Virginia State Police identified Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. as the man responsible for Laurie Ann Powell’s 1988 killing.
For 37 years, the murder of 18-year-old Laurie Ann Powell haunted Virginia’s Gloucester County and the investigators who refused to let her name fade into another cold case file.
Thursday, Virginia State Police delivered the answer Powell’s family has spent nearly four decades waiting for: advanced DNA testing identified Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. as the man responsible for her 1988 killing.
“We express our sincere condolences for your loss and the pain you had experienced these past 37 years. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding as our agencies worked toward solving this case,” Robin Lawson, the public relations director for Virginia State Police, said during a Friday news conference.
Wilmer, a commercial waterman who drifted between marinas in Gloucester, Middlesex, the Northern Neck and Hampton Roads, died in 2017. But, investigators said, if he were alive today, he would be facing homicide charges.
Powell vanished on March 8, 1988, after being dropped off by her boyfriend and beginning a walk along Route 614 toward Route 17. Her body was found nearly a month later in the Elizabeth River near Craney Island. She had been stabbed multiple times. Biological evidence from the crime scene included DNA tied to a sexual assault.
A multiagency effort and modern forensic tools funded through the state’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative helped change that. When investigators obtained Wilmer’s DNA postmortem, the match was found.
Authorities said Wilmer would have also been charged in the 1987 killings of David Nobling and Robin Edwards in Isle of Wight County, as well as the 1989 killing of Teresa Lynn Spaw-Howe in Hampton. The deaths of Nobling and Edwards became known as being a part of the Colonial Parkway murders.
Powell becomes the fourth confirmed victim linked to Wilmer.
Wilmer had no felony record during his lifetime, which meant his DNA never landed in CODIS, a DNA indexing system. State Police hinted that loopholes like this — where a suspected serial killer’s profile can’t be uploaded because he was never convicted — may require a legislative fix.
Investigators are now reconstructing Wilmer’s movements throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, asking the public for any memories, sightings, or interactions, however small. Officials highlighted Wilmer’s distinctive blue 1966 Dodge Fargo pickup, his wooden fishing boat Denny Wade, and his tree service business that ran under the name, Better Tree Services.
But, the day belonged to Powell’s family.
Powell’s sister, Cindy Kirchner, spoke through tears, describing her as a “fearless, bold, unforgettable firecracker” whose laughter and spirit still echo through the people who loved her.
“It’s not justice,” Virginia State Police Cpt. Timothy Reibel said. “But it is resolution.”
Anyone with further information is urged to contact Virginia State Police at questions@vsp.virginia.gov.
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A family is displaced after a fire that began in an attached garage swept through a house in Woodbridge, Virginia, early Saturday.
An overnight fire engulfs a Woodbridge home, which was later declared unsafe; all seven residents escaped safely.(Courtesy Prince William County Government Department of Fire and Rescue)
An overnight fire engulfs a Woodbridge home, which was later declared unsafe; all seven residents escaped safely.(Courtesy Prince William County Government Department of Fire and Rescue)
Flames that began in an attached garage swept through a house in Woodbridge, Virginia, early Saturday.
Prince William County Fire and Rescue said seven people, including a child, were all evacuated safely, as crews worked to contain heavy fire coming from a house in the cul-de-sac of Luca Station Drive around 2:45 a.m.
No injuries were reported.
The home sustained extensive damage and has been declared unsafe.
The Red Cross is assisting the displaced family.
Investigators are working to determine what caused the fire.
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Fairfax Co. schools to install weapons detectors at high school football playoff games after a string of incidents around the D.C. region during the fall athletic season.
Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia will install weapons detectors at high school football playoff games starting this weekend, following a string of incidents around the D.C. region during the fall athletic season.
In a statement to WTOP, the school system said additional safety measures, “including the weapons detection system,” will be in place at all postseason football games held at its schools. The measures are part of an ongoing effort to “enhance our layered security” at its schools, the statement said.
“Our hope is that these new measures will enhance safety for everyone who attends our games,” the statement said.
