North State Journal — Vol. 2, Issue 40

VOLUME 2 ISSUE 40

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WWW.NSJONLINE.COM |

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2017

inside Hurricanes eye return to NHL playoffs, Sports Fall in love with western North Carolina Thousands of people flock to N.C.’s Blue Ridge Mountains each year in search of stunning fall foliage. Depending on temperatures and rain, leaves start changing at the beginning of October in high elevations and descends through the mountains until early November. This year, a cold snap in September started the process early, but warm temperatures lately have slowed it a bit. Forecasters at Appalachian State University say that elevations below 5,000 feet will be the best color this year with Oct. 10‑20 being the peak leaf time for the Blue Ridge Parkway, Boone and Blowing Rock. From Oct. 18-26, leaves are at their peak for Pisgah National Forest and from Oct. 24-31 the best leaf show will hit Asheville, Cherokee and other areas below 2,000 feet.

EAMON QUEENEY | NORTH STATE JOURNAL

the Wednesday

NEWS BRIEFING

Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway visit Camp Lejeune Tuesday Jacksonville Ivanka Trump, daughter and advisor to President Donald Trump, and Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, were in Jacksonville on Tuesday at Camp Lejeune. They met with military spouses to learn more about how the challenges of navigating a career in a military family.

The two-day symposium, hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Hiring Our Heroes (HOH), is aimed at finding new ways to help military families as they handle multiple moves and deployments.

Three NC private schools to share $140 million Charlotte Three private universities in the piedmont region will split $140 million left to them earlier this year by Charlotte attorney and business investor, Porter Byrum. Byrum passed away at age 96, leaving the money earmarked for scholarships.

Wake Forest University will get $70 million, Queens University in Charlotte and Wingate University will each get $35 million from his estate.

U.S. orders expulsion of 15 Cuban diplomats Washington, D.C. The Trump administration on Tuesday ordered the expulsion of 15 diplomats from Cuba’s embassy in Washington following last week’s U.S. move to pull more than half of its own diplomats out of Havana.

The decisions were based on the Cuban government’s failure to do enough to protect American personnel in Cuba targeted in mysterious “attacks” damaging their health, officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Cuban diplomats have been given seven days to leave.

NORTH

STATE

JOURNaL ELEVATE THE CONVERSATION

EPA to consolidate facilities and reconsider coal ash waste regulations

By Donna King North State Journal RALEIGH — The Environmental Protection Agency says it will reconsider a rule regulating coal ash waste from power plants in a win for utility industry groups that petitioned for a review of the rule saying that the cost of compliance far outweighs the benefits.

The EPA, the federal government’s lead environmental regulator, said it will reconsider specific provisions of the coal ash rule that took effect in 2015 that regulates how power plants manage and dispose of coal ash in waste pits. The EPA’s rule was the first on disposal of coal ash after a series of spills made national headlines, including the spill from a Duke Energy plant into the Dan River in 2014.

“EPA is not committing to changing any part of the rule, or agreeing with the merits of the petition — the Agency is simply granting petitions to reconsider specific provisions,” the EPA said in a press release.

The EPA said it is in the “public’s interest to reconsider specific provisions” of the regulation and figure out how to amend it to give states more leeway in how they comply with the rule.

“It is important that we give the existing rule a hard look and consider improvements that may help states tailor their permit programs to the needs of their states, in a way that provides great-

— EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt

See COAL ASH, page A2

8

KINSTON — When Hurricane Matthew plowed through North Carolina it left catastrophic flooding, people without homes and overall devastation in its wake. As the state approaches the one-year anniversary this Sunday, North Carolinians are looking back and seeing just how far they’ve come.

During the peak of the storm in October 2016, 150 miles of eastern North Carolina were covered in water. There were 4,000 shelter occupants, 48 counties declaring the need for federal assistance, 32 disaster recovery centers open, and $75 million in applications filed for individual assistance from the federal government.

Among the communities hit the hardest included Lumberton, Fayetteville, Princeville and Kinston.

The Neuse River, which runs parallel to Hwy. 70 in Kinston, rose to 28.3 feet In Edgecombe County, the Tar River rose to 36 feet in Princeville, just

— Kinston Mayor BJ Murphy

See MATTHEW, page A3

CHRIS WATTIE | REUTERS

A woman lights candles at a vigil on the Las Vegas strip following a mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Country Music Festival.

Death toll makes the mass shooting deadliest in modern U.S. history

By Devika Krishna Kumar and Alexandria Sage Reuters

Jones & Blount

$2.00

By Laura Ashley Lamm North State Journal

“We still have a dozen or so citizens living in hotels, but we have many more needing assistance with their houses, from a fresh coat of paint to a new set of steps.”

Lone gunman kills 59, injures more than 500, in Las Vegas concert attack

New N.C. laws take effect this week, including one that removes the general prohibitions on hunting migratory birds on Sundays.

20177 52016

Communities that came together after Hurricane Matthew flooded eastern N.C. look back, but focus on the future

“It is important that we give the existing rule a hard look and consider improvements that may help states tailor their permit programs to the needs of their states.”

INSIDE

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One year later: Lessons and love in Hurricane Matthew recovery

ADOBE STOCK

LAS VEGAS — A 64-year-old man with multiple machine guns rained down gunfire from the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel to country music festival on Sunday, slaughtering at least 58 people in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history before killing himself.

The barrage of bullets from the Mandalay Bay hotel into a crowd of 22,000 people lasted several minutes, sparking panic. At least 515 people were injured as some fleeing fans trampled each other while police scrambled to locate the shooter.

Police have identified the gunman as Stephen Paddock, who lived in a retirement community in Mesquite, Nevada. They said they believed he acted alone and did not know why he attacked the crowd.

The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for the masSee LAS VEGAS, page A3

North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

A2 WEDNESDAY

10.04.17 #96

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North State Journal (USPS PP 20451) (ISSN 2471-1365) Neal Robbins Publisher Donna King Editor Cory Lavalette Managing/Sports Editor Ray Nothstine Opinion Editor

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Steam rises from a smoke stack at Duke Energy’s Mayo Plant in Roxboro.

COAL ASH from pageA1 er regulatory certainty, while also ensuring that human health and the environment remain protected,” said EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

In response to North State Journal’s request for comment on the EPA’s review decision, N.C. Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson Jamie Kritzer emailed, “The N.C. Department of Environmental Quality will review any changes the EPA proposes for the federal Coal Combustion Residuals Rule and take appropriate actions to address the agency’s concerns during the public comment process.”

Environmental groups claim that if EPA rolls back the safeguards, it would put the public at risk because coal ash pits

FDA moves to smooth path for complex generic drugs

By Toni Clark Reuters WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday announced a series of measures designed to speed to market generic versions of complex drugs such as Mylan NV’s emergency EpiPen in an effort to address the rising cost of pharmaceuticals.

The measures, announced in a

blog post by Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, stray into an area that has not previously been the FDA’s purview: drug prices. The agency has typically made its decisions based on safety and efficacy without regard to cost.

Gottlieb said the measures are designed to increase competition in the market by enabling generic competition to complex drugs, something he has long argued for.

“Drug access is a matter of

are located near waterways and groundwater.

The Sierra Club said in a press release the move was “widely considered to be a ploy to scrap the protections entirely.”

The petitioners, the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group (USWAG) and AES Puerto Rico, are Washington-based groups representing power companies.

USWAG argued in its petition the rules should be changed because a new law enacted after they were put in place made them unduly burdensome. It gives states the authority to police utilities disposing of coal ash waste, but the EPA rule currently prevents authorities from customizing its application.

USWAG President Jim Rower said his group did not expect the EPA to scrap the rules but

GSK reports that it invested $322 million in 2016 in research and development of medications and vaccines. public health concern,” Gottlieb said. “We know that enabling more generic competition, where Congress intended, helps reduce prices, enable more access and improve public health.”

Complex drugs include medicines like metered-dose inhalers to treat asthma have at least one feature difficult to copy under existing rules, which means those drugs can face less competition.

CHRISTINE T. NGUYEN | NORTH STATE JOURNAL | FILE

rather to try to give states the authority to tailor them to specific conditions on the ground. He said a draft proposal the EPA was considering before it issued the final rule gave states flexibility while the final version did not.

“It makes good sense to put the flexibility back in,” he said.

The EPA is also reportedly moving forward with plans to consolidate research and testing laboratories to streamline the agency and cut costs. However, consolidation may mean some job growth at the EPA campus in North Carolina.

According to Ann Pitchford, a scientist and president of the local National Association of Government Employees union, the EPA has plans to relocate or merge at least five labs.

“Some people have retired,

“In some cases, costly, branded drugs that are complex drugs have lost their exclusivity but are subject to no generic competition,” Gottlieb said.

Mylan, which faced an uproar over the escalating price of the EpiPen last year, culminating in a congressional hearing on the matter, has itself complained about getting its own versions of complex drugs onto the market, including its copy of GlaxoSmithKline’s Advair asthma treatment.

GSK, the UK-based pharmaceutical company with 3,000 employees in the Research Triangle Park, won FDA approval in September for a new three-in-one inhaler called Trelegy Ellipta. It is the first once-daily triple medicine for chronic obstructive pulmonary

some people are finding other jobs and some people say they are going to move,” she said.

Pitchford said some chemists at the Las Vegas the Office of Research and Development (ORD), where the government has decided not to renew building leases, have been offered jobs in Ohio or North Carolina.

“Administrator Pruitt strongly believes in supporting states by providing laboratory and scientific expertise to better protect the environment,” spokesman Jahan Wilcox said in an emailed statement.

The EPA said it is revisiting the office consolidations, which were originally proposed under the Obama administration. The plan to move offices to government-owned properties was part of an earlier cost-cutting move.

disease (COPD).

GSK estimates that approximately a quarter of COPD patients already use the three drugs individually to treat COPD, and hopes its product will prove an attractive, easier alternative regimen.

They say it will also cut co-pay costs for patients currently buying all three medicines separately.

An FDA advisory panel also voted last week 11-0 that the safety and efficacy of GlaxoSmithKline’s new Shingrix shingles vaccine warrants approval for its use in adults aged 50 and older.

Panel members said they were “very impressed” by efficacy data from Shingrix clinical trials, and that it represents an improvement over Zostavax, the only marketed shingles prevention vaccine from Merck & Co.

Want to learn more about North Carolina Agriculture?

The First Furrow www.FirstFurrow.com

North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

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MATTHEW from page A1 one foot short of the height of the dike protecting the town.

But the waters still came.

“When Hurricane Floyd hit in 1999, it had a major shift in our population and demographics,” said Kinston Mayor BJ Murphy.

“It wiped out 800-900 homes taking out entire neighborhoods. We were better prepared this time, but people were still affected. To my understanding, there have been 200 applications for FEMA buyouts.

“Then and even now, when it comes to emergencies and natural disasters, I really have seen the best in humanity. What I have seen through these disasters is a rallying of churches, neighborhoods, government officials all around one common cause. It’s unfortunate that it takes disasters to really bring together our people — our country as a whole,” he added.

“We still have a dozen or so citizens living in hotels, but we have many more needing assistances with their houses from a fresh coat of paint to a new set of steps,” said Murphy.

Since Hurricane Matthew, one community church rallied together and found ways to offer shelter and food to disaster relief workers across the county.

First Presbyterian Church of Kinston turned two classroom spaces into bunkrooms which house 11 bunks or 22 beds total.

These bunkrooms, with an adjacent Jack and Jill shower and lounge area, are providing the necessary space for relief worker assistance with home repairs. The church’s Handymen, a group of men ranging in age from 60 to 80, built the bunkbeds by hand.

“As a church, we looked at the different needs in our community not covered by FEMA. People needed particular help with their homes, volunteers needed a place to say,” said Edward Bellis, interim pastor.

For $20 per person a day, disaster relief groups can stay in these bunkrooms and received three meals provided a day by the church. In the short months the bunkrooms have been available, five recovery assistance groups have already stayed in the shelter and it is full through October.

“The mission of the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance is ‘Out

PHOTOS BY MADELINE GRAY | NORTH STATE JOURNAL | FILE

Piles of recycling that Reginald Suggs had collected sits in his front yard in Kinston after he moved it to avoid rising flood waters that covered his backyard and caused his kitchen floor to collapse. Many other houses on the block were demolished following Hurricane Floyd.

of chaos comes hope,’” said Bellis.

“Christ said, ‘do unto the least of these, do unto me.’ We are living the mission by providing hope, shelter, and food.”

Hurricane Matthew marked the third major flood in 21 years for Kinston. This prompted city officials to formalize flood prevention efforts through the establishment of a coalition of local governments in the Neuse River basin.

“We need the Army Corps of Engineers and the state of North Carolina to study the Neuse River Basin,” said Murphy. “While laws must be passed to study the basin, and the study could take three to six years, it’s important for this area.

“It all starts with the state

studying the basin,” he added.

“Look at building a dam, cleaning the river, helping the beavers, studying Department of Transportation policies — all of the above approach.”

Throughout this last year, as Murphy noted, “Recovery is much longer than the 24-hour news cycle that a disaster is covered in.”

The City of Kinston has continued to move forward. Tourism is still a driving force. Visitors are staying at the new Mother Earth Motor Lodge in addition to the reopening of the city’s additional hotels including the Country Hearth Inn. Baseball was welcomed back as the Down East Wood Ducks just completed their first season with more than 146,000 attendees.

Jean Barber, left, and Shirley Bostick, right, both of Kinston, clean out the refrigerator of a house. All of the food had spoiled because the electricity had been out for over three weeks following Hurricane Matthew.

LUCY NICHOLSON | REUTERS

STEVE MARCUS | REUTERS

STEVE MARCUS | REUTERS

Main, A body is covered with a sheet in the intersection of Tropicana Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard South after a mass shooting at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. Right top, a woman wearing a Route 91 wristband walks near the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino following a mass shooting at the Route 91 Festival. Right bottom, a pair of cowboy boots is shown in the street outside the concert venue after the shooting.

LAS VEGAS from page A1 sacre, but U.S. officials said there was no evidence of that.

The preliminary death toll, which officials said could rise, eclipsed last year’s massacre of 49 people at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub by a gunman who pledged allegiance to Islamic State.

Shocked concertgoers, some with blood on their clothing, wandered streets, where the flashing lights of the city’s gaudy casinos blended with those of emergency vehicles.

The attack happened at 10 p.m. at the end of the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival, when country artist Jason Aldean was performing. Aldean and his band were not injured. Just hours before, Ashville native and singer Luke Combs was onstage performing. Combs took to social media afterward to let fans and family know they are ok. He

posted a photo taken earlier in the night of his performance.

“I wanted to post a photo of what this night was supposed to be about and not give this horrible person the recognition he so desperately wanted,” he wrote.

Police said Paddock had no criminal record.

“We have no idea what his belief system was,” said Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said. “I can’t get into the mind of a psychopath.”

Police said they recovered a total of 42 weapons belonging to Paddock, including 23 from the hotel room and 19 at his home in Mesquite, a small desert town about an hour from Las Vegas The rat-a-tat sound of the Las Vegas shooter’s gunfire prompted initial witnesses to say the gunman was using an automatic weapon, a term often used to describe a

fully automatic gun that can fire as many rounds as its magazine, drum or belt holds by pulling and holding the trigger. Those weapons have been largely outlawed for three decades and cost thousands of dollars.

Investigators now say that some of the weapons were modified with a “bump stock,” which replaces a semi-automatic stock, resting against the shoulder to provide stability and absorb recoil, firing rounds much more quickly than possible by pulling it manually.

Such devices are not outlawed because the trigger is still pulled for each round, even though the rate is faster than possible using only one’s finger.

U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer urged President Trump on Tuesday to bring together both major parties to impose new gun laws. Republicans have criticized the move.

“To all those political opportunists who are seizing on the tragedy in Las Vegas to call for more gun regs. ... You can’t regulate evil,” Kentucky’s Republican Governor, Matt Bevin, said on Twitter.

“It was an act of pure evil,” said Trump.

