFast has also made great efforts to weave themselves into the fabric of the local community, with VinFast’s CEO of U.S. Manufacturing Van Anh Nguyen becoming a resident of the state of North Carolina and a collaboration with Central Carolina Community College to develop a world-class training program at

a week before it was shut down.

Video of the coaster, which reaches 325 feet in height, had showed a key support beam bending with the top visibly detached as cars with passengers barreled by. The roller coaster runs at speeds of up to 95 mph.

The department’s Elevator and Amusement Device Bureau said it had conducted its annual inspection of Fury 325 in February and only found a few signage issues, which the park quickly corrected.

Inspections by the park, the engineering company, a third-party testing firm and the Department of Labor have been ongoing. Carowinds has said it’s changing how it inspects rides daily, including the use of drone cameras to examine areas.

While the park straddles the border between the two states, North Carolina regulators inspect Fury 325 because its nearby entrance is in North Carolina.

its new state-of-the-art facility to help train the future workforce.

“This partnership will open the door for the people of Chatham County and beyond to receive free training and start their careers at Vinfast manufacturing EVs that will improve our environment and revolutionize the automotive industry,” Thuy said.

In addition to those, VinFast announced that they plan to donate three acres of land to the Mary Oaks Baptist Church, which is currently located on the site, and the company will work to identify resources needed to potentially relocate the church if necessary.

“I believe that you all share with me the hope that in the near future, Vinfast EVs produced in North Carolina, will be rolling out on roads across the United States and playing their part in keeping the U.S. clean and livable,” said Vietnam Ambassador to the U.S. Nguyen Quoc Dzung.

Remain, Misdemeanor Poss Schedule VI CS, on 7/22, at 3221 US Hwy 220 Bus S. ♦ Barrientos, Javier (M, 28), Arrested on charge of Assault by Strangulation, on 7/23, at 737 Albemarle Rd.

♦ Bolton McKee, James (M, 49), Arrested on charge of Possess Schedule II CS, Possess Meth, Resisting Public Officer, Possess Drug Paraphernalia, on 7/21, at 811 New Century Dr.

The Randolph Guide is a quick look at what’s going on in Randolph County.

August 3

Liberty Summer Hose Down 6pm

Another Summer Hose Down is set to take place at Freedom Park in Liberty! Sunset Slush will be there, so bring cash!

August 4

Music & Market: The Tonez 5pm – 10pm

Come out to Commerce Square Park this Friday for live music by The Tonez! Food trucks will be on sight at 5 p.m. and the music starts at 7 p.m.

August 5

Asheboro Farmers Market

7am – 1pm

Come out to the Asheboro Downtown Farmers Market, located at 134 S. Church Street. This event is free and open to the public!

Adopt & Play

Saturdays 10am – 2pm

Randolph County Animal Services is hosting its monthly Adopt & Play Event this Saturday at the Animal Services Adoption Center, located at 1370 County Land Rd. in Randleman. There will be fun activities and plenty of furry friends looking for their forever homes. Adoption fees on specific animals have been reduced for this event.

August 6

Sunday Concert –Ace Party Band

7pm – 8:30pm

Come out to Bicentennial Park this Sunday for live music by the Ace Party Band! This event is free and open to the public. All you have to do is bring a lawn chair.

at 3716 Mechanic Rd.

♦ Arellano, Jose (M, 28), Arrested on charge of First Deg Tresp Enter/

♦ Jenkins, Robert (M, 44), Arrested on charge of Possess Drug Paraphernalia, Possess Meth, on 7/21, at Andrew Hunter Rd & US Hwy 64 E.

August 9

World Tavern Poker at Carolina Tap House

7pm

Join America’s #1 Bar Poker League right in Asheboro at the Carolina Tap House! Entry is 100% free to the public and games take place every Wednesday night!

Neal Robbins, publisher | Frank Hill, senior opinion editor

Accountability on the issues impacting you

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN famously said, “A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”

President Joe Biden’s open border policies have fueled a historic surge in illegal immigration and the flames of our ongoing border crisis.

Since Biden took office, there have been over 5.6 million illegal crossings encountered at our Southern border, and while approximately 1.6 million illegal immigrants have escaped apprehension that we know of. According to Customs and Border Protection, 144,500 illegal immigrants were encountered at the Southern border in June alone—a 186% increase from the number of June encounters during the last administration.

To date in FY23, Border Patrol agents have seized more than 22,000 pounds of fentanyl, surpassing the total amount seized in all of FY22. Fentanyl poisoning is the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-45, and is killing 300 Americans every single day—including over 3,000 North Carolinians in 2022. An amount small enough to fit inside the ear of Lincoln on a penny can be lethal. For anyone who cares about the safety of our young people, it’s heartbreaking and frustrating to witness this rapid decline in border security.

Every state, including North Carolina, is suffering from the impacts of Biden’s open border policies. That’s why last week, I confronted Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra following the recent announcement that a facility for unaccompanied minors will begin operating in Greensboro within the next few weeks.

In 2021, while testifying before the Energy and Commerce Committee, Secretary Becerra told me there were no plans to open such a facility in North Carolina. He knew that very day he had people doing a site visit at American Hebrew Academy in Greensboro. After Secretary Becerra blatantly misled me and several members of our delegation, the people of North Carolina deserve to know the truth. We have received nothing but delayed and vague responses.

You deserve real answers and real solutions. Housing illegal immigrants in schools across the nation will not solve our border crisis. When House Republicans made our “Commitment to America,” we promised to secure

COLUMN | STEPHEN GAINEY, SUPERINTENDENT

Welcome back to school

I WANT TO “WELCOME EVERYONE BACK” to the Randolph County School System for the 2023-2024 school year.

It is my hope that all of our students, staff members, and parents have had a great summer. Nonetheless, I will be very excited to see our students and staff members return to campuses throughout the school system in August 2023.

In preparation for the start of the school year, open house events are scheduled for the week of August 21-25. More specifically, each middle school will have an open house event on August 22. The high schools have scheduled open house events for August 23. Finally, on August 24, the elementary schools will host their open house events.

I encourage all parents and students to take advantage of these events to meet staff members at schools, tour the school buildings, and learn other important information needed for the start of the school year. Information regarding the time of these events at specific schools can be found on our school system’s website at www.randolph.k12. nc.us. This information also can be obtained by calling the main office of your child’s school or the central office’s main telephone number (336-633-5000).

While the opening of the 2023-2024 school year is exciting, I also want to take a moment to thank the members of our Board of Education and our County Commissioners for their great work on the school system’s local budget for the 2023-2024 school year.

To be more specific, all of our school system’s local budget

the border and protect innocent Americans from the consequences of President Biden’s radical agenda. Real solutions like H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, and the recently passed Schools Not Shelters Act, will deliver on our promise to secure the border—something Washington Democrats refuse to do.

As the Sandhills’ Congressman and representative of the largest military base in the country, I am also committed to our resilient energy grid. Physical attacks on our nation’s power grid, like the one we experienced in Moore County, increased by 71% in 2022.

Earlier this month, I joined a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing to further examine emerging threats to our electrical grid. This hearing built on what we learned at the field hearing I hosted in Moore County last month. We heard from expert witnesses about tangible solutions to strengthen our grid and prevent future attacks on the infrastructure you depend on.

One threat to our grid is the lack of a viable supply chain for grid components. Biden’s Department of Energy is about to make matters worse through proposed rules that will make it harder to find transformers. Their new rules will increase the time to procure new transformers from months to years.

To combat these proposed standards, I introduced Protecting America’s Distribution Transformer Supply Chain Act to delay these new bureaucratic regulations for energy distribution transformers. I was able to include this in the FY2024 Department of Energy authorization bill. This will not totally solve the supply chain problem, but it will prevent Washington bureaucrats from making it worse. Our government exists to serve and protect you. From securing our borders to protecting your way of life, I am committed to building a safer future for you and your family that promotes long term economic prosperity, public safety, and freedom.

Richard Hudson is serving his sixth term in the U.S. House and represents North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. He currently serves as the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and is a member of the House Republican Steering Committee.

requests for the 2023-2024 school year were approved due to the hard work of these elected officials. This budget result led to an increase in the school system’s “current expense” funding by $1,428,000. In addition, this work led to $950,000 in “special capital outlay” funding to support the school system’s “9-Year Facility Upgrade/Repair Plan.”

This “special capital outlay” funding was provided for the school system for the first time during the 2014-2015 school year. It supplements the “regular capital outlay” funding received each year based on the school system’s student enrollment. Without a doubt, the members of our Board of Education and the County Commissioners continue to play a major role in the success of our school system through their teamwork.

In closing, please know that our staff members will do everything possible to help the children of this county continually improve over the next 10 months, as well as their future years with us, in terms of academic performance and overall development as individuals. I look forward to working with our students, parents, staff members, and members of the school system’s community as all of us work to shape the future of our country through the provision of a positive educational experience for the kids of Randolph County. It is a great time to be a member of the Randolph County School System.

Stephen Gainey is the Superintendent of the Randolph County School System

COLUMN | U.S. REP. RICHARD HUDSON

SIDELINE REPORT

MLB

Braves acquire veteran infielder Lopez in trade with Royals

Atlanta

The Atlanta Braves have added veteran infielder Nicky Lopez in a trade with the Kansas City Royals. The major league-leading Braves sent left-hander Taylor Hearn to Kansas City for the 28-year-old Lopez, who can play shortstop, second base and third. Hearn was designated for assignment by Texas on July 19. He was traded to Atlanta last week for cash, and he got one out in his only appearance with the Braves on Saturday. Lopez hit .213 with 13 RBIs in 68 games with Kansas City this season.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

Nebraska DB Farmer suspended indefinitely by Rhule

Lincoln, Neb.

Nebraska defensive back

Myles Farmer wasn’t on the 120-man roster when the Cornhuskers opened practice and his return is uncertain.

First-year coach Matt Rhule said he suspended Farmer indefinitely, saying it had to do with failure to adhere to team standards. Farmer was Nebraska’s second-leading tackler last year. Rhule also announced that wide receiver Josh Fleeks reported to practice significantly overweight. The Baylor transfer will be held out until he makes weight. Backup defensive lineman Brodie Tagoloa probably is out for the season because of injuries sustained in a car accident.

NFL Bengals QB Burrow could miss ‘several weeks’

Cincinnati Bengals coach Zac Taylor says quarterback Joe Burrow could miss “several weeks” with a right calf strain. The 26-year-old franchise quarterback hobbled on one leg and then went to the ground after a scramble play near the end of practice Thursday. Backup QBs Jake Browning and Trevor Siemian took the snaps on Friday. Preseason practice was truncated in Burrow’s rookie year in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, he was still rehabbing after knee surgery the previous December. On the first day of camp last year, he was stricken with appendicitis.

CYCLING

17-year-old American cyclist killed while training

Colorado Springs, Colo.

U.S. national team cyclist Magnus White was killed over the weekend when he was struck by a vehicle on a training ride near his home in Boulder, Colorado. USA Cycling announced his death in a statement Sunday. The 17-year-old was on a final training ride before competing in the junior mountain bike world championships in Glasgow, Scotland. He is survived by his parents, Michael and Jill, and his brother, Eero. White was a rising multidisciplinary star, winning a junior national championship in cyclocross in 2021 and earning a place on the U.S. national team. He had begun to dabble in road racing and mountain biking this year.

Buescher wins at Richmond, secures playoff spot

The Associated Press

RICHMOND, Va. — Chris Buescher pulled away on a restart with three laps to go to win at Richmond Raceway on Sunday and snag one of the final spots in NASCAR’s playoff field.

Buescher led 88 laps and was ahead by nearly six seconds when a caution came out with under 10 laps to go. That erased his lead over Virginia native Denny Hamlin, who was booed by his hometown crowd in before the race.

But Hamlin got a poor final restart and Buescher easily pulled away for his first Cup Series win of the season, third of his career.

“I knew that last restart was going to be tough, but I knew we had the speed in this thing,”

Buescher said.

He and RFK Racing teammate Brad Keselowski led a combined 190 of the 400 laps in their Fords. Keselowski, now a part owner of the team, led 102 laps on the 0.75mile oval.

Buescher started 26th and had to drive the field for the win that locked him into the 16-driver playoff field with four races remaining in the regular season. Buescher became the 13th race winner this year and there are three playoff spots up for grabs over the next month.

It was the 139th Cup win for primary team owner Jack Roush, second since Keselowski joined the ownership group.

Ford now has 723rd wins in NASCAR’s top Cup Series.

“Everybody at RFK Racing who has worked so hard to get us to this point,” said Buescher.

Hamlin, winner last week at Pocono, finished second in a Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing. Kyle Busch was third in a Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing, followed by the Fords of Joey Logano from Team Penske and Ryan Preece of Stewart-Haas Racing.

“One win is good, but you get three or four or five and then you feel a lot better,” said Keselowski. “It sure beats not having any at all, but we want to keep going. It’s nice to have one car locked in the playoffs. We need to get both cars locked in the playoffs. We have a good points gap, but we want wins and this is where we need to be.”

Keselowski, despite being winless this season, is still mathematically in contention for the playoffs.

The race was slowed just three times by caution flags, with the final yellow sending the leaders to pit road for four tires with eight laps to go. When the green flag was shown again, Buescher used the inside line to pull away for his third career victory.

Hamlin’s bid for the victory ended on the second lap of the final sprint when he drove in too deep in the first turn and slid up the track. He finished 0.549-seconds behind Buescher.

The series moves to Michigan where Kevin Harvick, winless so far in this his final season, is the defending champion.

USC prepares for European tour as Bronny recovers

The Associated Press

THE SON OF LEBRON JAMES is at home after going into cardiac arrest last week

“We have our family together, safe and healthy, and we feel your love.”

LeBron James, in part of a tweet, following his son’s discharge from a Los Angeles hospital after he went into cardiac arrest during a USC practice

By Joe Reedy, The

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — As Bronny James continues to recover after going into cardiac arrest, his Southern California teammates have been at practice to prepare for a 10-day exhibition tour of Greece and Croatia that begins next week.

The tour will run from Aug. 5-15 and see the Trojans visit Athens and Mykonos, Greece, and Dubrovnik, Croatia. Teams are allowed to go on a foreign tour once every four years under NCAA rules.

James was discharged from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Thursday and is resting at home, according to a statement from the hospital. His father, Lakers superstar LeBron James, also posted on social media that his family is “safe and healthy.”

Bronny James will continue to undergo tests to determine the cause of his cardiac arrest, which occurred Monday morning during a workout at USC’s Galen Center.

Cardiac arrest occurs when the heart abruptly stops beating because of a problem with its electrical activity. While uncommon in young people, sudden cardiac arrest is the leading medical cause of death in young athletes. Some studies have estimated one sudden cardiac death in 50,000 to 80,000 young athletes each year.

No information has been made public about what may have caused Bronny James’ cardiac arrest. But

one of the most common causes in young athletes is an underlying problem with the heart’s structure, such as a genetic condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that leads to a thickened heart muscle more prone to irregular electrical activity. A more rare cause is commotio cordis, which occurs when someone receives a sharp blow to the chest during a specific part of the heartbeat’s cycle — what happened to Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin earlier this year.

James was the second high-profile USC basketball recruit to go into cardiac arrest in the last year. Vin-

cent Iwuchuwku also was stricken during a workout last July, but the 7-foot-1 center returned to the court six months later and appeared in 14 games. It’s too soon to know how James’ playing career could be affected, especially without a lot of information being made public. Various experts point to James’ quick move out of intensive care and being released three days later as encouraging.

The upcoming trip is important for the Trojans as James recovers. USC had the nation’s fourthranked recruiting class, including the top-rated player in guard Isa-

iah Collier.

James committed to the Trojans in May after the 6-foot-3 18-yearold became one of the nation’s top prospects as a two-way point guard for Sierra Canyon School in Chatsworth, California. He is the sixth McDonald’s All-American to come to USC since Andy Enfield became coach in 2013. With his family fame and huge social media following, Bronny James also has the top name, image and likeness valuation in sports at $6.3 million, as estimated by On3. com. He is the oldest of LeBron and Savannah James’ three children.

AP PHOTO

Chris Buescher raises the Cook Out 400 Trophy in Victory Lane after winning Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Richmond.

AP PHOTO

Bronny James, right with his father LeBron James, was hospitalized after going into cardiac arrest while participating in a practice at Southern California last Monday.

ZooKeepers find different values during CPL season

By Bob Sutton Randolph Record

ASHEBORO — Tyler McPeak and Dallas Callahan have given the Asheboro ZooKeepers a veteran presence in different ways during the Coastal Plain League baseball season.

McPeak is looking to polish his swing and plate approach in advance of a final season at Lenoir-Rhyne, where he has been a record-setting slugger.

“I’ve always been a guy that feels there’s something else to be desired,” McPeak said. “Chasing perfection in an imperfect game.”

Callahan opted for a final goaround in a collegiate summer league even though he’s done playing at UNC Greensboro.

“I wanted to stay ready in case somebody wants to give me a shot,” said Callahan, 23.

Callahan, the son of first-year ZooKeepers general manager Melissa Godwin, started 53 games this year for UNCG (25-34), batting .195 in 55 games overall. He hit seven home runs.

Callahan, a catcher, played for Asheboro in the summer of 2021, when the team’s nickname was Copperheads. Last year, hip surgery kept him out of a summer circuit.

More recently, he had two-hit outings four times in a six-game stretch for the ZooKeepers.

“I’m here for the game,” Callahan said. “I’m not ready to give it up.”

McPeak has been out of the lineup for two weeks with ailments af-

ter being the team’s biggest offensive threat. Yet even with the missed time, the first baseman entered the last week of the regular season second on the team in home runs (4) and runs batted in (23) behind Jared Beebe. McPeak’s nine doubles top the team, and he holds a .314 batting average.

McPeak, a North Lincoln product, will be entering his sixth season in a college baseball program.

He was on the Campbell team prior to transferring to Lenoir-Rhyne, where his 18 home runs this year set a single-season school record.

“It would be nice to break that record again,” he said.

Until then, time in a summer league was a good option again.

“I’m just trying to have fun,” McPeak said. “I know this is proba-

Zane Cheek

bly my last year of summer ball.”

Thompson honored

Daniel Thompson of the ZooKeepers was named the CPL Pitcher of the Week. Across two outings, the right-hander for UNC Greensboro struck out 12 batters in 8 2/3 innings and picked up one victory.

It also was a big week for Asheboro’s Daniel Hudson. He had the game-winning single against the Boone Bigfoots in a 13-12 comeback home victory and then homered twice the next night against the High Point-Thomasville HiToms at Finch Field. The 20-10 outcome against the HiToms gave the ZooKeepers a five-game winning streak, which was snapped the following night by the Wilson Tobs.