Schools will be using the OpenGate weapons detectors system, which the county started using in April. It is designed to detect handguns, long guns and knives. At the time, school officials said OpenGate is faster and more selective than traditional metal detectors.
Schools are advising sports fans to come early and to purchase their tickets online. Students attending games must obtain a wristband identifying which school they attend.
If a student from a non-participating school tries to attend a playoff game, they will receive a different type of wristband and must stay with a parent or guardian for the entire contest.
A spokesperson for the Virginia High School League — the governing body for the state playoffs — told WTOP that Fairfax County schools, along with other school districts, determine the security measures for regional playoff football games.
Throughout the fall season, security measures increased at area high school football events following multiple incidents at games.
In Prince George’s County, Maryland, metal detectors and extra police were added to games after a robbery happened after a football game at Dr. Henry Wise Jr. High School in Upper Marlboro on Sept. 19.
D.C. Public Schools also established a new policy requiring students to have an adult chaperone at games, citing “multiple instances of spectator conflict.”
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Surry County, Virginia — For being just 19 years old, Cameran Drew of Surry County, Virginia, is ambitious — some might say overly ambitious.
In last week’s election, the young liberal took on the establishment when he ran for a seat on the Surry County Board of Supervisors.
“I wanted this job because I knew I could serve the people,” Drew told CBS News. “I knew I could be an advocate for the youth and be an advocate for our county.”
It’s a confidence he credits to his favorite teacher, Kenneth Bell, who teaches civics at Surry County High School.
Bell describes Drew as a “wonderful young man” who he always knew would make a great politician someday. He just didn’t realize that day would come so soon.
“He would have been formidable against any opponent against whom he would have run,” Bell told CBS News.
And Drew says it was Bell’s “guidance” that “helped me and prepared me so much for this moment.”
But there was a catch in Drew’s campaign. To get elected, Drew would have to defeat the incumbent, a beloved lifelong resident and conservative: Bell.
Bell had held the position since this summer in an interim capacity after the former supervisor resigned.
Drew was challenging his own mentor. But both said it didn’t create an uncomfortable situation at all.
“Because he was very receptive,” Drew said. “We were both respectful about it, so it was never an awkward moment.”
In fact, during the campaign, Bell said he found himself defending Drew, especially on the age issue.
“Yes, he’s young, but he’s really invested in trying to make a difference,” Bell said, admitting that he realizes it’s rare for a political candidate to defend his opponent.
“Well, you have to be a teacher, I think, to really know this and to see somebody who you helped shape and mold take this brave step, not knowing what’s going to happen,” Bell said.
In the end, Drew won by just eight votes at last count, according to unofficial state election results — 345 to 337, a margin of just 1.2%.
Bell happily conceded. And what did he say to Drew following his former student’s narrow win?
“Congratulations, and I’m so proud of you,” Bell said. “And I love you.”
Said Drew, “I’m just lost for words because of the fact he’s been so gracious.”
The messaging is centered around affordability, and the push comes after inflation emerged as a major vulnerability for Trump and Republicans in Tuesday’s elections, in which voters overwhelmingly said the economy was their biggest concern.
Democrats took advantage of concerns about affordability to run up huge margins in the New Jersey and Virginia governor races, flipping what had been a strength for Trump in the 2024 presidential election into a vulnerability going into next year’s midterm elections.
White House officials and others familiar with their thinking requested anonymity to speak for this article in order to not get ahead of the president’s actions. They stressed that affordability has always been a priority for Trump, but the president plans to talk about it more, as he did Thursday when he announced that Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk would reduce the price of their anti-obesity drugs.
“We are the ones that have done a great job on affordability, not the Democrats,” Trump said at an event in the Oval Office to announce the deal. “We just lost an election, they said, based on affordability. It’s a con job by the Democrats.”
The White House is keeping up a steady drumbeat of posts on social media about prices and deals for Thanksgiving dinner staples at retailers such as Walmart, Lidl, Aldi and Target.
