Forecasters say the greatest impact should be near and north of Interstate 20. Snow, freezing rain, a wintery mix and black ice are concerns through Saturday morning.
Airport spokeswoman Kim Hunt said officials there are “prepping for all the different scenarios.”
As the weather forecast for Friday becomes more specific today, workers will begin pretreating runways and taxiways with an agent to help prevent icing.
“We will also pretreat the roadways leading up to the terminal, the top floor of the parking deck, exposed ramps, even the crosswalks,” Hunt said. “As the forecast gets more specific today, that will dictate the timing of our pre-treatment. Particularly with the runways and taxiways – we don’t want to do the pre-treatment too early since aircraft operating tonight could essentially degrade it.”
In addition, the airport operations team will inspect conditions throughout the night and early morning. Snow removal equipment is ready to go, but officials believe the greatest area of concern will be ice forming, or freezing rain.
Hunt said travelers should keep in mind that the winter weather could cause delays in both getting to the airport and for scheduled flights.
“Our best advice is to stay in touch with your airline and check the status of your flights early and often,” she said.
More than six years have passed since a 20-year-old man died in a barrage of gunfire on Birmingham’s Valley Avenue, and police and family have not given up hope of finding the killer or killers.
Kijuan Harrell, a 20-year-old graduate of Pinson Valley High School, was shot to death June 23, 2018, while sitting in the front passenger’s seat of a vehicle.
The shots rang out just before 1:30 a.m. that Saturday in the 500 block of Valley Avenue.
The vehicle Harrell was in ended up in a parking spot at the far west end of Fox Valley Apartments.
He was taken to UAB Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 2:13 a.m. from a gunshot wound to the chest.
Another male was in the vehicle at the time of the shooting but was not injured.
Birmingham police investigated the June 23, 2018 shooting death of a 20-year-old man on Valley Avenue.(Carol Robinson)
Police early in the investigation said Harrell may have been a bystander caught in crossfire.
Officer Truman Fitzgerald said Thursday the shots were fired from a black vehicle, believed to be a Nissan Maxima.
“Kijuan was loved by many,’’ his mother, Chiquita Norman Dixon, told AL.com in 2018. “A piece of my soul has been ripped out and is not coming back.”
Dixon previously said she believes those who know what happened are not telling police, or her, the truth about what led to her son’s death.
Harrell graduated from high school with advanced diploma and played basketball.
Anyone with information that will aid our detectives, please contact the Homicide Division directly at 205-254-1764 or remain anonymous by contacting Crime Stoppers at 205-254-7777.
A Minnesota judge has ordered MyPillow to pay nearly $778,000 for unpaid bills and other costs to package delivery service DHL, which had sued the company that’s synonymous with its founder, chief pitchman and election denier Mike Lindell.
The award includes over $48,000 in interest and over $4,800 for DHL’s attorney’s fees. The order, signed last month by Hennepin County Judge Susan Burke, said MyPillow had agreed in October to pay DHL $550,000 but failed to do so and did not send anyone to a hearing last month on DHL’s effort to collect.
Lindell said after the lawsuit was filed that MyPillow stopped using DHL over a year earlier in a dispute over shipments that he said were DHL’s fault.
The “MyPillow Guy” is also being sued for defamation by two voting machine companies, Dominion Voting Systems in Washington, D.C., and Smartmatic in Minnesota.
Craig Ferguson has canceled five shows set for this weekend at the Comedy Club Stardome in Alabama. The comedian and former late-night host was set to perform on Friday, Jan. 10, through Sunday, Jan. 12, at the venue, 1818 Data Drive in Hoover.
Ferguson had two performances scheduled each night on Friday and Saturday, and one performance on Sunday. It’s unclear why the shows were canceled, but the dates are listed as canceled on the Stardome website and tickets are no longer on sale via Etix. Tickets were priced at $30 general admission, $50 for premium seating, plus fees.
“If an event is canceled and not rescheduled, upon formal notification from the event promoter, we will email all online customers and refunds will automatically be applied to the credit card used by the customer at the time of purchase,” the Etix website says.
See more info on Etix’s refund policies here. To reach the Stardome’s box office, call 205-444-0008.
Ferguson, 62, is best known as the host of the CBS series “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” (2005-2014). He has hosted game shows such as “Celebrity Name Game” (2014–2017) and “The Hustler” (2021), as well as the historical talk show “Join or Die with Craig Ferguson” (2016). His TV credits also include a breakthrough role on “The Drew Carey Show” (1996-2004).