Trump and First Lady Melania Trump led a moment of silence with staff and high-ranking officials on the White House lawn Monday in honor of the victims.

Trump said he would travel to Las Vegas on Wednesday to meet with victims, their family members and first responders.

The suspected shooter’s brother, Eric Paddock, said the family was stunned by the news.

“We’re horrified. We’re bewildered, and our condolences go out to the victims,” Eric Paddock said in a phone interview, his voice trembling. “We have no idea in the world.”

He said his brother belonged to no political or religious organizations, and had no history of mental illness. Their father had been a bank robber who for a while was listed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” suspects list.

Video of the attack showed panicked crowds fleeing as sustained rapid gunfire ripped through the area.

“People were just dropping to the ground. It just kept going on,” said Steve Smith, a 45-year-old visitor from Phoenix, Arizona. He said the gunfire went on for an extended period of time.

Mike McGarry, of Philadelphia, was at the concert when he heard hundreds of shots ring out.

“It was crazy - I laid on top of the kids. They’re 20. I’m 53. I lived a good life,” McGarry said. The back of his shirt bore footmarks, after people ran over him in the panicked crowd.

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North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Nation & WORLD

Navy says training aircraft carrying two reported missing Washington, D.C. The Navy said on Sunday it was investigating reports of a jet crash in Tennessee and that one of its training aircraft had not returned to its air station. A Navy training facility in Meridian, Miss., received reports of a jet crash near Tellico Plains, Tenn., in the Cherokee National Forest early Sunday evening, the Navy said in a statement.

O.J. Simpson walks out of Nevada prison after serving nine years for robbery Las Vegas O.J. Simpson, acquitted of the 1994 murder of his ex-wife and her friend after the “Trial of the Century,” was released early on Sunday from a prison in Nevada, where he had been held since 2008 for a botched armed robbery at a Las Vegas casino hotel. The state’s Department of Corrections posted a seven-second video on Facebook showing the retired football star and former actor being released at 12:08 a.m. local time.

Five detained over wired explosives found in Paris neighborhood Paris French counter-terrorism investigators questioned five people on Tuesday after police over the weekend found what appeared to be a ready-to-detonate bomb at an apartment building in one of Paris’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said one of those arrested was on an intelligence services list of “radicalized” persons - a list that includes the names of potential Islamist militants.

“We are still in a state of war,” Collomb, speaking after a Sunday attack in which a man stabbed and killed two women outside the train station in Marseille, told France Inter radio.

Judicial sources said the explosive device included two gas canisters inside the building in the affluent 16th district of western Paris and two outside, some of them doused with gasoline and wired to connect to a mobile phone. More than 230 people have been killed in attacks by Islamist militants in France over the past three years.

U.S. attorney general enters campus speech debate

By Donna King North State Journal WASHINGTON, D.C. — Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the U.S. Justice Department are stepping into the debate over free speech on college campuses. Lawyers from department filed a brief Tuesday on behalf of students at Georgia Gwinnett College who are challenging a school policy that requires them to use “free speech zones” to express their views. Sessions said the department will continue to take such action in the months to come on campus cases across the country.

In a speech Tuesday at the Georgetown University Law Center, Sessions said that freedom of thought is “under attack” on the nation’s college campuses.

“Starting today, the Department of Justice will do its part in this struggle. We will enforce federal law, defend free speech, and protect students’ free expression from whatever end of the political spectrum it may come,” Sessions told an audience of Georgetown students.

While the attorney general spoke, other students and faculty of Georgetown Law School gathered outside to protest his appearance with a bullhorn. They opposed that the address was to an invitation-only audience without giving critics of the Trump administration an opportunity to comment.

Several dozen protesters stood on the front steps of the school, some with duct tape over their mouths to symbolize that they felt their views were censored from the event. Some held signs denouncing racism, censorship, and President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind DACA, the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy that shields illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

In his address, Sessions focused on whether the rights of speakers on college campuses were being trampled by student protesters who disrupted their speeches and limited other students’ access to them because the protesters find the speakers’ views offensive.

Protesters “are now routinely shutting down speeches and debates across the country in an effort to silence voices that insufficiently conform with their views,” he said.

One protester, third-year law student Charlotte Berschback, complained on the sidelines of the protest that invitations to the Sessions speech had been withdrawn from students who had

YURI GRIPAS | REUTERS

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks at a briefing at the Justice Department in Washington.

“Starting today, the Department of Justice will do its part in this struggle.

We will enforce federal law, defend free speech, and protect students’ free expression from whatever end of the political spectrum it may come.”

— Attorney General Jeff Sessions RSVPed and had initially been told they would have a seat.

“We pay a ton of tuition,” she said. “We should have a role in deciding who comes to our school.”

She added that liberal students had been excluded from attending the Sessions event and that the school should have used a lottery process to let students attend.

Sessions cited concerns about multiple incidents at college campuses around the country, including the University of California at Berkeley and Middlebury College in Vermont.

Sessions mentioned recent violent protests at Berkeley. He

said the school spent more than $600,000 and was forced to have an overwhelming police presence to prove that the mob was not in control of the campus.

Ahead of Sessions’ Georgetown address, a group of 30 professors signed onto a letter calling Sessions’ appearance hypocritical because of Trump’s criticism of NFL players ho kneel during the anthem.

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a key cabinet member in an administration headed by a president who spent last weekend denouncing athletes engaged in free expression and calling for them to be fired,” the professors wrote Monday night.

The professors went on to cite other examples of why they think Sessions is unfit to deliver this address, including his department’s prosecution of a protester who disrupted his confirmation hearings.

Sessions said that the president has a right to free speech, as do all Americans. He reminded the audience that the Constitution protects their right to speech, but does not protect them from criticism for their actions, a distinction that he says has become muddied in recent years.

“A national recommitment to free speech on campus and to ensuring First Amendment rights is

long overdue,” Sessions said.

The issue of campus free speech has been a hot one in N.C., particularly after the state legislature passed the Restore/Preserve Campus Free Speech law in August. The measure codifies free speech protections on campus, protecting students’ rights to distribute literature in outdoor areas on campus and prohibiting “free speech zones.” The “zones” were used to limit student expression to certain areas and times.

The law also requires institutions to develop penalties for students or faculty who “substantially disrupts the functioning of the constituent institution or substantially interferes with the protected free expression rights of others.”

The UNC Board of Governors is directed in the law to create an 11-member “Free Speech Committee” that will report annually to the Board of Governors on barriers to or disruptions of free speech on constituent campuses, descriptions of how those colleges are administrating disciplinary action of such infractions, and the status of maintaining administrative and institutional neutrality on controversial political and social issues.

Reuters News Service contributed to this report.

Cases to watch as the U.S. Supreme Court returns The nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court reconvened session for a new term on Monday with pivotal cases on their docket

By Donna King North State Journal RALEIGH — This term Supreme Court justices will consider major cases on voting rights, religious liberty, union funding and class-action suits. The court now has a 5-4 conservative majority with President Donald Trump’s nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, on the bench.

Does partisan gerrymandering violate the Constitution?

On Tuesday the court heard arguments in a case that could influence American politics for decades, particularly in N.C. They are taking up a fight over electoral maps drawn by Wisconsin Republicans that a lower court ruled were designed to entrench themselves in power.

The nine justices will consider the lawfulness of partisan gerrymandering, the long-standing practice of manipulating the boundaries of electoral districts to benefit one party, and whether in this case Republicans intended to

hobble Democrats.

Wisconsin is appealing a lower court’s ruling that the electoral map drawn by state Republicans violated the constitutional rights of voters. Wisconsin Republicans argue that enforcing a judiciary-designed definition for “partisan” in legislative elections would create a system of judicial review on every map.

Action by the court in this case will set the first standard on whether maps of state legislative districts drawn to benefit one particular party violate the Constitution. For decades, the court has been willing to invalidate state electoral maps on the grounds of racial discrimination but never those drawn simply to give one party an advantage.

Which crimes mean deportation for immigrants?

On Monday, the court heard arguments in another case on part of an immigration law requiring the deportation of immigrants who commit violent felonies because of uncertainty over which crimes fit the bill and which do not.

The justices heard arguments in the government’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that language in the Immigration and Nationality Act calling for deportation of legal immigrants convicted of a “crime of violence” was so vague that it violated their rights to due process of law under the U.S. Constitution.

CARLOS BARRIA | REUTERS

A pedestrian walks in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington.

The case involves a Filipino legal immigrant named James Garcia Dimaya federal authorities ordered deported after he was convicted in two California home burglaries, though neither crime involved violence. However, in the federal criminal code, a “crime of violence” includes offenses in which force either was used or carried a “substantial risk” that it would be used.

The ruling in the case could help clarify the crimes for which noncitizen immigrants may be expelled, affecting the Trump administration’s policy of stepping up the removal of those with criminal records.

Can a baker refuse to make a wedding cake because of religious beliefs?

In December, justices are scheduled to hear the case of Christian baker Jack Phillips, who runs the

Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver.

Phillips referred a gay couple to another bakery because he felt that making their wedding cake violated his religious beliefs. The couple, David Mullins and Charlie Craig, sued him saying he violated the state’s anti-discrimination law.

The case promises to show the pivotal role Justice Anthony Kennedy will play on the court this term.

Kennedy, the longest-serving justice and at age 81 the second oldest, has earned a reputation as the “swing” vote: a conservative willing in some major cases to side with liberal justices. Kennedy authored the 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. But Kennedy also has been a defender of religious liberty and free speech. In the gay marriage ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges, he wrote that people op-

posed to same-sex marriage “reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises.”

Analysts say the baker’s case will force Kennedy to balance his strong support for gay rights with his advocacy for religious rights and free speech, a move that could help shape Kennedy’s legacy even as some of his former law clerks have speculated he could retire next summer.

“This is a case where we are likely to have a court of one: Justice Kennedy,” said former solicitor general Greg Garre, who served under Republican former President George W. Bush.

The three cases are among several key issues that the court will decide this term, scheduled to run through June.

North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

CARLOS BARRIA | REUTERS

Local residents wait in line during a water distribution in Bayamon following damages caused

by Hurricane Maria in Las Piedras.

Recovery slow but steady in Puerto Rico as fed plans for billions in recovery costs

By Roberta Rampton Reuters SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — President Donald Trump expressed satisfaction on Tuesday with the federal response to Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico, despite criticism that the government was slow to address the crisis and two weeks later much of the island’s residents are still without power.

Trump, who has grappled with hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in the past six weeks, said at a briefing that the disasters are straining the budget.

“I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico,” he said. “And that’s fine. We’ve saved a lot of lives.”

Trump visited Puerto Rico to reassure the island’s struggling residents that he is committed to their

recovery. The economy of the U.S. territory, home to 3.4 million people, already was in recession and its government filed for bankruptcy before it was hit by the worst hurricane in 90 years.

The storm wiped out the island’s power grid, and less than half of residents have running water. It is still difficult for residents to get a cell phone signal or find fuel for their generators or cars. While Trump was warmly received by many, not all were happy to see him.

“You are a bad hombre,” said a hand-lettered sign in pink marker held by a woman along his motorcade route.

Peter Van Buren, a 25-year state department veteran, says disasters are the same and Puerto Rico being an island makes things tougher. He said discontent is exacerbated in the immediate aftermath when communication is poor, damage is being assessed and resources are being di-

verted to the most critical first, like hospitals and emergency response needs.

“A disaster destroys in hours infrastructure that took decades to build,” said Van Buren. “Millions of people lose the services that separate a middle-class suburb from an impoverished slum – clean water, sewers, power, hospitals, roads. And Maria was the strongest storm to strike the area in 80 years… At the moment of any disaster, needs are at 100 percent while the response is at a zero point. The response starts in deficit. It always looks grim, especially to participants and outside observers unfamiliar with the process. They want what is a marathon to play out like a sprint.”

One of the first people Trump met when he and his wife, Melania, touched down in San Juan,Puerto Rico, was the city’s mayor, Carmen Yulin Cruz, who has repeatedly blasted Trump as showing insufficient concern about the U.S. territory’s plight.

Trump shook hands with Cruz after his arrival but he saved his warm words of praise for other local and federal authorities.

“Right from the beginning, this governor did not play politics,” he said of Puerto Rico Governor Richardo Rossello.

Rossello had refused to join Cruz’ criticism saying his only focus was on the territory’s recovery. On Mon-

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ALVIN BAEZ | REUTERS

Local residents look for food along an empty area of a supermarket following Hurricane Maria in San Juan.

Pull quote: “At the moment of any disaster, needs are at 100 percent while the response is at a zero point.”

— Peter Van Buren

day he reported progress in getting fuel supplies to the island, with more than 720 of the island’s 1,100 gas stations now up and running, and more will open back up in the coming days.

During the visit, Trump and the first lady met survivors of the disaster in the nearby town Guaynabo, walking down a street and talking to several families whose homes were damaged. The sidewalks were piled with debris.

“Their drivers have to start driving trucks,” he said at the White House. “So on a local level, they have to give us more help. But I will tell you, the first responders, the military, FEMA, they have done an incredible job in Puerto Rico.”

The Trump administration has transferred more than $20.5 million in federal funds to Puerto Rico to defray disaster expenses,

FEMA said on its website.

The administration is preparing to ask Congress for $13 billion in aid for Puerto Rico and other areas hit by natural disasters, according to congressional sources said.

“We’re expecting to hear from the administration as early as tomorrow perhaps, maybe Thursday, for more relief for hurricanes for Puerto Rico, for Florida, for Texas,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said. “These hurricanes were exceptional and that means we’re going to have to have more response to fill the FEMA accounts and some other accounts.”

Also on Tuesday, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission proposed making available as much as $76.9 million to fund repairs of communication networks and restore communications services in Puerto Rico. Nearly 90 percent of cell sites remain out of service.

Puerto Rico could also receive $1 billion in additional Medicaid funding. Republicans who lead the House Energy and Commerce Committee requested $1 billion for the territory to help fill the gap in medical care when hospitals were wiped out in the hurricane. The request is part of a separate bill to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program. It is scheduled to be considered and voted on in committee on Wednesday.

North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

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North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

to

Jones & Blount

Manteo

jonesandblount.com @JonesandBlount

NC Public Power: Powered by Excellence, Fueled

by Commitment

On Feb. 4, 1889, a group of civic leaders assembled in front of a small building just off North Center Street in Statesville, North Carolina.

As night fell, a switch was pulled, and the city’s first electric streetlights blinked on, illuminating the tiny downtown for a momentous two hours.

NC Public Power was born.

Today, NC Public Power illuminates the homes and workplaces of 1.2 million people in 71 communities across our state—more than the populations of Raleigh and Charlotte combined.

All told, one out of every eight people in North Carolina gets their energy from a public power utility.

As we celebrate Public Power Week, Oct. 1-7, we recognize the value of public power and all the people dedicated to keeping the lights on.

WEST Bostic Walk into Washburn’s General Store in Bostic and it’s like they closed one afternoon in 1958 and didn’t reopen till right before you showed up. It’s not just the inventory that seems of another time. There’s the building with its wood floors and tin ceiling. There’s the way customers are treated, whether newbies or regulars. And there’s the permeating sense of family. For most of us, it’s a trip back in time. But for the Washburns, it’s just the way they’ve always done it.

Lexington Quick: Where’s the barbecue capital of the world? Ask folks in Lexington, and they’ll tell you, “Right here.” See for yourself. Mark your calendar and prep your waistline for Lexington’s Barbecue Festival, Saturday, Oct. 28. A regular on best-of lists around the region and the country, the festival is a celebration of one style of barbecue: Lexington style! It’s also chock full of activities, including a dog show, hog race and BMX stunt shows.

Murphy To Manteo PPW Ad_Final.indd 1

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Moody’s: NC’s pension liability is the lowest in the nation

By Donna King North State Journal

In a recent survey, seven out of 10 NC Public Power customers said they would choose public power if given a choice. That’s because they benefit from public power’s affordable rates, faster restoration, local job creation, excellent local customer service and superior reliability.

In fact, those surveyed NC Public Power customers gave their highest marks for reliable service: 93 percent.

