Top Stories Montgomery

Posts Tagged ‘Montgomery’

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — Police are on the scene of a double shooting in west Birmingham.

One man was shot in the hand. It is unknown where the other man was shot, but Birmingham police spokesman Sgt. Johnny Williams Jr. said that victim was critically wounded. Both were taken to UAB Hospital.

The gunfire erupted just after noon in two locations: the 900 block of 9th Street S.W. and the 1100 block of Cotton Avenue. Williams said a man was shot at each location.

“We do believe they are related,” Williams said. “It appears a couple of groups of males were involved in a gun battle.”

Detectives and evidence technicians are on both scenes. Williams said they are still trying to sort out what happened.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

MOBILE, Alabama — A judge this morning revoked probation for Shelby Robinson, the 19-year-old who is accused of kidnapping and raping 2 women in downtown Mobile.

Mobile County Circuit Judge Sarah Stewart ruled that Robinson, because of his most recent arrest, should serve the remaining 2 years of his 3-year sentence in prison.

His attorney, Harding Fendley, said Robinson won’t be eligible for any early release.

Robinson pleaded guilty to second-degree robbery last year for helping steal money and cigarettes from a gas station.

While on probation, Robinson was arrested last month in connection with the June 5 attacks on 2 women walking down Dauphin Street in downtown Mobile.

The women were leaving an R. Kelly concert after-party, according to police, when Robinson used a gun to force them into their car and sexually assaulted them.

“The state is extremely pleased with the results today,” said Mobile County Chief Assistant District Attorney Deborah Tillman. She said that the judge gave Robinson “the maximum she possibly could.”

After raping the women, police said, he used their ATM cards to withdraw cash from an Eight Mile bank machine and made purchases at a Wal-Mart and gas stations. Investigators say they have video from the ATM machine showing him using their bank cards.

Robinson faces 10 felony charges: first-degree robbery, two counts of second-degree kidnapping, first-degree rape, 2 counts of first-degree sodomy, and 4 counts of fraudulent use of a credit card.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

MANASSAS, Virginia — The North thought it would deliver a crushing blow to the Rebel Army on its way to capturing the Confederate capital in Richmond. The South thought a decisive battle would prove to the North that the Union could not be kept together by force.

But the Battle of Bull Run, also called the Battle of Manassas, proved only to both sides that the Civil War would be a long, bloody affair. Today, officials mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s first major land battle with ceremonies at Manassas National Battlefield Park.

The commemorations are the first in a weekend of activities surrounding the anniversary, culminating in a battle re-enactment this weekend on a nearby farm that could draw more than 100,000 spectators Saturday and Sunday.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Join the conversation by clicking to comment or email Robinson at crobinson@bhamnews.com.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

MOBILE, Alabama — About 100 people walked into Mobile County Circuit Judge Joseph Johnston’s courtroom today after receiving a summons in the mail.

Many of the people on the crowded benches, though, didn’t know that they wouldn’t be walking out — at least not for a few hours and not before paying a few hundred dollars.

For some, the only escape was through the back door in handcuffs, headed to Mobile County Metro Jail.

Johnston posted court police at the double doors of his courtroom and told his audience that they had to make their overdue court payments or be taken to jail. Only a cash bail in the amount owed could buy release.

“I just got a job,” said Jermaine Jackson, who pleaded guilty to sex abuse in 2009 and had fallen behind by $350 in his monthly installments to the court.

“You know how many times people tell me that?” the judge said. “It’s a lot.”

The judge directed Jackson to a nearby phone to call family and friends in a fundraising effort.

“They’re talking about locking me up if I don’t get $350,” he said into the phone.

In the midst of court cuts and layoffs statewide, Johnston’s maneuver on Friday raised as much as $6,000 in forced payments. That includes court costs and restitution to victims, such as compensation for stolen goods.

In 2002, Johnston used the tactic a half-dozen times to raise roughly $75,000 for the state. Alabama’s courts faced a $3 million budget shortfall that year.

As hours passed this morning, the audience began to wither. Some dozed off. Others slumped over, glumly waiting their turn.

Raphael Smith, 22, approached the judge with his mother at his side. He pleaded guilty to second-degree theft of property last year and owed $550 in past due payments toward more than $2,400 in restitution to a Kohl’s store.

He served time in prison, but since getting out, he acknowledged, hadn’t paid anything toward his debt.

Johnston told Smith’s mother that she shouldn’t be the one to worry about paying.

“He’s the one that ought to be motivated,” the judge said.

Smith insisted that he didn’t have sufficient funds. The judge sent him to jail.