Ferguson has earned a Peabody Award, two Daytime Emmy Awards and three Grammy nominations. He hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2008 and is the author of a 2009 memoir, “American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot.” Ferguson was born in Scotland and is a naturalized American citizen.
The start of a new year means that tax season is just around the corner.
The deadline for filing 2024 income taxes with the Internal Revenue Service is April 15, 2025. The date when the IRS will begin processing returns has not been announced – it’s typically late January – but Free File Guided Tax Software will be available Friday, Jan. 10.
Starting Jan. 10, the IRS will begin accepting tax returns via IRS Free File. The free software tools offered by IRS Free File partners can be accessed via IRS.gov.
“The IRS remains committed to its partnership with Free File Inc. to ensure taxpayers have free and secure options for filing their taxes electronically,” said IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel. “Taxpayers have multiple filing choices, including trusted tax professionals, tax software, Free File, Direct File or free preparation services through IRS partners.”
IRS Free File is available for taxpayers with an Adjusted Gross Income of $84,000 or less in 2024. It will allow taxpayers to prepare and file returns now and will hold them until they can be electronically filed on the opening date. Some of the Free File providers include state tax return preparation and filing as well.
Taxpayers with AGI of more than $84,000 can use the Free File Fillable Forms starting Jan. 27.
OK, Texas. The eyes of the SEC are upon you. Or will be, all the livelong day Friday, unless it turns out to be a snow day in the Dallas Metroplex. It’s time for you to justify your existence in the Southeastern Conference.
Along with Oklahoma, you were gifted a spot in the SEC, which didn’t need to expand and may one day come to regret that decision. In your first year in the conference, you were gifted the easiest schedule in memory, maybe in modern history, and still you didn’t win the league because you went 0 for 2 against a Georgia team in decline.
You were gifted a playoff path that began with the two lowest-ranked teams in the field, and after struggling to put away Clemson and barely surviving Arizona State, you’ve been gifted a semifinal in your home state.
Oh, sure, it’s against Ohio State, the hottest team still standing, and though it’s called the Cotton Bowl, it’s not being played in the Cotton Bowl, but you do get to bring Bevo.
All things considered, even though you haven’t completed your pledge period, you’re the SEC’s last hope. The rest of the country already has started dancing on the league’s grave. If you lose, the Big Ten may stage a New Orleans-style funeral for SEC football on Peachtree Street in Atlanta as a lead-in to the National Championship Game.
No pressure, Steve Sarkisian, but it’s about time a Nick Saban disciple other than Kirby Smart rises to the occasion this deep in the season.
Which is really the point of this tough-talk pep talk to the Burnt Orange Nation. The rest of the country is missing the point as it delights in delineating all the reasons for the purported death of the SEC’s dynastic control of college football.
Everybody can pay players now, as if the SEC were the only conference with generous boosters prior to the introduction of NIL money. The transfer portal has dented the SEC’s talent advantage, as if the top three and seven of the top 10 high school recruiting classes in the early signing period don’t belong to SEC programs, as do three of the top four and six of the top 10 portal hauls.
There will be a question to be asked if Texas loses Friday, which would make the National Championship Game SEC-free for a second straight year for the first time since 2004 and 2005. That question won’t be whether SEC football as we know it is dead and buried, gone, GONE! It’ll be this:
Can SEC football dominate the national landscape if Alabama isn’t dominating the SEC? Because the former has never happened without the latter.
Consider. The 2024 SEC football media guide says league schools have won 28 national championships, starting with Tennessee in 1951. Remember that the conference began in 1933, and it counts only those titles awarded by a wire service media poll, coaches’ poll, the Football Writers Association of America, the BCS and the College Football Playoff.
In the 46 years from 1951 to 1996, the SEC lists 13 national championships. Alabama won seven of them, six under Bear Bryant and one under Gene Stallings. Six other league schools added one each: Tennessee (1951) Auburn (1957), LSU (1958), Ole Miss (1960), Georgia (1980) and Florida (1996).
That stretch alone tells us the SEC didn’t truly begin to own college football until the BCS began in 1998 with Tennessee winning it all. From 1998 through 2022, the conference won 15 national titles in 25 years. Alabama captured six of them, all under Saban, and he added a seventh at LSU.
More than any other single event, Saban’s arrival at LSU in 2000 and his return to the conference at Alabama in 2007 forced the rest of the conference to step up or fade out. Since his BCS championship at LSU in 2003, five different conference schools have earned a banner. Four of them – Alabama (6), LSU (3), Florida (2) and Georgia (2) – have hung more than one. Auburn added the other in 2010.