These benefits attract businesses and improve the quality of life in public power communities across North Carolina.

ElectriCities, a not-for-profit member services organization, was formed in 1965 to protect the interests of NC Public Power communities and to provide a unified voice on issues affecting public power. The energy behind NC Public Power,

CHICAGO — Moody’s Investors Service reported recently that N.C. has the lowest unfunded pension liability in the country at 23 percent, in a study of all 50 states and their returns on investment. The credit rating agency said that the U.S. state unfunded pension liabilities hit $1.3 trillion in fiscal 2016, a $56 billion or 4.5 percent increase over the previous fiscal year.

The report attributed the higher adjusted net pension liability for the 50 states to underperforming investment returns, low interest rates and insufficient contributions to retirement systems for government workers.

“About half the states are also not making sufficient payments to pension

ElectriCities consolidates many of the services needed by municipally owned electric utilities, providing its members assistance with corporate communications, economic development, government relations, marketing, safety and training, and services that maximize the lifespan and efficiency of members’ electric distribution systems.

Below are just a few of our state’s public power communities. Discover more at www.electricities.com, and by following @ElectriCitiesNC on Twitter, @ElectriCities on Facebook, and @NCPublicPower on Instagram.

By NSJ Staff

New Bern

On a Saturday at The Barber Shop in Drexel, somebody might actually get a haircut. That is, if it doesn’t get in the way of the bluegrass. Every Saturday, the regulars come in, grab a cup of coffee, run their mouths a bit and settle in to play music. It’s been that way for more than 50 years and continues thanks to Carroll Anthony, son of Lawrence Anthony, the original shop owner and guitar player.

Our state’s first capital and the birthplace of Pepsi, New Bern is a riverfront city that’s home to more than 300 years’ worth of North Carolina history. Dive into that history with a visit to Tryon Palace, where you can enjoy exhibits and programs year-round. The palace’s Candlelight Celebration in December is especially exquisite. Another New Bern can’t-miss is the award-winning Mumfest.

This family fun event is Oct. 13-15 in historic downtown and includes amusement rides, live entertainment and a boat show.

Forest City From the local government to the local drugstore, Forest City is big on providing a more-than-you-expect level of service.

That’s why new businesses have opened on Main Street, why patrons pack the lunch counter at The Fountain at Smith’s Drugs, and why, on Thanksgiving night and through the holiday season in a tradition that dates back to 1930, people drive from miles around to see downtown Forest City decked out in a million lights.

Dallas Dallas is a small town that embraces its history and honors its legacies, while actively pursuing progress. That sounds a lot like Dallas potter Barry Lockman.

From the clay he digs from a hillside above the creek where he played as a child, to his deer-tail brushes, to the kiln he built from homemade bricks, Lockman is a master at using local resources to create his beautifully unique salt-fired pottery.

The Warbirds over Monroe air show, Nov. 11-12, is one of the coolest history lessons you’ll ever experience. It is an opportunity not only to get an up-close look at vintage aircraft, but also to see the flying beauties in action and learn about the veterans who flew them. Performers will have you oohing and aahing as WWII bombers streak through the sky, some accompanied by exploding orange fireballs and billowing black smoke. It’s shock and awe, Greatest Generation style.

EAST Wilson The Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park in downtown Wilson is set to open Nov. 2, with the North Carolina Whirligig Festival following Nov. 4-5. Both events give folks an opportunity to marvel at the gigantic spinning sculptures machinist Vollis Simpson created from scrap metal and junk parts. He called them windmills and adorned them with rockets, angels, stars and thousands of reflectors. In June 2013, Simpson’s whirligigs were adopted as the official folk art of the state of North Carolina.

Statesville Each October, Statesville, the birthplace of public power in North Carolina, hosts the annual Carolina BalloonFest, a weekend-long event where you can gaze in awe as more than 50 hot air balloons take to the skies. You can even take to the sky yourself in a tethered balloon ride.

This year’s festival also includes live music on two stages, an artisan village and marketplace, a kids’ activity area, North Carolina wine and craft beers, and loads of great festival food.

Southport At the southern tip of North Carolina’s mainland, Southport is the quintessential coastal community—a place you can go to unwind and soak in life on the water. Along with its Historic Riverwalk, North Carolina Maritime Museum, and some of the most beautiful bed-andbreakfast establishments in the state, Southport is home to the North Carolina 4th of July Festival, a huge celebration complete with a parade and spectacular fireworks launched from a barge on the Intracoastal Waterway.

Reuters News Service contributed to this report.

Lawmakers back in Raleigh for special session

Drexel

Monroe

systems to prevent their unfunded liabilities from growing even if investment targets are met,” Moody’s said in a statement.

It projected the liability will grow again in fiscal 2017 to $1.7 trillion.

Overall, fiscal 2016’s $1.3 trillion unfunded liability equaled 122 percent of state revenue.

Illinois, which has been hindered by its state constitution from reducing retirement benefits to cut pension costs, had the biggest unfunded liability in fiscal 2016 equal to 487 percent of its revenue versus a median of 82 percent for all states. Alaska came in second at 443 percent of revenue, followed by Connecticut at 285 percent.

Fayetteville Ready to take things up a notch? Set your GPS to Fayetteville’s ZipQuest Waterfall & Treetop Adventure, and get ready to fly.

Armed with safety equipment and some basic training, you’ll spend two and a half hours on a zip line, darting through a pristine forest at speeds of up to 40 mph. Each run, you’ll see something awe-inspiring, like Carver’s Falls, a waterfall that’s over 150 feet wide and two stories tall.

Fountain Between Wilson and Greenville is a laidback little town called Fountain—the kind of place that’s out of the way but not too far.

On weekend nights, you can stop by the R.A. Fountain General Store and join the crowds who come to hear some of the area’s finest acoustic music by greats like Lightnin’ Wells.

Owner Alex Albright, also an ECU English professor and a Fountain commissioner, says the store is his way of helping take care of his community.

Kinston Back in the day, a visit to Kinston had to include a stop at Neuse Sport Shop and King’s Restaurant. It still does, but now Kinston’s must-visit list is longer—and growing. There’s Chef & the Farmer, Vivian Howard’s upscale restaurant featured on the PBS show, “A Chef’s Life.”

There’s Mother Earth Brewing and its sister distillery Mother Earth Spirits.

With Kinston’s thriving downtown, you might want to plan to stay a while. Add boutique hotel The O’Neil to your list.

RALEIGH — Gov. Roy Cooper issued another extra session proclamation last week to reconvene the General Assembly for the purpose of considering an override of one of his vetoes. With Cooper’s veto of House Bill 56, a bill that amended various environmental laws and provided supplemental funds related to the discharge of GenX in the Cape Fear River, the General Assembly now has five vetoed bills on its calendar for discussion.

Cooper has vetoed 12 bills during this extended legislative session with seven of those vetoes being overridden so far.

Regardless of the vetoes, the legislature was coming back this week subject to its prior adjournment resolution. While the complicated rules of the chambers can allow for numerous items to be considered through procedural maneuvers, ostensibly the Oct.

4, 2017, session is limited to bills of certain types, including redistricting and those having been vetoed.

Changes to the state’s trial court judicial districts and the method of selecting judges have been frequent topics in both the halls and meetings rooms of the General Assembly since the August session. While no bills have advanced from committees on those topics, they are eligible for consideration during the current session.

During their late August session, the two chambers of the General Assembly passed revised maps for election of their members following a federal court order to do so. Those maps and the accompanying legislation are not subject to the governor’s veto power under the N.C. Constitution.

The N.C. House convenes Wednesday at 10 a.m. and the N.C. Senate opens its session at noon.

New laws taking affect this week in N.C.

Wake Forest

By NSJ Staff

Since 1916, folks in Wake Forest have been stopping by Shorty’s for a chili dog and a game of pool. Next door at fiveyear-old White Street Brewing, they’re serving up award-winning brews like the gold medal Kölsch, featured at the brewery’s Oktoberfest on Oct. 7. Public power lineworkers from around the country will get a chance to enjoy all the city offers when they round up April 27-28 for training and competition as the city hosts the 2018 American Public Power Association Lineworkers Rodeo.

RALEIGH — The N.C. General Assembly continues to enact new laws this week in Raleigh during another special session.

However, many laws are becoming effective as of Oct. 1, 2017. Highlights of more than 30 bills, with hundreds of provisions, include: Senate Bill 182, sponsored by Sen. Tom McInnis (R-Richmond), prohibits the use of light bars on the state’s highways with an intensity of greater than 25 candlepower.

Light bars, popular on four-wheel drive trucks and SUVs used for off-roading, are typically very bright and illuminate a broad area. The bill does not prohibit the installation of the bars, simply the use of them on public roads.

House Bill 559, sponsored by Rep. Chris Millis (R-Pender), removes the general prohibitions on hunting of migratory birds on Sunday and Sunday

hunting in counties with populations over 700,000. The law does not immediately allow Sunday hunting of migratory birds, but allows for the Wildlife Resources Commission to allow it if they so choose after March 1, 2018.

The bill also maintains a prohibition on hunting between 9:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. as well as hunting within 500 yards of a place of religious worship on Sunday. Counties are allowed to prohibit or further restrict Sunday hunting by ordinance if a countywide referendum is passed by a majority of county voters.

Senate Bill 323, sponsored by Sen. Michael Lee (R-New Hanover), establishes that various types of records held by the University of North Carolina and its constituent institutions that relate to membership in the NCAA, athletic conferences or other collegiate sports organizations are subject the N.C. public records laws.

9/28/2017 9:45:10 AM

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2017

BUSINESS

JORDAN STEAD | AMAZON

Amazon’s campus in Seattle, in both the downtown and South Lake Union neighborhoods. Photographed from the roof of Amazon’s Port 99 building.

n.c.

FAST FACTS Sponsored by

Focused on improving the economic well-being and quality of life for all North Carolinians, a collaborative team of regional partners, allies and education institutions represents the economic interests of businesses and towns from across the state.

Approved Logos

This week, NSJ highlights the University of North Carolina System.

In 1971, the Higher Education Reorganization Act placed the 16 baccalaureategranting institutions that make up the University of North Carolina under one governing board, with these objectives: to foster the development of a well-planned and coordinated system of higher education, to improve the quality of education, to extend educational benefits beyond campus borders and to encourage economic and effective use of the state’s resources. In its efforts to move forward with strategic planning, the University recognized the importance of establishing an overall mission, and defining the role each campus would play in fulfilling the mission.

It now encompasses 17 diverse constituent institutions and other educational, research, and public service organizations. Each shares in the overall mission of the University. That mission is to discover, create, transmit, and apply knowledge to address the needs of individuals and society.

NC competition for Amazon’s second headquarters heats up The tech retailer is looking for strong schools, local high tech skills, a businessfriendly tax structure and good, cheap quality of life for its new second headquarters

By Donna King North State Journal NORTH CAROLINA cities are working hard to lure internet retail giant Amazon to the state for a second headquarters. The $5 billion project promises 50,000 jobs paying $100,000 or more annually over 15 years. Charlotte, the Research Triangle Park and Triad areas are all submitting proposals by the Oct. 19 deadline. More than 100 cities across North America have said they are putting together proposals as well, including Dallas, Houston, Toronto, St. Louis, Miami, Detroit and Atlanta.

“We are looking for a location with strong local and regional talent — particularly in software development and related fields — as well as a stable and business-friendly environment to continue hiring and innovating on behalf of our customers,” said Amazon’s Request for Proposal page.

The Charlotte Chamber of Commerce has launched a social media campaign with the hashtag #CLTisPrime to stir up energy around Charlotte’s bid. “Tell the world, and especially Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, why Charlotte USA is a great place to live and work,” said a chamber press release. “Make your voice heard and help us showcase what makes our region unique.”

The largest e-commerce company in the world, Amazon said it intended to create a headquarters, called HQ2, that would be a “full equal” to its Seattle office, Bezos said in a statement. The company wants a metropolitan area of more

than a million people with an international airport, good education and mass transit.

The HQ2 project would initially need more than 500,000 square feet and up to 8 million square feet beyond 2027, Amazon said. Its Seattle campus spreads across 8.1 million square feet in 33 buildings and employs more than 40,000 people.

Amazon has made clear that state incentives are likely to be an important consideration for any city in the running. In N.C., corporate incentives have been a point of contention in the General Assembly over the past several years as many say they are critical tools for job creation and more money is needed to level the playing field with neighboring states. Others say they are costly and wouldn’t be needed if the state went to a zero percent corporate tax rate for every employer, not just the big ones.

N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper said last week that he and Commerce Secretary Tony Copeland are working on a proposal package for Amazon to come to N.C. “Amazon’s jobs are not any more valuable than any job created by any other company,” said N.C. Americans for Prosperity executive director Donald Bryson. “If Gov. Cooper agrees that a lower tax burden creates jobs, then he needs to start talking about lowering taxes for all businesses, and stop buying votes by giving away taxpayer money to Amazon and foreign banks.”

A provision in the state budget that passed into law in June provides enhanced incentives for companies that invest at least $4 billion and create at least 5,000 jobs. In return, these “transformative projects” could be reimbursed for up to 100 percent of the withholding taxes from the new jobs they create and total incentive outlay would likely not be limited to the current $35 million statewide cap on the Job Development

Amazon said it will take proposals up until Oct. 19 and would select the location next year.

Investment Grant (JDIG) projects.

Under JDIG, companies must meet investment and job creation projections to qualify for the tax rebates.

Amazon and other large companies have come to expect incentives. Amazon has been awarded more than $1 billion in state and local subsidies since 2000, according to estimates by watchdog Good Jobs First. Texas leads the way with the value of subsidies to Amazon followed by Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio, it said.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker approved a law this year with $3 billion incentives package for a Taiwanese tech company that’s building a $10-billion liquid crystal display factory in the state with 1,300 jobs. N.C. was in the running for that project.

Amazon’s current Seattle location is considered one of the most expensive places in the country to run a business, sparking their search for a second home.

“The high cost of living and the high cost of real estate, all of that adds up to why expanding in that market is not viable,” said Burt Flickinger, managing director of retail consultant Strategic Resource Group.

Amazon began as a bookseller and grew into the internet’s biggest retailer. Total revenue was $136 billion at the end of last year, up sharply from $34 billion in 2010. Amazon recently snatched up Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion.

Reuters News Service contributed to this report.

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COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT Sponsored by

Next Stop: Selma Railroad Days Selma, a North Carolina public power community, was born a railroad town and remains one today. Once a year, folks come from all over to celebrate that historic beginning and all Selma is today—from the railroad to antiques, agriculture, theater and much more.

In its 42nd year, the Selma Railroad Days Festival, Oct. 6-7 in uptown Selma, is the ultimate in family entertainment. This year’s theme is “Trains, Planes and Automobiles,” and you can be sure you’ll experience all three of those and then some.

The festival kicks off Friday night with a food truck rodeo and a concert at The Ice House Theatre, an alcoholfree traditional country music venue. Saturday is the big day, with a 5K run, a kid’s Caboose Run, loads of crafts and food vendors, a parade, a car show, live entertainment, a model train display and, get this, helicopter rides around uptown!

Find details, including a schedule of events, at www.selma-nc.com/railroaddays-festival.

North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

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THE BRIEF

Amazon’s Seattle campus, in both the downtown and South Lake Union neighborhoods.

Consumer lending, insurance issues dominate Wells’ CEO’s Senate appearance Washington, D.C. Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan was questioned about sales practices, mischarging customers for auto insurance, and complaints about mortgage fees at the bank’s consumer lending unit when he testified before U.S. senators on Tuesday.

The U.S.’s third-largest bank has yet to shake off a yearlong sales practices scandal, sparking management changes, lawsuits and government investigations. Reuters reported on Monday that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the leading regulator for Wells Fargo, was considering new sanctions against the bank for customer abuses involving auto insurance and mortgage loans. Wells Fargo reached a $190 million settlement with regulators a year ago after it said it had opened as many as 2.1 million accounts without customers’ authorization to meet internal sales target. That estimate was raised to potentially as many as 3.5 million in August after an expanded review.