“He ain’t playing,” his mother said.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Independent Filmmakers Shoot ‘Black Heart’ in Huntsville HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – Indie filmmakers shoot scenes from their short film ‘Black Heart’ at Focus Live Martini Bar and Grill in N.W. Huntsville. Director Tyler R. Gibson and lead actor/writer Julian ‘Jay’ Burton were working their magic on location Monday, July 18, 2011. (The Huntsville Times/Glenn Baeske) Watch video

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama– Silence on the set is what director Tyler R. Gibson asks for as he steps over a sea of black and orange extension cords on the floor of Focus Live Martini Bar Monday afternoon. After three long days of shooting, his film, “Black Heart,” is almost finished.

“Black Heart” is a romantic drama following the life of June Gamble, a troubled Army veteran eluding the guilt of a painful childhood memory by writing poetry.

The 30-minute short is the second self-produced indie film from Alpha Line Pictures, a company headed by Gibson and Julian “Jay” Burton, the screenwriter and lead actor in the film.

After acting and being involved with film for three years, Gibson is directing for the first time with “Black Heart.” He said he enjoys working with actors, setting scenes and seeing his creative vision develop on screen.

“It has actually helped out my acting a lot. I’m not on the inside looking out, I’m on the outside looking in and that helps me. It’s an amazing art,” Gibson said.

Gibson, 25, wants to surprise people with this film, noting that it’s not going to be like anything people have ever seen.

“We’re all about doing different stuff. That’s the only way I believe you’re going to make it,” Gibson said. “We’re really big on originality.”

Other scenes for the movie were shot in Decatur and East Lawrence Memorial Gardens in Moulton.

“We want to get respect out of people. If we can do this type of film in Huntsville and the North Alabama region and get respect from bigger dogs in California, Florida and New York, we can do it anywhere,” said Burton, a 28-year-old Birmingham native. “Even though it’s a short, we treat it with a mainstream mindset like it’s a feature film.”

Gibson and Burton hope to release the film in mid-August on YouTube, Facebook and BlipTV. 

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — Fewer than one in five Alabamians who applied for federal government disaster aid in the wake of the April 27 tornadoes have been approved for a grant so far, according to numbers released Wednesday by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

By contrast, FEMA has issued grants to nearly half of the applicants in Joplin, Mo., which was devastated by a tornado on May 22.

In Mississippi, which was hit with the same storm as Alabama three months ago, FEMA has approved one-quarter of its grant requests.

In 2005, 57 percent of FEMA grant applications were approved after two major hurricanes.

Emergency management officials say each disaster is different, with variables such as extent of insurance coverage and demographics influencing the numbers.

“You have to be very careful when comparing Alabama to Joplin,” said Art Faulkner, director of the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, which worked closely with FEMA on disaster relief efforts. There are likely differences in insurance coverage, and it’s difficult to compare a city with a state, he said.

Registration to apply for FEMA grants and Small Business Administration disaster loans ended Monday. The numbers show that 87,917 people in 43 Alabama counties applied for grants and 15,597 have been approved for more than $65 million.

FEMA officials said the approval rate may go up because there are applications still under review as applicants wait to see what their insurance will cover. FEMA cannot duplicate insurance, but it can fill in gaps when someone is underinsured.

FEMA declined to give the number of applications pending due to insurance or any other reason.

Insurance factors into higher grant approval rates for hurricanes and earthquakes because fewer people have or can obtain insurance against those events, said Barry Scanlon, president of Witt Associates and a former assistant to former FEMA chief James Lee Witt.

In the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, 3.3 million people applied for grants and 1.9 million of those — or 57 percent — were approved for a total of $7 billion.

But post-Katrina, FEMA was heavily criticized by the General Accounting Office for an estimated $1 billion in “improper and potentially fraudulent” payments.

Asked whether that Katrina experience has tightened the noose so much on fraud that it also has suppressed the grant approval rate, Scanlon said he didn’t think so.

“I think they are constantly trying to reduce waste, fraud and abuse, but I don’t know that has changed the eligibility requirements,” he said.

Based on need, grants are available for home repair, transportation, medical expenses, temporary lodging and lost personal property, among other uses.

FEMA also disclosed Wednesday that it had sent 30,779 letters telling victims they weren’t eligible for coverage. Of those, 8,126 have since been determined eligible for some form of assistance after FEMA received new or additional information.

The “initial decline” letters have been criticized for their wording, which declared applicants “ineligible” or said they qualified for “$0.00.”

Some applicants received the letters merely because they had insurance, before they knew if insurance would cover any or all of the damage. Others received denials for “insufficient damage” even though their houses were wrecked by a tornado.

Faulkner said Gov. Robert Bentley criticized the letters and helped to improve the wording. He wouldn’t speculate on whether the letters may have suppressed the approval rate by chasing victims out of the system.