“I don’t want to hear about the affordability, because right now, we’re much less,” Trump told reporters Thursday, arguing that things are much better for Americans with his party in charge.
“The only problem is the Republicans don’t talk about it,” he said.
The outlook for inflation is unclear
As of now, the inflation outlook has worsened under Trump. Consumer prices in September increased at an annual rate of 3%, up from 2.3% in April, when the president first began to roll out substantial tariff hikes that suddenly burdened the economy with uncertainty. The AP Voter Poll showed the economy was the leading issue in Tuesday’s elections in New Jersey, Virginia, New York City and California.
Grocery prices continue to climb, and recently, electricity bills have emerged as a new worry. At the same time, the pace of job gains has slowed, plunging 23% from the pace a year ago.
The White House maintains a list of talking points about the economy, noting that the stock market has hit record highs multiple times and that the president is attracting foreign investment. Trump has emphasized that gasoline prices are coming down, and maintained that gasoline is averaging $2 a gallon, but AAA reported Thursday that the national average was $3.08, about two cents lower than a year ago.
“Americans are paying less for essentials like gas and eggs, and today the Administration inked yet another drug pricing deal to deliver unprecedented health care savings for everyday Americans,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai.
Trump gets briefed about the economy by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other officials at least once a week and there are often daily discussions on tariffs, a senior White House official said, noting Trump is expected to do more domestic travel next year to make his case that he’s fixing affordability.
But critics say it will be hard for Trump to turn around public perceptions on affordability.
“He’s in real trouble and I think it’s bigger than just cost of living,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal economic advocacy group.
Owens noted that Trump has “lost his strength” as voters are increasingly doubtful about Trump’s economic leadership compared to Democrats, adding that the president doesn’t have the time to turn around public perceptions of him as he continues to pursue broad tariffs.
New hype about income tax cuts ahead of April
There will be new policies rolled out on affordability, a person familiar with the White House thinking said, declining to comment on what those would be. Trump on Thursday indicated there will be more deals coming on drug prices. Two other White House officials said messaging would change — but not policy.
A big part of the administration’s response on affordability will be educating people ahead of tax season about the role of Trump’s income tax cuts in any refunds they receive in April, the person familiar with planning said. Those cuts were part of the sprawling bill Republicans muscled through Congress in July.
This individual stressed that the key challenge is bringing prices down while simultaneously having wages increase, so that people can feel and see any progress.
There’s also a bet that the economy will be in a healthier place in six months. With Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s term ending in May, the White House anticipates the start of consistent cuts to the Fed’s benchmark interest rate. They expect inflation rates to cool and declines in the federal budget deficit to boost sentiment in the financial markets.
But the U.S. economy seldom cooperates with a president’s intentions, a lesson learned most recently by Trump’s predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden, who saw his popularity slump after inflation spiked to a four-decade high in June 2022.
The Trump administration maintains it’s simply working through an inflation challenge inherited from Biden, but new economic research indicates Trump has created his own inflation challenge through tariffs.
Since April, Harvard University economist Alberto Cavallo and his colleagues, Northwestern University’s Paola Llamas and Universidad de San Andres’ Franco Vazquez, have been tracking the impact of the import taxes on consumer prices.
In an October paper, the economists found that the inflation rate would have been drastically lower at 2.2%, had it not been for Trump’s tariffs.
The administration maintains that tariffs have not contributed to inflation. They plan to make the case that the import taxes are helping the economy and dismiss criticisms of the import taxes as contributing to inflation as Democratic talking points.
The fate of Trump’s country-by-country tariffs is currently being decided by the Supreme Court, where justices at a Wednesday hearing seemed dubious over the administration’s claims that tariffs were essentially regulations and could be levied by a president without congressional approval. Trump has maintained at times that foreign countries pay the tariffs and not U.S. citizens, a claim he backed away from slightly Thursday.
“They might be paying something,” he said. “But when you take the overall impact, the Americans are gaining tremendously.”
