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From our file named "Duh." The Alabama Department of Human Resources says 13 counties that reinitiated a work requirement for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the food stamp program, saw an 85% drop in recipients. The counties had been exempt from the work requirement due to high levels of unemployment. But with the economy recovering, the state of Alabama restarted the work requirement on January 1 this year, which resulted in the massive drop in SNAP participants. ... Nationwide, there are about 44 million people receiving SNAP benefits at a cost of about $71 billion. The...

On Friday, May 27, leaders from historically black colleges (HBCUs) and organizations which support them gathered in Washington, DC at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for a panel discussion entitled, "Historically black colleges and the road ahead." AEI Resident Fellow and former President of Black Alliance for Educational Options in the United States, Gerard Robinson, moderated the discussion. Robinson, a Howard University alum, led the panel with a simple question, "…where would America be without HBCUs." Participants on the panel were Lezli Baskerville, President and CEO of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO);Michael Lomax, President of...

BROOKHAVEN, Miss. (AP) — A man who apparently got into a dispute with his wife and in-laws was arrested in a house-to-house shooting rampage in rural Mississippi that left eight people dead, including a sheriff’s deputy. “I ain’t fit to live, not after what I done,” a handcuffed Willie Corey Godbolt, 35, told The Clarion-Ledger (http://on.thec-l.com/2rbQIq5 ).

On Sept. 1, 1864, Union forces under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, victorious at Jonesborough, burned Atlanta and began the March to the Sea where Sherman's troops looted and pillaged farms and towns all along the 300-mile road to Savannah. Captured in the Confederate defeat at Jonesborough was William Martin Buchanan of Okolona, Mississippi, who was transferred by rail to the Union POW stockade at Camp Douglas, Illinois. By the standards of modernity, my great-grandfather, fighting to prevent the torching of Georgia's capital, was engaged in a criminal and immoral cause. And "Uncle Billy" Sherman was a liberator. Under President Grant,...

July 21, 2016 began as any other day for Wayne Parish. The Crystal Springs resident woke up, bid his family farewell and went to work at Performance Oil on McDowell Road in Jackson Mississippi. But the transformative events of that fateful day changed Parish’s life forever. On that day, the hard-working, law-abiding family man crossed paths with a 17-year-old delinquent named Charles McDonald. Despite his youth, McDonald was already an aspiring criminal and a recidivist offender. On July 21, his mother, Yvette Mason-Sherman, tried to take him to the Henley-Young Youth Detention facility, which is located next to Performance...

A state representative from Winona who urged in a weekend Facebook post that those who support the removal of Confederate monuments be lynched has apologized. Rep. Karl Oliver, R-Winona, wrote: “The destruction of these monuments, erected in the loving memory of our family and fellow Southern Americans, is both heinous and horrific. If the, and I use this term extremely loosely, “leadership” of Louisiana wishes to, in a Nazi-ish fashion, burn books or destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY, they should be LYNCHED! Let it be known, I will do all in my power to prevent this from happening in...

Earlier, we posted about a speech delivered by Shepard Smith at his alma mater, the University of Mississippi, in which he discussed his experience coming out. During that same address, Smith also talked about the Confederate flag — and called upon the state of Mississippi to remove the Confederate flag pattern from its own state flag. “It’s got to go,” Smith said. “Put it in the museum. Don’t get rid of it. Certainly put it in a museum, used it as a teaching device, have it as part of your curriculum… Get it out of the stadium. Get it out...

A mortuary in Mississippi is being sued by the husband of a gay man for allegedly refusing to cremate him because of his sexuality. John "Jack" Zawadski, 82, and his nephew filed the lawsuit after being told that the funeral parlour did not "deal with their kind". Their legal team argue the response of staff at the Picayune mortuary devastated Mr Zawadski and his family. But the co-owner of the funeral home has tearfully denied the allegations. "We just didn't do that," a weeping Henrietta Brewer told Mississippi Today.Mrs Brewer said that her mortuary had handled the funerals of "well...

Mississippi’s Supreme Court says the state doesn’t have to publicly disclose details of how it carries out executions. Thursday’s 7-2 decision dismisses a lawsuit that sought the release of Mississippi’s plans for executions and acquiring lethal drugs. In the lawsuit, the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center argued the Mississippi Department of Corrections wasn’t disclosing enough information. …

DALLAS (AP) — Vic Schaefer and his Mississippi State Bulldogs didn’t get much time to celebrate what might be the greatest shocker in women’s basketball history. Not when there’s one more game to win, not when there’s a national championship on the line against SEC rival South Carolina.