Providence Grove, multi-sport

Cheek was active in each of the sports seasons, beginning as a multi-purpose back for the football team. He averaged more than 90 rushing yards per game as a senior in 2022. He again was selected as an All-Piedmont Athletic Conference player.

He was one of Providence Grove’s key players in boys’ basketball as a guard.

He wrapped up his prep career as a sprinter on the track and field team.

His twin brother, Zander Cheek, also was a standout athlete for the Patriots.

Leonard takes baseball path with Post 45 as infielder

By Bob Sutton Randolph Record

ASHEBORO — Pierce Leonard is a first-year member of the Randolph County Post 45 baseball team. There’s a reason that he pursued American Legion baseball this summer.

Having finished his final high school year at Eastern Randolph after transferring from Uwharrie Charter Academy, Leonard chose baseball as a preference in terms of a sport to play in college.

“I figured I could go farther with baseball than I could basketball,” Leonard said.

He said he’ll play baseball at Guilford Tech.

But first, Leonard will be part of the Post 45 team aiming for a resurgence in this week’s Southeast Regional at McCrary Park.

Leonard, who was a defensive back in football, was one of the standouts in Eastern Randolph’s key players during a record-setting basketball season that extended into March in the Class 1-A championship game.

Days later, he was on the baseball field for the Wildcats.

“I hadn’t played baseball since my freshman year,” Leonard said. “I feel baseball is natural to me. I’m just loose up there.”

After fouling a ball off his shin, Leonard was out for most of the recent Post 45 postseason games. Randolph County manager Ronnie Pugh said Monday that Leonard was pretty much at full speed at a weekend practice in advance of the regional. “He should be good to go,” Pugh said.

Post 45 holds a 23-6 record, with four of those losses coming to Rowan County and the other two to High Point-Thomasville. Randolph’s spot in the regional was secured because of an automatic bid reserved for the host team.

When Post 45 failed to advance to the Area 3 finals, it meant the team would have more than a twoweek layoff before the Southeast Regional.

Post 45 has numerous players with experience from last year’s regional. Among those are lineup regulars Tanner Marsh, Braylen Hayes, Tyler Parks and Josh Meadows, as well as Alex Martinez and Robert Garner.

Martinez, a catcher and utility player, is with Post 45 after a season with Brunswick Community College. He didn’t play much in the spring, in part because he was behind Tatum Marsh, a former high school teammate at Asheboro and ex-Post 45 mate.

Checking the regional …

The five-day regional includes teams from seven states. It’s a double-elimination format.

There are four games the first two days and then three games Friday, two more Saturday and one or two games Sunday.

Post 45 will play the nightcap each day if it’s in the winner’s bracket. Randolph County opens Wednesday against Columbia (Tenn.) Post 19. That game is set for 7:30 p.m.

Other first-day games are Evans (Ga.) Post 192 vs. Owensboro (Ky.) Post 9 at 9:30 a.m.; Belleview (Fla.) Post 284 vs. West End (Va.) Post 361 at 12:30 p.m.; and Florence (S.C.) Post 1 vs. Fuquay-Varina Post 116.

Belleview, Evans, Owensboro and Columbia all played in the regional last year at McCrary Park. Post 45’s only game against any of those teams came with an eight-inning victory against Evans on the second day in a winner’s bracket game, but Randolph County lost its next two games and was eliminated.

Fuquay-Varina won the North Carolina state tournament, topping Wayne County Post 11 in Saturday’s final in Buies Creek.

The regional winner advances to the American Legion World Series next week in Shelby.

** During the summer, we recognize seniors from the past school year.

Blue Comets to stage first Fan Fest on Friday

By Bob Sutton Randolph Record

ASHEBORO — The first Blue Comets Fan Fest for Asheboro High School athletics will be held Friday night at Lee Stone Stadium on campus. Athletics director Wes Berrier said the objective is to create a massive community event.

“The main reason is trying to bridge that gap between the school and community,” Berrier said. “More or less building school spirit and building community spirit. It’s a great way for us to introduce our fall athletes and kind of showcase these teams.” Fall sports teams will be featured.

The event begins at 7 p.m. and continues until 1:30 a.m. The evening’s activities are a lead-up to the football team’s midnight madness practice that’s expected to run for about 90 minutes beginning at midnight.

Admission is free, though wristbands will need to be purchased to use a bounce house and inflatable water slides, along with chances to throw at the dunking booth. Concessions will be sold, and the Booster Club will have spirit gear for sale.

The idea for the Fan Fest came from new football coach Calvin Brown, formerly of Providence Grove, where the Patriots had a similar event. Berrier said meetings with the Booster Club began in the spring to put this together.

It will extend beyond the high school Blue Comets. Middle school football players and

cheerleaders and youth football and cheerleaders also will be recognized. The school’s marching band will perform.

Asheboro is the largest high school in Randolph County. It’s the only school in the county that’s a member of the Mid-Piedmont Conference.

While the emphasis is on fall sports, the school’s wrestling team and girls’ soccer team will be involved with concessions and face painting.

Those in the dunking booth, in half-hour intervals, include Brown, principal Ryan Moody, boys’ basketball coach Brian Nance, superintendent Aaron Woody, school counselor Allyson Key and Berrier. There’s a reason that Berrier goes last because he ”hopes everyone’s arm is tired” by that point.

Berrier said the goal is for a festival atmosphere and “to make this a huge school/community event that will continue to grow every year.”

New coaches

In addition to Brown, there are several new coaches leading fall teams for Asheboro.

The cross country coach is Griffin Dozier, son of former coach Angela Dozier. She’ll move to a role as assistant coach.

Griffin Dozier is a former Asheboro runner from the Class of 2017.

Dwayne Lester will take over as girls’ golf coach, replacing Heather Norris.

Kelly Smith was named the new volleyball coach last winter.

COURTESY PHOTO

Zane Cheek had an impact on multiple sports during his time at Providence Grove.

PJ WARD-BROWN | NORTH STATE JOURNAL

Second baseman Pierce Leonard of Randolph County Post 45 makes a play in the field earlier this season.

PJ WARD-BROWN | NORTH STATE JOURNAL

Dallas Callahan has been with Asheboro’s Coastal Plain League team even before this year.

Tyler McPeak has made big contributions at the plate for the Asheboro ZooKeepers.

PJ WARD-BROWN | NORTH STATE JOURNAL

UCA’s state titles highlight top area moments

There were championships and title-game appearances for Randolph County teams during the past high school year.

By Bob Sutton Randolph Record

THERE WERE championships and near misses and an assortment of other superlatives associated with the 2022-23 school year for Randolph County high school teams.

Uwharrie Charter Academy racked up a pair of team state championships in Class 1-A.

The Eagles secured the dual-team wrestling title and, a few months later, picked up the baseball crown.

** Eastern Randolph’s boys’ basketball team had its most successful season ever by advancing to the Class 1-A state championship game. Wilson Prep won the game.

Then in baseball, the Wildcats ended up one round away from a spot in the state finals. They were denied by UCA in the West Region finals.

Those might have been surprise postseason runs, but Eastern Randolph’s football success seemed normal. The Wildcats won the Piedmont Athletic Conference, received a first-round bye in the Class 1-A state playoffs, and won two playoff games before they were derailed by Mount Airy.

** Wheatmore’s girls’ soccer team also played for a state championship, but its bid to repeat as the Class 2-A titlist was thwarted in the final by Manteo.

** Asheboro’s boys’ soccer team made it to the Class 3-A West Region final, falling to Hickory.

** Randleman’s baseball and girls’ basketball teams both reached the fourth round of the Class 2-A state playoffs. In baseball, the Tigers were the two-time defending state champions.

** Providence Grove’s football team won one game in the Class 2-A state playoffs. That was notable because it was the school’s first victory in a postseason football game.

** In softball, Southwestern Randolph won three games in the Class 2-A state playoffs before a 10-inning loss to West Wilkes. UCA and Eastern Randolph also reached the fourth round in Class 1-A.

Notes of interest

** Brecken Snotherly of Eastern Randolph was the PAC’s Runner of the Year in girls’ cross country, Player of the Year in girls’ basketball and the Most Valuable Track Athlete for PAC girls’ track and field.

** Shortstop/pitcher Tanner Marsh of Asheboro was a top honoree in two sports in the Mid-Piedmont Conference. He was dubbed the Defensive Player of the Year in boys’ basketball and the Player of the Year in baseball as a senior.

** Conner Carter of Eastern Randolph was the state individual runner-up for the past two seasons in Class 1-A boys’ golf.

** Infielder Hunter Atkins of Randleman was the Player of the Year for PAC baseball in 2021 and 2023. He’s heading to UNC Greensboro, though first, he’s playing this summer for Randolph County Post 45 in American Legion baseball.

Check on college-bound athletes from several schools

Randolph Record

HERE’S A CHECK on some of Randolph County’s top athletes from the Class of 2023 with their college intentions:

** Asheboro’s Nicolas Chavez signed to go to UNC Asheville for men’s track and field. He was a hurdler and pole vaulter for the Blue Comets.

** Katelyn Thomas of Asheboro is headed to Anderson (S.C.) University to play women’s tennis. She has been on the Mid-Piedmont Conference all-conference team for the past two years.

** Diego Gutierrez of Asheboro is going to Carolina University for men’s soccer. He also was a wrestling standout for the Blue Comets.

Edwin Perez is slated to play men’s soccer at Chowan, which is

the same destination for Asheboro teammate Calvin Smith. Smith was the Defensive Player of the Year in the Mid-Piedmont Conference, while Gutierrez and Perez were all-conference choices.

** Trinity’s baseball team had several players pegged to extend their playing careers. A trio of All-Piedmont Athletic Conference players will make stops in junior college. Pitcher and outfielder Jake Little is going to Florence-Darlington Tech in Florence, S.C., to play for the Stingers, who’ve been a regional power. Pitcher Cade Hill is heading to Rockingham Community College. Jaxson Coble, who also played football for the Bulldogs, is going to Guilford Tech after being dubbed the Bulldogs’ top offensive player in 2023.

** Three-sport standout Dylan Hodges of Trinity is set to play men’s basketball at Division III Pfeiffer. Hodges was a high-flying swingman, averaging 17.4 points, 4.8 rebounds and a team-best 2.5 steals per game as a senior. Hodges was also a receiver for the football team, while he excelled as a high jumper and sprinter in track and field.

** From Providence Grove, Caroline Wright is going to Pfeiffer to play women’s golf. She was last year’s Player of the Year in the Piedmont Athletic Conference for girls’ golf.

Previous stories have documented intended destinations for many other Class of 2023 athletes from Randolph County.

Providence Grove finds next girls’ coach

By Bob Sutton Randolph Record

CLIMAX — Providence Grove

moved quickly this summer to hire a new girls’ basketball coach.

Johnathan Gainey is the new coach, filling the vacancy caused by the departure of Dylan Eppley.

Gainey previously coached girls’ teams at Winston-Salem Prep and Winston-Salem Reynolds. He also was the boys’ basketball coach at his alma mater, Kernersville Glenn.

Eppley left Providence Grove after three seasons to become the boys’ basketball coach at Southern Alamance.

“I felt like this was a move that I needed,” Eppley said of a chance to expand his professional experiences.

Eppley’s Providence Grove

teams had a 26-37 record, including 6-18 last season.

Eppley, 30, said he embraced his coaching opportunity with the Patriots as it was his first role as a varsity head coach. Former athletics director Calvin Brown, who became the football coach at Asheboro last winter, was supportive, he said.

“Calvin sold me on Providence Grove,” said Eppley, who also was on the football coaching staff. “He built an athletic department that was very connected.”

Eppley goes from one school nicknamed Patriots to another with the same nickname. He’ll be in a rebuilding phase at Southern Alamance, which is moving from Class 4-A to Class 3-A and is coming off a three-year stretch with an 18-44 record. That includes last season’s 6-19 mark.

Johnathan Gainey

PJ WARD-BROWN | NORTH STATE JOURNAL

Members of the Uwharrie Charter Academy wrestling team celebrate the Class 1-A dual team championship last winter.

Jake Little of Trinity made a big impact in baseball for the Bulldogs and he’ll continue playing in 2024.

Barbara "Barbie" Lundy Millikan

April 26, 1957 — July 30, 2023

Barbara “Barbie” Lundy Millikan gave her final heroic blow to cancer as she stepped into the presence of her Savior on Sunday morning, July 30, 2023.

Born April 26, 1957, she continually demonstrated strength and courage throughout her life as she battled breast cancer three separate times over a 32-year span with her loving husband of nearly 48 years, Vernon Eugene “Jap” Millikan, and her four devoted children Summer (Brian) Russell, Tabitha Johnson, Travis (Kari) Millikan, and Crystal Hilton. The Lord blessed her with being an adoring MawMaw to ten beautiful grandchildren, Madison, Karlee, Hannah, Shiloh, Zoe, Selah, Katelyn, Nevaeh, Kasen, and Kinsley. While Barbara had many loved ones who supported and prayed for her during the duration of her battle, her core team included three caring siblings, Richard (Stephanie) Lundy, Lisa Cox, and Linda (Fred) Corum, along with her nephews, Christopher and Matthew, great nephew Owen, and great niece Kayley, as well as her parents, Reuben and Nancy Lundy, who preceded her in her homegoing in 2022. As her nickname indicates, she was an avid Barbie fan and loved horses. Her favorite pastime was shopping for and spoiling her grandchildren with bottomless bags of birthday and Christmas gifts, she never missed an episode of Survivor or Big Brother, and she was known at the Asheboro Walmart Pharmacy to be a shining light and source of encouragement to those she came in contact with. Barbara showed tremendous strength and tenacity every moment she spent on this earth.

Suzette Spurlin

August 20, 1946 — July 29, 2023

Elaine Suzette McPherson Spurlin, age 76 of Randleman, passed away on Saturday, July 29, 2023, at the Randolph Hospice House.

Suzette was born in Randolph County on August 20, 1946, to Clarence and Maxine Lamb McPherson. Suzette was a true social butterfly that had a great sense of humor and never met a stranger. She was a member of Pleasant Garden Baptist Church for over 25 years and loved her Lord and Savior. Suzette taught for 23 years at the Wee-Shine Program at Pleasant Garden Baptist Church and also sold Aloette cosmetics receiving numerous awards. She enjoyed scrapbooking, going to the movies with her friends, and traveling with her family and spending time with the “Golden Girls”. Suzette loved to read and thoroughly enjoyed participating in her book club. In addition to her parents, Suzette is preceded in death by her brother, Ricky; and her sister, Sandra.

Suzette is survived by her husband of 60 years, Franklin R. Spurlin of Randleman; sons, Greg (Lorrie) Spurlin of Franklinville, Scott (Shannon) Spurlin of Bellevue, NE; grandchildren, Brandee, Candace, Taylor, Maleah, and Kayly; 5 great grandchildren; brother, Ronnie McPherson of Climax; and several nieces and nephews.

Judy Beck Hewett

August 1, 1942 — July 27, 2023

Ms. Judy Beck Hewett of Sophia, North Carolina died on July 27, 2023. She was born August 1st, 1942 to Helen Frances Allred and Charlie Beck. Her stepfather was LaRue B. Cox, Sr. She received her associate degree from Brookstone College of Business in High Point. Judy had several hobbies. She loved to sew, loved going camping with her partner Mark, and loved to read. In addition to her parents and her stepfather, Judy was preceded in death by her sister, Donna Shaw; and her brother, LaRue B. Cox, Jr. Survivors include her partner, Mark Ball; 2 sons, Martin C. Long, Jr. and wife Theresa and Christopher Long and wife Kathy; grandchildren, Samantha Goodman and husband Jeffrey, Madison Long, Trey Long, and Heather Dunn and husband Chris; great grandchildren, Jenson, Ellie, Tyson, C.J., and Tucker; sister, Carol Dickerson and husband James of Wilmington; 3 nieces; 2 nephews; and Mark's sister, Lynn Welborn and husband Darrell.

Robbie Dale Wilson

July 26, 1969 — July 23, 2023

Robbie Dale Wilson, 53, passed away July 23, 2023 at his home surrounded by family and loved ones in Randleman, NC. He was born in Gastonia, NC on July 26, 1969 to Robert Douglas Wilson and Rita Ann (Rollins) Shields.

Robbie, the most loving and devoted husband is survived by his wife, Stacie Wilson; mom, Rita Shields and husband Roger; dad, Robert Wilson and wife Becky; aunt, Rhonda Carlisle and husband Michael, of Lincolnton; uncles, Carl Rollins and wife Jackie, of Ranlo; George Willard of Mt. Holly; his beloved greyhounds, Phoebe and Cicero; and his macaw Simba.

Robbie liked helping others. This started when he became a paramedic in Mecklenburg and later a firefighter in Level Cross where he met his wife Stacie. He owned 2 businesses, WC Computers and Taz Tactical. He had many hobbies which included rebuilding Volkswagens, guns, golf, and spending time with his family, beloved pets and close friends.

Eddie Herring Brown

July 26, 1936 — July 23, 2023

Eddie Herring Brown, age 86, of Franklinville passed away on Sunday, July 23, 2023 at Kindred Hospital.

Mr. Brown was born in Hartwell, GA on July 26, 1936 to Joe and Lorene Herring Brown. He retired from Henredon Manufacturing after 47 years of service. Eddie was a member of Solid Rock Baptist Church and attended Big Spring Missionary Baptist Church in Mallory, WV and First Baptist Church of Man in Man, WV. In addition to his parents, Eddie was preceded in death by his sister, Jeanette Kay, and brothers, Owen, Julius, Winston, and Tommy Brown. Eddie was a devoted husband, father, grandfather, and friend. He enjoyed the outdoors including hunting, fishing, and horseback riding, and especially spending time with his family.

He is survived by his wife of 64 years, Rose Ellen Grant Brown; sons, Rev. Perry D. Brown and wife Sheila of Mallory, WV and Jeffrey D. Brown and wife Nancy of Randleman; grandchildren, Jessica D. Cain and husband Jordan of Franklinville and Jacob D. Brown and wife McKenna of Fremont, OH; great granddaughters, Sarah Margaret Cain and Hannah Lee Cain; brother, Ken Brown and wife Betty of Hartwell, GA; sister, Cathryn Griffin of Hartwell, GA; sisters-in-law, Mallie Lou Brown and Mary Ann Brown both of Hartwell, GA; and many loving nieces and nephews.

Larry Goldston

August 13, 1974 - July 27, 2023

Larry "Boobie" Duboyce Goldston, 48, of Ramseur, passed away Thursday, July 27, 2023 at his home.

Fredrick William Steinmann

January 15, 1943 ~ July 27, 2023 (age 80)

Luis Fernando Gonzalez Torres

December 31, 1990 — July 28, 2023

Luis Fernando Gonzalez Torres, 32, of Asheboro passed away Friday, July 28, 2023.

Luis was a loving father, son, and brother and will be deeply missed by all who knew him.

Luis loved spending time with his children and was a big soccer fanatic.