_____
Associated Press writers Will Weissert and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP) — For a day, at least, beleaguered Democrats are hopeful again. But just beneath the party’s relief at securing its first big electoral wins since last November’s drubbing lay unresolved questions about its direction heading into next year’s midterm elections.
The Election Day romp of Republicans stretched from deep-blue New York and California to swing states Georgia, Pennsylvania and Virginia. There were signs that key voting groups, including young people, Black voters and Hispanics who shifted toward President Donald Trump’s Republican Party just a year ago, may be shifting back. And Democratic leaders across the political spectrum coalesced behind a simple message focused on Trump’s failure to address rising costs and everyday kitchen table issues.
The dominant performance sparked a new round of debate among the party’s establishment-minded pragmatists and fiery progressives over which approach led to Tuesday’s victories, and which path to take into the high-stakes 2026 midterm elections and beyond. The lessons Democrats learn from the victories will help determine the party’s leading message and messengers next year — when elections will decide the balance of power in Congress for the second half of Trump’s term — and potentially in the 2028 presidential race, which has already entered its earliest stages.
People cheer as Democrat Abigail Spanberger walks out on stage after she was declared the winner of the Virginia governor’s race during an election night watch party Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in Richmond, Va. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
People cheer as Democrat Abigail Spanberger walks out on stage after she was declared the winner of the Virginia governor’s race during an election night watch party Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in Richmond, Va. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
“Of course, there’s a division within the Democratic Party. There’s no secret,” Sen. Bernie Sanders told reporters at a Capitol Hill press conference about the election results.
Sanders and his chief political strategist pointed to the success of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, as a model for Democrats across the country. But Rep. Suzan Del Bene, who leads the House Democrats’ midterm campaign strategy, avoided saying Mamdani’s name when asked about his success.
Del Bene instead cheered the moderate approach adopted by Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill in successful races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey as a more viable track for candidates outside of a Democratic stronghold like New York City.
“New York is bright blue … and the path to the majority in the House is going to be through purple districts,” she told The Associated Press. “The people of Arizona, Iowa and Nebraska aren’t focused on the mayor of New York.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a likely Democratic presidential prospect who campaigned alongside Democrats in several states leading up to Tuesday’s elections, noted the candidates hit on a common issue that resonated with voters, regardless of location.
“All of these candidates who won in these different states were focused on peoples’ everyday needs,” Shapiro said. “And you saw voters in every one of those states and cities showing up to send a clear message to Donald Trump that they’re rejecting his chaos.”
Intraparty criticism
Amid Democrats’ celebratory phone calls and news conferences, members of the party’s different wings had some sharp critiques for each other.
While Shapiro cheered the party’s success during a Wednesday interview, he also acknowledged concerns about Mamdani in New York.
Shapiro, one of the nation’s most prominent Jewish elected leaders, said he’s not comfortable with some of Mamdani’s comments on Israel. The New York mayor-elect, a Muslim, has described Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks as “genocide” against the Palestinian people and has been slow to condemn rhetoric linked to anti-Semitism.
“I’ve expressed that to him personally. We’ve had good private communications,” Shapiro said of his concerns. “And I hope, as he did last night in his victory speech, that he’ll be a mayor that protects all New Yorkers and tries to bring people together.”
Meanwhile, Sanders’ political strategist, Faiz Shakir, warned Democrats against embracing “cookie cutter campaigns that say nothing and do nothing” — a reference to centrist Democrats Spanberger and Sherrill.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat who defeated democratic socialist Omar Fateh to win a third term, said at a news conference Wednesday that “we have to love our city more than our ideology.”
“We need to be doing everything possible to push back on authoritarianism and what Donald Trump is doing,” Frey said. “And at the same time, the opposite of Donald Trump extremism is not the opposite extreme.”
Signs welcomes voters on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in Del Mar, Calif. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
Signs welcomes voters on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in Del Mar, Calif. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
Democrats win everywhere
Despite potential cracks in the Democratic coalition, it’s hard to understate the extent of the party’s electoral success.