“The government had a responsibility to assist survivors wherever it can,” he said. “But it doesn’t relinquish the personal responsibility of individuals to do what is needed to get assistance.”

If a victim believes an initial letter is wrong, he should appeal, Faulkner said. Despite the registration deadline passing, recipients of denial letters have 60 days from the day of receipt to file an appeal.

FEMA has been urging appeals of initial denials, but according to numbers provided by FEMA late last week, it had received only 1,742 appeal cases, of which 389 were successful. FEMA would not provide updated appeal numbers Wednesday.

At a U.S. Senate subcomittee hearing Tuesday on federal response to recent disasters, one senator asked FEMA Deputy Administrator Richard Serino whether budget constraints contributed to decisions about whether to qualify a state or county for disaster funding. Serino said no.

FEMA is down to $1.2 billion in its Disaster Relief Fund, which provides much of the federal money for disaster assistance. Unless it gets help from Congress, the agency will begin focusing money on life-saving activities when the fund dips below $1 billion.

Serino didn’t address decisions about individual grant approvals, but Scanlon said that, too, shouldn’t be affected by budget issues.

FEMA is “statutorially required to carry out the mission,” Scanlon said. “If you are eligible under the rules, you should get this funding.”

Join the conversation by clicking to comment or email Oliver at moliver@bhamnews.com.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Running out of time, President Barack Obama softened his stand and signaled Wednesday he would back a short-term deal to prevent a disastrous financial default on Aug. 2, but only if a larger and still elusive deficit-cutting agreement was essentially in place. He called lawmakers to the White House in a scramble to find enough votes from both Republicans and his own party.

Obama met with the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, and then separately with House Speaker John Boehner and his deputy, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, in hopes of cobbling together a big compromise. All signs pointed to a legislative fight that would play out to the end.

The president, pushing for a deal that would cut the nation’s budget deficit across the next decade and extend the government’s tapped-out borrowing power through the approaching election year, had threatened to veto any stopgap expansion of the nation’s debt limit. He even challenged Cantor, R-Va., not to call his bluff about it in one confrontational moment last week.

Obama’s now-calibrated position, offered by spokesman Jay Carney, reflected the reality: leaders are nearly out of time to head off unprecedented trouble. Carney said if a divided Congress and the White House can agree on a significant deal, Obama would accept a “very short-term extension” of the debt limit to let bigger legislation work its way through Congress.

Even a few days matters, given the stakes.

The government will exhaust its ability to borrow money and pay its bills come Aug. 2, an outcome that could sink the country back into recession, halt Social Security checks, send interest rates higher and erode the creditworthiness of the richest nation on earth.

The White House made clear Obama still opposes a short-term extension of the debt limit on the order of 30 days or more on the grounds that would just punt the problem. He reiterated that views in his meetings with lawmakers, a Democrat familiar with the talks said.

An aide to Boehner, R-Ohio, said the Republican leaders and the president will continue to talk, but no meeting had been scheduled.

Those familiar with the talks spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose details of the private discussions at the White House. All sides were keeping information tight as time slips by and negotiations grow sensitive.

The latest talks centered on what it will take to muster enough votes from both parties to muscle legislation through the House and Senate and raise the national debt limit. Congressional leaders say they want to prevent default, but they are far from agreed on how.

The divided-by-party nature of Obama’s negotiations underscored his need to get a bottom line from Democrats in both chambers and the leaders of the Republican-run House.

His challenge with fellow Democrats is to persuade them to accept changes to the popular entitlement programs of Medicare and Social Security. With Republicans, Obama is slamming into opposition from conservatives who refuse to consider tax increases. Obama wants a mixed approach of higher taxes on the wealthy and spending cuts that share the pain.

“There is still time to do something significant,” Carney said, urging compromise.

Realistically, though, the deadline for agreement is this week, not next week, given the time needed to craft, debate, pass and work out possible differences in legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Tuesday that the head of the Congressional Budget Office has told him it could take the scorekeeping agency two weeks to come up with an official cost estimate for even a relatively modest package of spending cuts.

Then there are the problems of moving the debt limit increase through the Senate, where the rules allow any single member to force delays.

Parliamentary experts say that if the Senate takes up the debt limit measure this Saturday, it could take more than a week, until Monday, Aug. 1, to pass the measure through the Senate, give the House time to consider it and make changes and then gain Senate approval one more time.

The Obama administration and Congress are also working on a backup plan to increase the debt limit if no big plan can be reached. It would allow Obama to raise the ceiling on his own unless overridden by Congress. Yet many House Republicans loathe that idea and have pledged to vote against it, raising doubts about how tenable even the fallback choice is.