UConn's record 111-game winning streak came to a startling end when Mississippi State pulled off perhaps the biggest upset in women's basketball history, stunning the Huskies 66-64 on Morgan William's overtime buzzer beater in the national semifinals Friday night.

Lawmakers want Mississippi to change how it handles executions, with changes meant to overcome legal challenges to execution drugs, and possibly allow the state to use electrocution and the firing squad as death penalty methods. The Senate agreed on Tuesday to changes to HB 638, sending it to Gov. Phil Bryant for his approval or veto after the House agreed Monday. The measure lists four preferred execution methods. The first is lethal injection using a three-drug mixture. After that, in order, the bill specifies poison gas, electrocution and firing squad as execution methods. The bill is a response to lawsuits...

Representatives from 13 states including 12 state attorneys general and one governor filed a motion in support of President Trump’s temporary travel ban. From the Dallas Morning News: Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday led a coalition of 13 states in filing a brief with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals defending President Donald Trump’s revised immigration order.In the brief, Paxton and representatives from 12 other states argue that the Trump administration’s new order is legal and falls under the president’s power over foreign affairs and national security. Those joining the brief included Paxton plus AG’s in the...

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Congressman Bennie Thompson, NAACP President Cornell William Brooks, actor Danny Glover, Ben Jealous, Mississippi NAACP President Derrick Johnson, Sierra Club President Aaron Mair, the Honorable Nina Turner, and UAW President Dennis Williams join hundreds of Nissan employees, civil-rights leaders and others to protest Nissan’s poor treatment of workers and unsafe working conditions in Canton, Miss.

On Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and actor Danny Glover will join the March on Mississippi in order to protest a pattern of civil rights abuses against the company's predominantly African American workers. Also joining the march are Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), NAACP President Cornell William Brooks, Sierra Club President Aaron Mair, hundreds of workers, civil rights leaders and social justice advocates. The march will end at Nissan's Canton factory, and the marchers will demand that the company start respecting its workers’ right to vote for a union free from fear and intimidation.

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant is ready to assist in President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, but some of his fellow Republicans are less than eager to cooperate. Bryant contends that beefed up enforcement at the federal level can only help states. “The federal law is the federal law,” Bryant told Newsmax while visiting Washington for the National Governors Association winter meeting this weekend. “You see now that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is simply enforcing the federal laws. I like to remind people, if we are going to ignore these laws, they need to tell us what other laws we...

The first call came Wednesday morning: Federal agents were raiding a Chinese buffet in the city of Pearl. Before long, word spread across Mississippi immigrant communities that agents were targeting a Hibachi grill in nearby Flowood and a sushi restaurant nearly 100 miles away in Meridian. “We told people we don’t know what’s going on,” said Bill Chandler, executive director of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance in Jackson. “The best thing to do is to go home.”

Gulfport — Police have arrested four people in the Jan. 29 armed robbery of the McDonald’s restaurant on Courthouse Road, and one of its customers. Police said they are Gulfport residents Titus Johnathon Daniels-Young, Kyle Addae James Monroe and Darome James Matthews, each 17, and Frederick Leon McCall, 23. Two of them shown in surveillance pictures from the restaurant wore masks and dark clothes, and at least one had a handgun. It’s unclear which two went in the store, or if they all did, and if the other two were the getaway driver and lookout. Gulfport police Sgt. Joshua Bromen...

One abortionist is revealing his abortion religion – and one New York Times writer couldn’t get enough of it. In a piece published Wednesday, New York Times Magazine columnist Ana Marie Cox interviewed Willie J. Parker, a Mississippi abortionist and former Planned Parenthood medical director, on his upcoming Life’s Work memoir. During the interview, Parker pointed to his faith as the reason he performs abortions. And while abortion is “life-ending,” he added, it isn’t “killing a person” – just a “human entity.” From the very beginning, Cox hyped that Parker’s book “is rooted” by his “moral and spiritual argument in...

    ~The FReeper Canteen Presents~ Road Trip: Keesler Air Force Base, MississippiKeesler Air Force Base is a United States Air Force base located in Biloxi, a city in Harrison County, Mississippi, United States. The base is named in honor of aviator 2d Lt Samuel Reeves Keesler, Jr., a Mississippi native killed in France during the First World War. The base is home of Headquarters, Second Air Force (2 AF) and the 81st Training Wing (81 TW) of the Air Education and Training Command (AETC).The Second Air Force mission is to provide the best-trainined, combat-ready forces. To carry out...