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Dangerous Category 5 Hurricane Irma had a devastating impact on islands in the Caribbean. Hurricane and Storm surge watches were issued Thursday morning for South Florida. The Florida Keys began evacuating visitors and residents, followed by flood zones in Miami and Miami Beach. Sarasota FL declared a local state of emergency Thursday morning. Polk County FL Sheriff Grady Judd said Wednesday that law enforcement authorities would check the identities of people who turn up at shelters--and take to jail anyone found to have an active arrest warrant. “If you go to a shelter for Irma and you have a warrant,...

While thoughts and prayers are with our Texas FRiends and neighbors, we are at the peak of the Atlantic Tropical Storm season. Hurricane Irma continues its trek from Cape Verde across the pond and toward the Hebert Box (see below). People with interests in the Southeastern U.S. and Gulf of Mexico should be alert to the forecast path updates for this powerful storm. It is important to note that the average NHC track errors are about 175 and 225 statute miles at days 4 and 5, respectively. Hurricane Irma originally had a small wind field. In the past 24 hours,...

Big Upstate manufacturers stand ready to challenge Duke Energy if the Charlotte-based power company asks South Carolina regulators for permission to raise rates on its Upstate customers. Duke announced Aug. 25 that it planned to cancel decade-old plans to build the two-reactor Gaffney plant. Scott Elliott, a Columbia lawyer who specializes in utility regulation, has already picked out arguments he intends to make on behalf of manufacturing clients in opposition to the expected rate hike request. Elliott represents the S.C. Energy Users Committee, a group of manufacturers that buy a lot of electricity. The group includes big Upstate employers such...

A descendant of Gen. Robert E. Lee has stepped down as pastor of his North Carolina church after facing blowback from parishioners and others for his comments denouncing racism and lauding the Black Lives Matter movement. As a minister and newspaper columnist, Robert W. Lee IV, the fourth great-nephew of the Confederate general, has spoken and written countless words, but the five sentences he uttered during MTV's Video Music Awards last week were just too much for some members of his congregation. ... Lee, who was pastor at Bethany United Church of Christ in Winston-Salem, has long supported removing monuments...

Irma spun into a monster storm Tuesday morning with sustained winds topping 180 mph, becoming the strongest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded outside the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, National Hurricane Center forecasters said in their 11 a.m. advisory. As the hurricane churns closer to the U.S. coast, its path becomes more certain, with South Florida, particularly the Keys, increasingly likely to take a hit. Tropical storm force winds could arrive as early as Friday. Gov. Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency for all 67 counties and has all 7,000 members of the state’s National Guard to report to...

That curve to the north – and eventually out into the Atlantic – that everyone in South Florida was hoping to see Hurricane Irma take isn’t happening as quickly as earlier models had predicted. The National Hurricane Center’s 8 a.m. update Monday drives the storm’s path in a flatter, westbound path that puts it closer Cuba’s shores by early Saturday morning.

Tropical Storm Irma picked up strength Wednesday and is expected to become a hurricane by Thursday or Friday, making it the fourth hurricane of an increasingly busy season. In their latest advisory, National Hurricane Center forecasters said sustained winds had reached 60 mph as the storm rolls west at 15 mph. While it’s too early to tell what threat Irma may pose to Florida or the U.S. Coast, it has the potential to gain significant strength as it crosses warm tropical Atlantic waters — sea surface temperatures are more than 2°F above normal — and encounters weak wind shear. Irma...

NBC-owned television stations in cities across the nation just teamed up with a nonprofit “journalism” group funded by a billionaire husband and wife team who not only spent millions campaigning for President Obama but also topped donor lists to groups like ACORN and MoveOn.org. The nonprofit, ProPublica, will contribute to the news operations of all NBC owned-and-operated stations, including those in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia, the network announced Monday. The NBC affiliates will get early access to investigative reports from ProPublica, which describes itself as an “independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public...

Meadows concluded by noting these 12 legislative days in September will literally determine the future of the Republican Party. “You may call it the bloody September — I call the Dirty Dozen because we’ve got 12 legislative days left. Hopefully we can rise to the occasion and get these things accomplished,” Meadows said. “They need to make sure that their member of Congress, their senators understand they are tired of talk. Just like my friend Clay Tally told me, they are tired of the rhetoric, they want results and they want us to get behind the president’s agenda, make sure...

