“I’m sorry.”
These are powerful words. Authentic apologies can work like a healing ointment on old wounds, dissolve bitter grudges, and repair damaged relationships. They encourage both parties to let go of toxic emotions like anger and guilt and provide a fresh foundation of mutual respect.
But authentic apologies involve much more than words expressing sorrow; they require accountability, remorse, and repentance.
On March 15, 1974, the Grand Ole Opry country music radio show closed its run at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, with Johnny and June Carter Cash leading the song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” After that final show, a six-foot circle of wood was cut from the Ryman stage and moved to the new Grand Ole Opry House.
The next night, Roy Acuff opened the first show at the new venue. A video of Acuff singing in the 1940s played before the screen lifted to reveal Acuff himself, singing live in the same spot. The message was clear: Though the stage had changed, the story continued. The circle had not been broken.
We need prisons. They should confine violent felons and people who steal, whether from a convenience store or a pension fund.
But by every legal, financial, and humanitarian standard, the Alabama Department of Corrections is a failure. By the most basic measure of prison operations, Corrections isn’t doing its job.
Before any other consideration, prisons must be safe for staff and inmates. And they ought to offer those in the cells an opportunity to reform, even if the incarcerated never step outside the barbed wire again.
Folks, 2026 is shaping up as one of the best political years in memory in Alabama.
The governor’s, lieutenant governor’s, and attorney general’s offices - and maybe one of our U.S. Senate seats - are up for grabs with no incumbent. The jockeying has begun in earnest for all these posts.
As the Trump administration continues to make significant cuts to NIH budgets and personnel and to freeze billions of dollars of funding to major research universities – citing ideological concerns – there’s more being threatened than just progress in science and medicine. Something valuable but often overlooked is also being hit hard: preventing research abuse.
The National Institutes of Health has been the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research. Its support helps translate basic science into biomedical therapies and technologies, providing funding for nearly all treatments approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010 to 2019. This enables the U.S. to lead global research while maintaining transparency and preventing research misconduct.
It’s not just an excuse for a three-day weekend or a day for barbecue and beer.
Memorial Day is a time for Americans to connect with our national history and core values by honoring those who gave their lives fighting for this country.
In the years following the bitter Civil War, a former Union general took a holiday originated by former Confederates and helped spread it across the entire country.
The holiday was Memorial Day, and today's commemoration marks the 158th anniversary of its official nationwide observance. The annual commemoration was born in the former Confederate States in 1866 and adopted by the United States in 1868. It is a holiday in which the nation honors its military dead.
When Teresa, a widow with four young children, saw a notice that members of her church would gather to deliver presents and food to a needy family, she took $10 out of her savings jar and bought the ingredients to make three dozen cookies. She got to the church parking lot just in time to join a convoy going to the home that was to receive the congregation’s help.
This is what happened to a University of Alabama student targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and how the university reacted.
(Alireza) Doroudi, an Iranian national pursuing a PhD in mechanical engineering (at the University of Alabama), was taken into custody by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit on Tuesday around 3 a.m… The University of Alabama has not provided further details about the situation. Spokesperson Alex House did not respond to messages Friday after initially stating that the university was cooperating with immigration authorities. House did not address whether the university was offering Doroudi any assistance. — Alabama Reflector, March 28, 2025
As Americans become more polarized, even family dinners can feel fraught, surfacing differences that could spark out-and-out conflict. Tense conversations often end with a familiar refrain: “Let’s just drop it.”
As a communications educator and trainer, I am frequently asked how to handle these conversations, especially when they involve social and political issues. One piece of advice I give is that “agree to disagree,” or any other phrase that politely stands in for “stop talking,” will not restore harmony. Not only that, but it could also do permanent harm to those important family bonds.
It’s no secret that warming temperatures, wildfires, and flash floods are increasingly affecting lives across the United States. With the U.S. government now planning to ramp up fossil fuel use, the risks of these events are likely to become even more pronounced.
That leaves a big question: Is the nation prepared to adapt to the consequences?
The great American historian Barbara Tuchman once described folly in government as the pursuit of policies contrary to a country’s own interests and despite the availability of feasible alternatives. Folly, as Tuchman noted, is more than just a one-off bad decision; rather, it is the consistent implementation of a policy that achieves the opposite of what is intended. The Trump administration’s unprecedented trade war rises to this level of mismanagement.
