The State Board of Education voted unanimously on a resolution that sharply criticizes the budget passed by the state senate today. They say it will lead to thousands of teachers and teacher assistants being laid off. 

The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival has canceled its fall season for the first time in 34 years. Administrators made the decision in light of the state budget proposal, which cuts essentially all state funds for the festival. About 15 percent of the organization's $1.1 million budget comes from the state. Artistic director Pedro Silva says the festival has to start looking for other sources of funding as the next fiscal year approaches.

The Sacrificial Poets are a local slam poetry team known for powerful spoken word performances that address important social issues like race and politics. The team believes that art creates change by making statements and asking questions. Later this month, The Sacrificial Poets will travel to Tunisia and Egypt to gather stories from people who witnessed North Africa’s political revolutions firsthand and bring those oral histories home to North Carolina.

A few years ago, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sociology Professor Judith Blau and her teaching assistant Rafael Gallegos were at Abbey Court Apartments complex in Carrboro, NC. They were passing out flyers on behalf of the Latino cultural organization El Centro when they were nearly run off by the police. The irony of the situation – that the Abbey Court neighborhood has a high density of immigrants who need support and services and that Abbey Court had the highest crime rate in Carrboro and a hostile relationship with the police department – was not lost on Blau.

In his heyday in the 1940s and '50s, jazz guitarist Greensboro native Tal Farlow wowed the Down Beat crowd, playing with Charles Mingus, Red Norvo and the like. His large hands and his intrinsic sense of harmony distinguished him from his contemporaries. Farlow walked away from the jazz scene in the late 1950s, but he never let go of his love for the music.

A ceremony today in Wilmington is honoring black soldiers who served in the Civil War. A North Carolina Highway Historical Marker will be unveiled just outside the National Cemetery in the city. Jim Steele is the manager of the Fort Fisher State Historic Site. He says a combination of free blacks and former slaves participated in a fight to take the fort.

Greensboro city officials will cut the ribbon for a new amphitheater today. The venue is located on the southern part of the Greensboro Coliseum Complex. The amphitheater's capacity holds about 2,000 more people than Raleigh's new downtown Amphitheater. Andrew Brown with the coliseum says an amphitheater was a natural choice for the complex.

Earlier today, lawmakers in the state Senate tentatively approved a 19-point-7 billion dollar spending plan for the next two years. The framework of the plan was a reworked budget proposal released earlier this week after negotiations between Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate.

Republican budget writer Richard Stevens was the first lawmaker to speak about the plan- otherwise known as House Bill 200- on the Senate floor earlier today. He told his colleagues that he and other Republicans have produced the kind of plan they promised they would.

Sports equipment manufacturers meet with medical experts in Chapel Hill Thursday to consider ways to prevent sports concussions. The conference is meant to address research connecting concussions to dementia in retired athletes. A recent Wake Forest University study of football helmets says there is no helmet that can fully prevent concussions. But manufacturers have made progress in producing helmets that reduce the odds of a head injury. Robert Parish is the President and CEO of Jarden Team Sports, which owns the Rawlings brand of sports equipment.

Drilling for natural gas contained inside of a sedimentary rock called shale has taken off in recent years in some states. But a team of environmental scientists at Duke University recently released a report to illustrate how that process can contaminate groundwater supplies with methane. Their research is calling more public attention to the shale gas drilling process, known as hydraulic fracturing or "fracking."