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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Weekend college football was good for Georgia and bad for Alabama in the AP Top 25. The Bulldogs are now in the top four. The Crimson Tide’s first homecoming loss since 2001 dropped Alabama to number ten. Oklahoma outlasted the Tide and that pushed the Sooners to number eight -
The Crimson Tide’s path to the College Football playoffs just got a little more complicated. Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer suffered his first hometown loss, and the Tide lost its first homecoming game since 2001. That was against LSU. Since then, Alabama has won twenty one homecoming games. -
Revenge? Dirty tricks? Ty Simpson’s Heisman hopes? All of these issues have come up ahead of Alabama’s game against Oklahoma. Homecoming games are often depicted as a chance for students and alumni to gather and watch an easy win. The Crimson Tide may have to deal with allegations in the press from Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin. -
With the longest U.S. government shutdown over, state officials said Thursday that they are working quickly to get full SNAP food benefits to millions of people who made do with little-to-no assistance for the past couple of weeks. Until recently, SNAP families and food banks in Alabama will have to subsist with pledges of emergency funding from Governor Kay Ivey and The State Department of Human Resources. -
An estimated 750,000 Alabamians depend on SNAP dollars to afford groceries. Close to 40,000 members of the military and national guard live and work in Alabama. So, how long will it take before food stamps benefits and Pentagon pay start flowing after President Trump signed the bill ending the longest federal shutdown in U.S. history. End of the week—maybe. -
Alabama football is grabbing a lot of headlines right now. But, Crimson Tide men’s basketball will face a crucial test in Tuscaloosa tonight. That’s when Alabama plays Purdue. The Boilermakers made the Final Four last year. That’s when the Tide got in for the first time. More recently, Alabama lost to Purdue a year ago. -
Fernando Clark spent the last 10 months of his life in a jail cell, waiting for psychiatric treatment a court ordered he undergo after he’d been arrested for stealing cigarettes and some fruit from a gas station. He died while waiting for the treatment that never arrived, found unresponsive in his jail cell. -
Space weather forecasters issued an alert for incoming severe solar storms that could produce colorful northern lights and temporarily disrupt communications. This may result in an "Aurora Borealis" or Northern Lights, as far south as Alabama. -
The cities of Montgomery and Birmingham and the Jimmie Hale Mission will have warming stations open night as some of the first blasts of winter weather hit Alabama. Low twenties are in the forecast from the Tennessee Valley to Tuscaloosa and the Magic City. The Gulf coast is expected to be closer to thirty. -
The pain Americans are facing at airports across the country is expected to get worse this week if Congress is unable to reach a deal to reopen the federal government. At Birmingham/Shuttlesworth International Airport, passengers faced sixteen (updated) flight cancellations today, following a weekend of similar frustrations, according to the website FlightAware.