Mr. Torres is survived by his parents, Fernando Gonzalez and Alicia Torres Pedraza; children, Dilan Fernando Gonzalez Chilel, William Maroquin Chilel, and Alicia Mayte Gonzalez Onteveros; siblings, Jennifer Garcia Torres, Christian Garcia Torres, and Josefina Gonzalez Torres; and stepdad Lazaro Garcia.

Frederick William Steinmann, 80, of Asheboro, passed away on Thursday, July 27, 2023. Fred was born to William F. Steinmann and Mary L. Lotti on January 15, 1943, in Jersey City, NJ. Fred was a proud father to five children: Shawn Steinmann, Sandy (Steinmann) Williams, Jill (Steinmann) Manson, Kim (Smith) Tuero, and Lynn (Smith) Bailey. He met and married is loving, wife, Janette C. (Smith) Steinmann in the Florida Keys. They were married on March 17, 1985, in Key Largo, FL. Fred, being mechanically inclined, spent a majority of this life working on cars, boats and trucks. He turned this into a career. Together with is wife, Jan, they managed an auto parts store in Key Largo for almost 30 years. After that, he became interested in over the road trucking. He started as a team driver and a few years later, in 2005, he became an Owner/Operator. Fred and his dedicated wife Jan thoroughly enjoyed trucking and traveling together weather on the road, at home, or visiting family and friends in Florida. Along the way, he passed his knowledge about truck driving to his grandson, Jacob, before he retired in 2015. Fred is survived by his wife, Janette C. Steinmann, his five children, several grandchildren and great grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his parents, William and Mary.

Larry was born on August 13, 1974 in Randolph County. He was a highly decorated and passionate firefighter engineer for the Greensboro Fire Department for 15 years and a local 947 Union member. Larry was an active member in McCrary UMC as an usher and sang in the choir for "Men of Faith". He was also a part of the nominating committee for his church.

Larry loved sports and was a talented baseball and football player. He was Randolph County football player of the year and offensive player of the year for Asheboro High School in 1991. He played baseball when he attended NC A&T, and played football and baseball when he attended WCU.

Mr. Goldston is survived by his wife, Felisha Goldston of the home; daughter, Annissa Claire Goldston; parents, Larry Lee Goldston and Brenda Ewing Goldston of Ramseur; brother, Ashley Jerrod Goldston (Monica) of Ramseur; sister, Sonya L. Goldston of Ramseur; aunts and uncles, Eldora Allen (Jerry), Gwendolin Richardson (Will), Jackie E. Biggs (Walter), Hurley E. Ewing (Annie), Benjamin Ewing (Carolyn), Ida Neal, Earl Street, William P. Shoffner (Shirlene), Carnell Goldston (Estelle); mother-inlaw "Mom", Clara Little; sistersin-law "Sisters", Sonya Mebane, Valerie Little, Carmen Daniels; brothers-in-law "Brothers", James Little, Leon Little, Tony Little, Terry Little, Dana Daniels; a host of nieces and nephews; and special friends, Mickey Burgess, Johnny Ellison, Alex Gary, Chris Davis, Martin Barrow, Sherrone Shoffner, and Shawn Randleman.

Clyde Spencer

December 20, 1947 - July 24, 2023

Clyde Thomas Spencer, of Asheboro, NC transitioned peacefully to his heavenly home, on Monday, July 24, 2023.

Clyde was born in Randolph County on December 20, 1947, and was the son of the late Issac L. Spencer and Pearl A. Spencer. Clyde was a happy person who made everyone smile and laugh, especially his family. He enjoyed fishing, grilling, listening to oldschool and gospel music, cleaning his truck, and watching auto racing. Most of all, spending time with his “Honey Poo” Omi was the most precious time of his life!

You could never be around him mad or upset and stay that way long, because he would start cracking jokes and make you forget all about it!

He will truly be missed and never forgotten, as he will always be in our hearts.

He is survived by his loving wife, Neomia Daisy Spencer; daughters, Teffany Shepard (Daniel) of Florida, Melissa Venable (Charles) of Charlotte NC; sisters, Brenda Gray (Donald) of Siler City, NC, Debra Johnson (Christopher) of Liberty NC; brother, Charles Greene of Asheboro, NC; grandchildren, Persephone Redfearn (Damarcus) of Gastonia NC, Aaron Hammond (Nakeisha) of Charlotte NC, Jasmine Hicks (Drekkerius) of Texas, Myra Brady of Asheboro NC, Sean Venable of Charlotte, NC and Trevor Venable of Charlotte, NC; great grandchildren, Jabari, Tyler, Demetria, Stephanie, Christian, Niyah, Erin, Aamir, Comaggio, Camilliyon, Charisma, and a host of nieces and nephews.

He is preceded by his sister, Linda Kay Spencer of Asheboro, NC; brother, Clarence Jr. Staley (better known as “Duck”) of Ramseur NC; and daughter Bridget Brady of Asheboro, NC.

Vivian Tanner McDonald

September 14, 1954 ~ July 24, 2023

Vivian Tanner McDonald, age 68, of Randolph County passed away July 24, 2023 at Woodland Hill Center.

She was born September 14, 1954 the daughter of the late Geneva Tanner. She is also preceded in death by her beloved husband, Pete McDonald; and daughter, Wanda Cole. She will be missed by her beloved son, Patrick Tanner; grandson, Patrick Diante Tanner; granddaughters, Tekeiva Tanner and Shanquesha Tanner; great grandchildren, Damonte Reza, Annah Ingram, Amariah Ingram, Makiyah Ingram, Micah Ingram, Alijah Diggs; sisters, Chassie Tanner, Bertha Tanner, Lilly Mae Jones, and Shirley Tanner; brothers, Albert Tanner, Eugene Tanner, and Charles Hubert Tanner; and a host of other beloved family and friends.

Members of Congress break for August with no clear path to avoiding a shutdown this fall

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Lawmakers broke for their August recess with work on funding the government largely incomplete, fueling worries about whether Congress will be able to avoid a partial government shutdown this fall.

Congress has until Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year, to act on government funding. They could pass spending bills to fund government agencies into next year, or simply pass a stopgap measure that keeps agencies running until they strike a longer-term agreement. No matter which route they take, it won’t be easy. “We’re going to scare the hell out of the American people before we get this done,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. Coons’ assessment is widely shared in Congress, reflecting the gulf between the Republican-led House and the Democratic-led Senate, which are charting vastly different — and mostly incompatible — paths on spending.

The Senate is adhering mostly to the top-line spending levels that President Joe Biden negotiated with House Republicans in late May as part of the debt-ceiling deal that extended the government’s borrowing authority and avoided an economically devas-

tating default.

That agreement holds discretionary spending generally flat for the coming year while allowing increases for military and veterans accounts. On top of that, the Senate is looking to add $13.7 billion in additional emergency appropriations, including $8 billion for defense and $5.7 billion for nondefense.

House Republicans are going a different way. GOP leaders have teed up bills with far less spending than the agreement allows in an effort to win over members who insist on

rolling back spending to fiscal year 2022 levels. They are also adding scores of policy add-ons broadly opposed by Democrats.

At a press conference at the Capitol this past week, some members of the House Freedom Caucus, a conservative faction within the House GOP, said that voters elected a Republican majority in that chamber to rein in government spending and it was time for House Republicans to use every tool available to get the spending cuts they want.

“We should not fear a government shutdown,” said Rep. Bob

Good, R-Va. “Most of the American people won’t even miss if the government is shut down temporarily.”

Many House Republicans disagree with that assessment. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, called it an oversimplification to say most Americans wouldn’t feel an impact. And he warned Republicans would take the blame for a shutdown.

“We always get blamed for it, no matter what,” Simpson said. “So it’s bad policy, it’s bad politics.”

But the slim five-seat majority Republicans hold amplifies the power that a small group can wield. Even though the debt ceiling agreement passed with a significant majority of both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives opponents were so unhappy in the aftermath that they shut down House votes for a few days, stalling the entire GOP agenda.

Shortly thereafter, McCarthy argued the numbers he negotiated with the White House amounted to a cap and “you can always do less.” GOP Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, followed that she would seek to limit nondefense spending at 2022 budget levels, saying the debt agreement “set a top-line spending cap — a ceiling, not a floor.”

The decision to cut spending

The UFO congressional hearing was ‘insulting’ to US employees, a top Pentagon official says

The Associated Press

A top Pentagon official has attacked this week’s widely watched congressional hearing on UFOs, calling the claims “insulting” to employees who are investigating sightings and accusing a key witness of not cooperating with the official U.S. government investigation.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick’s letter, published on his personal LinkedIn page and circulated Friday across social media, criticizes much of the testimony from a retired Air Force intelligence officer that energized believers in extraterrestrial life and produced headlines around the world.

Retired Air Force Maj. David Grusch testified last Wednesday that the U.S. has concealed what he called a “multi-decade” program to collect and reverse-engineer “UAPs,” or unidentified aerial phenomena, the official government term for UFOs.

Part of what the U.S. has recovered, Grusch testified, were non-human “biologics,” which he said he had not seen but had learned about from “people with direct knowledge of the program.”

A career intelligence officer, Kirkpatrick was named a year ago to lead the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was in-

tended to centralize investigations into UAPs. The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies have been pushed by Congress in recent years to better investigate reports of devices flying at unusual speeds or trajectories as a national security concern.

Kirkpatrick wrote the letter last Thursday and the Defense

Department confirmed Friday that he posted it in a personal capacity. Kirkpatrick declined to comment on the letter.

He writes in part, “I cannot let yesterday’s hearing pass without sharing how insulting it was to the officers of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community who chose to join AARO,

many with not unreasonable anxieties about the career risks this would entail.”

“They are truth-seekers, as am I,” Kirkpatrick said. “But you certainly would not get that impression from yesterday’s hearing.”

In a separate statement, Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough denied other allegations made by

below levels in the debt ceiling deal helped get the House moving again, but put them on a collision course with the Senate, where the spending bills hew much closer to the agreement.

“The way to make this work is do it in a bipartisan way like we are doing in the Senate. If you do it in a partisan way, you’re heading to a shutdown. And I am really worried that that’s where the House Republicans are headed,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters.

McCarthy countered that people had the same doubts about whether House Republicans and the White House could reach an agreement to pass a debt ceiling extension and avoid a default.

“We’ve got ‘til Sept. 30. I think we can get this all done,” McCarthy said.

In a subsequent press conference, McCarthy said he had just met with Schumer to talk about the road ahead on an array of bills, including the spending bills.

“I don’t want the government to shut down,” McCarthy said. “I want to find that we can find common ground.”

In all, there are 12 spending bills. The House has passed one so far, and moved others out of committee. The Senate has passed none, though it has advanced all 12 out of committee, something that hasn’t happened since 2018.

Grusch before a House Oversight subcommittee.

The Pentagon “has no information that any individual has been harmed or killed as a result of providing information” about UFO objects, Gough said. Nor has the Pentagon discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

Kirkpatrick wrote, “AARO has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of any reverse engineering program for non-human technology.”

He had briefed reporters in December that the Pentagon was investigating “several hundreds” of new reports following a push to have pilots and others come forward with any sightings.

Kirkpatrick wrote in his letter that allegations of “retaliation, to include physical assault and hints of murder, are extraordinarily serious, which is why law enforcement is a critical member of the AARO team, specifically to address and take swift action should anyone come forward with such claims.”

“Yet, contrary to assertions made in the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with AARO,” Kirkpatrick said. He did not explicitly name Grusch, who alleged he faced retaliation and declined to answer when a congressman asked him if anyone had been murdered to hide information about UFOs.

Messages left at a phone number and email address for Grusch were not returned Friday.

AP PHOTO Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., talks to reporters outside his office about calls for an impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

AP PHOTO

Ryan Graves, Americans for Safe Aerospace Executive Director, from left, U.S. Air Force (Ret.)

Maj. David Grusch, and U.S. Navy (Ret.) Cmdr. David Fravor, testify before a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee hearing on UFOs, Wednesday, July 26, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

Hoke Republican Party hosts picnic with judges

The Hoke County Republican Party held a Judicial Freedom Rally last Saturday at Ithika

Judicial Candidates. Roughly 60 curious citizens came out for

Folwell lends his governor’s campaign $1 million; Stein, Robinson still on top with money

Hoke Library to hold plant swap on August 12

The Hoke County Public Library will be holding a “Plant Swap” event on Saturday, August 12. Residents can come by the library in Raeford to bring their seeds, cuttings, and plants to be swapped out for something new. The library will also be collecting seeds to launch a new “seed library” in the fall, so all donations are greatly appreciated. However, the library is requesting that all plants be free of pests and in containers that donors are willing to part with. For interested parties who do not have plants to share, the library will also have a few plant cuttings available to adopt. For additional information about this event, please contact Stephanie at (910) 875-2502 or stop by the library.

Budd leads effort to protect religious liberty of federal contractors

Last week, Senators Ted Budd (R-NC) and James Lankford (R-OK) led a collation of 25 senators to introduce a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act to overturn a rule from the Department of Labor, which according to the coalition, threatens religious liberty protections for faith-based organizations. According to a press release from Budd, the Department of Labor under former President Donald Trump issued a rule clarifying protections for faith-based federal contractors, but this rule was later rescinded during the Biden Presidency.

“President Trump’s rule was an important step to strengthen religious liberty protections for faith-based contractors,” said Budd. “The Biden Administration’s reversal of this rule needlessly targets faithbased organizations that simply want to serve our communities alongside their secular counterparts without violating their religious beliefs.”

The Associated Press RALEIGH — Most of what North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate and State Treasurer Dale Folwell raised during the first half of the year for his campaign committee has come from $1 million that he loaned it, according to a new campaign finance report.

Folwell’s campaign, like others whose candidates are on ballots in 2024, had until late Friday to send in reports to the State Board of Elections covering activities through June 30.

Some announced candidates

The Associated Press

CHARLOTTE — Another structural issue has been located with a large roller coaster that’s been closed for weeks since a large crack in a support column was discovered, a North Carolina agency confirmed on Friday.

A Swiss-based engineering company that designed and built the Fury 325 roller coaster at Carowinds, which sits along the North Carolina-South Carolina border, replaced that steel support column earlier this month, news outlets reported.

But the North Carolina Department of Labor, which inspects the ride and decides whether it can operate, said in an email that the agency has now been notified of a separate “weld indication,” which “could be either a break or a crack.”

“No certificate of operation has been issued nor do we have a timeline of when the certificate of operation will be issued for the Fury 325,” department spokesperson Meredith Watson said, referring other questions to Carowinds.

In a statement released Friday, Carowinds said it was conducting a full maintenance review of the ride while test runs are performed.

“During such reviews, it is not uncommon to discover slight weld

for governor had already revealed their top-line figures before the deadline.

The numbers filed by Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein and Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson — the top gubernatorial fundraisers so far — essentially matched what their campaigns had already announced. Stein’s campaign reported raising $5.98 million through June 30, while Robinson’s generated $2.29 million. Stein had $8.23 million in cash entering July compared to $3.21 million for Robinson.

Folwell’s campaign report said

the committee raised $1.17 million — of which $1 million was the loan that he provided on June 30 — and had $1.19 million in his campaign coffers entering July.

Former U.S. Rep. Mark Walker, who like Folwell is a Republican, reported raising $554,000 — in keeping with his earlier announcement — and had $495,000 in cash on hand. Walker formally entered the race in May.

Stein made his gubernatorial announcement in January and remains the lone high-profile Democrat running. Folwell announced his bid in March, followed by Rob-

inson in April.

Former state Sen. Andy Wells announced his bid for the Republican nomination less than two weeks ago. Wells had kept open his candidate committee from his previous races for the legislature during the 2010s and for lieutenant governor in 2020. Wells gave his campaign a $51,000 loan on June 29, his report said. The campaign had $63,400 in cash entering July. Primary elections will be held next March.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is barred by state law from seeking a third consecutive term.

tion of Fury 325 in February and only found a few signage issues, which the park quickly corrected. Inspections by the park, the engineering company, a third-party testing firm and the Department of Labor have been ongoing. Carowinds has said it’s changing how it inspects rides daily, including the use of drone cameras to examine areas. While the park straddles the border between the two states, North Carolina regulators inspect Fury 325 because its nearby entrance is in North Carolina.

indications in various locations of a steel superstructure. It is important to note that these indications do not compromise the structural integrity or safety of the ride,” the statement reads. “Once a repair is completed, it undergoes inspection and approval before the ride is deemed operational.”

Park staff closed Fury 325 on June 30 after a visitor pointed out the sizable crack. State Labor Commissioner Josh Dobson said earlier

this month that the crack had been visible for at least a week before it was shut down.

Video of the coaster, which reaches 325 feet in height, had showed a key support beam bending with the top visibly detached as cars with passengers barreled by. The roller coaster runs at speeds of up to 95 mph.

The department’s Elevator and Amusement Device Bureau said it had conducted its annual inspec-

Roller coaster with big crack has a second structural issue, inspectors say

Acres Creamery in West Hoke. The event was open to anyone interested in meeting the 2024

the rally. Left to right: Yoham Namkung, Judge Chris Freeman, Judge Michael Stading, Judge Steve Bibey, Judge Jefferson Griffin, Judge Warren McSweeney, Jessica Locklear for Judge, District Attorney Mike Hardin and Judge Skipper Creed.

AP PHOTO

The Fury 325 roller coaster at Carowinds amusement park is seen on Monday, July 3, 2023, in Charlotte.

♦ Vaquez-Sanchez, Jairo (W/M/35), License Not In Possession, 07/30/2023, Hoke County Sheriff’s Office

♦ Shorts, Malcolm Alphonso (B/M/29), Communicate Threats, 07/29/2023, Hoke County Sheriff’s Office

♦ Hood, Fredrick Devon (B/M/43), Assault on Emergency Personnel, 07/27/2023, Hoke County Sheriff’s Office

♦ Kershaw, Treshon Malik (B/M/26), Hit and Run, 07/27/2023, Hoke County Sheriff’s Office

♦ Locklear, Phillip Wayne (I/M/49), Probation Violation, 07/27/2023, Hoke County Sheriff’s Office

♦ Woods, James Kelly (I/M/51), Probation Violation, 07/27/2023, Hoke County Sheriff’s Office

♦ McMillian, Darius Lamont (B/M/37), Assault on a Female, 07/25/2023, Hoke County Sheriff’s Office

Neal Robbins, publisher | Frank Hill, senior opinion editor

COLUMN | U.S. REP. RICHARD HUDSON

Accountability on the issues impacting you

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN famously said, “A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”

President Joe Biden’s open border policies have fueled a historic surge in illegal immigration and the flames of our ongoing border crisis.

Every state, including North Carolina, is suffering from the impacts of Biden’s open border policies.