In Georgia, two Democrats cruised to wins over Republican incumbents in elections to the state Public Service Commission, delivering the largest statewide margins of victory by Democrats in more than 20 years.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats swept not only three state Supreme Court races, but every county seat in presidential swing counties like Bucks and Erie Counties, including sheriffs. Bucks County elected its first Democratic district attorney as Democrats there also won key school board races and county judgeships.
Maine voters defeated a Republican-backed measure that would have mandated showing an ID at the polls. Colorado approved raising taxes on people earning more than $300,000 annually to fund school meal programs and food assistance for low-income state residents. And California voters overwhelmingly backed a charge led by Gov. Gavin Newsom to redraw its congressional map to give Democrats as many as five more House seats in upcoming elections.
Key groups coming back to Democrats
Trump made inroads with Black and Hispanic voters in 2024. But this week, Democrats scored strong performances with non-white voters in New Jersey and Virginia that offered promise.
About 7 in 10 voters in New Jersey were white, according to the AP Voter Poll. And Sherrill won about half that group. But she made up for her relative weakness with whites with a strong showing among Black, Hispanic and Asian voters.
The vast majority — about 9 in 10 — of Black voters supported Sherrill, as did about 8 in 10 Asian voters.
Hispanic voters in New Jersey were more divided, but about two-thirds supported Sherrill; only about 3 in 10 voted for the Republican nominee, Jack Ciattarelli.
The pattern was similar in Virginia, where Spanberger performed well among Black voters, Hispanic voters and Asian voters, even though she didn’t win a majority of white voters.
This combination of photos taken on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, shows Abigail Spanberger in Richmond, Va., left, Zohran Mamdani in New York, center, and Mikie Sherrill in East Brunswick, N.J. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough, Yuki Iwamura and Matt Rourke)
This combination of photos taken on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, shows Abigail Spanberger in Richmond, Va., left, Zohran Mamdani in New York, center, and Mikie Sherrill in East Brunswick, N.J. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough, Yuki Iwamura and Matt Rourke)
Democrats will soon face a choice
The debate over the party’s future is already starting to play out in key midterm elections where Democrats have just begun intra-party primary contests.
The choice is stark in Maine’s high-stakes Senate race, where Democrats will pick from a field that features establishment favorite, Gov. Jan Mills, and Sanders-endorsed populist Graham Platner. A similar dynamic could play out in key contests across Massachusetts, New York, Texas and Michigan.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is aligned with the progressive wing of the party, said the people he speaks to are demanding bold action to address their economic concerns.
“Folks are so frustrated by how hard its become to afford a dignified life here in Michigan and across the country,” he said.
“I’m sure the corporate donors don’t want us to push too hard,” El-Sayed continued. “My worry is the very same people who told us we were just fine in 2024 will miss the mandate.”
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Associated Press reporter Mike Catalini in Newark and Joey Cappelletti in Washington contributed.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — Lawyers for two of President Donald Trump’s foes who have been charged by the Justice Department are set to ask a federal judge Thursday to dismiss the cases against them, saying the prosecutor who secured the indictments was illegally installed in the role.
The challenges to Lindsey Halligan’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia are part of multi-prong efforts by former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James to get their cases dismissed before trial.
At issue during Thursday’s arguments are the complex constitutional and statutory rules governing the appointment of the nation’s U.S. attorneys, who function as top federal prosecutors in Justice Department offices across the country.
The role is typically filled by lawyers who have been nominated by a president and confirmed by the Senate. Attorneys general do have the authority to get around that process by naming an interim U.S. attorney who can serve for 120 days, but lawyers for Comey and James note that once that period expires, the law gives federal judges of that district exclusive say over who can fill the vacancy.
But that’s not what happened in this instance.
After then-interim U.S. attorney Erik Siebert resigned in September while facing Trump administration pressure to bring charges against Comey and James, Attorney General Pam Bondi — at Trump’s public urging — installed Halligan to the role.