Sloan, appearing before the Senate for the first time as chief executive, attempted to reassure lawmakers that the San Francisco bank was healthy by highlighting changes he has made including overhauling the structure and senior management of its retail bank.

JORDAN STEAD | AMAZON

Commentary: Why no city should want Amazon’s HQ2

By Gregory Scruggs Reuters AMAZON, the world’s largest e-commerce retailer by sales and market cap, announced last Thursday a request for proposals for a large North American city to host a second headquarters equal in stature to its downtown Seattle campus. This unexpected move sparked an Olympics-style competition by the likes of Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Toronto, [as well as Charlotte, Research Triangle Park and Triad-area N.C. locations] to seduce the company.

Mayors and civic leaders are prepared to offer tax breaks, development-ready sites, new aviation connections, and fiber optic lines to lure up to 50,000 highly-paid employees for the $5 billion campus. But they should be careful what they wish for: winning the Amazon beauty pageant might be the ultimate Pyrrhic victory, especially if the winner offers too many subsidies. As The Brookings Institution argues, “State and local governments… have proven over and over that they are all too willing to give up their tax base for growth that would have occurred somewhere anyway.”

Although plenty of ailing metropolitan economies could use a shot in the arm, bringing in Amazon is like a heroin injection; it’s a sharp spike that can balloon housing prices and flip entire neighborhoods in the blink of an eye. While a handful of local business owners and real estate developers profit handsomely, the city as a whole can suffer. Some of the challenges, like the skyrocketing cost of housing in Seattle, can be measured.

Others, like a loss of local character, are intangible but no less important to many current residents.

Seattle’s experience as the country’s leading company town — 19 percent of the prime office space in Seattle is occupied by Amazon, the highest ratio for one company in

any American city — offers several warnings for why cities shouldn’t be desperately seeking Amazon.

Seattle, where I live, is undergoing its biggest boom since the Yukon Gold Rush. It’s currently the fastest growing city in the United States. That influx of people, including me, has put a lot of strain on the Emerald City.

House prices routinely climb an average of 10 percent annually.

As rents have plateaued nationally, they continue to rise here, again as much as 10 percent per year in popular neighborhoods. This trend persists despite an unprecedented building boom. New apartment buildings keep materializing and single-family homes are regularly replaced by clusters of townhouses, but supply can’t seem to catch up with demand. More and more families making average wages find themselves struggling to afford a home within the city limits, the rates of mega-commuters have soared and rent hikes force more people into homelessness.

The increasing cost of living has followed Amazon’s growth.

Over the same period in which rents have skyrocketed – up 57 percent since 2011 – Amazon’s global workforce has grown from 50,000 to 350,000. The largest concentration of Amazonians, over 25,000, is in Seattle. These highly educated tech workers are well-paid, with an average income starting above $100,000. Fast Company put it bluntly in a headline: “How Amazon’s Non-Stop Growth is Creating a Brand-New Seattle.”

In fairness, there are other factors driving Seattle’s housing prices: low-density zoning that sets aside most of the city for only single-family housing, foreign real estate investment, the growth of other tech companies, and the current popularity of the Pacific Northwest. (Home prices have also shot up in Amazon-less neighbors Vancouver, British Columbia and Portland, Oregon.)

“Although plenty of ailing metropolitan economies could use a shot in the arm, bringing in Amazon is like a heroin injection; it’s a sharp spike that can balloon housing prices and flip entire neighborhoods in the blink of an eye.”

Ready.

Set. Grow.

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But Portland remains the hippie Mecca lovingly ridiculed on the TV show “Portlandia.” Seattle, the city that birthed grunge rock, finds itself turning into something quite different. The Amazon-led influx has dramatically changed the culture in many parts of the city. Neighborhoods increasingly feel dominated by a white, male cohort of recent college graduates making six-figure salaries. The level of angst among people who have lived here for much of their lives is palpable and infectious.

Long-time residents of once-bohemian neighborhoods find their favorite bars overrun by loud groups of Amazon “brogrammers.” In Capitol Hill, Seattle’s famed “gayborhood,” there has been an uptick in anti-LGBT hate crimes on weekend streets increasingly crowded by drunken frat bros and sorority girls.

Amazon isn’t the only company offering highly paid jobs to young people, splitting the local economy between tech haves and non-tech have-nots. (Some speculate that the recent landmark municipal income tax is driving Amazon’s decision to create a second headquarters instead of just expanding in Seattle.)

And some of Seattle’s growth-related issues, like horrible and ever-worsening traffic stemming from a lack of invest-

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ment in a reliable public transportation system, can be squarely blamed on Seattle’s past myopia.

But Amazon plays an outsized role in the city’s recent transformation. It occupies as much prime commercial real estate as the next 43 Seattle companies combined.

With 8.1 million square feet growing to 12 million in the next few years, Amazon’s Seattle footprint dwarfs the size of any one company in another large city. Citi is the next largest big-city corporate tenant by square footage in the U.S. Its 3.7 million square feet in New York City account for only 3 percent of the Big Apple’s Class A office space.

The Amazon effect has generated tremendous resentment. In a region famous for its reserved, sometimes passive-aggressive attitude. Amazonians aren’t harassed on the street. But they are pilloried in other forms, like a dystopian love letter from future Seattle, a bevy of hilarious comics depicting I-survived-totell-the-tale stories of working for the behemoth, and a satirical anti-Amazon newsletter that periodically appears pasted on light poles around Capitol Hill. Street protests against the Bay Area tech giants demonstrate that these feelings are shared by the residents of other crunchy, formerly funky cities being economically divided and culturally destroyed by the fast growth of tech. That’s why Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf expressed tepid interest in Amazon, saying, “we would need to address all outcomes a project of this magnitude would create.”

The eventual home of HQ2 may not experience the same shocks as Seattle did. Many poorer or depopulated older cities would gladly trade their problems for Seattle’s. A much bigger city might absorb 50,000 new employees without a change to the local vibe. A city that is already boring might not find its character under assault. A city with more robust mass transit may not find Amazon’s arrival generating so much more traffic and a city with a lot of vacant housing might not see prices reach astronomical levels. But like Cassandra, I must share the warning: Beware of tech CEOs bearing gifts.

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Whole Foods price cuts hit hardest at Trader Joe’s, Sprouts -study Los Angeles Trader Joe’s and Sprouts Farmers Market Inc have been hit hardest by customer defections since Amazon.com Inc cut prices at Whole Foods, a data analytics firm said on Tuesday. Amazon slashed prices on select items at Whole Foods on Aug. 28, the day it closed the $13.7 billion purchase of the premium grocer, a move widely expected to upend the food retail business. On that day, Whole Foods’ customer traffic spiked 31 percent from a year earlier, according to a Thasos Group analysis of location data from millions of mobile phone users. Traffic was up 17 percent during the full week after the price reductions and remained up 4 percent for the following week, ended Sept. 16. According to the Thasos data, 10 percent of Trader Joe’s regular customers visited Whole Foods between Aug. 28 and Sept. 3, more than any other competing chain, followed by Sprouts, with 8 percent. Although Trader Joe’s and Sprouts saw the greatest percentage of their customers visit Whole Foods, the biggest losers in terms of actual shoppers were Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Kroger Co, the leading U.S. grocery sellers with millions of customers.

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North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

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north STATEment Neal Robbins, publisher | Ray Nothstine, opinion editor

VISUAL VOICES

EDITORIAL | RAY NOTHSTINE

How the Reformation shaped modern freedoms For Protestants, ultimate authority shifted from Church hierarchy towards the Scriptures.

MANY CHRISTIAN DENOMINATIONS and churches across the world are nearing the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. October 31 marks the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to Castle Church door in Wittenburg, Germany in 1517. Debate over Scripture, conscience, and church authority ultimately launched a revolution that reshaped Western Civilization and ushered in the modern world. “The Protestant Reformation was one of the most far-reaching events of the last millennium.

It ended the millennium-old hegemony of the Catholic Church in Western Europe and altered political and economic fortunes wherever it reached,” declared professors Sascha O. Becker, Steven Pfaff and Jared Rubin.

At the forefront, the Protestant Reformation was mainly about theology with issues like justification by faith, grace, and a broader access to the Scriptures. However, Luther’s ideas and the larger Reformation heavily impacted civil society, government, and religious liberty. Even many secular publications and media outlets have labeled Luther one (if not the most) of the central figures of the millennia. When Luther proclaimed at the Diet of Worms that “Here I stand, I can do no other,” he helped to elevate the principles of individual conscience and unalienable rights.

Luther’s concept of the priesthood of all believers made the ordinary parishioner into a leader in the congregational life of the church. Bestowing royalty directly through Christ diminished some of the powers of the clergy, while strengthening the spiritual significance of vocation outside of the Church. Luther liked to remind his parishioners that it was a non-clergy member, Emperor Constantine, who called for the most important council in the history of the Church at Nicaea in 325. The priesthood of all believers concept too helped spread the ideas of representative government within the Church, which led to the dissemination of Democratic ideals across Europe and America. The government and administration of the church was no longer just for the clergy, but a solemn responsibility of the laity.

This eroded a belief in the divine right of monarchs.

“There is no King, but King Jesus,” a rallying cry in the

colonies during the American Revolution, had its roots in the Reformation.

One of the greatest impacts of the Reformation was the rise of literacy and education, particularly among children. Many of the modern concepts of preschools and the importance of early education grew out of the Reformation. Education of females increased immensely after the Reformation. The translation of the Bible into the vernacular was critical not just for knowing and learning about God, but cultivated a greater quest for knowledge in the world. For Protestants, ultimate authority shifted from Church hierarchy towards the Scriptures. Reformation emphasis on Sola Scriptura impacted the birth of the American Constitution, where a written document supersedes and limits the decrees of earthly leaders.

While the translation of the Bible and particularly the English Bible played a pivotal role in the whole framework of the equality of man, the Reformation too differs from modern concepts of rabid individualism and freedom.

While America is rapidly becoming more individualistic and secular, freedom to the Reformers did not mean a freedom of selfishness or hedonism. In their mind, freedom was oriented not towards the self, but towards God and serving the Church.

True freedom was cultivated and strengthened through responsibility and a virtuous life.

While traditional notions of family are withering away in American culture and society today, the Reformers helped to elevate the idea of the family, placing it on an equal plane to singleness and celibacy within the Church.

The Reformation and Scripture has played an indelible role in shaping American political culture and thought. And while many of its best ideas and influences are lost on America today, the good news is that we live in a land ripe for spiritual reform and renewal.

EDITORIAL | FRANK HILL

Tax reform should force money out of political campaigns Would I rather have all my income each year or the tax deduction I am afraid of losing?

CALL YOUR SENATOR and congressman and demand they close most tax loopholes in the U.S. tax code if you are upset about the level of money in political campaigns today.

Taking money out of politics is not the main reason to do tax reform. But it would be a nice benefit, wouldn’t it?

Why would true tax reform take money out of political campaigns?

Huge sums of campaign money come from people and lobbying organizations who want to protect their specific tax exemption, deduction or loophole in the current, stale and sclerotic federal tax code.

If Congress would lower overall tax rates and eliminate as many tax loopholes as humanly possible, the amount of PAC and special interest money flowing to candidates should fall precipitously as well.

In an ideal world where personal and corporate income taxes are replaced by, for example, a single simple consumption tax on billions of transactions made each day in America, there would be next to zero reason to send campaign money to support a candidate other than to keep the consumption tax as low as possible and support a particular political philosophy on one side or the other.

Much of today’s campaign contributions go to protect someone’s ox that might be otherwise be gored one day.

If you are one of the 44 million households that itemize tax returns, ask yourself the following question: “Would I rather have all my income each year or the tax deduction I am afraid of losing?”

Chances are your calculus would lead you into the consumption tax camp immediately overnight. You would be taxed on what you purchase, consume or transact every day; if you are frugal, your taxes will be minimal.

If you are like many professional athletes and buy $10 million mansions, you would pay much more in taxes than the average person. Spendthrifts would become the new top 1 percent when it comes to paying taxes.

There are literally thousands of examples of unfair anomalies in the current tax code due to preferential tax treatment.

In 1942, NFL owners got Congress to add the NFL and other professional sports organizations to the list of nonprofit entities such as the American Medical Association, Boy Scouts of America and hospitals, colleges and universities in the country that do important charitable work in local communities.

How the NFL ever was compared to the Little Sisters of the Poor in terms of contributions to society is beyond explanation.

What if the tax reform bill now under

consideration in Congress set into motion cosmic forces that one day soon led to the abolition of the income tax code in its entirety and replaced it with a simple pertransaction consumption tax?

No income tax would mean no reason to shelter your income no matter what size it is from federal taxation.

There would be no reason for any tax deductions, exemptions or breaks that are usually available only to the highest income earners in America anyway.

And, therefore, no reason for much of the money that goes into campaign spending each year.

A 10 percent per transaction consumption tax would most likely bring in the same amount of revenue as the current income tax without all of the Rubik’s Cube machinations and tax avoidance schemes we have concocted since 1913.

Possibly more since the current tax code shelters enough income to prevent close to $2 trillion of taxes annually from being paid to the federal treasury.

Every time a purchase is made from buying paperclips to a new stadium, each person, entity, company or organization would pay a 10 percent tax to the federal government at the time of purchase at the checkout counter or closing.

Tax reform in 2017 should be the beginning of tax reform going forward.

Not the end.

North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

A11

GUEST OPINION | JOHN E. SKVARLA III

WALTER WILLIAMS

Blacks vs. Police ET’S THROW OUT a few numbers so we can put in perspective the NFL L players taking a knee during the playing

ALEX GRICHENKO | ADOBE STOCK

Skyline of Uptown Charlotte.

Charlotte is Amazon’s answer Sadly, most places in North America don’t meet the criteria for HQ2.

IT’S BEEN CALLED THE OLYMPICS of the corporate world, Amazon Idol and the biggest economic development event in a generation. It’s thrown the economic development world into mayhem. It’s the race for HQ2.

Earlier this month, Amazon publicly announced it would be looking for potential locations to place their second, yet ‘equal’ corporate headquarters (HQ2) that will house as many as 50,000 new full-time employees, over the next 10 to 15 years. The $5 billion capital investment has just about every city, county, state (or province) salivating.

Sadly, most places in North America don’t meet the criteria for HQ2. Amazon is looking for: • Metropolitan areas with more than one million people.

• A stable and business-friendly environment.

• Urban or suburban locations with the potential to attract and retain strong technical talent.

• Communities that think big and creatively when considering locations and real estate options.

They are also interested in: • An urban or downtown campus.

• A similar layout to Amazon’s Seattle campus (which consists of 33 buildings, 24 restaurants/cafes and a total of 8.1 million square feet).

• Public transportation.

• A development-prepped site.

Know anywhere that fits the bill perfectly? I certainly do!

There have been hundreds of articles written about where HQ2 should, or should not, go— with every major North American city’s merits examined under the strongest of microscopes. In particular, one that has caught the attention of the masses is an article from The Upshot, a New York Times blog that uses data and graphics to simplify the news, where they circuitously conclude that Denver, Colorado is the answer to the HQ2 question.

The only problem? Based on Amazon’s businessmodel, Denver does not make any business-sense.

According to Ryan Boudinot, a former employee of the tech-behemoth, “Amazon is constitutionally designed to obsessively test itself and try new things.

And the company is constantly pitting one idea against another, in a process called A/B testing…

When the announcement came that Amazon would open not a satellite office, but a doppelganger HQ, my first thought was, ‘They’re going to A/B test the entire company.’

Keeping Amazon’s A/B testing or any reasonable business process in mind, would Denver, at just over 1,000 miles from Seattle, be an optimal place for HQ2? It certainly would not.

Here is what would make sense: a metropolitan area large enough to support two major league sports franchises, located within the East coast time zone.

Clear across the country from Seattle, Washington and significantly extending Amazon’s business hours and their ability to conduct business more easily in other parts of the world.

Just including this modicum of business sense narrows the playing field considerably.