Since Biden took office, there have been over 5.6 million illegal crossings encountered at our Southern border, and while approximately 1.6 million illegal immigrants have escaped apprehension that we know of. According to Customs and Border Protection, 144,500 illegal immigrants were encountered at the Southern border in June alone—a 186% increase from the number of June encounters during the last administration.

To date in FY23, Border Patrol agents have seized more than 22,000 pounds of fentanyl, surpassing the total amount seized in all of FY22. Fentanyl poisoning is the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-45, and is killing 300 Americans every single day—including over 3,000 North Carolinians in 2022. An amount small enough to fit inside the ear of Lincoln on a penny can be lethal. For anyone who cares about the safety of our young people, it’s heartbreaking and frustrating to witness this rapid decline in border security.

Every state, including North Carolina, is suffering from the impacts of Biden’s open border policies. That’s why last week, I confronted Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra following the recent announcement that a facility for unaccompanied minors will begin operating in Greensboro within the next few weeks.

In 2021, while testifying before the Energy and Commerce Committee, Secretary Becerra told me there were no plans to open such a facility in North Carolina. He knew that very day he had people doing a site visit at American Hebrew Academy in Greensboro. After Secretary Becerra blatantly misled me and several members of our delegation, the people of North Carolina deserve to know the truth. We have received nothing but delayed and vague responses.

You deserve real answers and real solutions. Housing illegal immigrants in schools across the nation will not solve our border crisis. When House Republicans made our “Commitment to

COLUMN | DAVID HARSANYI

America,” we promised to secure the border and protect innocent Americans from the consequences of President Biden’s radical agenda. Real solutions like H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, and the recently passed Schools Not Shelters Act, will deliver on our promise to secure the border—something Washington Democrats refuse to do.

As the Sandhills’ Congressman and representative of the largest military base in the country, I am also committed to our resilient energy grid. Physical attacks on our nation’s power grid, like the one we experienced in Moore County, increased by 71% in 2022.

Earlier this month, I joined a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing to further examine emerging threats to our electrical grid. This hearing built on what we learned at the field hearing I hosted in Moore County last month. We heard from expert witnesses about tangible solutions to strengthen our grid and prevent future attacks on the infrastructure you depend on.

One threat to our grid is the lack of a viable supply chain for grid components. Biden’s Department of Energy is about to make matters worse through proposed rules that will make it harder to find transformers. Their new rules will increase the time to procure new transformers from months to years.

To combat these proposed standards, I introduced Protecting America’s Distribution Transformer Supply Chain Act to delay these new bureaucratic regulations for energy distribution transformers. I was able to include this in the FY2024 Department of Energy authorization bill. This will not totally solve the supply chain problem, but it will prevent Washington bureaucrats from making it worse.

Our government exists to serve and protect you. From securing our borders to protecting your way of life, I am committed to building a safer future for you and your family that promotes long term economic prosperity, public safety, and freedom.

Richard Hudson is serving his sixth term in the U.S. House and represents North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. He currently serves as the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and is a member of the House Republican Steering Committee.

Ignore President Biden, here’s what is really happening in Israel

Legislative proposals, domestic or foreign, are only “divisive” and “deeply contentious” when conservatives support them.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN has reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop pushing through a “divisive” judicial overhaul bill amid protests.

This is the same Biden, incidentally, who crammed through a massive, highly “divisive,” generational spending bill with zero votes from the opposition; the same guy who regularly rules by unconstitutional executive diktats; and the same guy who has done more to delegitimize the Supreme Court than any president in modern history.

In any event, the president is concerned. As is The New York Times, which reports, “The Israeli Parliament passed a deeply contentious law limiting the Supreme Court’s ability to overturn decisions made by government ministers.” What the Times means is that there is a new law limiting the judiciary’s ability to unilaterally declare legislation “unconstitutional” without using any legal justification whatsoever.

Because, as it stands, Israel has a strong anti-democratic system overseen by a high court that is probably the most powerful judiciary in the free world. Netanyahu’s judicial reforms — only a small piece has passed — would bring Israel back all the way to 1995, when “judiciary revolution” imbued the court with supreme power over legislation. The alleged authoritarian “backsliding” by Israel’s “farright” government would likely create a far more “democratic” system.

The judiciary primacy might work if the Israeli court’s decisions were grounded in some kind of statutory authority, traditional legal framework, or even existing regulation and law. But there is no Israeli constitution. The court’s decisions are often arbitrary, politically expedient, constantly evolving and sometimes contradictory. The court regularly blocks laws passed by center-right governments simply because judges claim policy is unreasonable.

Why only center-right governments? Because the entrenched judges (with their allies in the Israeli bar) appoint their own successors in perpetuity. Imagine the American left’s outlook if the Supreme Court’s originalists could simply tap their own replacements without any input from senators or the president.

The system is so insane that not only can the court lord over the legislative branch without explanation, but it can remove ministers and elected officials at will. The attorney general is empowered to bar officials — even the prime minister — from participating in national debates. This is not, by any real standard, “democratic” governance. It is illiberal.

Perhaps there is no good way to balance what is effectively two branches of the Israeli government. It’s a complicated issue. Reforms

are no panacea. But judicial reform is hardly a new idea, and reforms are not being “rushed.” They have been debated within Israeli politics for decades, with numerous moderate legal voices proposing changes over that time. In many ways, the freakout reminds me of the American left’s alarmism over tax cuts and net neutrality. It is largely a political effort to undermine Netanyahu.

The media likes to claim that the protests in Israel are a “grassroots” effort, as if this imbues a mob with a moral high ground or the authority to dictate government policy. In truth, many of the marches — and threats to shut down Israeli society — are organized by Israel’s biggest and most powerful unions and egged on by foreigners. If the prime minister lets these protestors blackmail him, he might as well resign right now. It’s going to incentivize anarchy.

Every time Israel has a contentious internal debate, concerntrolls such as New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman emerge to lament the coming end of Israeli democracy. You will notice that, according to the media, legislative proposals, domestic or foreign, are only “divisive” and “deeply contentious” when conservatives support them. The reality is that virtually everything we do in politics is “divisive” and “deeply contentious.” That’s why politics exists. And in Israel, the time of day is a deeply contentious issue.

Moreover, for the left, “democracy” can mean hypermajoritarianism or judicial tyranny. Whatever works. Depends on the day. What am I saying? Democrats will argue that limiting judicial supremacy in Israel is an attack on “democracy” while at the same time claiming SCOTUS is engaged in judicial supremacy for showing deference to the Constitution and handing back issues like abortion to voters. Calvinball all the way down.

Of course, if the Israeli Supreme Court were packed with rightwingers instead of left-wingers, American media, the Democratic Party and the protestors would be on the reform side. None of this has anything to do with governing principles or justice or norms or “democracy.” Like those destroying the American judiciary at home, it’s about power. The Israeli right is also about power. I’m not naive. But right now, the reforms they support are far better aligned with the norms of a functioning “democracy” than the ones in place. That’s something a person reading headlines in the American press might not know.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books — the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.”

SIDELINE REPORT

MLB Braves acquire veteran infielder Lopez in trade with Royals

Atlanta

The Atlanta Braves have added veteran infielder Nicky Lopez in a trade with the Kansas City Royals. The major leagueleading Braves sent left-hander Taylor Hearn to Kansas City for the 28-year-old Lopez, who can play shortstop, second base and third. Hearn was designated for assignment by Texas on July 19. He was traded to Atlanta last week for cash, and he got one out in his only appearance with the Braves on Saturday. Lopez hit .213 with 13 RBIs in 68 games with Kansas City this season.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

Nebraska DB Farmer suspended indefinitely by Rhule

Lincoln, Neb.

Nebraska defensive back Myles

Farmer wasn’t on the 120-man roster when the Cornhuskers opened practice and his return is uncertain. First-year coach Matt Rhule said he suspended Farmer indefinitely, saying it had to do with failure to adhere to team standards. Farmer was Nebraska’s second-leading tackler last year. Rhule also announced that wide receiver Josh Fleeks reported to practice significantly overweight. The Baylor transfer will be held out until he makes weight. Backup defensive lineman Brodie Tagoloa probably is out for the season because of injuries sustained in a car accident.

NFL Bengals QB Burrow could miss ‘several weeks’

Cincinnati Bengals coach Zac Taylor says quarterback Joe Burrow could miss “several weeks” with a right calf strain. The 26-yearold franchise quarterback hobbled on one leg and then went to the ground after a scramble play near the end of practice Thursday. Backup

QBs Jake Browning and Trevor Siemian took the snaps on Friday. Preseason practice was truncated in Burrow’s rookie year in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, he was still rehabbing after knee surgery the previous December. On the first day of camp last year, he was stricken with appendicitis.

Buescher wins at Richmond, secures playoff spot

The Associated Press RICHMOND, Va. — Chris Buescher pulled away on a restart with three laps to go to win at Richmond Raceway on Sunday and snag one of the final spots in NASCAR’s playoff field.

Buescher led 88 laps and was ahead by nearly six seconds when a caution came out with under 10 laps to go. That erased his lead over Virginia native Denny Hamlin, who was booed by his hometown crowd in before the race. But Hamlin got a poor final restart and Buescher easily pulled away for his first Cup Series win of the season, third of his career.

“I knew that last restart was going to be tough, but I knew we had the speed in this thing,”

Buescher said. He and RFK Racing teammate Brad Keselowski led a combined 190 of the 400 laps in their Fords. Keselowski, now a part owner of the team, led 102 laps on the 0.75mile oval.

Buescher started 26th and had to drive the field for the win that locked him into the 16-driver playoff field with four races remaining in the regular season. Buescher became the 13th race winner this year and there are three playoff spots up for grabs over the next month.

It was the 139th Cup win for primary team owner Jack Roush, second since Keselowski joined the ownership group.

Ford now has 723rd wins in NASCAR’s top Cup Series.

“Everybody at RFK Racing who has worked so hard to get us to this point,” said Buescher.

Hamlin, winner last week at Pocono, finished second in a Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing. Kyle Busch was third in a Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing, followed by the Fords of Joey Logano from Team Penske and Ryan Preece of Stewart-Haas Racing.

“One win is good, but you get three or four or five and then you feel a lot better,” said Keselowski. “It sure beats not having any at all, but we want to keep going. It’s nice to have one car locked in the playoffs. We need to get both cars locked in the playoffs. We have a good points gap, but we want wins and this is where we need to be.”

Keselowski, despite being winless this season, is still mathematically in contention for the playoffs.

The race was slowed just three times by caution flags, with the final yellow sending the leaders to pit road for four tires with eight laps to go. When the green flag was shown again, Buescher used the inside line to pull away for his third career victory.

Hamlin’s bid for the victory ended on the second lap of the final sprint when he drove in too deep in the first turn and slid up the track. He finished 0.549-seconds behind Buescher.

The series moves to Michigan where Kevin Harvick, winless so far in this his final season, is the defending champion.

AP PHOTO

Chris Buescher raises the Cook Out 400 Trophy in Victory Lane after winning Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Richmond.

NFL teams adapting to unrelenting heat

The Associated Press

HENDERSON, Nev. — The sight of wide receivers Keith Kirkwood and Shaq Davis leaving practice early this week because of heat-related symptoms was nothing new for the New Orleans Saints, with the hot and humid Louisiana weather a test for even the best-conditioned athletes.

The unrelenting, record-breaking heat across the nation this year has made the opening of training camps even more challenging than usual, however, not only for the Saints but teams throughout the NFL.

Scientists have already calculated this will be the hottest July on record, with the Southwest and parts of the South especially hit hard. Most of the Midwest and East also have been affected. That means NFL teams must be even more mindful than usual about keeping players safe while also getting as much work done as possible before the season begins in September.

Safety has been a centerpiece of the preseason since Minnesota offensive tackle Korey Stringer died on Aug. 1, 2001, after slipping and falling the previous day after a Vi-

Browns linebacker Jeremiah OwusuKoramoah cools off following a drill at Cleveland’s training camp last week in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

kings training camp practice. NFL teams at the time didn’t have medical training for exertional heat stroke.

Some teams are taking extra precautions this year, including more water breaks and early practice times.

“I don’t know all the science and all that stuff, but I do my best

to understand it,” Saints quarterback Derek Carr said. “I’ve seen growth ... from when I first came in the league to what we talk about now. It’s definitely a difference on the things we talk about, the way we practice, how long we do something … how much time you’re actually accumulating outside during the week.”

Carr is in his first season in New Orleans, so he’s acclimating to the wet, muggy conditions. He spent the previous three seasons with the Raiders in Las Vegas, where the air is dry but temperatures are considerably higher.

“It just feels like your skin is going to fall off,” Carr said of playing in Las Vegas. “It feels like it’s boiling.”

For their part, the Raiders have begun practicing at 8:30 a.m. to avoid the hottest parts of the day but still must contend with temperatures in the triple digits by the time they walk off the field.

The Raiders have an indoor facility but usually practice outside because it’s more spacious and the fields are grass rather than turf.

Cool boxes are set up just off the 50-yard line near one of the three practice fields that players use, and coach Josh McDaniels said the team met before camp opened to discuss coping with the conditions.

McDaniels said the key was listening to medical professionals.

“They have a very scientific way to measure (weather and safety conditions) that I’m not really qualified to speak intelligently about,” McDaniels said. “But I understand when they tell me that we’ve entered into a zone where it’s dangerous to be out there with helmets, pads, etc., then we’ll do the right thing.”

Much is at stake in camp, so players want to be on the field far more than in the cooling box or on the trainer’s table. They’re fighting for starting jobs and roster spots, and those players know that coaches and general managers are watching to see who best battles through adversity.

“The job’s got to get done,” Miami Dolphins offensive tackle Kendall Lamm said, “with or without the heat.”

Verstappen’s dominance makes 3rd straight F1 title look like formality

The Red Bull driver has won 10 of 12 races so far this season

The Associated Press PARIS — Max Verstappen’s dominance is so total that it already feels like he’s won his third straight Formula One title, even with 10 races remaining following the midseason break.

With a lead of 125 points over his nearest rival, the Red Bull driver is already in position to watch a highlights reel of his season and list his favorite wins. There have been 10 out of 12 races so far, plus a further two victories when including sprint

races. After winning the Belgian Grand Prix with another emphatic drive on Sunday, Verstappen was asked which of the victories he likes the most.

“It’s difficult to choose. There have been a lot of nice ones,” he said. “I think the one actually which I really enjoyed was like back in time in Miami.”

Back in time?

May 7, to be precise, although it may seem long ago in Verstappen’s world considering he has won every race since.

At that point in the season, however, his Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez was a self-declared title contender and still actually looking like

one.

The Mexican driver had just done the main race-sprint race double at Azerbaijan, and his confidence was boosted further when he took pole position for Miami with Verstappen qualifying in a lowly ninth.

“Tough qualifying,” Verstappen said. “So probably for me, that was a very enjoyable one.”

Not for Perez, who finished second behind Verstappen and has not won since. He’s acknowledged that his confidence was badly shaken, and it showed in the results after Miami: Perez was 16th in Monaco, fourth in Spain and sixth in Canada. He also went five straight races without qualifying in the top 10 despite Red Bull having easily the best

car in F1.

“It’s been a bit of a rough patch,” Perez said after finishing second in Belgium. “I really look forward to not leaving the podium anymore from now until the end of the year.”

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, who was third on Sunday, is also contending himself with podiums.

“This was the best we could achieve today, no doubt,” said Leclerc, who has not won a race since July 10 last year.

Verstappen is the youngest driver to win an F1 race, doing so when he was 18 years old on his Red Bull debut in 2016.

Now he’s racing in his own world, alone in front as he chases more milestones and records.

If Verstappen wins on his home track at the Netherlands GP on Aug. 27, then he will equal Sebastian Vettel’s record of nine straight wins from 2013, which was during Vettel’s heyday with Red Bull.

Verstappen’s own F1 record of 15 wins from last year also looks to set to be crushed.

Despite being only 25, he’s already on 45 F1 wins overall.

Next on the list is four-time F1 champion Alain Prost, who is fourth all-time with 51 wins.

Such is Verstappen’s intensity and thirst for victory that even Vettel’s tally of 53 might even be within his reach this year.

It’s increasingly hard to back against Verstappen.

AP PHOTO

Red Bull driver Max Verstappen won for the 10 time in 12 Formula One races this season with Sunday’s victory in Belgium.

Biden and Democrats raised $72 million-plus for his 2024 race since he opened campaign in April

The Associated Press

WILMINGTON, Del. — President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee raised more than $72 million for his reelection in the 10 weeks since he announced his 2024 candidacy, his campaign announced Friday, in a strong but not record performance by an incumbent.

That is all the money raised between April 25, when Biden made his announcement, and the end of June, and includes donations to his campaign and to a network of joint fundraising arrangements with the national and state parties. By comparison, President Barack Obama raised $85.6 million during the April-to-June quarter in 2011 when he launched his campaign for a second term, though he announced his candidacy three weeks earlier that April than did Biden.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee raised a combined $105 million in the second quarter — about $80,000 per day more than Biden took in this year, when Biden was benefiting from higher campaign finance donation limits due to inflation. Biden’s campaign still celebrated the haul, noting they were looking to avoid maxing out their most enthusiastic donors, as Trump did in 2020 when he faced fundraising shortfalls in the final months of the campaign.

The campaign said Democrats have $77 million on hand — the highest total ever by a Democrat at this point in an election cycle.

Biden, who has cleared the field of any serious rivals for the Democratic nomination, has nevertheless been confronting persistent concerns from within the par-

ty about voter enthusiasm for an 80-year-old candidate. The fundraising number is likely to quiet but not eliminate some concerns about whether Biden can assemble the support necessary for a successful campaign. His 2020 effort topped $1 billion in donations. Surveys show Democrats would prefer another candidate to run, but there is no consensus within the party about an alternative.

“This is fantastic,” said Democratic donor Robert Wolf. “The calls I was getting before they announced were: ‘Is he going to beat Trump? Is he going to beat (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis?’ And he blew them out of the water.” Biden’s sum is more than double Donald Trump’s during those three months for his 2024 effort, though the former president and other Republicans in the race are

not jointly raising money with the GOP and therefore face lower federal contribution limits for top donors. Biden’s campaign did not detail the total raised directly by his campaign, which would allow a more direct comparison with the Republican candidates, or how much it spent in the opening months, though the campaign staff remains relatively small.

“While Republicans are burning through resources in a divisive primary focused on who can take the most extreme MAGA positions, we are significantly outraising every single one of them -– because our team’s strength is our grassroots supporters,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez in a statement.

Biden, first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, all stepped up their fundraising in the closing weeks of the quarter as the reelection campaign looked to put up a strong showing, holding 38 fundraisers since the campaign launch — with the pace expected to increase as the campaign grows.