Siebert had been appointed by Bondi in January to serve as interim U.S. attorney. Trump in May announced his intention to nominate him and judges in the Eastern District unanimously agreed after his 120-day period expired that he should be retained in the role. But after the Trump administration effectively pushed him out in September, the Justice Department again opted to make an interim appointment in place of the courts, something defense lawyers say it was not empowered under the law to do.
Prosecutors in the cases say the law does not explicitly prevent successive appointments of interim U.S. attorneys by the Justice Department, and that even if Halligan’s appointment is deemed invalid, the proper fix is not the dismissal of the indictment.
Comey has pleaded not guilty to charges of making a false statement and obstructing Congress, and James has pleaded not guilty to mortgage fraud allegations. Their lawyers have separately argued that the prosecutions are improperly vindictive and motivated by the president’s personal animus toward their clients, and should therefore be dismissed.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump boasts that his tariffs protect American industries, lure factories to the United States, raise money for the federal government and give him diplomatic leverage.
Now, he’s claiming they can finance a windfall for American families, too: He’s promising a generous tariff dividend.
The president proposed the idea on his Truth Social media platform Sunday, five days after his Republican Party lost elections in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere largely because of voter discontent with his economic stewardship — specifically, the high cost of living.
The tariffs are bringing in so much money, the president posted, that “a dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.’’
Budget experts scoffed at the idea, which conjured memories of the Trump administration’s short-lived plan for DOGE dividend checks financed by billionaire Elon Musk’s federal budget cuts.
“The numbers just don’t check out,″ said Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.
Details are scarce, including what the income limits would be and whether payments would go to children.
Even Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, sounded a bit blindsided by the audacious dividend plan. Appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,’’ Bessent said he hadn’t discussed the dividend with the president and suggested that it might not mean that Americans would get a check from the government. Instead, Bessent said, the rebate might take the form of tax cuts.
The tariffs are certainly raising money — $195 billion in the budget year that ended Sept. 30, up 153% from $77 billion in fiscal 2024. But they still account for less than 4% of federal revenue and have done little to dent the federal budget deficit — a staggering $1.8 trillion in fiscal 2025.
Budget wonks say Trump’s dividend math doesn’t work.
President Donald Trump speaks during an event to mark Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetery, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Donald Trump speaks during an event to mark Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetery, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
John Ricco, an analyst with the Budget Lab at Yale University, reckons that Trump’s tariffs will bring in $200 billion to $300 billion a year in revenue. But a $2,000 dividend — if it went to all Americans, including children — would cost $600 billion. “It’s clear that the revenue coming in would not be adequate,’’ he said.
Ricco also noted that Trump couldn’t just pay the dividends on his own. They would require legislation from Congress.
Moreover, the centerpiece of Trump’s protectionist trade policies — double-digit taxes on imports from almost every country in the world — may not survive a legal challenge that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a hearing last week, the justices sounded skeptical about the Trump administration’s assertion of sweeping power to declare national emergencies to justify the tariffs. Trump has bypassed Congress, which has authority under the Constitution to levy taxes, including tariffs.
If the court strikes down the tariffs, the Trump administration may be refunding money to the importers who paid them, not sending dividend checks to American families. (Trump could find other ways to impose tariffs, even if he loses at the Supreme Court; but it could be cumbersome and time-consuming.)
Mainstream economists and budget analysts note that tariffs are paid by U.S. importers who then generally try to pass along the cost to their customers through higher prices.
The dividend plan “misses the mark,’’ the Tax Foundation’s York said. ”If the goal is relief for Americans, just get rid of the tariffs.’’
After two years as a criminal investigations detective, a Fairfax County police officer wanted a change in her work. She later found it by doomscrolling.
Ingrid Palencia, an officer with the Fairfax County Police Department who works with the public information team to creative informative viral videos for the community.(WTOP/ Scott Gelman)
Ingrid Palencia, an officer with the Fairfax County Police Department who works with the public information team to creative informative viral videos for the community.(WTOP/ Scott Gelman)
When Ingrid Palencia decided she wanted to try something new within the Fairfax County Police Department, she hadn’t realized that her next opportunity would involve spending time doing something she almost never did before: doomscrolling.