That plan is the result of work by Reid and the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Obama is trying to seize on momentum from a proposal from a bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators that would cut the deficit by almost $4 trillion but lacks many specifics.

Obama met for less than an hour with Reid; Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate and a member of the Gang of Six; House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House.

A House Democratic aide familiar with the meeting said House Democrats stand with Obama on his push for a big bargain but without hurting seniors through cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Obama’s meeting with Boehner and Cantor ran roughly 90 minutes.

The plan by the Gang of Six is probably far too complicated and contentious to win passage before the Aug. 2 deadline. But the plan’s authors hope it could serve as a template for a “grand bargain” later in the year that could erase perhaps $4 trillion from the deficit over the coming decade.

Even among Democrats, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said lawmakers had too few details about the Gang of Six plan.

Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House, reacted positively Wednesday to the new plan, saying it “has some good principles in it.”

However, Republican Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon of California, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, blasted the plan in a missive to his panel members, saying it would cut the Pentagon much too deeply and would unfairly curb military health and retirement benefits.

The Gang of Six framework promises almost $4 trillion in deficit cuts, including an immediate 10-year, $500 billion down payment that would come as Congress sets caps on the agency budgets it passes each year.

It also requires an additional $500 billion in cost curbs on federal health care programs, cuts to federal employee pensions, curbs in the growth of military health care and retirement costs and modest cuts to farm subsidies.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

FAIRFIELD, Alabama — The Fairfield City Council tonight unanimously approved a new property maintenance code council members say will allow the city to target neglected and abandoned houses.

Officials said the ordinance will allow them to condemn and demolish unsafe buildings and take possession of neglected properties in some extreme cases.

In other action, the council passed several measures dealing with the city’s Civic Center. First, it approved Mayor Kenneth Coachman’s appointment of Councilman F.D. Scott to the city’s Civic Center Authority. Scott, a vocal critic of the Civic Center operation, will serve a one-year term on the authority and replace Gloria Carter. He joins councilman Jerry Yarbrough on the authority. Scott served previously on the authority from 2004-08.

The council also voted to pay $2,000 a month to settle back taxes owed by the Civic Center Authority to the state Department of Industrial Relations. The total taxes owed are about $47,000, Coachman said. It also agreed to place a line item into the 2011 budget for the Civic Center, but plans to discuss at a later time Coachman’s request that $25,000 a month in city money be budgeted for the building.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — Alabama’s economy and businesses will be hurt by the state’s new immigration law, as it creates a “regulatory tax on businesses” that will be forced to comply, a Birmingham economist told a roomful of people during a panel discussion at the Birmingham International Center tonight.

Jeremy Thornton, an economics professor at Samford University’s Brock School of Business, said the state’s construction and agricultural industries will be hurt worst. He said the law is one of the “rare examples” where there is no economic benefit, only setbacks.

“The state will be poorer because of this bill,” he said during an interview after the three-person panel discussion.

The panel was the first in a series hosted by the Birmingham International Center and was meant to answer questions as to how the law will affect businesses, law enforcement, municipalities, and individuals.

Stephen Pudner, an attorney at Baker Donelson and moderator of the discussion, said the event was meant to answer questions about the bill, not to promote any political agenda. Others on the panel were Johnston Barton Proctor & Rose LLP attorney Dara Fernandez and John Jenkins, deputy director of the Alabama Department of Homeland Security. Initially, each panelist talked for about 10 minutes about their area of expertise on the law.

During his presentation and also during the question-and-answer session during the second half of the event, Jenkins explained many of the details of the law and how it will be enforced. He said Alabama officials will not have the final authority over determining whether a person is an illegal immigrant or not. That will be up to federal officials.

Fernandez explained how businesses will be held responsible for verifying that their employees are eligible to work in the United States or face penalties such as fines and having their business license suspended.

One of the audience members was Hoover Mayor Tony Petelos, who said he came to get some questions answered for how the immigration law affects cities. However, he said he left the event with more questions than answers.

“As a city, what will we do when issuing permits and licenses?” Petelos said.

Thornton said there are assumptions that enforcement of immigration law will provide jobs for out-of-work Alabamians. However, that’s known as the “lump of labor fallacy,” which refers to the idea that there is a fixed number of jobs. However, he said that’s like saying a football team can only score a certain number of points in a game.

Thornton said the law would actually distort the state’s labor markets and deter businesses from hiring otherwise qualified workers. It could also cause the state to lose tax revenue, as businesses decide to go underground rather than face regulatory burdens.

“A lot of these businesses are going to simply go off the books,” he said.

To read the new law, go here.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.