“There’s going to be a lot more early electricity for those in the primary season than the incumbent, so the idea that he did this with very few fundraisers and still kind of a skeleton crew is just great,” said Wolf, the former chairman and CEO of UBS Americas. He predicted that fundraising would escalate dramatically once Biden has a GOP rival. “A lot of people will get more engaged as soon as they know who they’re against.”

The campaign said the total came from nearly 400,000 donors, and that 97% of donations were under $200 and more than 30% of donors had not given to Biden in 2020. It added that the campaign email list now reaches nearly 25 million subscribers.

The campaign said a grassroots fundraising pitch offering the chance at meeting the president raised nearly $2 million from small donors, and that merchandise featuring “Dark Brandon” — a meme featuring Biden with lasers for eyes — has driven half of its online store revenue.

emissions will require a huge increase in electric vehicle sales that’s not attainable by 2032. The EPA says the industry can reach the greenhouse gas emissions goals if 67% of new vehicles sold in 2032 are electric. Currently, EVs make up about 7% of new vehicle sales.

The Associated Press

DETROIT — The U.S. government wants to raise the fuel economy of new vehicles 18% by the 2032 model year so the fleet would average about 43.5 miles per gallon in real world driving.

The proposed numbers were released Friday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which eventually will adopt final mileage requirements.

Currently the fleet of new vehicles must average 36.75 mpg by 2026 under corporate average fuel economy standards adopted by the administration of President Joe Biden, who reversed a rollback made by former President Donald Trump.

The highway safety agency says it will try to line up its regulations so they match the Environmental Protection Agency’s reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But if there are discrepancies, automakers likely will have to follow the most stringent regulation.

In the byzantine world of government regulation, both agencies essentially are responsible

for setting fuel economy requirements since the fastest way to reduce greenhouse emissions is to burn less gasoline.

“I want to make clear that EPA and NHTSA will coordinate to optimize the effectiveness of both agency standards while minimizing compliance costs,” NHTSA Acting Administrator Ann Carlson said.

A large auto industry trade group which includes General Motors, Toyota, Ford, Stellantis and others said requirements from the agencies should be lined up. “If an automaker complies with EPA’s yet-to-be-finalized greenhouse gas emissions rules, they shouldn’t be at risk of violating CAFE rules (from NHTSA) and subject to civil penalties,”

John Bozzella, CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, said in a statement.

However, the alliance has said the EPA’s proposed cut in carbon

NHTSA said its proposal includes a 2% annual improvement in fuel mileage for passenger cars, and a 4% increase for light trucks. It’s proposing a 10% improvement per year for commercial pickup trucks and work vans. Automakers can meet the requirements with a mix of electric vehicles, gas-electric hybrids and efficiency improvements in gas and diesel vehicles.

The agency says the new regulations will save more than $50 billion on fuel over the vehicles’ lifetimes and save more than 88 billion gallons of gasoline through 2050 if NHTSA’s preferred alternative is adopted. The standards would cut new-vehicle fuel consumption nearly in half by the 2035 model year, and benefits will exceed costs by $18 billion, the agency said. NHTSA will take comments from the public for 60 days before drafting a final regulation.

AP PHOTO

People cheer during a political rally for President Joe Biden at the Philadelphia Convention Center in Philadelphia, Saturday, June 17, 2023. Biden struck an economic populist message during the first rally of his reelection campaign.

AP PHOTO

A customer puts gas in their vehicle, June 28, 2016, in Miami.

US proposes 18% fuel economy increase for new vehicle fleet from 2027 through 2032

Dalton Eugene Bress

April 1, 1967 ~ July 24, 2023

Dalton Eugene Bress, affectionately known as Checo, was born at Columbus Regional on April 1, 1967, to his parents Missouri and Jerry Webb. He attended East Bladen High School and later pursued a career as a truck driver. Dalton had a passion for racing "First 48," taking his grandchildren on enjoyable outings, and sharing his mechanical expertise with those around him.

On July 24th, 2023, Dalton peacefully departed from us at Duke University Medical Center, surrounded by his beloved family and friends who cherished him deeply. His passing was an unexpected and profound loss, leaving our hearts heavy with grief. However, we find comfort in the belief that our God does not make mistakes, and we take solace in knowing that his son, Dalton Bress Jr., was there to welcome him through the pearly gates.

Dalton was preceded in death by his sister, Wanda Bress, his son, Dalton Bress Jr., and his father, Jerry Webb.

He leaves behind a legacy of love and fond memories to be cherished by those he held dear: His Wife: Debra Hayes-Bress of the Home; Mother: Missouri Webb of Riegelwood, NC; Daughter: Britney Bress of the Home; Sons: Brandon Bress of the Home, and Courtney Griffin of Atlanta, GA; Sister: Rachel Martin (Kenny) of Currie, NC, Cheryl Bress of Springfield, MA; Brothers: Charles Bress of Leland, NC, Danny Bress (Traci) of Bolivia, NC, Tony Bress of Riegelwood, NC; Grandchildren: De’Andre Allen, Bryan Lewis, Jarencia Johnson, Aaleyah Bress, Sae’Quan Bress, Autumn Bress, Ayla Bress, Sophie Bress, Jaiden Watson, and Ariana Bress; Sister-In-Laws: Diane Hayes of Riegelwood, NC, Cheryl Hayes of Wilmington, NC; Brothers-In-Law: Stephen Hayes of Wilmington, NC, James Hayes II of Wilmington, NC; Best Friends: David Bowen, Rodney Blanks, Demetrius Beatty, Kenneth Armstrong, and Diane ArmstrongDean. Dalton also leaves behind nieces, nephews, and a host of other cherished family members and friends.

Dalton Eugene Bress, or Checo as he was lovingly known, lived a life filled with love, joy, and meaningful connections. His presence will be deeply missed by all who had the privilege of knowing him. As we mourn his untimely departure, we find comfort in the lasting memories he leaves behind and the knowledge that he is reunited with loved ones who went before him. May his soul rest in eternal peace.

Jerry Thomas Lytle

April 7, 1941 ~ July 27, 2023

Jerry Thomas Lytle, age 82 of Raeford, passed away on Thursday, July 27th 2023 at Hospice House of Pinehurst.

Jerry lived in Raeford all of his life and was a member of Raeford Methodist Church.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Grover Cleveland Lytle and Mattie Thomas Lytle, as well as five sisters and a brother.

Jerry’s sisters were Ruth Lytle Phillips, Martha Lytle Miller, Margaret Lytle Davis, Donnie Lytle McMillan, and Mary Lytle Smith. His brother was Grover Cleveland Lytle, Jr.

Jerry is survived by six nieces and two nephews.

Jerry served in the Army between 1964 and 1970. He worked at Raeford Turkey Plant and Unilever in the past. He walked many a mile around Raeford and was a stranger to no one. He loved going to Hardee’s, visiting with people, and telling stories about his past. He was always ready to tell a joke or story. He spent his last years living at Open Arms Retirement Center. He will be missed greatly by his family, but we all know he is happy to be reunited with them in Heaven now.

Donald Eutice Faircloth

September 27, 1946 ~ July 26, 2023

Donald Eutice Faircloth was born September 27, 1946 and died July 26, 2023, age 76 yrs. The son of the late James W. and Virginia Faircloth of Pinehurst/ Aberdeen, NC. He was a long time resident of Hoke County, NC. He was a veteran, an accomplished chef, and builder of anything. He was respected and loved. And will continue to be missed and loved.

Joanne (Hamilton) Hendrix

February 3, 1931 ~ July 29, 2023

Mrs. Joanne Hamilton Hendrix of Raeford passed away at her home on Saturday, July 29, 2023, at the age of 92.

Joanne was born in Hoke County on February 3, 1931, to Joseph and Hazel Biggs Hamilton. She was preceded in death by her parents and husband, Lacy Manus Hendrix.

Julia Hamilton

November 21, 1943 ~ July 25, 2023

Ms. Julia Hamilton age, 79 went home to rest with her heavenly father on July 25, 2023. She leaves to cherish her loving memories her children: Sandra Morrisey, Steve Hamilton, Edward Hamilton; along with a host of other family and friends. Julia will be greatly missed.

Silas Wilson

June 25, 1925 ~ July 21, 2023

Mr. Silas Wilson, sadly passed away on July 21, 2023 at his nursing home in Raeford, NC. He was born in Green Sea, South Carolina on June 25, 1925. He served honorably in the AAF and the U.S Army during WWII. Silas was an apprentice and became a master locksmith, establishing his own company in Jersey City, New Jersey. He moved to North Carolina in the year 2000. He is survived by his wife, two sons, four daughters, his grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

Malcolm McPhatter

March 24, 1956 ~ July 25, 2023

Mr. Malcolm L McPhatter, 67 went home to rest with his heavenly father on July 25, 2023. He leaves to cherish his loving memories his wife, Bernice Mcphatter, children, grandchildren, siblings along with a host of other family and friends. Malcolm will be greatly missed. Services of love, comfort, compassion, and professionalism have been entrusted to Doby Funeral Home.

Willie H Graham

Jr.

Joanne received her education at Hoke County Schools and King’s Business College in Charlotte. She was the bookkeeper/office manager for Raeford Auto Company (the Ford dealer) for almost twentyfive years. She served on various county boards throughout the years including Social Services and a governor appointed Supervisor with Hoke Soil and Water Conservation for twentyseven years. Joanne joined the family farming operation with her husband full-time during this time.

Joanne was an active member of Raeford United Methodist Church and United Methodist Women serving on various committees in various capacities. She enjoyed bowling, reading, line-dancing, and traveling.

Joanne is survived by a daughter Hazel Ann Ross, and several nieces and nephews.

John Michael Davis

February 9, 1952 ~ July 20, 2023

John Michael Davis, born February 9, 1952, died unexpectedly on the evening of July 20, 2023 after living to the age of 71. He was one of three beloved sons of John Thomas Davis (11/23/1934 - 03/29/2020) and Barbara Turnor Davis (1/03/1934 - 5/10/2021), and a brother to the deceased Marcus Lee Davis (3/18/1959 - 6/13/2007) as well as the surviving Gregory Merrill Davis.

Additionally, he was the uncle of Dusti Nicole Clark, Joshua Lee Davis, and Jesse Eugene Davis, and great uncle to David James Murray, Isabella Day Clark, and Raymond Jude Jonathan Clark. Their Uncle Mike will be sincerely missed. He had a thoughtful mind and knew more history than most. His memory will be held sincerely in the hearts of his family.

March 6, 1984 ~ July 21, 2023

Mr. Willie H. Graham Jr. age, 39 transitioned from earth to glory on July 21, 2023. He was preceded in death by his mother Edna McLauchlin. Willie leaves to cherish his loving memories his wife, Porsha Graham; children: Elijah Graham, Zechariah Graham, Isaiah Watkins; father, Willie H. Graham Sr.; sisters: Titania McLauchlin, Demetrius Graham, Diana Graham, Kimberly Haywood, Precious Haywood; brothers: Wayne Graham, Allen Douglas, Isacc Douglas; aunts: Jacquelyn McLauchlin, Irene Richardson along with a host of other family and friends. Willie will be greatly missed.

STATE & NATION

Members of Congress break for August with no clear path to avoiding a shutdown this fall

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Lawmakers broke for their August recess with work on funding the government largely incomplete, fueling worries about whether Congress will be able to avoid a partial government shutdown this fall.

Congress has until Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year, to act on government funding. They could pass spending bills to fund government agencies into next year, or simply pass a stopgap measure that keeps agencies running until they strike a longer-term agreement. No matter which route they take, it won’t be easy.

“We’re going to scare the hell out of the American people before we get this done,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del.

Coons’ assessment is widely shared in Congress, reflecting the gulf between the Republican-led House and the Democratic-led Senate, which are charting vastly different — and mostly incompatible — paths on spending.

The Senate is adhering mostly to the top-line spending levels that President Joe Biden negotiated with House Republicans in late May as part of the debt-ceiling deal that extended the government’s borrowing authority and avoided an economically devastating default.

That agreement holds discretionary spending generally flat for the coming year while allowing increases for military and veterans accounts. On top of that, the Senate is looking to add $13.7 billion in additional emergency appropriations, including $8 billion for defense and $5.7 billion for nondefense.

House Republicans are going a different way.

GOP leaders have teed up bills with far less spending than the agreement allows in an effort to win over members who insist on rolling back spending to fiscal year 2022 levels. They are also adding scores of policy add-ons broadly opposed by Democrats. At a press conference at the Capitol this past week, some members of the House Freedom Caucus, a conservative faction within the House GOP, said that voters elected a Republican majority in that chamber to rein in government spending and it was time for House Republicans to

use every tool available to get the spending cuts they want.

“We should not fear a government shutdown,” said Rep. Bob Good, R-Va. “Most of the American people won’t even miss if the government is shut down temporarily.”

Many House Republicans disagree with that assessment. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, called it an oversimplification to say most Americans wouldn’t feel an impact. And he warned Republicans would take the blame for a shutdown.

“We always get blamed for it, no matter what,” Simpson said. “So it’s bad policy, it’s bad politics.”

But the slim five-seat majority Republicans hold ampli-

fies the power that a small group can wield. Even though the debt ceiling agreement passed with a significant majority of both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives opponents were so unhappy in the aftermath that they shut down House votes for a few days, stalling the entire GOP agenda.

Shortly thereafter, McCarthy argued the numbers he negotiated with the White House amounted to a cap and “you can always do less.” GOP Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, followed that she would seek to limit nondefense spending at 2022 budget levels, saying the debt agreement “set a top-line spending cap — a

ceiling, not a floor.”

The decision to cut spending below levels in the debt ceiling deal helped get the House moving again, but put them on a collision course with the Senate, where the spending bills hew much closer to the agreement.

“The way to make this work is do it in a bipartisan way like we are doing in the Senate. If you do it in a partisan way, you’re heading to a shutdown. And I am really worried that that’s where the House Republicans are headed,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters.

McCarthy countered that people had the same doubts about whether House Republicans and the White House could reach an

The UFO congressional hearing was ‘insulting’ to US employees, a top Pentagon official says

The Associated Press

A top Pentagon official has attacked this week’s widely watched congressional hearing on UFOs, calling the claims “insulting” to employees who are investigating sightings and accusing a key witness of not cooperating with the official U.S. government investigation.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick’s letter, published on his personal LinkedIn page and circulated Friday across social media, criticizes much of the testimony from a retired Air Force intelligence officer that energized believers in extraterrestrial life and produced headlines around the world.

Retired Air Force Maj. David Grusch testified last Wednesday that the U.S. has concealed what he called a “multi-decade” program to collect and reverse-engineer “UAPs,” or unidentified aerial phenomena, the official government term for UFOs.

Part of what the U.S. has recovered, Grusch testified, were non-human “biologics,” which he said he had not seen but had learned about from “people with direct knowledge of the program.”

A career intelligence officer, Kirkpatrick was named a year ago to lead the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was in-

tended to centralize investigations into UAPs. The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies have been pushed by Congress in recent years to better investigate reports of devices flying at unusual speeds or trajectories as a national security concern. Kirkpatrick wrote the letter last Thursday and the Defense

Department confirmed Friday that he posted it in a personal capacity. Kirkpatrick declined to comment on the letter.

He writes in part, “I cannot let yesterday’s hearing pass without sharing how insulting it was to the officers of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community who chose to join AARO,

many with not unreasonable anxieties about the career risks this would entail.”

“They are truth-seekers, as am I,” Kirkpatrick said. “But you certainly would not get that impression from yesterday’s hearing.”

In a separate statement, Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough denied other allegations made by

agreement to pass a debt ceiling extension and avoid a default.

“We’ve got ‘til Sept. 30. I think we can get this all done,” McCarthy said.

In a subsequent press conference, McCarthy said he had just met with Schumer to talk about the road ahead on an array of bills, including the spending bills.

“I don’t want the government to shut down,” McCarthy said. “I want to find that we can find common ground.”

In all, there are 12 spending bills. The House has passed one so far, and moved others out of committee. The Senate has passed none, though it has advanced all 12 out of committee, something that hasn’t happened since 2018.

Grusch before a House Oversight subcommittee.

The Pentagon “has no information that any individual has been harmed or killed as a result of providing information” about UFO objects, Gough said. Nor has the Pentagon discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

Kirkpatrick wrote, “AARO has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of any reverse engineering program for non-human technology.”

He had briefed reporters in December that the Pentagon was investigating “several hundreds” of new reports following a push to have pilots and others come forward with any sightings.

Kirkpatrick wrote in his letter that allegations of “retaliation, to include physical assault and hints of murder, are extraordinarily serious, which is why law enforcement is a critical member of the AARO team, specifically to address and take swift action should anyone come forward with such claims.”

“Yet, contrary to assertions made in the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with AARO,” Kirkpatrick said. He did not explicitly name Grusch, who alleged he faced retaliation and declined to answer when a congressman asked him if anyone had been murdered to hide information about UFOs.

Messages left at a phone number and email address for Grusch were not returned Friday.

AP PHOTO

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., talks to reporters outside his office about calls for an impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

AP PHOTO

Ryan Graves, Americans for Safe Aerospace Executive Director, from left, U.S. Air Force (Ret.) Maj. David Grusch, and U.S. Navy (Ret.) Cmdr. David Fravor, testify before a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee hearing on UFOs, Wednesday, July 26, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

Borna Coric, of Croatia, returns the

World No. 15 and Three Former Champions Headline 2023 Winston-Salem Open

City Offers Community and Neighborhood Centers as Cooling Centers

Forsyth County

The city of Winston-Salem is opening its community and neighborhood centers as cooling centers to help people get out of the heat. All centers are open to the public and anyone can come inside and cool off in the lobby area. A list of centers can be found at www.cityofws. org/856. The city recommends that those experiencing homelessness use local day centers located at City with Dwellings and the Bethesda Center for the Homeless. All emergency shelters within the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Continuum of Care are low-barrier 24-hour emergency shelters, except for two. This means that guests can be on-site at the shelter 24 hours per day and there is no requirement for guests to leave during the day.

CITY OF WS

Police Department and Police Foundation Host School Supply Giveaway

Forsyth County

The Winston-Salem Police Department and the WinstonSalem Police Foundation will host their annual school supply giveaway on Friday, Aug. 11 at 2 p.m. at The Quarry at Grant Park, 1790 Quarry Road for students from prekindergarten to high school. Children and their caregivers may pick up a backpack full of school supplies on a first come, first served basis, with one bag per child in attendance. The event is done in collaboration with The Chronicle and the city’s Recreation and Parks Department.

CITY OF WS

Annual event starts

August 19

Twin City Herald

WINSTON-SALEM — Borna

Coric, current World No. 15, will enter the Winston-Salem Open as the likely top seed.

Coric has played Winston-Salem twice before — once in 2015 when he fell to the eventual champion Kevin Anderson in the quarterfinals, and again in 2017 when he made another run to the quarters losing to Jan-Lennard Struff, another top seed in this year’s player field.