As part of the public information team at the Northern Virginia police department, Palencia handles inquiries from news organizations and sometimes is sent to crime scenes. She writes blog posts on the department’s website, and reviews hours’ worth of footage from officers’ body camera and dashboard camera to figure out driving habits to draw attention to.
Palencia was previously a criminal investigations detective in McLean, working on active cases and looking into property crimes. But her new role falls into a different realm.
“I’m scrolling social media now,” Palencia said. “It’s very different, but it’s a good different. It’s nice to learn something new.”
Social media as a learning tool
The department started taking advantage of a trend officers observed on social media.
Fellow Fairfax County Officer Katie Watts uses a wand, named “Tappy,” to draw attention to some of the most egregious driving violations. Palencia, meanwhile, plays a similar role, spending hours reviewing footage and crafting different videos aimed at boosting trust and confidence in law enforcement.
She watches each video to see if there’s a traffic stop that catches her eye. The stops that get shared on the department’s Instagram page are relevant and timely, Palencia said.
At the start of the school year, some of the videos involved school zones or school buses. Some users commented they just moved to Virginia from a different state, and were unfamiliar with the local driving laws.
“People love seeing that we’re enforcing traffic violations and pulling people over for running the red lights, running the red stop sign, driving on the shoulder,” Palencia said. “Especially the school bus. Now that school is in session, that’s a big one for us.”
Engaging with the community
The posts usually get a substantial amount of engagement, including a variety of comments. It’s the result of drivers relating to what they’re watching, Palencia said.
“It’s satisfying,” she said. “Myself, when I’m driving and I see somebody doing something that they shouldn’t be, I’m like, ‘I wish there was a cop here.’”
While Palencia’s day-to-day responsibilities vary, there’s usually a focus, which can sometimes be blog updates.
The team works ahead to produce videos so the department maintains an active social media presence, even if there are other demands.
The main goal is to make sure drivers know what the laws are, and “That they can trust us. That they can call us if they need us. That they can trust the police officers that are in our community.”
Given her previous work as a detective, Palencia didn’t think she was going to enjoy putting together social media content. But time spent packaging videos proved the opposite.
“I’ve learned to like it,” Palencia said. “And I really enjoy looking for videos and posting, and really enjoy the comments. I love reading them. I like interacting with them.”
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Voter anger over the cost of living is hurtling forward into next year’s midterm elections, when pivotal contests will be decided by communities that are home to fast-rising electric bills or fights over who’s footing the bill to power Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers.
Electricity costs were a key issue in this week’s elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, a data center hotspot, and in Georgia, where Democrats ousted two Republican incumbents for seats on the state’s utility regulatory commission.
Voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City all cited economic concerns as the top issue, as Democrats and Republicans gird for a debate over affordability in the intensifying midterm battle to control Congress.
Already, President Donald Trump is signaling that he’ll focus on affordability next year as he and Republicans try to maintain their slim congressional majorities, while Democrats are blaming Trump for rising household costs.
Front and center may be electricity bills, which in many places are increasing at a rate faster than U.S. inflation on average — although not everywhere.
“There’s a lot of pressure on politicians to talk about affordability, and electricity prices are right now the most clear example of problems of affordability,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of politics and government and pollster at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.
Rising electric costs aren’t expected to ease and many Americans could see an increase on their monthly bills in the middle of next year’s campaigns.
Higher electric bills on the horizon
Gas and electric utilities are seeking or already secured rate increases of more that $34 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, consumer advocacy organization PowerLines reported. That was more than double the same period last year.
With some 80 million Americans struggling to pay their utility bills, “it’s a life or death and ‘eat or heat’ type decision that people have to make,” said Charles Hua, PowerLines’ founder.