Then by adding some of Amazon’s other criteria, the list grows considerably shorter. Where on the East coast can you find a city with over a million people, having public transportation, an incredibly strong pipeline of tech-savvy workers in a business-friendly environment and with a physical location that can accommodate ten million-square-feet of development?

The answer is obvious…

Charlotte, North Carolina.

And what really sets Charlotte apart? It’s not the beautiful North Carolina weather, close proximity to the mountains, recreational facilities, or even the restaurant, night life and burgeoning brewery scene.

It’s the people.

Charlotte sits at the end of a talent pipeline that funnels from North Carolina’s vast network of public, private and community colleges and universities (including the world-renowned Research Triangle). As if these factors were not enough, Charlotte has become a place where the nation’s top talent wants to locate.

With extremely high quality of life, reasonable housing prices, low tax rates and a fantastic international airport, Charlotte is importing the highest quality personnel daily.

The race for HQ2 barrels towards the October 19 RFP submission date and while who will win is yet undetermined, it becomes abundantly clear that Charlotte, North Carolina is the only realistic choice.

John E. Skvarla III is the former N.C. Secretary of Commernce and is a senior government relations advisor at Nexsen Pruet.

COLUMN | SUSAN ESTRICH

Where, oh, where, is Gen. Kelly?

What is he doing, the president of the United States, getting in the middle of this?

I FEEL LIKE YELLING at the screen: “Stop. Just stop.”

I have never felt this way about a president of the United States.

I used to like to listen to Ronald Reagan. Didn’t agree with him, but he had a way about him. And I was never actually afraid of Reagan.

I had a lot of bad thoughts about George W. Bush, but at no time did I want to yell at him. I might have said, “You’re wrong” or “Stop the war,” but I never said, “Just please, for once, stop!”

Why is the president of the United States fighting with the players of the NFL? What is he doing in a brawl with an unemployed free agent?

Why can’t he stop calling the leader of North Korea, who has nuclear weapons, names?

Where, oh, where, is Gen. John Kelly?

“It doesn’t matter,” my son says, taking the paper from me, telling me to change the channel — a realist in the “What can you do?” school, figuring that the market “has already accounted for it.”

Trump’s signature campaign issue, the repeal of Obamacare, is going down the tubes. Houston is still reeling; Florida is still a disaster. Puerto Rico is in

ruins. The president is watching television, thinking, “Who do these football players think they are?

Who does this guy in North Korea think he is? Don’t they know who I am?”

It is not that Trump is getting bad advice. His top aides were plainly so embarrassed about what he did that they (or those close to them) leaked that they had advised the president not to get in a game of North Korean name-calling before appearing at the UN, and he obviously chose to ignore their advice.

Because he could. Because he wanted to. Because he feels that those guys should respect the flag. (Well, the president should respect the First Amendment, but I digress.) Because he can’t shut up when it comes to this schoolyard brawl with a hot-tempered guy with nuclear weapons. No one is telling Trump to do this. They are telling him not to do this. They are telling him not to increase the risk, by even a tiny amount, of unspeakable horror. He gets on his smartphone, and he ignores them.

He ignores them all. He tweets what he wants.

He’s in the trenches with the NFL, demanding that the league

expel the players whose protests he disapproves of. Nuts. Just nuts.

What is he doing, the president of the United States, getting in the middle of this? Giving the players an even bigger audience, for sure. If only that were all.

“Lack of impulse control,” I think the shrinks call it. “Contain it,” we used to tell our kids sometimes — meaning that not every single thought or opinion is worth sharing, particularly when it will just provoke a useless fight. The older you get, the more important that becomes. A lifesaver, it is.

Saying that to Donald Trump is about as hard as anything.

Actually getting him to do it may be altogether impossible.

A cellphone can be a dangerous weapon when wielded by this president. Clearly, Gen. Kelly can’t get it away from Trump’s hands.

But it is not the most dangerous weapon at his disposal: Whether or not Gen. Kelly can keep that one away is the most terrifying thought of all.

Susan Estrich is an author and law professor, and was campaign manager for 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis.

of the national anthem. Many say they are protesting against police treatment of blacks and racial discrimination. We might ask just how much sense their protest makes.

According to The Washington Post, 737 people have been shot and killed by police this year in the United States. Of that number, there were 329 whites, 165 blacks, 112 Hispanics, 24 members of other races and 107 people whose race was unknown. In Illinois, home to one of our most dangerous cities — Chicago — 18 people have been shot and killed by police this year. In the city itself, police have shot and killed 10 people and shot and wounded 10 others. Somebody should ask the kneeling black NFL players why they are protesting this kind of killing in the Windy City and ignoring other sources of black death.

Here are the Chicago numbers for the ignored deaths. So far in 2017, there have been 533 murders and 2,880 shootings. On average, a person is shot every two hours and 17 minutes and murdered every 12 1/2 hours. In 2016, when Colin Kaepernick started taking a knee, Chicago witnessed 806 murders and 4,379 shootings. It turns out that most of the murder victims are black. Adding to the tragedy is the fact that Chicago has a 12.7 percent murder clearance rate. That means that when a black person is murdered, his perpetrator is found and charged with his murder less than 13 percent of the time.

Black support tends to go toward the criminals in the community rather than to the overwhelming number of people in the community who are law-abiding.

Similar statistics regarding police killing blacks versus blacks killing blacks apply to many of our predominantly black urban centers, such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, St. Louis and Oakland. Many Americans, including me, see the black NFL player protest of police brutality as pathetic, useless showboating. Seeing as these players have made no open protest against the thousands of blacks being murdered and maimed by blacks, they must view it as trivial in comparison with the police killings. Most of the police killings fit into the category of justified homicide.

NFL players are not by themselves.

How much condemnation do black politicians, civil rights leaders and liberal whites give to the wanton black homicides in our cities? When have you heard them condemning the very low clearance rate, whereby most black murderers get away with murder? Do you believe they would be just as silent if it were the Ku Klux Klan committing the murders?

What’s to blame for this mayhem? If you ask an intellectual, a leftist or an academic in a sociology or psychology department, he will tell you that it is caused by poverty, discrimination and a lack of opportunities. But the black murder rate and other crime statistics in the 1940s and ‘50s were not nearly so high as they are now. I wonder whether your intellectual, leftist or academic would explain that we had less black poverty, less racial discrimination and far greater opportunities for blacks during earlier periods than we do today.

He’d have to be an unrepentant idiot to make such an utterance.

So what can be done? Black people need to find new heroes. Right now, at least in terms of the support given, their heroes are criminals such as Baltimore’s Freddie Gray, Ferguson’s Michael Brown and Florida’s Trayvon Martin.

Black support tends to go toward the criminals in the community rather than to the overwhelming number of people in the community who are law-abiding.

That needs to end. What also needs to end is the lack of respect for and cooperation with police officers. Some police are crooked, but black people are likelier to be victims of violent confrontations with police officers than whites simply because blacks commit more violent crimes than whites per capita.

For a race of people, these crime statistics are by no means flattering, but if something good is to be done about it, we cannot fall prey to the blame games that black politicians, black NFL players, civil rights leaders and white liberals want to play. If their vision is accepted, we can expect little improvement of the status quo.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

A12 NEWS IN IMAGES

ILYA NAYMUSHIN | REUTERS

FEDERICO RIOS | REUTERS

SOE ZEYA TUN | REUTERS

Main, an aerial view shows a combine harvesting wheat in a field of the Iskra farm outside the Siberian village of Kulun, the Uzhursky district of Krasnoyarsk region, Russia.

Middle left, a rebel from Colombia’s Marxist National Liberation Army (ELN) poses for a photograph in the northwestern jungles, in Colombia. Middle right, a Shi’ite Muslim boy prays after he beat himself at a mosque during a religious festival marking Ashura, in central Yangon, Myanmar.

NOT ALL VODKA IS MADE FROM POTATOES SWEET POTATOES ARE VEGETABLES VEGETABLES ARE GOOD FOR YOU

— YOU’RE WELCOME Covington vodka is available in 750 mL and 1.75 L. covingtonvodka.com

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2017

New Hurricanes goalie Scott Darling in one of several players imported from Chicago to assist in Carolina’s quest to return to the postseason.

the Wednesday SIDELINE REPORT

SPORTS

The South side of Chicago

NFL

The Hurricanes’ ties to the Windy City run deep, and they’re hoping the Blackhawks’ winning pedigree rubs off in 2017-18

Trubisky is Bears new starting quarterback Mitch Trubisky, the second overall pick in the 2017 NFL Draft out of UNC, is the new No. 1 in Chicago. Trubisky replaces Mike Glennon, a former NC State quarterback, as the Bears’ signal-caller after Glennon had four turnovers in last Thursday’s 34-14 loss at Green Bay. Trubisky will become the third draft pick from this year’s draft to start at quarterback this season, joining Houston’s Deshaun Watson (Clemson) and Cleveland’s DeShone Kizer (Notre Dame).

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

WFU’s Serigne up for academic award Wake Forest senior tight end Cam Serigne is a finalist for the National Football Foundation’s Campbell Trophy, given each year to college football’s top scholar-athlete. Twelve to 14 finalists will be named Nov. 1, and each will receive an $18,000 postgraduate scholarship. The winner of the “Academic Heisman” will receive a $25,000 scholarship.

Serigne is the Demon Deacons’ all-time leader in touchdown receptions by a tight end (15) and has 136 catches for 1,627 yards in his career.

MLB

Braves GM resigns amid investigation Braves general manager John Coppolella resigned Monday due to a rules violation “regarding the international player market,” the team’s website said. Coppolella led the Braves the last two seasons — both 90-loss campaigns — and Atlanta team president John Hart will handle the GM duties while the team searches for a replacement.

By Cory Lavalette North State Journal

ROB KINNAN | USA TODAY SPORTS

NC State back Jaylen Samuels and the Wolfpack powered through Syracuse and will now host Louisville on Thursday in an ACC game.

NC State focuses on Louisville in short week Pack players give up Twitter to focus on visit from No. 17 Cardinals

By Shawn Krest North State Journal RALEIGH — Jaylen Samuels last tweeted on Sept. 27. Kentavius Street on Sept. 25. Darian Roseboro’s last tweet is from Sept. 30.

On Oct. 1, Nyheim Hines sent a quick retweet, and Kelvin Harmon posted, “Back to the lab again.”

Don’t expect to see much more from the Wolfpack over the next two days.

Louisville is coming to town.

“On Thursday night, we’ll have two top-25 teams fighting on national television,” said coach Dave Doeren, who last tweeted on Sept.

23. “I told them to get off social media and focus on the game plan.

We only have a couple days to learn

it, to get it right.”

No. 24 NC State is hosting No. 17 Louisville on a short week for both teams. Doeren opened his Monday press conference by saying, “Welcome to Wednesday of game week,” as the team scrambles to prepare for the defending Heisman Trophy winner in Cardinals’ quarterback Lamar Jackson.

“They’re a great team,” Doeren said. “Obviously, their Heisman quarterback is returning. He leads the ACC in total offense with 575 yards a game, 40 points, 300 yards passing. He also leads his team in rushing.”

Jackson torched the Wolfpack last season, passing for 355 yards and three touchdowns, while rushing for 76 yards and a score, doing most of his damage in the first half as the Cardinals built a 44-0 lead, en route to a 54-10 pounding of the See NC STATE, page B4

RALEIGH — Turn any direction in PNC Arena and you’ll see someone who has ties to the Chicago Blackhawks. In the Carolina Hurricanes’ dressing room, no less than six players have donned the iconic Indian-head logo.

Five of them won Stanley Cups there, each with varying roles in the Blackhawks’ three titles this decade.

It’s coincidence that the Hurricanes drafted a player, Czech forward Martin Necas, whose last name translates to “bad weather,” but the parade of players who have come from the Windy City has not been an accident.

“I don’t think you can ever have enough guys in your room with playoff experience, and more importantly playoff success,” general manager Ron Francis said on July 5, a day after he added the final piece of the offseason moves by adding another Blackhawks player, Marcus Kruger.

“You look at Marcus, he’s won two Stanley Cups, he’s won a World Championship. You look at Justin Williams: three Stanley Cups. You bring in (Trevor) van Riemsdyk and (Scott) Darling, and each won a Stanley Cup. So that’s seven Stanley Cups with those four guys alone coming into our locker room.”

The acquisition of Kruger was perhaps the most surprising addition. Everyone knew the Hurricanes needed a goalie — they got Darling. They craved veteran leadership — Williams returned to Carolina with two more rings on his knuckles.

“We think the guys we picked up this summer not only are very good hockey players, but very good people and proven winners.”

— Ron Francis, Hurricanes GM

See HURRICANES, page B4

JAMES GUILLORY | USA TODAY SPORTS

Carolina defensemen Trevor van Riemsdyk (57) is congratulated

by Marcus Kruger (16), Brock McGinn (23) and Joakim Nordstrom (42) following a preseason goal. All but McGinn are former Blackhawks.

INSIDE

NASCAR

Dale Jr. victory lap comes to Charlotte Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s retirement tour visits his home track in Concord this Sunday for the Bank of America 500 (2 p.m., NBC). Earnhardt Jr., who has never won a Cup points race at Charlotte in 34 tries, announced in April he would retire from full-time racing after this season.

JAMES GUILLORY | USA TODAY SPORTS

EAMON QUEENEY | NORTH STATE JOURNAL

Wake Forest dropped its first game of the season last weekend to Florida State, and an even tougher matchup awaits the Demon Deacons, who travel to Death Valley to play at No. 2 Clemson. All seven North Carolina FBS teams play this week, including Notre Dame visiting the Tar Heels in Chapel Hill and Duke hitting the road against Virginia. Charlotte, still looking for its first win, will host Marshall, while App State comes off their bye to play visiting New Mexico State. East Carolina also looks to turn its season around with a conference game against Temple in Greenville. Find out all you need to know about N.C.’s teams ahead of this week’s college football games. B3

North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

B2 WEDNESDAY

10.04.17

TRENDING

David Padgett: Welcome to coaching in the ACC! Padgett, a former Cardinals player with no head coaching experience, is the man who will guide Louisville basketball this season after Rick Pitino was removed from the team amid a scandal that rocked college basketball. Padgett, 32, played at Kansas and Louisville and became a Cardinals assistant in 2015. The 6-11 Padgett now takes the reins of a preseason top-10 team.

beyond the box score POTENT QUOTABLES

NFL

A week ago there were rumbles that Cam Newton may never get back to being Superman. That’s old news after the Carolina Panthers and their quarterback upset the New England Patriots on the road, 33-30, to move to 3-1 and into a tie with the Atlanta Falcons for first in the NFC South. Newton completed 22 of 29 passes for three touchdowns with one interception and also ran for 44 yards and a score.

MIKE DINOVO | USA TODAY SPORTS

“It seemed like everybody else stepped up their game and we didn’t.”

Monster Energy Cup driver Ryan Newman after he was eliminated from the series playoffs following a 13thplace finish at Dover.

Jaromir Jagr: The ageless future Hall of Famer will be back in the NHL this season after signing a one-year deal with the Calgary Flames, Jagr, 45, is second all-time in league scoring to Wayne Gretzky and will be playing for his ninth team and first in Canada. He played the last two seasons with the Florida Panthers. Jagr will make $1 million in base salary and could earn anohter $1 million in bonuses.

Dalvin Cook: The former Florida State running back did his best Adrian Peterson impersonation Sunday — and not the good one. Cook, the rookie who took Peterson’s place as the Minnesota Vikings’ featured back this season, tore his ACL on Sunday and is done for the year. Peterson tore his ACL in 2011 but rebounded to be league MVP the next year. The Vikings will hope for a similar recovery for Cook, but in the meantime Minnesota will rely on Latavious Murray as its primary ball carrier.

GREG M. COOPER | USA TODAY SPORTS

NHL

NASCAR

XXX | USA TODAY SPORTS

“Nothing about this was fun.”

