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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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. -
The Detroit Lions have agreed to a contract extension with a former member of the Crimson Tide— three-year deal worth up to $75.7 million that his agents say makes him the NFL’s newest highest-paid running back. -
2026 has been a busy year for NASA. Four astronauts flew to the moon for the first trip there by human beings there since Apollo 17 in 1972. The flight of Artemis two also highlights Alabama's role in the US space program. The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville designed, built, tested, and manages the big Space Launch System rocket that sends Artemis missions to Earth orbit. Huntsville has its claim to fame when it comes to NASA, but Opelika does too. One of its favorite sons is retired astronaut Jim Voss. He flew four times on the space shuttle and served on the second full-time crew aboard the International Space Station. A conversation that's out of this world, is next on APR Notebook. -
U.S. News and World Report named hospitals nationally for a list of specialties as well as those that were high performing on a state by state basis. One Alabama is ranked number eleven in the U.S. for rheumatology and number forty eight for obstetrics and gynecology. It was the only facility in the state to gain national recognition, and also ranked as the best hospital in Alabama -
The latest number of cyclospora cases, from the Alabama Department of Public Health, is 85 (updated) plus two hospitalizations. This new data was followed by news of two fatalities in Michigan, state health officials announced Monday. -
2026 has been a busy year for NASA. Four astronauts flew to the moon for the first trip by human beings there since Apollo 17 in 1972 The flight of Artemis two also highlights Alabama's role in the US space program. The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville designed, built, tested, and manages the big Space Launch System rocket that sends Artemis missions to Earth orbit. Huntsville has its claim to fame when it comes to NASA, but Opelika does too. One of its favorite sons is retired astronaut Jim Voss. He flew four times on the space shuttle and served on the second full-time crew aboard the International Space Station, a conversation that's out of this world, is next on APR Notebook.
