News

The Super Bowl of the home furnishings industry gets under way this weekend in High Point. For the next week – High Point can expect some 80-thousand visitors.  The High Point Market is the largest home furnishings industry trade show in the world.  Buyers, leading retailers, journalists and analysts come from 110 countries to check out the latest styles.

Brian Casey is president and CEO of the High Point Market Authority. He says they can tell the economy is getting better:

The US Fish and Wildlife Service and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission are investigating the shooting of a mature bald eagle in Warren County near the Virginia border. They're offering a $2,500 reward for anyone with information that leads to a conviction.

Margaret H. Turner fought vigilantly for civil rights in Durham, North Carolina in the 1960s by recruiting local students to join the March on Washington, mentoring NAACP youth, and enrolling her own children in a previously all-white school as a way to bring balance to an unequal education system. Turner passed away last week at the age of 93.

Filmmaker Kay D. Ray has captured the stories of generations of female jazz musicians in a new documentary called “Lady Be Good: Instrumental Women in Jazz.”

“Mama’s Gun” is the critically-acclaimed sophomore CD from neo-soul artist Erykah Badu. The project was released 10 years ago and featured background vocals from a teenage singer who called herself YahZarah. That teenager is all grown up now and after touring with Badu and recording two studio projects of her own, YahZarah has reinvented herself for her third CD, “The Ballad of Purple St. James.” YahZarah joins host Frank Stasio for a live, in-studio performance and to talk about working with the Grammy-nominated group The Foreign Exchange and how she defeated the music business in the battle for creative authority of her own music. YahZarah will perform a benefit concert for Durham Nativity School on Saturday, April 2, 2011 at 8 p.m.

The town of Garner in Wake County is preparing to lose its largest employer, ConAgra Foods.  The company employed about 600 people in its Slim Jim plant there until the summer of 2009 when a fatal natural gas explosion killed four works and injured 67. But instead of rebuilding the plant where the explosion took place, ConAgra announced last year that it would be cheaper to close its Garner plant and move its operation to Ohio.

Veterinarians are meeting in Asheville today to learn a quicker, more cost-effective way to neuter and spay pets. The Humane Alliance of Western North Carolina is hosting the conference. It operates a spay and neuter service in Buncombe County that sterilizes an average of 24,000 cats and dogs a year. The group can offer the procedure at a lower cost than full service clinics because it performs many at a time in an assembly line.

A bill passed in the state House would allow residents with concealed handgun permits to carry them into more public places. The measure would allow people with "concealed carry" handgun permits to bring their weapons into restaurants. This includes establishments that serve alcohol.

Republican representative Mark Hilton of Conover says the bill isn't unusual:

Some city and town officials are crying foul over a bill that would limit their ability to provide high-speed internet to their citizens. North Carolina courts have twice ruled local municipalities have the right to provide broadband service: once for Morganton in the 1980s and again for Laurinburg in the mid 90s. Those towns, along with Wilson and Salisbury offer broadband to its citizens, and Fayetteville is planning to.

Salisbury Assistant City Manager Doug Paris says those court decisions make the argument against municipal broadband a weak one:

The sea level at North Carolina's coast will probably rise one meter by the end of the century thanks to global warming. With about 2,000 square miles of the coast just a meter or less above sea level, state residents can expect radical changes. The Outer Banks could be cut to pieces, water might threaten thousands of homes and buildings and the coastal ecosystem would never be the same.