The 26-year-old Croatian missed 12 months, from March 2021 to March 2022 with a right shoulder injury, but came roaring back to professional tennis last summer when he captured his first ATP Masters 1000 title in Cincinnati, Ohio after upsetting Rafael Nadal and Stefanos Tsitsipas en route to the trophy.

Three former champions will also spice up the 2023 player field, starting with the defending champion, Frenchman Adrian Mannarino.

The 35-year-old is just coming off a title in Newport, Rhode Island — his first since the 2022 Winston-Salem Open. Mannarino

is currently ranked No. 27, just five shy of his career best. Last year, the lefty also celebrated 10 consecutive years inside the top 75 on the ATP Tour.

Pablo Carreño Busta, the 2016 winner, also enters the field as another likely top seed. The Spaniard has a long history in Winston-Salem. He played his first event in North Carolina in 2014, and since then he has made the quarterfinals or better five times, with a title run in 2016 when he defeated countryman Roberto Bautista Agut in a three-set thriller (7-6, 6-7, 4-6).

The Spaniard boasts an impressive resume, including hardware from the 2021 Tokyo Olym-

pics where he defeated then World No. 2 Daniil Medvedev and World. No. 1 Novak Djokovic en route to the podium for a bronze medal. The 32-year-old has enjoyed a career high of No. 10 and earned seven ATP Tour singles as well as four doubles titles. Roberto Bautista Agut, another champion and fan favorite, will return to the Piedmont Triad this summer. The current World No. 25 has been to Winston-Salem on three other occasions. After the heart-breaking loss in 2016 to Carreño Busta, he returned the following year to finally lift the

See OPEN, page 2

Wake Forest University school of medicine approved for $4.4 million PCORI funding award to study telehealth

Twin City Herald

A team of researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine was approved for a $4.4 million funding award from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to assess the benefits of expanding telehealth by primary care physicians to children with complex chronic conditions and their caregivers.

The project is a collaboration with Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Brenner Children’s in Winston-Salem and Atrium Health Levine Children’s in Charlotte. The award has been approved pending completion of a business and programmatic review by PCORI staff and issuance of a formal award contract.

Telehealth experienced a rapid expansion with the COVID-19 pandemic, but questions remain about the most effective, evi-

dence-based ways to incorporate telehealth as part of routine care, especially in chronic disease management, and how best to mitigate health disparities.

“In-person appointments can be incredibly challenging for families with medically fragile children,” said Savithri Nageswaren, MBBS, professor of pediatrics at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and co-principal investigator of the study. “Caregivers often must miss work to attend the many in-person appointments these children need, which can cause a financial strain. There’s also an enormous amount of planning ahead of time, given the medical complexity of the child, with feeding and medicines.” Researchers will conduct a multicenter randomized control trial to test the benefits of a telehealth intervention called enhanced primary care (E-PRIME)

at 36 primary care pediatric offices across North Carolina.

The research team plans to enroll 400 children who will be randomized to either the early (first six months of the study) or delayed implementation (later six months of the study) of E-PRIME.

“Our primary objective is to improve the delivery of care to these children,” said Sabina Gesell, Ph.D., professor of social sciences at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and co-principal investigator of the study. “We would really like to understand health disparities in this population, and we expect to recruit at least 180 children from minority groups.”

The research team will evaluate the effectiveness of E-PRIME by measuring hospitalizations, emergency room visit rates and

ball against Carlos Alcaraz, of Spain, during men’s semifinal at the Madrid Open tennis tournament in Madrid, Spain, Friday, May 5, 2023.

WEDNESDAY

8.2.23

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OPEN from page 1

trophy with a 6-4, 6-4 victory over Damir Dzumher. Bautista Agut has a total of 10 titles to his name and reached a career-high ranking of No. 9 with nearly 400 match wins on the ATP Tour.

Other notable entrants include Dan Evans of Great Britain (No. 30), Yoshihito Nishioka of Japan (No. 31), Jiri Lehecka of the Czech Republic (No. 33), and Americans Brandon Nakashima (No. 58) and Marcos Giron (No. 62).

Two popular Frenchman are also expected to appear. Richard Gasquet has reached the quarterfinals in Winston-Salem three times, including in 2022. Gaël Monfils has received one of the tournament’s wild cards and was a finalist in 2013.

The tournament will award three more wild cards into the main draw of the singles event and two into the qualifying rounds.

The 2023 event will take place from August 19 through 26 at the Wake Forest University Tennis Complex

COLUMN | MICHAEL BARONE

The proximal origin of a scientific fraud

The COVID origins story has also been a journalistic fiasco.

“WE DO NOT BELIEVE that any type of laboratorybased scenario is plausible.” That’s the key sentence in an article published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.”

It’s also a prime example of eminently credentialed and government-subsidized scientists saying the exact opposite of what they believed, in an attempt — successful at the time, but now, three years later, exposed — to deceive the public.

The article appeared, as the date indicates, just as the spread of COVID was becoming apparent. It also appeared after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said in January 2020 that the virus could have leaked from “China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens” in Wuhan.

Cotton was careful to say that a lab leak was not proven and that the virus could also have been transmitted through an animal, and he dismissed the possibility of an intentional leak.

A lab leak origin was quickly dismissed as a “fringe theory” by The Washington Post and a “conspiracy theory” by The New York Times. Those characterizations were attributed to government and government-financed scientists — the same bunch who would shortly produce the “Proximal Origin” paper.

The pushback against the lab leak theory has now been revealed as a fraud, thanks to the work of journalist Matt Taibbi, academic Roger Pielke Jr. and the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

The real conspiracy had roots in a February 2020 conference call led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time, and Dr. Francis Collins, his boss as head of the National Institutes of Health, and including the four scientists who would co-author the “Proximal Origin” paper.

In February, as the House subcommittee documents reveal, all four were expressing thoughts directly contrary to what they put their names to in March.

-”I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario,” wrote Dr. Robert Garry. “In the lab it would be easy.”

-”The only thing here that strikes me as unusual,” wrote Dr. Andrew Rambaut, “is the furin cleavage site,” something much more likely to be produced by a lab than by natural transmission.

-Dr. Edward Holmes wrote he was “60-40 lab.”

The main work over the last couple of weeks, wrote Dr. Kristian Andersen, “has been focused on t(r)ying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say we have high confidence in any of the three main theories.”

♦ Aiken, Aundra Tishay (F/25) Arrest on chrg of Communicate Threats (M), at 200 N Main St, Winstonsalem, NC, on 7/27/2023 12:32.

♦ Broderson, Ira Austin (M/46) Arrest on chrg of 2nd Degree Trespass (M), at 201 N Church St, Winston-salem, NC, on 7/30/2023 13:30.

♦ BROWN, DWAYNE PATRICK was arrested on a charge of ASSAULTSIMPLE at 445 N PATTERSON AV on 7/29/2023

♦ Bullard, Dillonger Thomas (M/23) Arrest on chrg of 1) Assault On Female (M) and 2) Fail To Appear/ compl (M), at 5412 Bridal Ridge Dr, Pfafftown, NC, on 7/28/2023 20:54.

♦ BULLOCK, REGINALD ROBERT was arrested on a charge of ASSAULT ON FEMALE at 2918 EDWARDS ST on 7/30/2023

♦ CHAPMAN, ROBERT DUKE was arrested on a charge of COMM LAW ROBBERY at 201 W FOURTH ST on 7/29/2023

caregiver stress. All participants will be followed for one year.

“This study was selected for PCORI funding for its potential to answer the need for real-world evidence about how best to incorporate telehealth into the primary care of people with multiple chronic conditions and how this may differ among populations at risk for health disparities,” said Nakela L. Cook, M.D., the executive director of PCORI. “We look forward to following the study’s progress and working with Wake Forest University School of Medicine to share the results.”

PCORI is an independent, nonprofit organization authorized by Congress in 2010. Its mission is to fund research that will provide patients, their caregivers and clinicians with the evidence-based information needed to make better-informed health-care decisions.

♦ Conrad, Michael William (M/35) Arrest on chrg of 1) Vand-personal Prop (M), 2) Fail To Appear/compl (M), 3) Fail To Appear/compl (M), and 4) Fail To Appear/compl (M), at 1398 Old Hollow Rd/baux Mountain Rd, Winston-salem, NC, on 7/26/2023 22:36.

♦ Duncan, David Hugh (M/63) Arrest on chrg of 1) Speeding To Elude Arrest (F), 2) Imp Regis - Expired, Suspended, Revoked, Altered Plate (M), 3) Reckless Driving (M), 4) Ndl - Suspended / Revoked (M), and 5) Imp Regis - Unauthorized Giving, Lending Use Other Vehicle (M), at 298 S Research Pw/rams Dr, Winston-salem, NC, on 7/28/2023 20:10.

♦ Ellis, David Mcelelland (M/52) Arrest on chrg of 2nd Degree Trespass (M), at 5985 Loop Road, Clemmons, on 7/28/2023 10:31.

♦ Frazier, Derrick Zivaughn (M/22) Arrest on chrg of 1) Breaking/larcfelony (F), 2) Larceny After B&e (F), and 3) Larceny-firearm (F), at 201 N Church St, Winston-salem, NC, on

7/26/2023 18:00.

♦ GENCHIMUNOZ, JORGE LUIS was arrested on a charge of ASSAULT ON FEMALE at 3525 YARBROUGH AV on 7/30/2023

♦ Gillie, Thomas Jackson (M/22) Arrest on chrg of Murder-first Deg (F), at 201 N Church St, Winstonsalem, NC, on 7/26/2023 17:40.

♦ Glascoe, Brianna Emily (F/34) Arrest on chrg of 1) Hit & Run - Fail To Give Aid And Assistance (M), 2) Ndl - Suspended / Revoked (M), and 3) Speeding - Failure To Decrease To Avoid Accident (M), at 5198 Reidsville Rd, Walkertown, NC, on 7/26/2023 04:20.

♦ Gonzalez Lopez, Luis Angel (M/21) Arrest on chrg of 1) Poss Marijuana Fel (F), 2) P/w/i/s/d Marijuana (F), 3) Maintain Vehicle (F), 4) Drug Paraphernalia (M), 5) Resisting

Arrest (M), 6) Speeding To Elude Arrest (F), 7) Speeding - Posted (M), 8) Ndl - Operator Or Chauffer (failure To Obtain) (M), 9) Reckless Driving (M), and 10) Stop Light Violation (M), at Eb 40/nc 66 South, Kernersville, NC, on 7/26/2023 20:04.

♦ HARRIS, ANTWAN LAMONT was arrested on a charge of ROBBERY at 4030 UNIVERSITY PW on 7/29/2023

♦ HAWKINS, MARQUIS TREMAINE was arrested on a charge of FUGITIVE at 190 OAK SHADOWS CT on 7/28/2023

♦ HERNANDEZGARCIA, GERARDO ALBERTO was arrested on a charge of IMPAIRED DRIVING DWI at 199 N SPRUCE ST/W SECOND ST on 7/28/2023

♦ JOHNSON, CLARENCE DAVID was arrested on a charge of B&EVEHICLE at 1404 REYNOLDA RD on 7/29/2023

♦ Johnson, Jaquan Malik (M/27) Arrest on chrg of 1) Weap-poss By Felon (F), 2) Ccw (M), and 3) Imp Regis - Expired, Suspended, Revoked, Altered Plate (M), at 2901 Main St/old Hollow Rd, Walkertown, NC, on 7/27/2023 22:17.

Not exactly “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” eh?

Why the change? As one conference call participant put it, “further debate about” a lab leak would “do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”

Unstated, but known to every one of the scientists, was that Collins and Fauci had approved cooperation with the Wuhan lab and controlled millions in research dollars coveted by every scientist.

Their intentions were not in doubt. On April 16, Collins told Fauci he hoped “Proximal Origin” would put down “the very destructive conspiracy” of the lab leak theory, and on April 17 Fauci recommended it to reporters as the product of a “group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists,” without mentioning his own role.

That same month, Andersen in emails admitted that a lab leak was possible and bragged about misleading New York Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr.

I found the cynicism revealed in these emails shocking, even though I have written critically, in July 2021 and March 2023, about government scientists’ attempts to discredit the lab leak theory. I note that statistics guru Nate Silver, not a member of any right-wing conspiracy, is now similarly appalled.

“I’m deeply disappointed by the scientists’ conduct here and how unmoored they were from any attempt at truthseeking,” he wrote last week. “The COVID origins story has also been a journalistic fiasco,” he added, opining that “journalists are more prone toward being manipulated by bad apples in academia and science than they were ten or twenty years ago.”

Evidence for that predilection comes from New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who last week tweeted that a House Republican hearing “raised thorny questions about free speech in a democratic society: Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?”

Leave aside the deliciously Orwellian flavor of her verb “tamp down” and her astonishing ignorance of First Amendment law, and reflect on how “Proximal Origin” suggests that the government and government-financed credentialed experts are often better at generating misinformation and falsehoods than at detecting them. Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

♦ Johnson, Joshua Steven (M/25) Arrest on chrg of 1) Assault On Female (M), 2) Fail To Appear/ compl (M), and 3) Fail To Appear/ compl (M), at 5925 Hedgecock Rd, Kernersville, NC, on 7/30/2023

18:00.

♦ Kallsen, Christopher Patrick (M/54) Arrest on chrg of 1) Sex Offender Violation (F) and 2) Sex Offender Violation (F), at 301 N Church St, Winston-salem, NC, on 7/31/2023

10:50.

♦ Krafft, Jason Michael (M/41) Arrest on chrg of Vio. Protective Order By Courts Another State/ Indian Tribe (M), at 5871 Sunny Ridge Tl, Clemmons, NC, on 7/31/2023 16:16.

♦ LINTNER, ROBERT THOMAS was arrested on a charge of P/W/I/S/D MARIJUANA at 399 N BROAD ST/W FOURTH ST on 7/29/2023

♦ MARSHALL, KRISHON LEJUAN was arrested on a charge of RESISTING ARREST at 2602 NEW WALKERTOWN RD on 7/30/2023

♦ MILLER, ROBERT WILLIAM was arrested on a charge of COMM LAW ROBBERY at 3810 N PATTERSON AV on 7/30/2023

♦ NICHOLS, SHEILA LEANN was arrested on a charge of COMM LAW ROBBERY at 3810 N PATTERSON AV on 7/30/2023

♦ Owens, Deanna Renee (F/34) Arrest on chrg of 1) Impaired Driving Dwi (M), 2) Fail To Appear/compl (M), 3) Fail To Appear/compl (M), and 4) Fail To Appear/compl (M), at 421 Lewisville-clemmons Rd, Lewisville, NC, on 7/26/2023 00:19.

♦ Pitts, Jerry Tyler (M/32) Arrest on chrg of Vio. Protective Order By Courts Another State/ Indian Tribe (M), at 6555 Gentry Ln, Clemmons, NC, on 7/31/2023 01:36.

♦ Roberts, Kywun Kereem (M/26) Arrest on chrg of Ccw (M), at Old Hallow Rd, Walkertown, NC, on 7/27/2023 22:17.

DEATH NOTICES

♦ Kristy Lu Beroth, 59, of Winston-Salem, died July 28, 2023.

♦ Vilma Marie Burcin Boulifard, 84, of Winston-Salem, died July 26, 2023.

♦ Errol Vance Cahoon, 84, died July 26, 2023.

♦ Pencie Bauguess Cardwell, 92, of King, died July 28, 2023.

♦ Allison Haynes Cook, 69, of Mocksville, died July 26, 2023.

♦ Roger Eaton, 68, of Kernersville, died July 28, 2023.

♦ Sam Rowan Jones, 94, of Winston-Salem, died July 26, 2023.

♦ Albert James (A.J.) Lincoln Jr., 81, of Kernersville, died July 30, 2023.

♦ Dorothy “Dot” Guy Long, 96, of Macon County, died July 26, 2023.

♦ Lucy Jane Calder Millikan, 91, of Winston-Salem, died July 26, 2023.

♦ Kathleen Karen Flanary Nelson, 62, of Winston-Salem, died July 27, 2023.

♦ Alma “Jean” Richardson Pettus, 84, of Winston-Salem, died July 27, 2023.

♦ Ann Reid, 85, of WinstonSalem, died July 27, 2023.

♦ Bonnie B. Simms, 89, of Winston-Salem, died July 28, 2023.

♦ Alan Reeves Suskin, 85, died July 26, 2023.

♦ Donald Gray Swaim, 87, of Forsyth County, died July 29, 2023.

♦ Jewel Cecelia Baity Troutman, 79, died July 27, 2023.

♦ Rebekah Ann Westmoreland, 86, of Greensboro, died July 31, 2023.

WAKE FOREST from page 1

SPORTS

SIDELINE REPORT

MLB Braves acquire veteran infielder Lopez in trade with Royals

Atlanta

The Atlanta Braves have added veteran infielder Nicky Lopez in a trade with the Kansas City Royals. The major league-leading Braves sent left-hander Taylor

Hearn to Kansas City for the 28-year-old Lopez, who can play shortstop, second base and third. Hearn was designated for assignment by Texas on July 19. He was traded to Atlanta last week for cash, and he got one out in his only appearance with the Braves on Saturday. Lopez hit .213 with 13 RBIs in 68 games with Kansas City this season.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

Nebraska DB Farmer suspended indefinitely by Rhule

Lincoln, Neb.

Nebraska defensive back

Myles Farmer wasn’t on the 120-man roster when the Cornhuskers opened practice and his return is uncertain.

First-year coach Matt Rhule said he suspended Farmer indefinitely, saying it had to do with failure to adhere to team standards. Farmer was Nebraska’s second-leading tackler last year. Rhule also announced that wide receiver Josh Fleeks reported to practice significantly overweight. The Baylor transfer will be held out until he makes weight. Backup defensive lineman Brodie Tagoloa probably is out for the season because of injuries sustained in a car accident.

NFL Bengals QB Burrow could miss ‘several weeks’

Cincinnati Bengals coach Zac Taylor says quarterback Joe Burrow could miss “several weeks” with a right calf strain. The 26-year-old franchise quarterback hobbled on one leg and then went to the ground after a scramble play near the end of practice Thursday. Backup QBs Jake Browning and Trevor Siemian took the snaps on Friday. Preseason practice was truncated in Burrow’s rookie year in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, he was still rehabbing after knee surgery the previous December. On the first day of camp last year, he was stricken with appendicitis.

CYCLING

17-year-old American cyclist killed while training

Colorado Springs, Colo.

U.S. national team cyclist Magnus White was killed over the weekend when he was struck by a vehicle on a training ride near his home in Boulder, Colorado. USA Cycling announced his death in a statement Sunday. The 17-year-old was on a final training ride before competing in the junior mountain bike world championships in Glasgow, Scotland. He is survived by his parents, Michael and Jill, and his brother, Eero. White was a rising multidisciplinary star, winning a junior national championship in cyclocross in 2021 and earning a place on the U.S. national team. He had begun to dabble in road racing and mountain biking this year.