Activists who toppled a statue of a Confederate soldier just days after Charlottesville perhaps thought they were doing God's work ... at least until they got arrested. At that moment, it's hard to imagine that the enormity of what they'd done didn't slam into them. After all, they'd destroyed public property and been stupid enough to do so on video. But perhaps they need not worry too much. It seems that the district attorney is going to let Leftist ideology mitigate his prosecution:

At first the FBI probed the e-mails of Paula Broadwell and CIA Director David Petraeus from a suspicion of cyberstalking and harassment. They then dropped the probe after determining that the biographer of Petraeus had a personal relationship with him, even though they discovered that Broadwell had classified documents on her computer. After the entire probe went public and forced Petraeus to resign, FBI agents suddenly conducted a seizure of materials from Broadwell’s home — which the Washington Post reports comes from a belated curiosity into her possession of those classified documents: The FBI is making a new push to...

NEWTON — A former Burke County principal faces two assault charges after witnesses say he pepper sprayed Confederate re-enactors Thursday. Former East Burke and W.A. Young principal Karl Philip Smith, 56, of Morganton, was charged by the Newton Police Department after witnesses say he used the pepper spray during a reunion parade, according to an NPD press release. Smith, known by many as Phil, reportedly discharged the pepper spray when the re-enactors went to fire their weapons, the release said. He eventually was identified by witnesses, and officers took him into custody. Cheryl Shuffler, the public information officer for the...

Chapel Hill, N.C. — A student was arrested along with other protesters when about 800 people gathered at McCorkle Place on Tuesday night to demand the removal of the Silent Sam Confederate statue from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus. The statue was surrounded by two sets of barricades earlier Tuesday morning in an effort to prevent protesters getting close to it. The barriers, combined with the fact that the statue is continually monitored by surveillance cameras, prompted many to state that Silent Sam is better protected than any student on the campus. At times Tuesday night,...

A former elections worker in North Carolina was indicted Monday by a Durham County grand jury for mishandling provisional ballot results during the March 2016 primary election. Richard Robert Rawling, 59, of Cary, was charged on the counts of obstruction of justice — a felony — and failure to discharge a duty of his office — a misdemeanor. An investigation of the state’s elections board determined Rawling ran or ordered subordinates to run provisional ballots through tabulators more than once and made manual changes to the ballot count so the results of the provisional canvass would match the number of approved provisional ballots.

Employees of a Huntersville business park say they are uncomfortable after finding a truck parked there with racially charged wording written on it. The writing said things like "Obama did Charlottesville." Those employees of Birkdale Business Park say they confronted the driver of the truck, who admitted to writing the words himself. "I had never seen the truck before in the entire time I had been there," one woman, who asked not to be named, said. "It was a statement." She says she believes the driver parked the truck in front of her workplace because the majority of employees there...

ASHEBORO — A Friday afternoon accident at the Sunset Avenue overpass in Asheboro caused traffic to be rerouted in and around the area. The incident was reported at 1 p.m. when a dump truck driven by Jeffrey J. Friedmann of Winston-Salem was traveling northbound on Interstate 73/74. He had just left the McDonald’s construction site on Dixie Drive. Friedmann told officers he noticed that the dump bed of the truck was beginning to move, according to a report from the Asheboro Police Department. The dump bed of the 1995 Peterbilt truck struck the support beams of the overpass bridge, causing...

CNN posted a map on August 17 showing the location of approximately 1,500 Confederate monuments and/or official symbols in the U.S. The map will, no-doubt, serve as a hit-list for the frenzied Workers World Party members and others seeking the removal and destruction of Confederate statues in city after city across America. CNN reports, “Roughly 1,500 Confederate symbols still exist on public land more than 150 years after the conclusion of the Civil War.” It explains that 718 of the Confederate symbols are “monuments and statutes.”

One of the activists who toppled a Confederate statue in Durham, N.C., on Monday night is a member of an extreme leftist group that supports the totalitarian regime in North Korea and wants to abolish capitalism. Taqiyah Thompson, a student at North Carolina Central University, was arrested Tuesday following a press conference in which she defended the actions of the demonstrators and equated police officers to Confederate soldiers and Ku Klux Klan members. “I did the right thing,” she said. “Everyone who was there — the people did the right thing. The people will continue to keep making the right...

A woman who claims she took part in the toppling of the Confederate statue with a group of protesters in North Carolina has been arrested and is facing several charges. Takiyah Thompson, 22, was taken into custody on Tuesday by Durham County sheriff’s deputies shortly after protesters held a news conference at North Carolina Central University where she identified herself as the person who climbed a ladder to the top to tie a rope around the monument before the crowd tore it down on Monday. She can be seen in video showing the moments before the Confederate statue was toppled....

On Tuesday night North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) called on the state legislature to grant counties, municipalities, and the state the ability to remove Confederate statues lest protesters get hurt pulling them down. NC adopted a law in 2015 that protects historical statues from being removed, and Cooper wants this law reversed. Cooper used a Facebook post to reference the way slaves were once kept in chains in the South. And he criticized the existence of Confederate monuments without mentioning that Southern slave-owners were Democrats and that the Confederacy was a Democrat nation. Rather, he said, “These monuments should...