President Donald Trump’s embrace of tariffs to a level not seen in more than a century, supposedly to foster the redevelopment of the country’s industrial base, will do the opposite of what he intends it to do. It will crush U.S. small businesses, particularly those engaged in manufacturing, decimating the backbone of American industry and of countless communities across the country. Already, corporate bankruptcies are up 7.38 percent year over year, commercial freight contracts have plummeted, ports are empty, and hiring has been frozen across several different industries.
Globally, measles is on the rise across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, South America, and parts of Europe. In 2025, North and South America saw 11 times more cases than during the same period last year. In Europe, measles rates are at their highest point in 25 years.
In the United States., as of May 2, 2025, health authorities have confirmed 935 cases of measles affecting 30 states. This is a huge surge compared with the 285 cases reported in 2024. A large measles outbreak is happening in Canada, too, with over 1,000 cases.
The Conversation asked Rebecca Schein, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases, to explain what this spike at home and abroad might mean for a disease that was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000.
American families are struggling to keep up with their bills.
The cost of food soared by more than 23% from 2020 to 2024. Other price increases, which are especially steep for vehicles, insurance, child care, and housing, come as nearly 40% more people are behind on their credit card payments than in 2022.
Now, uncertainty arising from zigzagging tariffs, firing of tens of thousands of federal workers and contractors, and massive cuts and freezes to federally funded programs means that more people are increasingly pessimistic about the economy.
The Trump administration claims to be rooting out “gender ideology extremism” and “restoring biological truth” in the United States.
In a January 2025 executive order, President Donald Trump decreed that there are only two genders – male and female – and that anyone who believes differently denies “the biological reality of sex.”
Yet as a gender studies scholar, I know what the science really says about gender and sex.
This much we know: Alabama’s gender-affirming care ban will be law for the foreseeable future.
Attorneys for transgender young people and their families sued to overturn it. But after a three-year battle, the plaintiffs and the state moved to dismiss the lawsuit. The attorneys for the families said their clients had “to make heart-wrenching decisions that no family should ever have to make, and they are each making the decisions that are right for them.”
To be sure, the broader legal landscape looks threatening. The U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to uphold a similar ban on gender-affirming care in Tennessee. One can hardly blame parents for giving up on an unjust legal system.
Tim Wrightman, a former All-American UCLA football player, tells a story about how as a rookie lineman in the National Football League, he was up against the legendary pass rusher Lawrence Taylor. Taylor was not only physically powerful and uncommonly quick but a master at verbal intimidation.
Looking young Tim in the eye, he said, “Sonny, get ready. I’m going to the left and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, after federal immigration-control officials charged five Mexican citizens with the deaths of four illegal immigrants from drowning, including two children, Shawn Gibson, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, stated, “Smugglers often treat people as disposable commodities. Yesterday’s heartbreaking events are a stark reminder of the urgent need to dismantle these criminal networks driven by greed.”
Gibson has it partly right and partly wrong.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the United States’ top public health official, recently claimed some religious groups avoid the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine because it contains “aborted fetus debris” and “DNA particles.”
The United States is facing its worst measles outbreaks in years with nearly 900 cases across the country and active outbreaks in several states.
At the same time, Kennedy, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, continues to erode trust in vaccines.
The biographer Robert Caro says that power reveals. Power lets you do what you want. And your desires show who you are.
After four years in the U.S. Senate, we have few doubts about what Tommy Tuberville wants.
A man sent to Washington to represent Alabama spends a lot of time on television talking about President Donald Trump or his enemies. Alabama is a peripheral concern. In some cases, Tuberville takes positions that are demonstrably bad for the people here.
When he’s not ignoring Alabamians, he’s embarrassing them. Tuberville in 2022 made an overtly racist assertion that Black Americans are criminals at a rally in Nevada. He also took a very long time to acknowledge that white nationalists are racists.
