Pat Duggins
News DirectorPat Duggins is APR’s news director. As a kid, he watched the Apollo manned moon launches along Florida’s space coast. Pat later spent 14 years covering NASA for NPR. After re-organizing the APR newsroom, he and the team were honored with over 150 awards for excellence in journalism. That includes APR being the first radio newsroom to receive RFK Human Rights’ “Seigenthaler Prize for Courage in Journalism.” Pat holds a master’s degree from the University of Alabama and has published two books on NASA. When he’s not at APR, he enjoys cooking with Lucia, and tending his beloved fig tree.
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Kylan Darnell became an overnight celebrity in the TikTok niche that documents the glitzy, ritualistic recruitment process for sororities. As a 21-year-old rising senior four years later, she's taking more of her sorority life offline. -
“So, do you all remember the dorms that you were in when you were in school?” The University of Alabama’s new President Dr. Peter Mohler asked a group of reporters at the campus’s Riverside West student residential hall. APR asked him to compare his own undergraduate dormitory experience to the students arriving today, ahead of the start of the Fall term. -
The scheduled execution of an Alabama Death Row inmate will not go forward next week as the state waits for the completion of a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation. A judge last month stayed the August, 21st execution of David Lee Roberts until a mental evaluation could be conducted to see if Roberts is competent to be executed. -
Richard Thomas has not one but two big shoes to fill when he goes out on the road this summer in a celebrated one-man show. The Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee is portraying the great American writer Mark Twain in a play written and performed for decades by the late Hal Holbrook. One of his stops will be in Alabama -
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to London on Thursday in a show of the U.K.'s support for Ukraine a day before a critical U.S.-Russia summit is set to take place in Alaska. The situation between Ukraine, Russia, the U.S. and the European Union hits home for Yaryna Zhurba. The Huntsville resident has family living in the Ukrainian city of Solochiv, near the border with Poland. -
A federal judge declined a request to block an Alabama law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in public schools and the teaching of what Republican lawmakers dubbed “divisive concepts” related to race and gender. U.S. District Judge David Proctor wrote that University of Alabama students and professors who filed a lawsuit challenging the law as unconstitutional did not meet the legal burden required for a preliminary injunction, which he called “an extraordinary and drastic remedy.” -
It is a well-versed group of athletic directors, former coaches and players along with a sports writer, who will be armed with statistics, analytics, charts and graphs and enough highlights to start their own college football network as the settle into their work on the College Football Playoff selection committee. In the end, though, the sport's method of determining a champion – or at least deciding who gets the right to play for the championship – comes down to a matter of opinion. -
GE Appliances plans to shift production of refrigerators, gas ranges and water heaters out of China and Mexico as part of a more than $3 billion investment to expand its U.S. operations in Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia,Tennessee and South Carolina. -
Number eight ranked Alabama has named Ty Simpson its starting quarterback heading into the team’s season opener at Florida State. Coach Kalen DeBoer told Simpson along with fellow QBs Austin Mack and Keelon Russell before sharing the news with the team Monday. -
Republican U.S. House member Barry Moore of Alabama announced that he is running for the U.S. Senate, seeking the position being vacated by Senator Tommy Tuberville who is running for governor.
