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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UAB athletic director Mark Ingram is leaving after 11 years, with his departure announced Tuesday by the university as an agreement to “part ways.” Andy Kennedy, the men's basketball coach, will be UAB's interim athletic director during the search for Ingram's replacement. -
Explosions rocked an Ohio industrial recycling business, sparking a large fire that drew a swarm of emergency responders. Two workers were unaccounted for and a few others had minor injuries, officials said. The owner of the facility is based in Brent, Alabama -
Civil rights advocates on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review a Texas law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments, teeing up a potential new test of state-sponsored religious expression in classrooms. This could have an impact in Alabama, where the state passed a similar measure back in April, which was signed into law by Governor Kay Ivey. -
Ohio State and Oregon are 1-2 in the AP Top 25, giving the Big Ten Conference the top two teams in the preseason rankings for just the second time ever. Georgia, Notre Dame and Texas round out the top 5. The bitter pill for Alabama is its slot at number thirteen. The last time the Crimson Tide failed to make the top ten in the AP preseason was 2008, one year after legendary coach Nick Saban moved to Tuscaloosa. -
The U.S. Army temporarily halted all Apache helicopter training missions Friday after a fatal crash in Texas earlier this week killed two soldiers. No cause of the Wednesday crash has been released because the investigation has just begun. A safety investigation team from the Army Combat Readiness Center in Fort Rucker, Alabama, is trying to determine what happened, the Army said. -
Tennessee and Oklahoma put inmates to death within 30 minutes of each other Thursday and Alabama followed suit hours later as U.S. states executed three men by lethal injection in one day for the first time since 2010. The Tennessee man was executed for killing a motel maid in 1985 and the Oklahoma man for killing his girlfriend in 2003. In Alabama, a man was put to death for killing a 5-year-old girl he had offered to pay her mother to abuse. -
A former Southern Poverty Law Center official has been charged in the Department of Justice’s broader criminal case against the Alabama-based civil rights group, a frequent target of conservative critics who claim the nonprofit is politically biased. Heidi Beirich, a political extremism expert who left the law center about six years ago, was named in an indictment unsealed Wednesday. -
Democratic U.S. House member Shomari Figures will face a Republican endorsed by President Donald Trump in his fight for reelection to an Alabama congressional seat the GOP redrew as part of a larger effort to help the party keep control of the U.S. House. He will be running against state Rep. Rhett Marques, who won the GOP nomination for the 2nd Congressional District in Tuesday's special primary election. Figures was unopposed. -
Voters in four of Alabama’s seven congressional districts will select U.S. House nominees Tuesday under a new map that eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts currently represented by Democrats.Primaries for all seven congressional districts were originally scheduled for May 19, but Republican Governor Kay Ivey postponed the contests for the 1st, 2nd, 6th and 7th Congressional Districts. -
School is getting underway this week in the city of Birmingham as well as Mobile, Baldwin, and Montgomery Counties. Healthcare providers say measles shots should be on the list of things to do along with books, pencils, and erasers.