Duke football coach David Cutcliffe after the Blue Devils’ 31-6 loss to Miami on Friday at Wallace Wade Stadium.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

575 Yards allowed by the ECU defense in the Pirates’ 6131 loss to South Florida.

It was the fewest yards East Carolina has given up this season. Both James Madison and West Virginia had 614 yards in the first two weeks of the season, then Virginia Tech hung 675 on the Pirates. In ECU’s only win of the year two weekends ago, UConn still managed 596 yards of offense. That is an average of 614.8 yards allowed through five games.

MATTHEW O’HAREN | USA TODAY SPORTS

RON CHENOY | USA TODAY SPORTS

It’s just three races into the Monster Energy Cup playoffs and Kyle Busch has his second win. Busch passed Chase Elliott late to claim the victory at the Apache Warrior 400 at Dover.

Busch still trails Martin Truex Jr. — who won the other postseason race — for the points lead heading in to this weekend’s race at Charlotte.

Vegas, baby! The NHL’s newest team, the Vegas Golden Knights, officially join the league Friday when they play their first regular season game in Dallas against the Stars. Vegas will have to wait until next Tuesday for its home opener, a matchup with another Southwestern squad, the Arizona Coyotes.

MLB

BOB DECHIARA | USA TODAY SPORTS

Major League Baseball’s postseason got underway late Tuesday with Twins at Yankees in the A.L. Wild Card game, while the Rockies and Diamondbacks are set to play Wednesday in the N.L. Wild Card.

The Indians await the winner in the A.L. play-in, while the Dodgers will get the N.L. Wild Card winner. The Red Sox and Astros open their series Thursday, and the Nationals host the defending champion Cubs in Game 1 of their series on Friday.

Always Dry. Always Comfortable.

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North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

B3

Notre Dame offers stiff challenge for struggling Tar Heels

By Brett Friedlander North State Journal CHAPEL HILL — Playing Notre Dame doesn’t have the same mystique it once did for ACC schools now that the Irish are a member of the league in most sports.

The exception is football.

That’s especially true at a place like North Carolina, which has hosted the most famous brand in college football only five times in its history and just once since 1960.

Even though the Tar Heels have fallen on hard times at 1-4 and are a double-digit underdog to the 16th-ranked Irish, there’s still a noticeable buzz in the air about Notre Dame’s visit to Kenan Stadium on Saturday.

“I’m sure our fans love it,” coach Larry Fedora said at his regular weekly press conference Monday.

“It will be great for Chapel Hill. It’s good for everybody.”

Maybe not everybody.

Given his team’s fragile mental state and the growing number of key players that aren’t available because of injury, Fedora has a lot more to worry about Saturday than Rockne, The Gipper, those shiny gold helmets or Touchdown Jesus.

“For us it’s the next game and we’ve got so much to worry about within ourselves right now, just making sure we’re right,” Fedora said. “We don’t have a lot of time to spend thinking about who our opponent is or what our opponent is.

“They’re traditionally a great program and everybody knows that. It’s a great opportunity for our team.”

UNC (1-4, 0-2 ACC) could use a win in the worst way after traveling to Atlanta and taking a 33-7

BRETT DAVIS | USA TODAY SPORTS

North Carolina head coach Larry Fedora is hoping to turn around the Tar Heels’ season with a win over Notre Dame on Saturday.

North Carolina vs. Notre Dame When Saturday, 3:30 p.m.

Where Kenan Memorial Stadium Watch ABC

pounding at the hands of Georgia Tech.

The problem is that Notre Dame (4-1) might be an even more challenging matchup than the Yellow Jackets because of their physical style and their ability to run the football.

The injury-riddled Tar Heels are allowing an average of 221.8 yards on the ground this season, second-worst in the ACC. The Irish, by contrast, rank seventh nationally in rushing at 301.4 yards per game with running back Josh Adams and quarterback

Brandon Wimbush combining for more than 1,000 yards between them already.

Unlike Georgia Tech, which rushed for 403 yards with its triple option attack last Saturday, Notre Dame also has the added element of a passing game that will make things exponentially more difficult for a UNC defense that will be without linebacker Andre Smith — the team’s top tackler — and starting defensive linemen Tyler Powell and Jalen Dalton, among others.

“You can’t use that as an excuse,” Fedora said of his team’s depleted ranks. “You’ve got to find a way to get it done. We’ve got to find a way. I don’t want to be close.

I don’t want any moral victories. I want our guys to find a way to get over the hump and that’s my job.”

As if coming up with a plan for stopping the other team isn’t a tall enough task, Fedora and his staff now also find themselves searching for ways to kick-start an offense that came within five minutes of getting shut out for the first

time in Fedora’s coaching career.

The Tar Heels averaged 39.3 points in their first three games — close losses to California and Louisville, and their only win to date, on the road against Old Dominion — but have fallen off drastically since.

While Fedora has scaled back the playbook to help make things easier for redshirt freshman quarterback Chazz Surratt, the coach said his team’s recent offensive struggles are more the result of execution rather than poor offensive line play or a receiving corps that has lost three top targets for the season.

“There’s enough in the game plan to be successful,” Fedora said.

“It’s not that we’re so limited that there’s no way we can be successful. It’s just execute the plays that are called against the defense you see.”

Officially, UNC will be seeking only its second win in 20 all-time meetings with Notre Dame. The Tar Heels’ only victory in the series was a 12-7 triumph in Chapel Hill in 1960, although they also beat the Irish 29-24 at Kenan in a 2008 game that was vacated as part of the NCAA sanctions placed on the program during the tenure of former coach Butch Davis.

Though the odds are against the current team pulling off a similar result — one that counts, this time — beating a team with the stature of Notre Dame could be just what UNC needs to kick-start a season on the verge of flying off the rails.

“There’s a lot of ball games left to be played,” center Cam Dillard said after Saturday’s loss at Georgia Tech. “That’s why we practice, that’s why we have rosters and why we have depth charts, so that guys are ready to roll.”

Duke tries to shake off Miami loss for tough Virginia matchup Blue Devils have to work out offensive problems

By Shawn Krest North State Journal DURHAM — Duke head coach David Cutcliffe summed up his team’s attitude after last Friday’s 31-6 home loss to Miami.

“No fun,” Cutcliffe said after the game. “Nothing about this was fun.”

The team saw its 4-0 start to the season go up in smoke, while the offense faced difficult questions after scoring the fewest points at home of the David Cutcliffe era.

The offense has struggled at other times this season, including the previous week against North Carolina, but the Daniel Jones-led unit hit a new low in the Miami game.

“Last week, it was a little bit more schematic,” Cutcliffe said simply. “This week it was a little bit more getting whipped.”

Duke now needs to lick its wounds and try to make adjustments while traveling to Charlottesville, to face a vastly improved

Virginia team. The Cavaliers have already exceeded last season’s win total, and that 2-10 team managed to beat Duke in Durham.

One area that Cutcliffe wasn’t concerned was the Blue Devils’ attitude heading on the road. He doesn’t expect anyone to be hanging their heads after the Miami loss.

“I believe this team will fight anybody and everybody it plays,” Cutcliffe said. “I like their spirit, and I like their attitude. … This team has got some character, some guts and some toughness. They’re not backing down from work, and they’re not backing down from having a special season.”

Proving his point was linebacker Joe Giles-Harris. The sophomore led the team in tackles last year and is the leading tackler again so far this season, with 43.

He’s also added 6.5 tackles for loss, 2.5 sacks, an interception and a pass breakup, while setting the tone for the hard-hitting defense.

“I thought, for the biggest part of the (Miami) game, we were the most physical team on the field,” Cutcliffe said.

After the loss, Giles-Harris was asked about the benefit of playing

MARK DOLEJS | USA TODAY SPORTS

Duke needs quarterback Daniel Jones and the Blue Devils offense to step up.

Duke at Virginia When Saturday, Oct. 7, 12:20 p.m.

Where Scott Stadium Watch ACC Network

Friday night, and getting an extra day’s rest before heading to Virginia.

He was having none of the “look at the bright side” question, however.

“At the end of the day, you have to be ready to play,” Giles-Harris said. “If we have to play tomorrow, we have to play tomorrow.

You have to get in the right mental

state of mind, get your body right and go. This is business. That’s all it is.”

Cutcliffe will spend part of the week making sure the team puts the loss into perspective.

“As I look at our team, we’re 4-1,” he said. “We know there are a lot of things we have to do better, and we can. We said that before the game. Those opportunities still exist.”

He won’t find an unreceptive audience in Giles-Harris.

“My dad always told me, ‘Yesterday is yesterday. What are you going to do tomorrow?’ What happens down the road is what we can control,” Giles-Harris said.

“What we can do is put five behind us, knowing we’ve won four of them,” Cutcliffe continued.

“We’re 4-1. It beats the heck out of being something else.”

Wake Forest travels to Death Valley a week after FSU loss

By Brett Friedlander North State Journal When you’re the coach of an ACC football team and the league schedule makers decide to have you playing heavyweights Florida State and Clemson in back-to-back weeks, you can either get angry or look at it the way Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson did Tuesday.

“I’m not sure the last time someone had to play Florida State and Clemson back-to-back,” he said. “I want to thank the ACC office for thinking that we are a team capable of doing that.”

Clawson was being sarcastic, of course. But the fact of the matter is, unfavorable scheduling aside, his Deacons have progressed far enough over his first three-and-a-half seasons as their coach to believe they can handle such a daunting task.”

Wake came within an eyelash of knocking off the Seminoles at home last Saturday, outgaining them by more than 100 yards, recording five sacks and leading almost the entire game before finally falling 26-19 on a 40-yard touchdown pass with less than a minute remaining.

Though the Deacons (4-1, 1-1 ACC) might not have made the statement they wanted when it let FSU off the hook in a game it could easily and probably should have won, it sure did get Dabo Swinney’s attention.

The Clemson coach warned his defending national champions and anyone else who would listen Tuesday not take the unheralded Deacons lightly when the ACC Atlantic Division rivals meet at Death Valley.

He said doing so could have damaging consequences to the Tigers’ hopes of getting back to college football’s playoff for the third straight season.

“This is a very, very good football team and if anybody says otherwise they have no clue what they are talking about,” Swinney said at his weekly press conference. “We have not played and will not play another team that plays as hard as this Wake Forest team.”

As the Deacons learned against FSU, though, playing hard isn’t enough when facing a nationally elite opponent.

It also takes execution, especially in the red zone, where Wake settled for two early field goals instead of touchdowns against the Seminoles.

As well as the Deacons played, they left the door open for their opponent by turning the ball over twice, missing an extra point and allowing a long kickoff return that negated both their momentum and a 10-point lead. And FSU was only too happy to take advantage, thanks to one costly late-game breakdown in pass coverage.

The task of staying focused will get even more difficult this week in what promises to be a hostile environment at Death Valley.

Though there’s no comparison between Clemson’s home field and App State’s Kidd Brewer Stadium, offensive tackle Phil Haynes believes the experience of already having played in front of an unfriendly crowd once this season will help the Deacons know what to expect when things get loud Saturday.

He also thinks it’s an advantage not an obstacle to be playing Clemson the week after Florida State.

“There are a lot of good defenses in the ACC but they’re by far the best two,” Haynes said. “Having them back-toback is great for us as far as preparation and going out there and playing Florida State and looking at the film and correcting our technique. They’re pretty much the same teams talent-wise.”

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

App State vs. New Mexico State

East Carolina vs. Temple

Charlotte vs. Marshall

Kidd Brewer Stadium Saturday, 2:30 p.m. | ESPN3

Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium Saturday, noon | ESPNU

Jerry Richardson Stadium Saturday, 6 p.m. | WCCB TV-Charlotte

Preview: The Mountaineers (2-2, 1-0 Sun Belt) come off a bye week looking to rebound from a one-point loss to Wake Forest. This will be the second ever meeting between these new conference foes. App State beat the Aggies (2-3, 0-1) in Las Cruces last season.

Preview: Something’s got to give when the worst defense in the AAC goes up against the league’s worst offense. ECU (1-4, 1-1 AAC) ranks 128th out of 129 FBS teams nationally allowing 50.6 points per game. Temple (2-3, 0-2) has managed an average of just 16.2 points.

Preview: The road team has won each of the previous two matchups in this series, with Charlotte winning 27‑24 at Marshall last year, and the Herd winning 34-10 in Charlotte in 2015.

Players to watch: App State’s Taylor Lamb ranks second among active QBs nationally with 213 pass attempts without an interception. He is three TD passes away from Armanti Edwards’ school career record of 74. Aggies WR Jaleel Scott set career highs with nine catches and 174 receiving yards with a TD in last week’s 42-24 loss to Arkansas.

Players to watch: In two games since returning from ECU’s concussion protocol, QB Thomas Sirk has completed 50 of 82 passes for 728 yards and five touchdowns. He’s also rushed for 118 yards and two scores during that stretch. Temple CB Mike Jones, a graduate transfer from NC Central, had an interception in the season opener against Notre Dame and six tackles last week against Houston.

Fast fact: By forcing three-and-outs on 51.1 percent of its possessions, the Mountaineers rank third at the FBS level. They have forced 24 three-and-outs on 47 defensive possessions. Only Michigan (56.6) and Georgia Tech (51.4) are better.

What to expect: App State is a double-digit favorite and should take care of business as it sets its sights on a Sun Belt title.

— Brett Friedlander

Fast fact: ECU is one of four FBS teams with three receivers with at least 100 catches — Davon Grayson (105), Quay Johnson (101) and Jimmy Williams (100).

The others: Colorado, Oklahoma and Washington State.

What to expect: Temple is a 2½-point favorite, but if there’s an opponent that can help cure what ails ECU’s porous defense, it’s the offensively challenged Owls.

— Brett Friedlander

Players to watch: Marshall tight end Ryan Yurachek had a big game against Cincinnati, scoring three times.

The Mackey Award candidate has now caught a pass in 33 straight games. Linebacker Karrington King came to Charlotte as a walk-on. He’s now the program’s all-time career leader in tackles.

Fast fact: With this game, Marshall has now played as many games in North Carolina this season as in its home state of West Virginia. The Herd visited NC State in September and has had just two home games.

What to expect: The 49ers are still looking for their first win of the season. They came tantalizingly close last week, losing a 15-point second half lead to drop a 30-29 heartbreaker at FIU. It will be tough to get well against Marshall, who has won by 21 and 17 since the NC State loss.

— Shawn Krest

North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

B4

NC STATE from page B1

Three Hurricanes rookies earn roster spots Martin Necas and Haydn Fleury, former first-round picks, and 2016 secondrounder Janne Kuokkanen will all start 2017-18 with Carolina

By Cory Lavalette North State Journal RALEIGH — The Carolina Hurricanes officially broke camp Tuesday, required by the NHL to submit a roster before the league’s 5 p.m. deadline. The No. 6 defenseman’s job was rookie Haydn Fleury’s to lose entering camp, and he held on.

But not many expected two more rookies to still be on roster on Oct. 4.

Martin Necas, Carolina’s 12th overall pick in this summer’s NHL draft, will at least get a sniff of the NHL life thanks to a mysterious injury to veteran Lee Stempniak.

Stempniak has been absent from camp with a vague ailment that coach Bill Peters says the team is still trying to figure out.

With Stempniak out at least 10 days to two weeks, according to Peters, the door opened for Necas and he stormed through, showing off his speed and hands — all while conveniently being a right-handed shot, the same as Stempniak.

“He’s probably from Day 1 to now been better than what we would have anticipated, but we gotta make sure we’re doing the right thing,” Peters said of Necas. The 18-yearold Czech is a natural center, but moving to the right wing eases the defensive pressure that comes with playing center.

“The right thing” is making sure Necas isn’t rushed or overwhelmed with the early opportunity. The team still forecasts him as a center, and he will need development time there to grow into that role.

Enter Kuokkanen, also a rookie but more polished than Necas with a season in the Ontario Hockey League playing on the North American-sized rinks under his belt.

While Kuokkanen, also a center and projected there down the road, is a left-handed shot, Peters said the Finn prefers to play his off wing when not in the middle, making him a candidate for the spot vacated

by Stempniak.