Buescher wins at Richmond, secures playoff spot

The Associated Press

RICHMOND, Va. — Chris

Buescher pulled away on a restart with three laps to go to win at Richmond Raceway on Sunday and snag one of the final spots in NASCAR’s playoff field.

Buescher led 88 laps and was ahead by nearly six seconds when a caution came out with under 10 laps to go. That erased his lead over Virginia native Denny Hamlin, who was booed by his hometown crowd in before the race.

But Hamlin got a poor final restart and Buescher easily pulled away for his first Cup Series win of the season, third of his career.

“I knew that last restart was going to be tough, but I knew we had the speed in this thing,”

Buescher said.

He and RFK Racing teammate Brad Keselowski led a combined 190 of the 400 laps in their Fords. Keselowski, now a part owner of the team, led 102 laps on the 0.75mile oval.

Buescher started 26th and had to drive the field for the win that locked him into the 16-driver playoff field with four races remaining in the regular season. Buescher became the 13th race winner this year and there are three playoff spots up for grabs over the next month.

It was the 139th Cup win for primary team owner Jack Roush, second since Keselowski joined the ownership group.

Ford now has 723rd wins in NASCAR’s top Cup Series.

“Everybody at RFK Racing who has worked so hard to get us to this point,” said Buescher.

Hamlin, winner last week at Pocono, finished second in a Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing. Kyle Busch was third in a Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing, followed by the Fords of Joey Logano from Team Penske and Ryan Preece of Stewart-Haas Racing.

“One win is good, but you get three or four or five and then you feel a lot better,” said Keselowski. “It sure beats not having any at all, but we want to keep going. It’s nice to have one car locked in the playoffs. We need to get both cars locked in the playoffs. We have a good points gap, but we want wins and this is where we need to be.”

Keselowski, despite being winless this season, is still mathematically in contention for the playoffs.

The race was slowed just three times by caution flags, with the final yellow sending the leaders to pit road for four tires with eight laps to go. When the green flag was shown again, Buescher used the inside line to pull away for his third career victory.

Hamlin’s bid for the victory ended on the second lap of the final sprint when he drove in too deep in the first turn and slid up the track. He finished 0.549-seconds behind Buescher.

The series moves to Michigan where Kevin Harvick, winless so far in this his final season, is the defending champion.

USC prepares for European tour as Bronny recovers

The Associated Press

THE SON OF LEBRON JAMES is at home after going into cardiac arrest last week

“We have our family together, safe and healthy, and we feel your love.”

LeBron James, in part of a tweet, following his son’s discharge from a Los Angeles hospital after he went into cardiac arrest during a USC practice

By Joe Reedy, The

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — As Bronny James continues to recover after going into cardiac arrest, his Southern California teammates have been at practice to prepare for a 10-day exhibition tour of Greece and Croatia that begins next week.

The tour will run from Aug. 5-15 and see the Trojans visit Athens and Mykonos, Greece, and Dubrovnik, Croatia. Teams are allowed to go on a foreign tour once every four years under NCAA rules.

James was discharged from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Thursday and is resting at home, according to a statement from the hospital. His father, Lakers superstar LeBron James, also posted on social media that his family is “safe and healthy.”

Bronny James will continue to undergo tests to determine the cause of his cardiac arrest, which occurred Monday morning during a workout at USC’s Galen Center.

Cardiac arrest occurs when the heart abruptly stops beating because of a problem with its electrical activity. While uncommon in young people, sudden cardiac arrest is the leading medical cause of death in young athletes. Some studies have estimated one sudden cardiac death in 50,000 to 80,000 young athletes each year.

No information has been made public about what may have caused Bronny James’ cardiac arrest. But

one of the most common causes in young athletes is an underlying problem with the heart’s structure, such as a genetic condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that leads to a thickened heart muscle more prone to irregular electrical activity. A more rare cause is commotio cordis, which occurs when someone receives a sharp blow to the chest during a specific part of the heartbeat’s cycle — what happened to Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin earlier this year.

James was the second high-profile USC basketball recruit to go into cardiac arrest in the last year. Vin-

cent Iwuchuwku also was stricken during a workout last July, but the 7-foot-1 center returned to the court six months later and appeared in 14 games. It’s too soon to know how James’ playing career could be affected, especially without a lot of information being made public. Various experts point to James’ quick move out of intensive care and being released three days later as encouraging.

The upcoming trip is important for the Trojans as James recovers. USC had the nation’s fourthranked recruiting class, including the top-rated player in guard Isa-

iah Collier.

James committed to the Trojans in May after the 6-foot-3 18-yearold became one of the nation’s top prospects as a two-way point guard for Sierra Canyon School in Chatsworth, California. He is the sixth McDonald’s All-American to come to USC since Andy Enfield became coach in 2013. With his family fame and huge social media following, Bronny James also has the top name, image and likeness valuation in sports at $6.3 million, as estimated by On3. com. He is the oldest of LeBron and Savannah James’ three children.

AP PHOTO

Chris Buescher raises the Cook Out 400 Trophy in Victory Lane after winning Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Richmond.

AP PHOTO

Bronny James, right with his father LeBron James, was hospitalized after going into cardiac arrest while participating in a practice at Southern California last Monday.

STATE & NATION

Members of Congress break for August with no clear path to avoiding a shutdown this fall

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Lawmakers broke for their August recess with work on funding the government largely incomplete, fueling worries about whether Congress will be able to avoid a partial government shutdown this fall.

Congress has until Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year, to act on government funding. They could pass spending bills to fund government agencies into next year, or simply pass a stopgap measure that keeps agencies running until they strike a longer-term agreement. No matter which route they take, it won’t be easy.

“We’re going to scare the hell out of the American people before we get this done,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. Coons’ assessment is widely shared in Congress, reflecting the gulf between the Republican-led House and the Democratic-led Senate, which are charting vastly different — and mostly incompatible — paths on spending.

The Senate is adhering mostly to the top-line spending levels that President Joe Biden negotiated with House Republicans in late May as part of the debt-ceiling deal that extended the government’s borrowing authority and avoided an economically devas-

tating default. That agreement holds discretionary spending generally flat for the coming year while allowing increases for military and veterans accounts. On top of that, the Senate is looking to add $13.7 billion in additional emergency appropriations, including $8 billion for defense and $5.7 billion for nondefense.

House Republicans are going a different way. GOP leaders have teed up bills with far less spending than the agreement allows in an effort to win over members who insist on

rolling back spending to fiscal year 2022 levels. They are also adding scores of policy add-ons broadly opposed by Democrats.

At a press conference at the Capitol this past week, some members of the House Freedom Caucus, a conservative faction within the House GOP, said that voters elected a Republican majority in that chamber to rein in government spending and it was time for House Republicans to use every tool available to get the spending cuts they want.

“We should not fear a government shutdown,” said Rep. Bob

Good, R-Va. “Most of the American people won’t even miss if the government is shut down temporarily.”

Many House Republicans disagree with that assessment. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, called it an oversimplification to say most Americans wouldn’t feel an impact. And he warned Republicans would take the blame for a shutdown.

“We always get blamed for it, no matter what,” Simpson said. “So it’s bad policy, it’s bad politics.”

But the slim five-seat majority Republicans hold amplifies the power that a small group can wield. Even though the debt ceiling agreement passed with a significant majority of both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives opponents were so unhappy in the aftermath that they shut down House votes for a few days, stalling the entire GOP agenda.

Shortly thereafter, McCarthy argued the numbers he negotiated with the White House amounted to a cap and “you can always do less.” GOP Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, followed that she would seek to limit nondefense spending at 2022 budget levels, saying the debt agreement “set a top-line spending cap — a ceiling, not a floor.”

The decision to cut spending

The UFO congressional hearing was ‘insulting’ to US employees, a top Pentagon official says

The Associated Press

A top Pentagon official has attacked this week’s widely watched congressional hearing on UFOs, calling the claims “insulting” to employees who are investigating sightings and accusing a key witness of not cooperating with the official U.S. government investigation.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick’s letter, published on his personal LinkedIn page and circulated Friday across social media, criticizes much of the testimony from a retired Air Force intelligence officer that energized believers in extraterrestrial life and produced headlines around the world.

Retired Air Force Maj. David Grusch testified last Wednesday that the U.S. has concealed what he called a “multi-decade” program to collect and reverse-engineer “UAPs,” or unidentified aerial phenomena, the official government term for UFOs.

Part of what the U.S. has recovered, Grusch testified, were non-human “biologics,” which he said he had not seen but had learned about from “people with direct knowledge of the program.”

A career intelligence officer, Kirkpatrick was named a year ago to lead the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was in-

tended to centralize investigations into UAPs. The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies have been pushed by Congress in recent years to better investigate reports of devices flying at unusual speeds or trajectories as a national security concern.

Kirkpatrick wrote the letter last Thursday and the Defense

Department confirmed Friday that he posted it in a personal capacity. Kirkpatrick declined to comment on the letter.

He writes in part, “I cannot let yesterday’s hearing pass without sharing how insulting it was to the officers of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community who chose to join AARO,

many with not unreasonable anxieties about the career risks this would entail.”

“They are truth-seekers, as am I,” Kirkpatrick said. “But you certainly would not get that impression from yesterday’s hearing.”

In a separate statement, Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough denied other allegations made by

below levels in the debt ceiling deal helped get the House moving again, but put them on a collision course with the Senate, where the spending bills hew much closer to the agreement.

“The way to make this work is do it in a bipartisan way like we are doing in the Senate. If you do it in a partisan way, you’re heading to a shutdown. And I am really worried that that’s where the House Republicans are headed,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters.

McCarthy countered that people had the same doubts about whether House Republicans and the White House could reach an agreement to pass a debt ceiling extension and avoid a default.

“We’ve got ‘til Sept. 30. I think we can get this all done,” McCarthy said.

In a subsequent press conference, McCarthy said he had just met with Schumer to talk about the road ahead on an array of bills, including the spending bills.

“I don’t want the government to shut down,” McCarthy said. “I want to find that we can find common ground.”

In all, there are 12 spending bills. The House has passed one so far, and moved others out of committee. The Senate has passed none, though it has advanced all 12 out of committee, something that hasn’t happened since 2018.

Grusch before a House Oversight subcommittee.

The Pentagon “has no information that any individual has been harmed or killed as a result of providing information” about UFO objects, Gough said. Nor has the Pentagon discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

Kirkpatrick wrote, “AARO has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of any reverse engineering program for non-human technology.”

He had briefed reporters in December that the Pentagon was investigating “several hundreds” of new reports following a push to have pilots and others come forward with any sightings.

Kirkpatrick wrote in his letter that allegations of “retaliation, to include physical assault and hints of murder, are extraordinarily serious, which is why law enforcement is a critical member of the AARO team, specifically to address and take swift action should anyone come forward with such claims.”

“Yet, contrary to assertions made in the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with AARO,” Kirkpatrick said. He did not explicitly name Grusch, who alleged he faced retaliation and declined to answer when a congressman asked him if anyone had been murdered to hide information about UFOs.

Messages left at a phone number and email address for Grusch were not returned Friday.

AP PHOTO

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., talks to reporters outside his office about calls for an impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

AP PHOTO

Ryan Graves, Americans for Safe Aerospace Executive Director, from left, U.S. Air Force (Ret.) Maj. David Grusch, and U.S. Navy (Ret.) Cmdr. David Fravor, testify before a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee hearing on UFOs, Wednesday, July 26, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

COUNTY NEWS VinFast breaks ground on automotive manufacturing facility in Chatham County

Additional details about missing Moore Co. woman’s boyfriend come to light

A Moore County woman named Allisha Watts has been missing for roughly three weeks. During the search for Watts, authorities found her boyfriend, James Dunmore, unresponsive in her SUV in Anson County. Watts was last seen in Charlotte at Dunmore’s home on Pamela Lorraine Drive. This week, additional details about Dunmore’s criminal past in Virginia have come to light, including multiple charges for abduction, stalking, and assault and battery. Currently, friends and family members of Watts continue to conduct searches across North Carolina for the missing woman. Dunmore has yet to be charged with a crime, and at this time, his condition is still unknown.

Budd leads

effort to protect religious liberty of federal contractors

Last week, Senators Ted Budd (R-NC) and James Lankford (R-OK) led a collation of 25 senators to introduce a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act to overturn a rule from the Department of Labor, which according to the coalition, threatens religious liberty protections for faith-based organizations. According to a press release from Budd, the Department of Labor under former President Donald Trump issued a rule clarifying protections for faith-based federal contractors, but this rule was later rescinded during the Biden Presidency.

“President Trump’s rule was an important step to strengthen religious liberty protections for faith-based contractors,” said Budd. “The Biden Administration’s reversal of this rule needlessly targets faith-based organizations that simply want to serve our communities alongside their secular counterparts without violating their religious beliefs.”

Factory to bring in thousands of local jobs

By Ryan Henkel North State Journal

MONCURE – VinFast, a Vietnamese electric vehicle manufacturer, broke ground on their proposed billion dollar facility in Chatham County Friday, July 28.

In an event attended by VinFast executives, the Vietnam Ambassador to the United States, Gov. Roy Cooper as well as various government officials, VinFast laid out their future plans and goals regarding the factory located in the Triangle Innovation Point megasite.

“Just over a year ago, Vinfast announced the plan to build our first North American manufacturing facility and today we are here to start the construction of the first EV factory in North Carolina which will have an annual production capacity of 150,000 vehicles,” said VinFast Global CEO Le Thi Thu Thuy.

The plant, which will be the first ever automobile factory in the state of North Carolina, aims to create thousands of jobs and is just the latest example of the economic and business boom the state has been experiencing.

“I’m so happy to be here because I’m thinking about the great paying jobs that are going to be created right here in North Carolina,” Cooper said. “They’re going to put money in the pockets of working families and that’s a great thing.”

“Vinfast is leading an army of clean-energy companies coming to our state. It has helped us to set records for job growth and economic expansion over the last few years. When you talk to CEOs of automakers and truck makers, the private sector is moving away from gas and diesel and into the EV market at breakneck speed.

The competition is fierce, so it’s important that we’ve been able to pull together to harness the economic windfall that is coming from that, to make sure that money goes into the pockets of North Carolinians.”

The process has been an allhands-on-deck approach that has encompassed support from the federal government to the state all the way down to local authorities.

“This was a true bipartisan effort,” Cooper said. “We’re grateful to have everyone here working on this. Our entire team from transportation to environment to commerce to our community colleges,

we have all been working on this.”

“We are well on the way to being the greatest state in this country and the most progressive state in the south in showing what you can do when you have great vision, not just taking what comes, but knowing what we need to look like,” said Chatham County Rep. Robert Reives II. “We didn’t just take anything that came. We wanted to make sure that the people of Chatham County and all of our surrounding counties had an opportunity for good jobs. Jobs that their children will have.”

VinFast, which is a member of the VinGroup conglomerate, was established in 2017 and currently boasts a selection of electric cars, luxury cars, scooters, motorcycles and fully electric SUVs and according to Madam Thuy, recently had its business combination cleared by the US Securities and Exchange Commission brining, it one step closer to its listing on the stock market.

“With the factory that we are building here today, VinFast wants to strongly contribute to the goal of establishing robust, clean energy supply chains throughout the US,” Thuy said. “We have been hard at work to cultivate an ecosystem of suppliers in North Carolina that will complement our

facility and create cutting edge industrial processes here.”

Along with the manufacturing of EVs, Gov. Cooper expressed his desire and goal to expand the network of electric charging stations across the state as well.

“In North Carolina, we are moving fast on infrastructure,” Cooper said. “We have a coordinated effort competing for every single federal dollar. One of the main things we’re trying to do is to make sure we have charging stations all over the state to make sure we are ready for this EV revolution and that will be part of the infrastructure effort that we are putting forward.

“We want to make a real public effort here. Already, we’re getting $100 million from the federal government with the plan that we’re working on with our transportation plan. We’re also applying for significantly more federal dollars that we think can help us do this. What we want to do is to coordinate with the private sector here to make sure there are charging stations in as many places as possible to continue to encourage the purchase of EVs and make sure everybody is comfortable having one. We know how important and how critical this is to the EV market making sure there are chargers everywhere.”

Southern Pines Council postpones decision on potential S. Bennett St. planned development

UDO updated regarding architectural compliance permitting process

By Ryan Henkel North State Journal

SOUTHERN PINES — The Southern Pines Town Council met Tuesday, July 11, with multiple public hearings on UDO updates, annexations and architectural reviews on the agenda.

The council first approved the appointment of Mary Miller to the Appearance Commission on a three-year term and as a representative of the ETJ and approved an amendment to the Yard Sales Ordinance in order to remove misdemeanor arrest as an allowed remedy of a violation of the ordinance and that inspection authority is limited to the portion of a yard sale site that is open to the public for the purposes of the yard sale.

The next actions that took place were four public hearings.

The first was for text amendments to the UDO regarding the Architectural Compliance Permit process.

The proposed updates mainly focused on increasing the threshold for the requirement of an appearance before the town council for commercial structures seeking architectural compliance permits

to 15,000 square feet. Applications for an architectural compliance permit must provide a dimension site plan, elevation drawing and colored renderings, removal of subjective criteria regarding the review of an architectural compliance permit and replacing it with more concrete language, and the removal of priorly drafted amendment sections due to the government standardization of them.

“The genesis of this text amendment was a discussion about the process for architectural compliance permits and the size of buildings that qualify for administrative review versus the size of buildings that need to come before the town council for review,” said Planning Director BJ Grieve.

“Right now, the way the Town of Southern Pines looks at architecture for commercial structures is that any application for a building permit has to first secure an architectural compliance permit to make sure that the architecture complies with the 10 standards under the UDO,” Grieve said. “If it complies with all 10 of those standards and the building is less than 3,500 square feet, it may be reviewed by town staff for compliance.

“However, any commercial structure, whether it complies or not, that is larger than 3,500 square feet has to come before the

town council. So even if an applicant checks every single box, if it’s 3,600 square feet, it has to come before the town council. That has resulted in an awful lot of commercial structures coming before the town council for architectural compliance permits.”

Following the hearing, the council approved the text amendments in addition to a specific condition of a reduction from a requirement threshold of 15,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet.

The second hearing was for the annexation of one acre of land on the north side of Eastman Road, and the third hearing was for the annexation of 31.99 acres on the north side of Morganton Road.

“This is actually Morganton Park Phase 9,” Grieve said. “You have approved a PDP for an apartment complex on the subject property, and they are moving their way through site plan review. And they are moving their way through architectural compliance review.”

Following both hearings, the council approved the requests.