All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother. ~Abraham Lincoln
The formative period for building character for eternity is in the nursery. The mother is queen of that realm and sways a scepter more potent than that of kings or priests. ~Author Unknown
An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy. ~Spanish Proverb
Congress is moving forward with President Donald Trump’s bill to provide tax cuts for billionaires while ripping social services away from millions of Americans. In particular, the natural resources section of this massive bill reveals how congressional Republicans are trying to sell out public lands to the highest bidder to fund those insider tax breaks, while Big Oil campaign donors and other Wall Street insiders stand to see financial gain.
If passed, this bill would be the largest successful attack by Congress on U.S. lands and waters in modern American history. It would give the oil industry free rein over more than 293 million acres of public lands and waters—an area larger than Texas and California combined—for drilling through its first rounds of mandated lease sales alone.* Factoring in expected tax cuts and other legal changes that would benefit fossil fuel CEOs, the tax bill would be a massive win for Big Oil and a massive loss for the American public.
Republicans in Washington have their sights – once again – on defunding public media.
On May 1, 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit that helps fund American public media stations of all sizes, to terminate support for NPR and PBS. His administration is also proposing to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting entirely, threatening the funding of smaller outlets like WBHM in Birmingham, Alabama, and KGOU in Norman, Oklahoma.
Many Republicans have denounced public media programming as biased, outdated, or simply unnecessary.
There’s an old cemetery a few miles from my home. Several weeks ago, flags with three bars and seven stars sprouted over some of the graves.
It’s my annual reminder that we still have Confederate Memorial Day, one of three state holidays honoring men who killed American soldiers in defense of white supremacy.
That’s what the Confederacy was about, and it’s never been a secret. Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his memoirs that the Southern cause was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
Millions of teenagers across the land are about to leave the womb of high school for a world full of new freedoms and responsibilities. Although many have been waiting for this event for a long time, eager to get on with their lives as liberated adults, the thought of leaving behind friends and familiar places can be scary.
I appreciate teachers. I struggled with teachers, but I appreciate teachers. I even fought with teachers, but I appreciate teachers. This week includes National Teachers’ Day and it is National Teacher Appreciation Week. It gives me a ready-made opportunity to express my profound appreciation for teachers.
Teaching is one of the most important vocations in our society. In fact, it is a special calling. It is a calling that touches, shapes, and molds young minds for better or for worse. No other vocation provides such an opportunity to touch young, growing minds. Teachers often spend more time with our children than we do. Teaching is a precious gift.
Most states have one General Fund Budget. We are only one of five states that have two.
Some of you have asked why we have two budgets – one for the General Fund and one for Education. Here is why.
During the era of the Great Depression and even afterward, education in Alabama was woefully underfunded, and that is really being generous to simply say underfunded. Our schools were similar to those of a third-world country. We had two separate systems, one for white students and one for black students. Many rural schools were one-room shanties like folks used in the 1800s, like "blab" schools - no air conditioning and wood-burning stoves for heat. There were no buses to transport children, so they really did walk to school - barefoot - many times miles to and from. This was for the white schools. You can only imagine what an abysmal education was afforded to black kids. Many times teachers were not even being paid. They were given script notes in hopes of getting paid in the future.
I’ve given my share of commencement addresses, and I confess it’s a head-swelling experience to tell a captive crowd how you think they ought to live their lives while wearing an academic robe and a very silly hat. After all, didn’t they come primarily to hear what you have to say? Actually, they didn’t. In fact, graduation speakers are impediments to the real goal of the day – celebration, not reflection.
Summer means cookouts, picnics, and backyard barbecues. But a generous spread of food eaten outside raises some serious health questions. Nobody wants food poisoning – or to make their guests sick. But how do you know when you’ve kept the potato salad or fruit medley out too long?
As a professor and chair of the Food Science and Human Nutrition program at Iowa State University, I’ll answer those questions by starting with the basics of food safety.
I became acquainted with Governor George Wallace when I was a young page in the Alabama Legislature.
I was elected to the legislature in 1982. Ironically, my district was comprised of my home county of Pike and also the portion of Barbour County that was Wallace’s home, including Clayton and Clio.
As with many other physicians, recommending physical activity to patients was just a doctor chore for me – until a few years ago. That was because I myself was not very active. Over the years, as I picked up boxing and became more active, I got firsthand experience of positive impacts on my mind. I also started researching the effects of dance and movement therapies on trauma and anxiety in refugee children, and I learned a lot more about the neurobiology of exercise.