“Those guys have done a lot through the preseason and have played very well,” Peters said of his rookie forwards. “I think they’ve earned the respect of their teammates with their quality of play.

Guys like playing with them because they’re intelligent players who make plays.”

Both players are eligible for reassignment to the AHL, though Necas could also report to the OHL’s Saginaw Spirit — who selected him in

PERRY NELSON | USA TODAY SPORTS

Hurricanes rookie forward Martin Necas earned a spot on Carolina’s opening roster following training camp.

the league’s Import Draft — or be returned to the Czech professional league if Carolina chooses. If Necas plays 10 games in the NHL it would burn the first year of his three-year entry-level contract. He could, however, play up to nine and be assigned to Saginaw or returned to the Czech Republic and not accrue a year of service, essentially resetting him to first-year status.

Peters also said Tuesday that, barring catastrophe, newcomer Scott Darling would be his opening night starter in goal Saturday against the Wild. It will mark the first time since 2005 that Cam Ward, Carolina’s other goaltender, did not earn the Game 1 start.

Ward, then a rookie, did play in that game against the Lightning on Oct. 5, 2005, relieving an injured Martin Gerber in a 5-2 loss.

“I’m real excited for Saturday,” Darling said 20 minutes before Peters announced his decision.

Carolina Hurricanes October Schedule Date Opponent Time Oct. 7 Oct. 10 Oct. 14 Oct. 17 Oct. 19 Oct. 21 Oct. 24 Oct. 26 Oct. 27 Oct. 29

Minnesota Columbus at Winnipeg at Edmonton at Calgary at Dallas Tampa Bay at Toronto St. Louis Anaheim

7 p.m.

7 p.m.

7 p.m.

9 p.m.

9 p.m.

8 p.m.

7 p.m.

7 p.m.

7:30 p.m.

5 p.m.

Carolina Hurricanes Roster FORWARDS No. Name 7 Derek Ryan 11 Jordan Staal 14 Justin Williams 16 Marcus Kruger 19 Josh Jooris 20 Sebastian Aho 21 Lee Stempniak^ 23 Brock McGinn 28 Elias Lindholm 42 Joakim Nordstrom 49 Victor Rask 53 Jeff Skinner 59 Janne Kuokkanen* 86 Teuvo Teravainen 88 Martin Necas*

Position C/W C RW C RW RW RW LW C/W LW C LW C/W LW C/W

4 5 6 22 27 57 74

Haydn Fleury* Noah Hanifin Klas Dahlbeck Brett Pesce Justin Faulk Trevor van Riesmdyk Jaccob Slavin

D D D D D D D

30 33

Cam Ward Scott Darling

G G

221 206 207 200 215 188 205

6-1 6-6

185 232

*rookie; ^ injured reserve

All October games on Fox Sports Carolinas

track.

This weekend’s stop at Charlotte Motor Speedway for the Bank of America 500 (Sunday, 2 p.m., NBC) — the first of three races in the second round of the playoffs — would seem to favor

seven-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson. Johnson, currently fifth in points, has a series-best eight wins in Concord in 32 career races, and has seven other top-fives to go with his victories.

Kevin Harvick has three wins

in Concord, and each of Truex, Carl Edwards and Brad Keselowski have won at Charlotte once in their careers. Kyle Busch is looking for his first Cup win there, but has 11 top-five finishes in 27 trips.

Charlotte has been kind to others, as well. Jamie McMurray has seven career points wins, and two each have come at Talladega — the second race of this playoff round in two weekends — and in Concord.

However Charlotte will be kindest to racing’s most popular driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr. The North Carolina native announced earlier this year that this season will be his last as a full-time driver, and this stop in Concord will be a celebration of No. 88’s career.

Earnhardt Jr. finished seventh at Dover last weekend, his first top 10 since a sixth-place finish at Sonoma on June 25. He won at Charlotte for the NASCAR AllStar Race in 2000, but has never won a points race there.

After Talladega, the series will shift to Kansas for another elimination race. Johnson is again the all-time leader in wins there, tied with retired Jeff Gordon with three, with Harvick and Kenseth each two-time winners.

is very dialed in on the bench, very intense in games. And that intesity (rubs) off.”

And the transition for Kruger and other former Blackhawks is made easier by the former teammates in the room. Kruger has already teamed up with Joakim Nordstrom, another Chicago Cup winner, on the fourth line and the penalty kill. He looks across the locker room and sees Darling, van Riemsdyk and even Klas Dahlbeck, a draft pick of the Hawks in 2011. To his left a few stalls down are Teuvo Teravainen and Nordstrom.

“I go way back with Joakim, playing with my younger broth-

er and having my dad as a coach, so it goes a long way back,” Kruger said. “And obviously playing with him in Chicago, too. It’s good to see some familiar faces here around and playing with a lot of these guys before.”

Van Riemsdyk obviously knew his former Blackhawks teammates, but also a couple others.

“I know Brett Pesce very well,” he said of his former collegiate teammate at New Hampshire.

“And Noah [Hanifin], I met him for a month out in Germany.”

But with the start of the season just days away, the focus has shifted from pleasantries to preparation.

Teravainen, now in his second season in Carolina, looks more comfortable this time around.

He had five points in three preseason games, including four points on the power play. When “Turbo” wasn’t out with there — he missed a game and a couple practices due to injury, but should be ready for Saturday’s opener — the power play was noticeably less potent.

Darling battled some bumps and bruises of his own in camp, but allowed just three goals in 120 minutes of work in his two starts.

Peters hasn’t been willing to publicly name the 6-6 goalie his starter over veteran Cam Ward yet, but

By Cory Lavalette North State Journal

Adding van Riemsdyk solidified the third pairing on defense.

That could have been enough.

However bringing on Kruger — who, like van Riemsdyk, was a brief on-paper member of the new Vegas Golden Knights — was the cherry on top of Francis showing he was serious about putting an end to Carolina’s eight-season playoff drought, the longest in the NHL. Coach Bill Peters has already noticed the difference in how his team carries itself.

“I see it on the ice,” Peters said.

“Krugs is a competitive guy. Krugs

6-3 6-3 6-3 6-3 6-0 6-2 6-3

GOALIES

Martin Truex Jr., Kyle Busch lead the way into second round of postseason

HURRICANES from page B1

Wt. 170 220 188 186 197 172 195 185 192 189 200 200 188 178 167

DEFENSE

Cup playoffs visit Charlotte

Three of the 10 playoff races in the Monster Energy Cup Series playoffs are in the books, and four of the original 16 drivers battling for the title were eliminated after last weekend’s race at Dover.

Richard Childress Racing drivers Ryan Newman and Austin Dillon were each knocked out, along with Kasey Kahne and Kurt Busch, but the story of the first threerace segment was Martin Truex Jr. and Kyle Busch.

Truex opened the playoffs reminding everyone who dominated the regular season, winning at Chicagoland. The younger Busch, Kyle, responded at New Hampshire with a win, then doubled-down by taking the checkered at Dover on Truex’s home

Ht. 5-11 6-4 6-1 6-0 6-1 5-11 5-11 6-0 6-1 6-1 6-2 5-11 6-1 5-11 6-1

BRIAN FLUHARTY | USA TODAY SPORTS

Kyle Busch (18) and Martin Truex Jr. (78) have been the drivers to beat three races into the Monster Energy Cup playoffs. Sunday the tour visits Charlotte.

Pack.

Doeren worried last week about how to motivate his players to play a Syracuse team that NC State had beaten the year before. Clearly, last year’s game should provide plenty of ammunition for him as he shows the team lowlights in the film room this week.

“I don’t think we’ll have to show them any of it,” Doeren said. “Not to take anything away from Louisville, because they beat us, but we didn’t play well at all in that game.”

The Wolfpack had lost a heartbreaker to Clemson, after nearly derailing the Tigers’ national championship season in Death Valley, the week before.

State missed a late field goal that would have given it the victory, only to see Clemson win in overtime. The team then dwelt on the loss, allowing Clemson to beat the Pack twice.

“We were still not over what happened the week before,” Doeren said. “Whether that would’ve changed outcome or not, we’ll never know. Our players have a bad taste in their mouth from how we played.

It wasn’t our best coaching. It wasn’t our best playing. We’re playing against a team that’s gotten best of us the last three times we’ve played them. I don’t think last year’s film is needed to motivate our team.”

To avoid dwelling on a game like last year’s Clemson loss, this year the team has preached a “24-hour rule.” The players and coaches agreed to forget about the previous game after a full day, in order to focus on the next challenge. It came in handy following the win at Florida State, when the Wolfpack was able to refocus and fend off Syracuse the following week.

The rule, and the team’s maturity, have helped NC State avoid distractions.

“We’re an experienced football team,” Doeren said. “We’ve never had that before. In the past, we were building a program. In a lot of cases, we were playing sophomores and freshmen. That’s not what we have this year. So we haven’t paid any attention to negatives or positives. We’ve focused ourselves on the task at hand.”

“I’ve been impressed with our preparation for every game this year,” Doeren continued, “whether we’re playing Furman or Florida State. I just think they’ve bought into the process.”

The process gets a bit of a tweak during this short week.

Doeren has had to make a bit of an adjustment to the 24-hour rule.

“They get 12 hours, this week,” Doeren said, “or maybe it’s the eight-hour rule. I told the team, ‘You don’t get 24 hours for this one.’ We’ve already two days removed (from the week).”

Not that the players needed much coaxing to forget about the Syracuse win and focus on the ESPN Thursday Night game against Louisville. The switch in mindset came almost immediately after the game, in the locker room.

“You could feel it,” Doeren said. “I told the guys how proud I was of them, but you could feel immediately how excited they were for the next matchup.”

They were excited enough to be willing to give up Twitter, at least for a few days.

NC State vs. Louisville When Thursday, Oct. 5, 8 p.m.

Where Carter-Finley Stadium Watch ESPN

it seems like a foregone conclusion.

And Peters — himself a former head coach of the Blackhawks’ AHL affiliate in Rockford from 2008-11 — is brimming with optimism much like he has in each of the last three Octobers in Raleigh.

This time, though, pundits near and far seem to agree with him that the Hurricanes are a playoff contender, thanks in part to the Blackhawks-turned-Hurricanes dotting Carolina’s roster.

“Expectations are good,” Peters said back on the third day of camp.

“I’d rather have high expectations than none at all.”

The Hurricanes have them. Now it’s time to prove they’re worthy.

WEDNESDAY

10.04.17

NORTH

STATE

JOURNaL

Rest in peace, Tom Petty, Page 7

the good life IN A NORTH STATE OF MIND

play list

Oct. 6-7 42nd Annual Selma Railroad Days Festival Selma The 42nd Selma Railroad Days offers something for everyone in the family. Enjoy three stages of free, live entertainment, many vendor booths with a variety of offerings, a model train display, 5K road race, children’s area and cornhole tournament.

Oct. 6-8 N.C. Seafood Festival Morehead City Celebrating 31 years, the festival offers free local and regional entertainment, a 8K road race, sailing events, surf and pier fishing contests, Blessing of the Fleet on Sunday, SasSea’s Island playground for children, a boat show, vendors, fireworks, amusement rides and lots of seafood.

Oct. 7

PHOTO COURTESY OF NC SEAFOOD FESTIVAL

Eastern NC celebrates seafood

By Laura Ashley Lamm North State Journal MOREHEAD CITY — From Currituck to Southport, crabs, shrimp, flounder and more are sprinkled in the waters off North Carolina’s coast. It’s no secret the Old North State loves its share of fishing, sailing and seafood.

But for more than three decades, one celebration in Morehead City reigns supreme for celebrating the phenomenon — the North Carolina Seafood Festival.

“The fishing industry is America’s first industry, so here in North Carolina we take great pride in sharing and celebrating our history with attendees who visit us from all across the world,” said Stephanie McIntyre, executive director of North Carolina Seafood Festival.

“This year we celebrate our 31st North Carolina Seafood Festival.

We look forward to another year of showcasing North Carolina’s fishing industry while hosting events and activities that display our fresh seafood, rich culture and beautiful Morehead City waterfront.”

Beginning at noon on Friday, Oct. 6, and concluding at 5 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 9, the Seafood Festival has an array of activities planned for people of all ages.

Weekend favorites among the more than 180,000 attendees include the Blessing of the Fleet, which includes a religious service blessing the commercial fishing boats from across the state; the Southern Outer Banks Boat Show; the Family Fishing Tournament; the Twin Bridges 8K Road Race; Cooking with the Chefs Tent; Miss North Carolina kissing the ceremonial fish; concerts, shopping, rides and much more.

Festivalgoers are asked to drop their anchors at the inaugural Port of Pours Beer Tasting event which features 53 tastings from 16 craft breweries, 31 of which are North Carolina beers, on the Morehead City waterfront on Saturday.

“While the North Carolina Seafood Festival is steeped in tradition, we also believe in keeping things fresh by adding new events and attractions for our attendees,” said McIntyre. “We are excited to announce the inaugural Port of

40th Annual Brushy Mountain Apple Festival North Wilkesboro Downtown streets are filled with more than 425 arts and craft vendors, 100 food concessions, and four different music stages featuring a variety of music. Cloggers, folk dancers, rope skippers and square dancers provide additional entertainment venues for festivalgoers.

Appalachian Heritage crafts are highlighted, including woodcarving, chair making, soap making, pottery throwing and quilting. Local apple growers will be set up throughout the festival selling their apples, apple cider and dried apples. The festival pays tribute to the fruit grown and harvested each fall by regional apple orchardists.

Oct. 7-8

PHOTO COURTESY OF NC SEAFOOD FESTIVAL

Pours event, which we anticipate will continue to grow over time to include new craft breweries and expand in footprint.

“We have been dreaming of this concept for the past two years and I can guarantee that no detail has been overlooked,” McIntyre continued. “We look forward to toasting to 31 years of Seafood Fest while also raising our glass to the newest festival addition — Port of Pours!”

While attendance to the festival is free, this event will cost patrons $30 in advance or $35 at the door. The fee includes unlimited samples of craft beer.

Breweries from around the state and nation are well-represented in this lineup. For a list of participating breweries and their respective brews, along with ticket information, visit ncseafoodfestival.org.

The Seafood Festival will also welcome back the Challenge Butter “Dine, Relax & Taste” Caye, the popular spot where guests can relax and sample delicious dishes made by talented local chefs.

Seaside Creations caterer Sara Willis and chef Anthony Garnett of Blue Ocean Market will be showing attendees how to

prepare quick and easy appetizers, side dishes and sauces using Challenge Butter products and North Carolina-caught seafood.

Continuing with the ability to have chefs showcase seafood includes the crowd favorite, Cooking with the Chef’s Challenge, sponsored by Food Lion. In this challenge, two chefs compete cooking a secret seafood before a live audience. The two highest scores overall will advance to compete in the final competition and an ultimate winner will be announced.

The N.C. Seafood Festival is a nonprofit organization supported by Carteret County citizens, business leaders and the Town of Morehead City. The organization was designed with six principles in mind: to promote the social and economic impact of the seafood industry; to educate the public; to publicize the variety of seafood; to boost tourism in nonsummer months; to establish a scholarship program; and to provide an opportunity for other nonprofit groups to raise funds through participation in the festival. Since 1987, more than $1.8 million has been dispersed among participating Carteret County nonprofit groups.

Dates:

Friday, Oct. 6, noon to 11 p.m.

Saturday, Oct. 7, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Sunday, Oct. 8, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Schedule of Events:

www.ncseafoodfestival.org

Social Media Handles:

Instagram - @ncseafoodfest Twitter - @ncseafoodfest Facebook - @ Northcarolinaseafoodfestival Snapchat - NcSeafoodFest

Festival Hashtag: #NCSeafoodFest

Riverfest Wilmington Join in celebrating Wilmington’s Annual Riverfest on the beautiful Cape Fear riverfront. This festival includes a street fair with special exhibits along with vendors selling art and handmade crafts, competitions, fireworks, and more than 30 food vendors. Enjoy a car show, continuous live entertainment showcasing local musicians and bands, and see the second annual Miss Riverfest crowned as the festival’s ambassador.

