Franklin, NC
SO. YARMOUTH, MA-Western Carolina junior third baseman Nick Liles played in the all-star game of the prestigious Cape Code amateur baseball league last weekend, starting second base for the East squad and playing all nine innings in front of an overflow crowd of 8,629 at Veterans Field in Chatham, Mass.
Liles went 0-3 from the plate, [...]
STATEWIDE/NATIONAL-In a recent interview with an AP special reporter, presidential candidate Barack Obama listed North Carolina, Georgia and Virginia as southern states he figures are winnable.
And if the theory that Obama’s tarheel success will be driven by young, unaffiliated and newly-registered voters holds true, the numbers are with him.
Durham-based advocacy group Democracy North Carolina warned [...]
CULLOWHEE-The Southern Conference’s newest member is Samford University, a private, Baptist-affiliated school out of Birmingham.
From the Chattanooga Times Free Press:
Samford … was founded in 1841 as Howard College, [and] officially joined the SoCon on July 1, leaving the Ohio Valley Conference after five years and giving the SoCon, the fifth-oldest Division I conference in the [...]
BRYSON CITY-Among my great aunt Lillian’s passions was the collection of precious stones. She’d turn up in Cullowhee once a year or so, and I’d be ecstatic about the chance to skip school and drive to Franklin with her to sift trays of mud.
It wasn’t, safe to say, an interest I carried into adulthood — [...]
REGIONAL-The North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching, located at Western Carolina University, brings talented teachers from across the state to the mountains for rest, relaxation and professional rejuvenation.
Many teachers tell us that it is an extraordinary concept and that it works wonders.
Bill Poteat, a teacher from the foothills and a columnist for the [...]
NATIONAL-Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and another dozen or so books, is described this way by reviewer Richard Eder in the New York Times:
Ms. Ehrenreich has long been a happy warrior sallying forth against what she regards as the Big Lie about equal opportunity in our society. She [...]
HIGHLANDS-A few weeks ago we touched on the plan by the town of Highlands to put together a complex of apartments, half of them subsidized, within city limits, to help deal with the issue of affordable housing for workers in that town.
Highlands is a resort town, located on a ridge with relatively little buildable space, [...]
CASHIERS-Never mind banjo-savants or Ned Beatty, the weirdness in the woods these days seems often-as-not imported by the nouveau riche.
There’s nothing like whisperings of the mafioso to get a drowsy summer resident’s nose out of her whodunit, and the news this week is full of such gossip from the Big Ridge community, just north of [...]
DILLSBORO-The Great Smoky Mountains Railroad, an anchor of Dillsboro economic activity for two decades, announced plans this afternoon to cease all operations from its Dillsboro station, effective August 8.
Citing “the state of local and regional economic conditions, and rapidly rising diesel fuel costs,” Kimberly Albritton, Vice President & General Manager, said the railroad would consolidate [...]
ASHEVILLE-In early July, a federal court struck down the 2005 Environmental Protection Agency Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR), which was considered the most stringent aspect of the Bush Administration’s suspect “Clear Skies Initiative”.
Now, as North Carolina’s significant lawsuit against the enormous Tennessee Valley Authority moves into its second week, we’re all squinting through the haze [...]