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Veterans Day 2026 in Birmingham: 79th National Parade, deals + more events (Bham Now)
The country’s oldest Veterans Day celebration kicks off next week featuring a parade and more celebrations throughout the area.
Alabama Power routinely bills ratepayers for ads promoting its goods and services. State regulators want that stopped. (Inside Climate News)
Under a new law that takes effect in 2029, the powerful and highly profitable utility will be barred from charging customers for its own advertising. The Alabama Public Service Commission wants the company to voluntarily end the practice — immediately.
Straight-ticket ballots reach 70% of all Alabama votes; Democrats increase share (Alabama Reflector)
More than 70% of Alabama voters cast straight-ticket party ballots on Tuesday, a record that also featured a higher percentage of those votes going to Democrats.
The Secretary of State’s Office published a news release Thursday that said almost 1.2 million of the nearly 1.7 million votes were straight ticket. Of those, about 54% were for Republican candidates and about 46% for Democrats. In 2022, about 66.5% of the 1.4 million votes cast were straight ticket. About 68.4% of those went to the Republican slate and about 31.5% to the Democrats.
April Weaver becomes first woman to serve as Alabama Senate majority leader
The Alabama Senate Republican Caucus elected Senator April Weaver, R-Brierfield, as majority leader Thursday, making her the first woman to hold the post in state history. Weaver, whose district includes a portion of Shelby County, has served in the Senate since 2021.
Birmingham to introduce real-time road updates with new digital tools (Bham Now)
The city of Birmingham is modernizing traffic operations through a new partnership with Causeway Technologies, introducing digital tools to improve how the city plans, manages and communicates road closures. Traffic flow conditions will be automatically shared with major navigation providers to give motorists timely routing information.
After nearly 70 years, Birmingham’s Fountain Heights is getting a grocery store of its own (WBHM)
The We All Eat Market opened Saturday, bringing a neighborhood grocery store to Fountain Heights for the first time in nearly 70 years. The market opened inside the Fountain Heights Farms Cooperative’s new Heart of the Farm facility at 1201 16th St. N. The cooperative started with neighborhood gardens in 2016 and has grown into a network of 16 farm plots, with a goal of expanding to 119 plots by 2030.
US loses a football field of forest every 2 minutes (Inside Climate News)
A new U.S. Forest Monitor tracks satellite imagery to document forest loss over time. Alabama had the sixth-most forest loss among the states between 1990 and 2017, with 79% of the forest land being converted to cropland and about 21% to development.
Ivey announces new ‘Opportunity Zones’ approved by U.S. Treasury, IRS (1819 News)
Gov. Kay Ivey on Friday announced that Alabama’s Opportunity Zones 2.0 nominations have been approved by the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service. The zones encourage long-term private investment in economically distressed communities through tax incentives. Twenty-four census tracts in Jefferson County are among those on the list.
