Pat Duggins

Communities on the U.S. Gulf Coast distributed sandbags and closed beaches as Tropical Storm Bertha threatened to bring flooding and strong winds Wednesday from the Florida Panhandle to Louisiana.

Before Arnold Schwarzenegger was “The Terminator,” and before Lou Ferrigno was the “Incredible Hulk,” there was Charles Gaines. The Alabama native and author whose book and documentary “Pumping Iron” helped bring professional bodybuilding into the mainstream and introduce Schwarzenegger to the world, has died. He was 84.

Tropical Storm Bertha made landfall in Louisiana and was southwest of New Orleans while moving west toward Texas early Thursday morning, after closing beaches on the Gulf Coast from the Florida Panhandle to Mississippi.

“We will not tolerate the victimization of vulnerable women here in Shelby County,” said Lieutenant Clayton Smith, commander of the Shelby County Drug Task Force to the press. His comments followed the arrest of fifteen men now accused of soliciting sex. The group reportedly includes former sports writer Robert Aaron Suttles, who left journalism to become the content director for “Yea Alabama,” the name, image, and likeness operation for Crimson Tide athletics. The arrests occurred during a human trafficking sting operation.

There were at least three suspects involved in a shootout at a crowded food festival near Seattle's Space Needle over the weekend.

Police say the 15-year-old arrested after a shootout at a food festival near Seattle’s Space Needle over the weekend was armed with a ghost gun with an extended magazine. The attack killed Ashley Whitehead, an Alabama woman who moved to the Pacific Northwest a year ago.

Preliminary testing showed the bullets that killed two bystanders during a shootout at a crowded Seattle food festival last weekend didn’t come from the gun a 15-year-old arrested at the scene was seen firing. That finding was in court documents from police. One of the fatalities was Ashley Whitehead, who had just moved to the Seattle area from Alabama a year ago.

A TSA agent discovered a set of stolen Civil War-era cannonballs in a passenger's suitcase during a routine security screening at an Alabama airport earlier this month,

2026 has been a busy year for NASA. Four astronauts flew to the moon for the first trip by human beings there since Apollo 17 in 1972 The flight of Artemis two also highlights Alabama's role in the US space program. The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville designed, built, tested, and manages the big Space Launch System rocket that sends Artemis missions to Earth orbit. Huntsville has its claim to fame when it comes to NASA, but Opelika does too. One of its favorite sons is retired astronaut Jim Voss. He flew four times on the space shuttle and served on the second full-time crew aboard the International Space Station, a conversation that's out of this world, is next on APR Notebook.

The latest number of cyclospora cases, from the Alabama Department of Public Health, is twenty eight plus two hospitalizations. This new data was followed by news of two fatalities in Michigan, state health officials announced Monday.