The final hearing was continued from the last meeting – the third time it had been continued – and was for a conceptual development plan for 0.786 acres on the west side of S. Bennett Street between New York Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue. “The developer wants to build a

mixed-use building on that property,” Grieve said at the June meeting. “A mixed-use building contains a mixture of uses. In this particular case, according to the artistic rendering, the ground floor has retail and restaurants, and it can be up to 25% offices on the ground floor. It also has the opportunity to have offices on the floor above that, and then it also has residential condominium units.”

“At the end of [last month]’s meeting, town council directed staff to work with the applicant on items that had been identified by planning staff as still not optimally refined in the CDP,” Grieve said. “With a planned development, the CDP is the document that will become the zoning. So when staff reviews a CDP, we’re looking to make sure that in the future, a developer can look at it and know the rules to develop in accordance with how the CDP was approved.”

The council had discussed eleven topics at June’s meeting, and in accordance with those concerns, the applicants submitted a revised CDP, which included greater adherence to design standards for windows and building segmentation, landscaping, open space requirements, watershed allocation, and signage.

However, the CDP still had deviations such as building height,

VinFast has also made great efforts to weave themselves into the fabric of the local community, with VinFast’s CEO of U.S. Manufacturing Van Anh Nguyen becoming a resident of the state of North Carolina and a collaboration with Central Carolina Community College to develop a worldclass training program at its new state-of-the-art facility to help train the future workforce.

“This partnership will open the door for the people of Chatham County and beyond to receive free training and start their careers at Vinfast manufacturing EVs that will improve our environment and revolutionize the automotive industry,” Thuy said.

In addition to those, VinFast announced that they plan to donate three acres of land to the Mary Oaks Baptist Church, which is currently located on the site, and the company will work to identify resources needed to potentially relocate the church if necessary.

“I believe that you all share with me the hope that in the near future, Vinfast EVs produced in North Carolina, will be rolling out on roads across the United States and playing their part in keeping the U.S. clean and livable,” said Vietnam Ambassador to the U.S. Nguyen Quoc

total amount of parking, guarantee of private balconies, and frontage.

The council closed the public hearing but postponed a final decision on the matter until a later meeting in order to take time to think through their decision.

“I have personal feelings about the property that speak to my lifestyle, and I understand that it does not speak to everyone’s lifestyle and so I just want to make sure that I review last month’s public comments along with the new information today before making a decision,” said council member Taylor Clement.

The Southern Pines Town Council will next meet August 8.

Dzung.

PJ WARD-BROWN | NORTH STATE JOURNAL

Governor Roy Cooper and members of VinFast break ground during the VinFast Groundbreaking Ceremony in Moncure, NC on July 28, 2023.

M, 7/31/2023, Moore County Sheriff’s Office,

Drive While License Revoked Impaired Rev Based, Fail Stop Stopsign/Flsh Red Lt, $1,000

Secured

♦ HICKS, CURTIS DANIEL, 20, W, M, 7/31/2023, Aberdeen PD, Possess Methamphetamine, Shoplifting Concealment Goods, $25,000 Secured

♦ WRIGHT, TIMOTHY WAYNE, 34, W, M, 7/29/2023, Carthage PD, Assault Government Official/

Employee (x2), $25,000

Secured

♦ BLUE, LADARIUS LAQUAN, 25, B, M, 7/29/2023, Bonding Company, Felony Possession of Cocaine, Possess Marijuana up to 1/2oz, Drive While License Revoked Not Impaired Rev Based, $6,000 Secured

♦ TATE, SAMANTHA RENEE, 31, W, F, 7/28/2023, Moore County Sheriff’s Office, Breaking and

Here’s a quick look at what’s coming up in Moore County:

August 3

Trivia Thursday at the Brewery

6pm

Come out for Trivia at the Southern Pines Brewery! Enjoy fun and prizes each Thursday. Southern Pines Brewing Company is located at 565 Air Tool Dr., Southern Pines, NC.

Thursday Night Music Bingo

7pm

Come out to James Creek Cider House for Music Bingo with Lauren! James Creek is located at 172 US Hwy 1 Bus. in Cameron. A food truck will be on site at 8!

August 4

Carthage Farmers Market

2pm – 6pm

or Entering (x2), Larceny after Break/Enter (x2), Possess Stolen Goods/Prop (x2), Burning

Personal Property, Set Fire to Woods/Lands/Fields, Second Degree Trespass (x2), $35,000

Secured

♦ COLLINS, SEAN MICHAEL, 48, W, M, 7/28/2023, Moore County Sheriff’s Office, Assault on a Female, Possess Schedule I CS, $100,000 Secured

Do you have a birthday, wedding, engagement or other milestone to celebrate? Contact: ads@northstatejournal.com

Come out and support your local farmers at the brand-new farmers market in Carthage! The market features fresh produce, meats, eggs, and handmade goods! The market will be set up on S. Ray Street in the parking lot across from the post office.

August 5

Moore County

Farmers Market

8am – 12pm

Enjoy the Moore County Farmers Market at the Armory Sports Complex, which is located at 604 W. Morganton Road in Southern Pines! Buy local and fresh seasonal produce and products every Saturday morning from 8am until 12pm!

Sandhills Farmers Market

10am – 1pm

Come out for the Sandhills Farmers Market in the heart of the Village of Pinehurst! The market features many wonderful farms, nurseries, bakeries, meat and egg providers, cheesemakers, and specialty food producers in the area.

We are part of the Randolph County School System

CRIME LOG

Neal Robbins, publisher | Frank Hill, senior opinion editor

COLUMN | U.S. REP. RICHARD HUDSON

Accountability on the issues impacting you

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN famously said, “A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”

President Joe Biden’s open border policies have fueled a historic surge in illegal immigration and the flames of our ongoing border crisis.

Every state, including North Carolina, is suffering from the impacts of Biden’s open border policies.

Since Biden took office, there have been over 5.6 million illegal crossings encountered at our Southern border, and while approximately 1.6 million illegal immigrants have escaped apprehension that we know of. According to Customs and Border Protection, 144,500 illegal immigrants were encountered at the Southern border in June alone—a 186% increase from the number of June encounters during the last administration.

To date in FY23, Border Patrol agents have seized more than 22,000 pounds of fentanyl, surpassing the total amount seized in all of FY22. Fentanyl poisoning is the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-45, and is killing 300 Americans every single day—including over 3,000 North Carolinians in 2022. An amount small enough to fit inside the ear of Lincoln on a penny can be lethal. For anyone who cares about the safety of our young people, it’s heartbreaking and frustrating to witness this rapid decline in border security.

Every state, including North Carolina, is suffering from the impacts of Biden’s open border policies. That’s why last week, I confronted Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra following the recent announcement that a facility for unaccompanied minors will begin operating in Greensboro within the next few weeks.

In 2021, while testifying before the Energy and Commerce Committee, Secretary Becerra told me there were no plans to open such a facility in North Carolina. He knew that very day he had people doing a site visit at American Hebrew Academy in Greensboro. After Secretary Becerra blatantly misled me and several members of our delegation, the people of North Carolina deserve to know the truth. We have received nothing but delayed and vague responses.

You deserve real answers and real solutions. Housing illegal immigrants in schools across the nation will not solve our border crisis. When House Republicans made our “Commitment to

COLUMN | DAVID HARSANYI

America,” we promised to secure the border and protect innocent Americans from the consequences of President Biden’s radical agenda. Real solutions like H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, and the recently passed Schools Not Shelters Act, will deliver on our promise to secure the border—something Washington Democrats refuse to do.

As the Sandhills’ Congressman and representative of the largest military base in the country, I am also committed to our resilient energy grid. Physical attacks on our nation’s power grid, like the one we experienced in Moore County, increased by 71% in 2022.

Earlier this month, I joined a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing to further examine emerging threats to our electrical grid. This hearing built on what we learned at the field hearing I hosted in Moore County last month. We heard from expert witnesses about tangible solutions to strengthen our grid and prevent future attacks on the infrastructure you depend on.

One threat to our grid is the lack of a viable supply chain for grid components. Biden’s Department of Energy is about to make matters worse through proposed rules that will make it harder to find transformers. Their new rules will increase the time to procure new transformers from months to years.

To combat these proposed standards, I introduced Protecting America’s Distribution Transformer Supply Chain Act to delay these new bureaucratic regulations for energy distribution transformers. I was able to include this in the FY2024 Department of Energy authorization bill. This will not totally solve the supply chain problem, but it will prevent Washington bureaucrats from making it worse.

Our government exists to serve and protect you. From securing our borders to protecting your way of life, I am committed to building a safer future for you and your family that promotes long term economic prosperity, public safety, and freedom.

Richard Hudson is serving his sixth term in the U.S. House and represents North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. He currently serves as the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and is a member of the House Republican Steering Committee.

Ignore President Biden, here’s what is really happening in Israel

Legislative proposals, domestic or foreign, are only “divisive” and “deeply contentious” when conservatives support them.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN has reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop pushing through a “divisive” judicial overhaul bill amid protests.

This is the same Biden, incidentally, who crammed through a massive, highly “divisive,” generational spending bill with zero votes from the opposition; the same guy who regularly rules by unconstitutional executive diktats; and the same guy who has done more to delegitimize the Supreme Court than any president in modern history.

In any event, the president is concerned. As is The New York Times, which reports, “The Israeli Parliament passed a deeply contentious law limiting the Supreme Court’s ability to overturn decisions made by government ministers.” What the Times means is that there is a new law limiting the judiciary’s ability to unilaterally declare legislation “unconstitutional” without using any legal justification whatsoever.

Because, as it stands, Israel has a strong anti-democratic system overseen by a high court that is probably the most powerful judiciary in the free world. Netanyahu’s judicial reforms — only a small piece has passed — would bring Israel back all the way to 1995, when “judiciary revolution” imbued the court with supreme power over legislation. The alleged authoritarian “backsliding” by Israel’s “farright” government would likely create a far more “democratic” system.

The judiciary primacy might work if the Israeli court’s decisions were grounded in some kind of statutory authority, traditional legal framework, or even existing regulation and law. But there is no Israeli constitution. The court’s decisions are often arbitrary, politically expedient, constantly evolving and sometimes contradictory. The court regularly blocks laws passed by center-right governments simply because judges claim policy is unreasonable.

Why only center-right governments? Because the entrenched judges (with their allies in the Israeli bar) appoint their own successors in perpetuity. Imagine the American left’s outlook if the Supreme Court’s originalists could simply tap their own replacements without any input from senators or the president.

The system is so insane that not only can the court lord over the legislative branch without explanation, but it can remove ministers and elected officials at will. The attorney general is empowered to bar officials — even the prime minister — from participating in national debates. This is not, by any real standard, “democratic” governance. It is illiberal.

Perhaps there is no good way to balance what is effectively two branches of the Israeli government. It’s a complicated issue. Reforms

are no panacea. But judicial reform is hardly a new idea, and reforms are not being “rushed.” They have been debated within Israeli politics for decades, with numerous moderate legal voices proposing changes over that time. In many ways, the freakout reminds me of the American left’s alarmism over tax cuts and net neutrality. It is largely a political effort to undermine Netanyahu.

The media likes to claim that the protests in Israel are a “grassroots” effort, as if this imbues a mob with a moral high ground or the authority to dictate government policy. In truth, many of the marches — and threats to shut down Israeli society — are organized by Israel’s biggest and most powerful unions and egged on by foreigners. If the prime minister lets these protestors blackmail him, he might as well resign right now. It’s going to incentivize anarchy.

Every time Israel has a contentious internal debate, concerntrolls such as New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman emerge to lament the coming end of Israeli democracy. You will notice that, according to the media, legislative proposals, domestic or foreign, are only “divisive” and “deeply contentious” when conservatives support them. The reality is that virtually everything we do in politics is “divisive” and “deeply contentious.” That’s why politics exists. And in Israel, the time of day is a deeply contentious issue.

Moreover, for the left, “democracy” can mean hypermajoritarianism or judicial tyranny. Whatever works. Depends on the day. What am I saying? Democrats will argue that limiting judicial supremacy in Israel is an attack on “democracy” while at the same time claiming SCOTUS is engaged in judicial supremacy for showing deference to the Constitution and handing back issues like abortion to voters. Calvinball all the way down.

Of course, if the Israeli Supreme Court were packed with rightwingers instead of left-wingers, American media, the Democratic Party and the protestors would be on the reform side. None of this has anything to do with governing principles or justice or norms or “democracy.” Like those destroying the American judiciary at home, it’s about power. The Israeli right is also about power. I’m not naive. But right now, the reforms they support are far better aligned with the norms of a functioning “democracy” than the ones in place. That’s something a person reading headlines in the American press might not know.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books — the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.”

Susan Lynn Blue

February 20, 1957 - July 24, 2023

Susan Lynn Blue, age 66, of Pinebluff, NC passed away at FirstHealth Hospice House on July 24, 2023. Lynn was born in Pinehurst, NC on February 20, 1957 to Gentry Theodore Frye and Lilly Agusta Oiler.

She enjoyed her life in the garden, playing cards, fishing, reading, puzzles and spent much of her later years as a caregiver for those closest to her. Always a devoted problem solver for anyone within her space and gave the best advice. She was an animal lover with a special place in her heart for all the cats.

Meow!

Lynn is survived by her husband, John L. Blue; children, Shane (Tess) Blue, Sherry Blue; her favorite grandchild Mariah Tyson, and brother Steven (Sue) Frye. Lynn was preceded in death by her parents; Gentry and Lilly Frye and her younger brother David Frye.

Pee-wee Herman actor and creator Paul Reubens dies from cancer at 70

The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — Paul Reubens, the actor and comedian whose Pee-wee Herman character — an overgrown child with a tight gray suit and an unforgettable laugh — became a 1980s pop cultural phenomenon, has died at 70.

Reubens, who’s character delighted fans in the film “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and on the TV series “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” died Sunday night after a six-year struggle with cancer that he kept private, his publicist said in a statement.

“Please accept my apology for not going public with what I’ve been facing the last six years,” Reubens said in a statement released Monday with the announcement of his death. “I have always felt a huge amount of love and respect from my friends, fans and supporters. I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”

Created for the stage, Pee-wee with his white chunky loafers and red bow tie would become a cultural constant in both adult and children’s entertainment for much of the 1980s, though an indecent exposure arrest in 1991 would send the character into entertainment exile for years.

The staccato giggle that punctuated every sentence, catch phrases like “I know you are but what am I” and a tabletop dance to the Champs’ song “Tequila” in a biker bar in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” were often imitated by fans, to the joy of some and the annoyance of others.

Reubens created Pee-wee when he was part of the Los Angeles improv group The Groundlings in the late 1970s. The live “Pee-wee Herman Show” debuted at a Los Angeles theater in 1981 and was a success with both kids during matinees and adults at a midnight

show. The show closely resembled the format the Saturday morning TV “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” would follow years later, with Herman living in a wild and wacky home with a series of stock-character visitors, including one, Captain Karl, played by the late “Saturday Night Live” star Phil Hartman. HBO would air the show as a special.

Reubens took Pee-wee to the big screen with 1985’s “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” which takes the character outside for a nationwide escapade. The film, in which Peewee’s cherished bike is stolen, was said to be loosely based on Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neo-realist classic, “The Bicycle Thief.” Directed by Tim Burton and co-written by Hartman, the movie was a success, grossing $40 million, and continued to spawn a cult following for its oddball whimsy.

A sequel followed three years later in the less well-received “Big Top Pee-wee,” in which Pee-wee seeks to join a circus. Reubens’ character wouldn’t get another movie starring role until 2016’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” for Netflix. Judd Apatow produced Pee-wee’s big-screen revival. His television series, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” ran for five seasons, earned 22 Emmys and attracted not only children but adults to Saturday-morning TV.

Jimmy Kimmel posted on Instagram that “Paul Reubens was like no one else — a brilliant and original comedian who made kids and their parents laugh at the same time. He never forgot a birthday and shared his genuine delight for silliness with everyone he met.”

Both silly and subversive and championing nonconformity, the Pee-wee universe was a trippy place, populated by things like a talking armchair and a friendly

pterodactyl.

Director Guillermo del Toro tweeted Monday that Reubens was “one of the patron saints of all misfitted, weird, maladjusted, wonderful, miraculous oddities.”

The act was a hit because it worked on multiple levels, even though Reubens insists that wasn’t the plan.

“It’s for kids,” Reubens told The Associated Press in 2010. “People have tried to get me for years to go, ‘It wasn’t really for kids, right?’ Even the original show was for kids. I always censored myself to have it be kid-friendly.

Reubens’ career was derailed when he was arrested for indecent exposure in an adult movie theater in Sarasota, Florida, the city where he grew up. He was handed a small fine but the damage was incalculable.

He became the frequent butt of late-night talk show jokes and the perception of Reubens immediately changed.

“The moment that I realized my name was going to be said in the same sentence as children and sex, that’s really intense,” Reubens told NBC in 2004. “That’s something I knew from that very moment, whatever happens past that point, something’s out there in the air that is really bad.”

Reubens said he got plenty of offers to work, but told the AP that most of them wanted to take “advantage of the luridness of my situation”,” and he didn’t want to do them.

“It just changed,” he said. “Everything changed.”

He did take advantage of one chance to poke fun at his tarnished image. Just weeks after his arrest, he would open the MTV Video Music Awards, walking on to the stage alone and saying, “Heard any good jokes lately?” (Herman appearances on MTV had fueled Pee-wee’s

popularity in the early 1980s.)

In 2001, Reubens was arrested and charged with misdemeanor possession of child pornography after police seized images from his computer and photography collection, but the allegation was reduced to an obscenity charge and he was given three years probation.

Born Paul Rubenfeld in Peekskill, New York, in 1952, the eldest of three kids, he grew up in Sarasota where his parents ran a lamp store and he put on comedy shows for neighbor kids.

After high school he sought to study acting. He spent a year at Boston University, and was then turned down by the Juilliard School and Carnegie-Mellon University. So he enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts. That would lead to appearances at local comedy clubs and theaters and joining the Groundlings.

“Paul’s contributions to comedy and entertainment have left a lasting impact on the world, and he will be greatly missed by all in the Groundlings community,” the group said in a statement.

After the 1991 arrest, he would spend the decade playing primarily non-Pee-wee characters, including roles in Burton’s 1992 movie “Batman Returns,” the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” film and a gueststar run on the TV series “Murphy Brown.”

Reubens — who never lost his boyish appearance even in his 60s, would slowly re-introduce Peewee, eventually doing a Broadway adaptation of “The Pee-wee Herman Show” in 2010, and the 2016 Netflix movie.

Reubens was beloved by his fellow comedians, and fans of Peewee spanned the culture.

“His surreal comedy and unrelenting kindness were a gift to us all,” Conan O’Brien tweeted. “Damn, this hurts.”

AP PHOTO

Actor Paul Reubens portraying Pee-wee Herman poses for a portrait while promoting “The Pee-wee Herman Show” live stage play, Monday, Dec. 7, 2009, in Los Angeles.