But now that Saban has retired to become Pat McAfee’s professional sidekick and Coach Prime’s commercial running buddy, there is a serious void at the top of the SEC food chain. Is there a future GOAT candidate among his disciples Smart, Sark and Lane Kiffin? Can his successor, Kalen DeBoer, turn a rocky start in Tuscaloosa into a lengthy, rewarding stay?
Is the SEC even capable of re-establishing its hegemony if Alabama proves incapable of leading the way in a post-Saban world?
There’s one thing we know for sure that the rest of the country seems to have forgotten. Football is too important at too many places in the SEC for the sport to roll over and play dead for long. Texas, given the deep pockets of its big cigars, is on the short list of realistic candidates to be the Alabama of the future, if that kind of dominance is even possible in an NFL Lite environment.
But first things first. Friday presents an excellent opportunity for the other UT to prove it belongs and to demonstrate the SEC is not going away. You’ve been warned, Longhorns. Around here, coming up short on the big stage is not alright, alright, alright. A’ight?
One year ago, the unthinkable happened for many Alabama football fans – Nick Saban’s legendary tenure as the Crimson Tide head coach came to an end. The year that followed featured new names and faces, some excitement, and plenty of shock as Alabama fans tried to adjust to their new reality. Paul Finebaum joins us to look back at Alabama’s first year in the post-Saban era and gives his thoughts on where the program is headed under Kalen DeBoer.
Later, Michael Casagrande and Matt Stahl share their memories as reporters handling that fateful day when Saban made his announcement.
Beat Everyone is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on your favorite platform to automatically receive new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Beat Everyone is brought to you by Broadway Joe’s Fantasy Sports.
Expected at former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral are the five living men who have also served as president: Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
There are also incoming, current and former vice presidents, including JD Vance, Kamala Harris, Al Gore, Mike Pence —and of course Biden, who served alongside Obama.
Biden and his wife Jill took their seats next to Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff. There were no visible greetings, but the former presidents were all together in a private room ahead of their entrances into Washington National Cathedral.
Obama took his seat next to Trump, chatting with his successor in office, who did not stand to greet him but shook hands. They were engaged in conversation as Harris entered the cathedral.
Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence shook hands as the president-elect took his seat with wife Melania, just in front of his former vice president.
One of the dignitaries missing from the former president lineup is Michelle Obama.
Ahead of the funeral, CNN reported that the former first lady had a scheduling conflict and remained in Hawaii, where she had been on an “extended vacation.”
Nearly a decade ago, intense protests over racial injustice rocked the University of Missouri’s flagship campus, leading to the resignation of two top administrators. The university then hired its first-ever vice chancellor for inclusion, diversity and equity. Tensions were so high that football players were threatening a boycott and a graduate student went on hunger strike.
Today, the entire diversity office is gone, an example of changes sweeping universities in states led by conservatives, and a possible harbinger of things to come nationwide.
“I feel like that is the future, especially for the next four years of Trump’s presidency,” said Kenny Douglas, a history and Black studies major on the campus in Columbia, Missouri.
Student Kenny Douglas poses for a photo at the University of Missouri where he is a a history and Black studies major, Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2024, in Columbia, Mo. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)AP
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, both conservative and liberal politicians say higher education changes in red parts of America could be a road map for the rest of the country.
Dozens of diversity, equity and inclusion programs have already closed in states including Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, Iowa, Nebraska and Texas. In some cases, lessons about racial and gender identity have been phased out. Supports and resources for underrepresented students have disappeared. Some students say changes in campus climate have led them to consider dropping out.
The University of Alabama’s former Safe Zone Resource Center was empty as students prepared for their first week of classes on Aug. 19, 2024. Officials closed the space to comply with a new state law. AL.com / Rebecca GriesbachRebecca Griesbach
During his campaign, Trump vowed to end “wokeness” and “leftist indoctrination” in education. He pledged to dismantle diversity programs that he says amount to discrimination, and to impose fines on colleges “up to the entire amount of their endowment.”
Many conservatives have taken a similar view. Erec Smith, a research fellow at the free-market Cato Institute whose scholarship examines anti-racist activism and Black conservatism, said DEI sends the message that “whiteness is oppression.” Diversity efforts are “thoroughly robbing Black people and other minorities of a sense of agency,” he said.
The New College of Florida, a tiny liberal arts institution once known as the most progressive of Florida’s public campuses and a refuge for LGBTQ+ students, became a centerpiece for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “war on woke.” DeSantis overhauled the school’s Board of Trustees in 2023, appointing a new majority of conservative allies, including culture war strategist Christopher Rufo.