45th Annual Asheboro Fall Festival Asheboro This popular combination street fair, harvest celebration and homecoming is held annually in downtown Asheboro and offers a variety of quality arts and crafts, demonstrations, children’s crafts, food and live music.

Oct. 8 Bank of America 500 Concord Sparks will fly and as the playoff intensity heats up with the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series’ Bank of America 500, NASCAR’s fall classic.

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North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

NeCessities! history marked Oct. 2, 1961

The Battleship North Carolina arrives in Wilmington

taking the crown Miss Asheville USA crowned Miss N.C. USA 2018

The Battleship North Carolina came to Wilmington on this day in 1961. The mighty ship opened to the public just a couple of weeks later. At the time of her commissioning on April 9, 1941, she was considered the world’s greatest sea weapon. During World War II, North Carolina participated in every major naval offensive in the Pacific area of operations and earned 15 battle stars. The battleship survived many close calls and near misses with one hit when a Japanese torpedo slammed into the battleship’s hull on Sept. 15, 1942. A quick response on the part of the crew allowed the mighty ship to keep up with the fleet. By war’s end, the battleship lost only 10 men in action and had 67 wounded. After serving as a training vessel for midshipmen, North Carolina was decommissioned in 1947. In 1958 the announcement of her impending scrapping led to a statewide campaign by citizens of North Carolina to save the ship and bring her back to namesake state. The campaign included a special effort among North Carolina’s school children, and of the 1.1 million children in school at the time, 700,000 gave at least a dime. The battleship remains there today, standing sentinel in the Cape Fear River, one of 27 State Historic Sites.

By NSJ Staff

Oct. 2, 1894

State School for the Deaf opened in Morganton The North Carolina School for the Deaf opened with 104 students and eight teachers. The first superintendent was Edward McKee Goodwin, who served in that position until his death in 1937. A statesupported school for the deaf and blind was first proposed in 1816, but no provision was made for such an institution until the 1840s when Gov. John Motley Morehead took up the cause. In 1844, the legislature appropriated $5,000 for the school and, the following year, the Governor Morehead School was established in Raleigh to teach the deaf, dumb and blind. By 1890, a movement was afoot to create a separate school for the deaf to alleviate overcrowding at the Raleigh campus. Morganton civic leaders organized by Samuel McDowell Tate sought the new school, offering the state $5,000 and 100 acres on “Spa Hill,” a picturesque hilltop setting on the outskirts of town.

Construction began in 1891. The monumental Main Building was the first to be erected and still dominates the campus today. Today, the North Carolina School for the Deaf campus in Morganton has 19 buildings and students in kindergarten through 12th grade. An eastern campus opened in Wilson in 1964.

PHOTO OF MISS N.C. USA CAELYNN MILLER-KEYES BY RYAN MILES

HIGH POINT — Caelynn Miller-Keyes was crowned Miss North Carolina USA and Kaaviya Sambasivam was crowned Miss North Carolina Teen USA on Sept. 30 at the High Point Theatre.

Miller-Keyes is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism. She is currently employed at Windy Gap, where she mentors young girls.

“My goal as Miss North Carolina USA is to continue improving Title IX policies for sexual assault survivors,” said the new Miss N.C. USA. “I want to empower women to speak up should they be victimized, and to learn the power of forgiveness. I was able to gain my power back and heal after forgiving my attackers.”

Sambasivam is a freshman at the University of Georgia, pursuing a double-major in business and psychology. As an Indian-American, she hopes to become a civil rights attorney. “I am proud to be a representative for diversity in pageantry as Miss North Carolina Teen USA. My goal for this year is to inspire other young ladies to break boundaries, defy stereotypes and blossom into the best versions of themselves,” said the teen titleholder.

Miller-Keyes will represent North Carolina in the nationally televised production of Miss USA, and Sambasivam will represent the state in the Miss Teen USA Pageant.

raise your glass for National Vodka Day More vodka options in North Carolina: Doc Porter’s Distillery, Charlotte Durham Distillery, Durham First Flight Vodka, Greenville Fainting Goat Spirits, Greensboro Seven Jars Distillery, Charlotte

Oct. 3, 1900

Famed writer Thomas Wolfe is born in Asheville Famed writer from Asheville Thomas Wolfe was born in 1900. Wolfe attended public schools in Asheville for seven years while living in his mother’s boardinghouse with the rest of his family. Growing up in Asheville formed the basis for his thinly-veiled autobiographical novel “Look Homeward, Angel,” which was published in 1929. Asheville residents easily recognized themselves in the text, and Wolfe received letters from irate readers who felt wrongly portrayed in the book. It was 1937 before he would return to his childhood home, having published many short stories and a second novel, “Of Time and the River,” in the meantime. Although he planned to spend the summer writing in a rented cabin, Wolfe worked little, being constantly disturbed by visitors and undergoing family strife. He began to ponder the many implications of the phrase “You can’t go home again,” the title of a novel that would be published in 1940, two years after his death. His mother’s former boardinghouse known as the “Old Kentucky Home,” made famous as “Dixieland” in his first novel, is now a State Historic Site.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SOCIAL HOUSE VODKA

North Carolina is home to distilleries of all stripes and concoctions. But on National Vodka Day, we take a look at the offerings that N.C. has in the more neutral of spirits.

Covington Gourmet Vodka, which bills itself as “the best yam vodka on Earth,” is distilled from N.C. sweet potatoes in Snow Hill, N.C. The unique spirit won a

gold medal in 2013 at the World Spirits Competition in San Francisco.

Social House Vodka, one of N.C.’s newest spirits, hypes its farm-to-flask concept and sources its corn from a local farm and is distilled in Kinston. The brand made a grand entrance in August of this year with a launch party at N.C. State’s Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh.

Oct. 5, 1909

East Carolina set up to educate teachers On this day in 1909, the East Carolina Teachers Training School opened its doors with the mission of providing young men and women the training they needed to be able to teach in the public schools of North Carolina. The school was established in Greenville in 1907 at the urgent persuasion of former governor and Greenville resident Thomas Jordan Jarvis. There were seven other eastern North Carolina communities vying for the institution including Edenton, Washington, Kinston, New Bern, Tarboro, Rocky Mount and Elizabeth City. When the school opened in October 1909, there were 11 faculty members to teach the 104 women and 19 men enrolled in a two-year training program. In 1911, 16 members of the first class graduated, all of them women. The first man to graduate, Henry Oglesby, did not do so until 1932. In 1921, the school began offering four-year degrees. The college offered its first master’s degree in 1929 and began to diversify its curriculum. The school was renamed East Carolina University in 1967, and was incorporated into the UNC system five years later. Today, East Carolina University is the third largest school in the UNC system, with an outstanding reputation in the fields of teacher training, music, art and medicine.

flavors of N.C. NC chef Vivian Howard kicks off fifth season of PBS show

By NSJ Staff

PHOTO COURTESY OF PBS

KINSTON restaurateur Vivian Howard will be in front of the camera and in the kitchen for a fifth season of her Peabody Awardwinning show “A Chef’s Life.”

The show centers on Howard, who, with her husband Ben Knight, left the big city to open a fine dining restaurant in small-town eastern North Carolina.

Each episode follows Howard out of the kitchen and into cornfields, strawberry patches and hog farms as she hunts down the ingredients that inspire her seasonal menus. Using a chef’s modern sensibilities, Howard explores Southern cuisine, past and present — one ingredient at a time.

A celebration of true farm-to-table food, the 13-week series combines the action and drama of a high-pressure business with the joys and stresses of family life.

In Season 5, Howard finds plenty of reasons to celebrate, as Chef and the Farmer turns 10 years old and her first cookbook hits the New York Times bestseller list. She sets out on a book tour with her trusted team and a finicky food truck.

In between greeting hordes of fans in multiple states, Howard discovers small batch whiskey in Kentucky, fishes for trout in the North Carolina mountains, and breaks bread with fellow chefs in the Virginia hills where good food and good music meet.

North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

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ENTERTAINMENT U.S. Box Office: Tom Cruise’s ‘American Made’ dead even with ‘It,’ ‘Kingsman 2’ Three films are essentially tied at the top of the weekend box office, as of Sunday morning.

Warner Bros. and New Line’s “It” appears to be back on top with $17.3 million from 3,917 locations. But Universal’s “American Made” and Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” are trailing just behind with $17 million each.

Paris’ Champs Elysees gets star turn as a catwalk

FRED PROUSER | REUTERS | FILE

Members of the group “Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers” Ron Blair, Tom Petty, Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell pose at the premiere of the documentary film from director Peter Bogdanovich “Runnin’ Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers” at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, Calif.

Rock legend Tom Petty dies after cardiac arrest The “Free Fallin’” singer was celebrating his 40th anniversary tour this year

By Piya Sinha-Roy Reuters LOS ANGELES — Veteran rocker Tom Petty, best known for hits such as “Free Fallin’” and “American Girl,” died on Monday after he was found unconscious and in cardiac arrest, his manager said. He was 66.

Petty suffered cardiac arrest at his home in Malibu early on Monday morning and was taken to UCLA Medical Center but could not be revived, his longtime manager Tony Dimitriades said in a statement.

“We are devastated to announce the untimely death of our father, husband, brother, leader and friend Tom Petty,” Dimitriades said on behalf of the family.

He died peacefully at 8:40 p.m.

local time surrounded by family, his bandmates and friends.

Petty, best known for his roots-infused rock music, carved a career as a solo artist as well as with his band The Heartbreakers and as part of supergroup The Traveling Wilburys.

Petty and The Heartbreakers embarked on a 40th anniversary tour of the United States this year and last played three dates in late September at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. The band was scheduled to perform two dates in New York in November.

Petty formed The Heartbreakers in the mid-1970s, but it wasn’t until the band’s third album “Damn the Torpedoes” in 1979 that their music really took off, with hits such as “Refugee” and “Don’t Do Me Like That.”

Petty and the Heartbreakers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, when they were described by organizers as “the quintessential American individualists,” capturing the voice of the American everyman.

Petty also co-founded the 1980s supergroup The Traveling Wilburys with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne, penning hits such as “End of the Line” and “She’s My Baby.”

Dylan called his death “shocking, crushing news” in a statement to Rolling Stone magazine on Monday. He said Petty was “a great performer, full of the light, a friend, and I’ll never forget him.”

Florida-born Petty caught the rock ‘n’ roll bug after he was introduced by his uncle to Elvis Presley, who was shooting the picture “Follow That Dream” on location in Florida in 1960.

He has said he began working on music in earnest after seeing the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964.

The Champs Elysees avenue in Paris got a makeover on Sunday as a giant outdoor catwalk, as celebrities and models took to the runway in the first show of its kind by L’Oreal, the French cosmetics firm. Movie stars such as Jane Fonda and Helen Mirren — who twirled a cane as she strutted down the specially erected runway on the treelined boulevard — rubbed shoulders with models, some of whom sported elaborate hairstyles and dramatic makeup.

Country stars heartbroken over shooting at Vegas ‘neon sleepover’

Amid his successes, Petty also suffered dark periods during a career spanning five decades.

A 2015 biography of the singer, “Petty: The Biography,” revealed for the first time the rocker’s heroin addiction in the 1990s.

Author Warren Zanes said in an interview with The Washington Post that Petty had succumbed to the drug because he “had had encounters with people who did heroin, and he hit a point in his life when he did not know what to do with the pain he was feeling.”

Petty also suffered from depression, channeling his pain into 1999s “Echo,” during which he was also dealing with a divorce. In 2002, he married Dana York and told Reuters that he had been in therapy for six years to deal with depression.

“It’s a funny disease because it takes you a long time to really come to terms with the fact that you’re sick — medically sick, you’re not just suddenly going out of your mind,” he said at the time.

American country music stars were gripped by fear and horror after Sunday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas turned a three-day open-air festival attended by some 22,000 people into a scene of carnage.

The Route 91 Harvest festival, promoted as a “three-day neon sleepover,” attracted fans from across the United States to hear country’s biggest stars, including Jason Aldean, Eric Church and Sam Hunt.

FILM REVIEW: ‘FLATLINERS’ Courtney (Ellen Page) in Columbia Pictures’ ‘Flatliners.’

By Andrew Barker LOS ANGELES — Joel Schumacher’s 1990 schlocksterpiece “Flatliners” was perhaps most notable for taking a silly but strangely compelling premise (a gang of sexy, thrill-seeking medical students who intentionally “flatline” to experience a little slice of death) as well as a stacked cast of young talent (Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon), and somehow doing nothing much of note with either of them. So say this much for director Niels Arden Oplev’s decent-looking yet deadly dull remake — it’s nothing if not faithful to the original.

About as inessential as reboots get, “Flatliners” finds a replacement cast of equally overqualified actors, and beefs up its depictions of the afterlife with some updated visual effects, but otherwise offers no reason for reanimating this long-expired property.

Taking over Sutherland’s old role is Ellen Page, who stars as Courtney, a serious medical student for whom a childhood tragedy has prompted an interest in the afterlife. Discovering an unused basement facility beneath the hospital where she’s a medical resident, and perhaps moved by the tough-love motivations of her cranky professor (Sutherland, appearing for purely meta reasons), she hatches a plan to research brain activity after death by using herself as a test subject.

IMAGE PROVIDED BY SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT INC.

The film doesn’t waste much time exploring what pushed this promising future doctor to risk her life in the name of nebulous research, and neither do the two fellow students she recruits to stop her heart and subsequently jolt her back to life: Sophia (Kiersey Clemons), Courtney’s spunky buddy beset by self-confidence issues, and Jamie (James Norton), a callow trust-fund himbo who lives on his own private yacht. After a short spell of handwringing, they go along with the plan — Courtney flatlines, and the film’s visual effects team cooks up

some trippy if unimaginative imagery to illustrate her sojourn to the great beyond. Arriving just in time to help bring her back into the light are Ray (Diego Luna), the one halfway reasonable student in the group, and Marlo (Nina Dobrev) a hotshot resident who wears spiky high heels while on rounds and righteously exclaims things like, “This isn’t science, it’s pseudoscience!”

At first, the experience seems to have been a positive one. Courtney’s brain gets a jumpstart, and she finds herself suddenly remembering arcane details from old medical

textbooks, arousing jealousy from her hypercompetitive peers, who all want their turns going under.

(Herein lies the film’s one clever update: While the Gen X flatliners cheated death for a cheap thrill, their millennial counterparts do it in search of better grades.)

Despite the film’s brief attempts to convince us otherwise, none of these experiments seem to reveal much of anything about post-mortem brain activity, nor do they spark any sort of philosophical or theological epiphanies. They do, however, put our motley gang of med-

icals in the mood to party, and the film’s running time swells an extra 10 minutes to accommodate some mild sequences of drinking, dancing and sex.

In spite of their medical training, it comes as something of a surprise to our heroes to learn that temporarily killing themselves might bring about unintended consequences, and all of them begin to experience spooky visions and hallucinations. It takes them an agonizingly long time to figure out why this is happening, and the film promptly devolves from a goofy ’90s throwback into a thoroughly flat J-horror throwback, full of cheesy jump scares and plenty of angry figures with dark eye makeup glowering in doorways.

As dull as it gets, “Flatliners” never sinks all the way into outright fiasco, and there’s enough talent both behind and in front of the camera to keep things on the right side of basic competence. The actors do what they can with the material, and Oplev happens upon a few decent visual ideas. What’s missing, however, is any indication why anyone involved wanted to revisit this material. While many remakes struggle to break out of the shadow of their hallowed source material, the original “Flatliners” was no one’s idea of a classic, providing ample opportunities for improvement on which this film stubbornly refuses to seize.

North State Journal for Wednesday, October 4, 2017

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North Carolina Arts, History & Nature

Fall in One Place Autumn is a perfect time to celebrate everything North Carolina has to offer, from the gorgeous weather to local foods to traditional music. From the annual tradition of the North Carolina State Fair to Wide Open Bluegrass to local county fairs and festivals, North Carolina has it all, all in one place.

Explore our complete list of Fall Festivals and Fairs across the state.

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