News

The Triangle’s Long Leaf Opera Company is one of the few opera organizations in the country to feature works composed originally in English. The company has been running continuously for 14 years and is the brainchild of Artistic Director Randolf Umberger and conductor Benjamin Keaton. Unberger died this fall leaving Keaton to run the season by himself. Keaton’s effort to honor his predecessor’s memory has been heroic, but he can’t keep doing it alone, so he has announced that this season will be the company’s last.

Jade City’s city workers rally together in a peaceful demonstration against employee pension cuts…but it’s not peaceful for long when The Beef Cooka’s evil henchmen hit the scene.

President Barack Obama made his first trip as commander in chief to Fort Bragg yesterday. He was there to thank all American troops for their service in Iraq.

President Obama spoke in a sunlit airplane hangar before about 3-thousand troops and their families. He told them their service was selfless and historic, and would be remembered.

President Barack Obama: "You served a cause greater than yourselves. You helped forge a just and lasting peace with Iraq and among all nations. I could not be prouder of you. And America could not be prouder of you."

Governor Bev Perdue has vetoed a bill that would have repealed the Racial Justice Act.

A judge has ruled that Durham novelist Michael Peterson will get a new trial in his wife's 2001 death. Judge Orlando Hudson ruled Wednesday that former State Bureau of Investigation agent Duane Deaver misled the court about the bloodstain evidence at the 2003 trial in which Peterson was convicted of murder in the death of Kathleen Peterson, who was found at the bottom of a bloody staircase. The SBI fired Deaver in January after an independent audit found he misreported, mishandled or exaggerated forensic evidence in 34 criminal cases.

North Carolina has recorded some of the lowest student dropout rates ever in recent years. But what is causing the rate to drop, and do we even have a good handle on who is still dropping out and why?

By 1994, Bob Korstad and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University had compiled more than 1,300 oral histories of people who had lived in the Jim Crow South. The project was called "Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South." It's now being digitized so that anyone can access the oral histories.

Fiscal agents throughout North Carolina government and the university and community college system gathered in Raleigh yesterday to address fiscal challenges facing the state. 

Scott Ralls is President of the state community college system.  The recession hit around the time he took the helm.

Scott Ralls:  "It certainly has been a challenge, not just because the loss of revenue that has been challenging to budget and prioritize, but also the very significant increase in demand that we simultaneously faced during that timeframe."

In the music of Astanza Project, you will hear influences of Latin, jazz, rock, roots and more. The Greensboro-based band is known for blending cultures to develop their signature fusion sound. The four members join host Frank Stasio to perform live and talk about their forthcoming CD.

In the late 1960s, North Carolina had the largest and most active Klu Klux Klan organization in the country. That was largely because of a charismatic man named George Franklin Dorsett, the Imperial Kludd or Chaplain of the United Klans of America. Dorsett’s fiery speeches and magnetism attracted more than 6,000 men to the Klan. Dargan Frierson was an FBI agent in Greensboro with the agency’s COINTELPRO program. This was J. Edgar Hoover’s plan to infiltrate and destroy any organization that Hoover himself deemed a threat to American security, be it the Klan or the Black Panthers.
Dargran Frierson succeeded in disrupting the Klan in North Carolina. His success came when he recruited Dorsett as an informant. Dargan’s son, Michael Frierson, is a filmmaker and professor at U-N-C-Greensboro and his film “FBI KKK” tells his father’s story.