Many faculty departed last year, leaving vacancies that the new leadership has filled with a variety of conservative academics — and non-academics, including British comedian and conservative commentator Andrew Doyle, who will be teaching a new course this January called “The Woke Movement.”
“This is only the beginning,” Rufo wrote in the forward to school President Richard Corcoran’s new book, “Storming the Ivory Tower.”
Trump’s opponents dismiss his depictions of liberal indoctrination on campuses as a fiction. But conservatives point to diversity programs and the student debt crisis as evidence colleges are out of touch.
“What happens if you are an institution that’s trying to change society?” asked Adam Kissel of the conservative Heritage Foundation — the group behind Project 2025, a sweeping anti-DEI blueprint for a new GOP administration that Trump has disavowed while nominating some of its authors for administrative roles. “Society will push back on you.”
Pushback is exactly what DEI programs have faced.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, in March signed into law a bill barring state funding for public colleges that advocate for “divisive concepts” including that someone should feel guilty because of their race or gender. The law also states people at schools and colleges must use the bathroom that matches their gender assigned at birth.
The effects of the anti-DEI law rippled through campuses including the University of Alabama and Auburn University, the state’s two largest four-year colleges. DEI offices and designated areas for LGBTQ+ and Black students closed when classes started in late August — just before the law took effect.
Dakota Grimes, a graduate student in chemistry, was disappointed when Auburn University closed the campus’ Pride Center, a designated safe space for LGBTQ+ people and allies. Grimes’ organization, Sexuality and Gender Alliance, still meets regularly in the library, she said, but LGBTQ+ students don’t feel as welcome on campus. Students are subjected to homophobic and transphobic slurs, Grimes said.
“They don’t feel safe just sitting in the student center because of the kind of environment that a lot of students and even teachers create on campus,” Grimes said.
Julia Dominguez, a political science senior at the University of Alabama and president of the Hispanic-Latino Association, said funding for the group’s annual Hispanic Heritage Month festival was pulled two weeks before the event in September. Students who were once excited about being at a school that celebrates Latino culture, she said, are now feeling dejected and disillusioned.
The organization isn’t giving up, Dominguez said.
“We are still present,” Dominguez said. “We are still doing the work. It’s just harder now. But we’re not going to allow that to steal our joy because joy is resistance.”
In Idaho, DEI programs have been under attack for years, with Republican lawmakers blasting efforts to build an inclusive culture as “divisive and exclusionary.” In recent sessions, the Legislature has blocked colleges and universities from using taxpayer dollars on campus DEI programs. A 2024 law banned written “diversity statements” in higher education hiring and student admissions.
Nick Koenig, a University of Idaho doctoral student who teaches in climate change and sociology, poses for a photo on Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024, on campus in Moscow, Idaho. Koenig moved to Idaho in 2022 and fears that UofI will soon follow the example of other colleges and universities in Idaho and shut down their equity and diversity centers in favor of generically renamed centers designed to cater to all students. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)AP
In December, the State Board of Education scrapped DEI offices, causing shockwaves at the University of Idaho. Doctoral student Nick Koenig is considering leaving the state.
“Where do your true values lie?” asked Koenig, who decided to move to Idaho to research climate change after a Zoom call with the then-director of the school’s LGBT center. “It’s not with the students that are most marginalized.”
So far, nearly all of the threats to DEI have come from state legislatures, said Jeremy Young, of the free-expression group PEN America.
“There hasn’t been much support at the federal level to do anything,” he said. ”Now, of course, that’s going to change.”
Young anticipates that diversity considerations will be eliminated for research grants and possibly for accreditation. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights typically investigates discrimination against people of color, but under Trump, that office could start investigating diversity programs that conservatives argue are discriminatory.
Republicans also may have more leeway to take action at the state level, thanks to an administration that’s “going to get out of the way of red states and let them pursue these policies,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow who studies higher education policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Colleges are also cutting some programs or majors seen as unprofitable. Whether politics plays into decisions to eliminate certain courses of student remains to be seen.
Douglas, the University of Missouri student, is concerned. He said the promise of change that followed the earlier protests on the Columbia campus has dissipated.
This fall, a student group he is part of had to rename its Welcome Black BBQ because the university wanted it to be “welcoming to all.” The Legion of Black Collegians, which started in 1968 after students waved a Confederate flag at a football game, complained the change was erasing its visibility on campus.
For Douglas and many others, the struggle for civil rights that prompted diversity efforts isn’t a thing of the past. “White people might have moved past it, but Black people are still experiencing it,” he said.
