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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Motorists in Alabama continue to face more pain at the gas pump as U.S. military action against Iran enters its first week. The website of Alabama Triple-A says the cost of a gallon of regular gasoline is $2.98. That’s about a thirty cent jump over the past week. -
Thousands of marchers from around the nation are gathered in Selma, Alabama for this weekend's 61st annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee. This year's celebration will pay special tribute to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who passed away last month at the age of 84. -
Clocks will skip ahead an hour at 2 a.m. Sunday for daylight saving time in most of the U.S. Alabama GOP Congressman Mike Rogers who introduces such a bill every term, said the airline industry, which doesn't want the scheduling complexity a change would bring, has been a factor in persuading lawmakers not to take it up. -
The campus of the now-defunct Birmingham Southern College is being purchased by the U.S. Coast Guard. In a written statement, the Coast Guard said one of the reasons the historic campus was selected is its capacity to accommodate more than 12-hundred recruits. The repurposing of the college campus is also expected to create about one-thousand jobs. -
Published reports say Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is offering help to countries in the Middle East when it comes to defending against Iranian drones. An Alabama U.S. Army veteran, who volunteered to help the Ukrainian military, says they’re good at that type of warfare. -
A Texas judge is hearing evidence Wednesday on whether Camp Mystic, the all-girls youth camp where 25 girls and two counselors were killed in catastrophic floods last year, should remain closed while a lawsuit filed by one of the girls’ families is pending. The flood also killed eight year old Sarah Marsh of Mountain Brook, Alabama. -
In this edition of APR Notebook— I became news director at Alabama Public Radio in September of 2009. One of my first stories involved James Beard award-winning chef Frank Stitt of Birmingham. It was prompted by this, arguably the worst oil spill in American history. -
The website of Alabama Triple-A says the price at the pump may already be showing signs of what’s to come. The cost of a gallon of regular gasoline in the state jumped by ten cents between Monday and yesterday. -
Kanon Catchings scored a career-high 32 points and Georgia ended No. 16 Alabama's eight-game winning streak with a 98-88 victory Tuesday night. Catchings ignited the Bulldogs with 20 points before halftime, leading their fourth win in five games. -
One of Alabama’s longest-serving death row inmates could soon receive a new trial after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the state’s appeal of a lower court's ruling that prosecutors violated his rights by intentionally rejecting potential Black jurors.