In Georgia, proposals to build data centers have roiled communities, while a victorious Democrat, Peter Hubbard, accused Republicans on the commission of “rubber-stamping” rate increases by Georgia Power, a subsidiary of power giant Southern Co.
Monthly Georgia Power bills have risen six times over the past two years, now averaging $175 a month for a typical residential customer.
Hubbard’s message seemed to resonate with voters. Rebecca Mekonnen, who lives in the Atlanta suburb of Stone Mountain, said she voted for the Democratic challengers, and wants to see “more affordable pricing. That’s the main thing. It’s running my pocket right now.”
Now, Georgia Power is proposing to spend $15 billion to expand its power generating capacity, primarily to meet demand from data centers, and Hubbard is questioning whether data centers will pay their fair share — or share it with regular ratepayers.
Midterm battlegrounds in hotspots
Midterm elections will see congressional battlegrounds in states where fast-rising electric bills or data center hotspots — or both — are fomenting community uprisings.
Analysts attribute rising electric bills to a combination of forces.
That includes expensive projects to modernize the grid and harden poles, wires and substations against extreme weather and wildfires.
Also playing a role is explosive demand from data centers, bitcoin miners and a drive to revive domestic manufacturing, as well as rising natural gas prices, analysts say.
“The cost of utility service is the new ‘cost of eggs’ concern for a lot of consumers,” said Jennifer Bosco of the National Consumer Law Center.
In some places, data centers are driving a big increase in demand, since a typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 homes, according to the International Energy Agency. Some could require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans.
Meanwhile, communities that don’t want to live next to one are pushing back.
It’s on voters’ minds
An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from October found that electricity bills are a “major” source of stress for 36% of U.S. adults.
Still, the impact is still more uneven than other financial stressors like grocery costs, which just over half of U.S. adults said are a “major” source of stress.
And electric rates vary widely by state or utility.
For instance, federal data shows that for-profit utilities have been raising rates far faster than municipally owned utilities or cooperatives.
In the 13-state mid-Atlantic grid from Illinois to New Jersey, analysts say ratepayers are paying billions of dollars for the cost to power data centers — including data centers not even built yet.
Next June, electric bills across that region will absorb billions more dollars in higher wholesale electricity costs designed to lure new power plants to power data centers.
That’s spurred governors from the region — including Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Illinois’ JB Pritzker and Maryland’s Wes Moore, all Democrats who are running for reelection — to pressure the grid operator PJM Interconnection to contain increases.
High-rate states vs. lower-rate rates
Drew Maloney, the CEO of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association of for-profit electric utilities, suggested that only some states are the drivers of higher average electric bills.
“If you set aside a few sates with higher rates, the rest of the country largely follows inflation on electricity rates,” Maloney said.
Examples of states with faster-rising rates are California, where wildfires are driving grid upgrades, and those in New England, where natural gas is expensive because of strained pipeline capacity.
Still, other states are feeling a pinch.
In Indiana, a growing data center hotspot, the consumer advocacy group, Citizens Action Coalition, reported this year that residential customers of the state’s for-profit electric utilities were absorbing the most severe rate increases in at least two decades.
Republican Gov. Mike Braun decried the hikes, saying “we can’t take it anymore.”
___
Associated Press reporter Jeff Amy in Atlanta contributed to this report.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — If Saturday in Morgantown was an audition, Julian Lewis passed.
And passed.
And passed.
Ju Ju looked past open receivers. He looked ready to turtle whenever West Virginia sent the house. But he also looked like Shedeur Sanders out there at times, didn’t he?
Especially when dropping ball after ball in the bucket for CU wide receiver Omarion Miller.
The Buffs dropped their third game in a row at Milan Puskar Stadium, falling 29-22 against the Mountaineers and slipping to 3-7 on a lost season.
Yet it was the most fun the Buffs have been in what, a month? For the first time in what feels like forever, we saw snippets of last fall’s passing game. We saw the deep ball and the vertical passing game that scared the Big 12 half to death.
2024: Shedeur to Travis Hunter.
2025: Ju Ju to Omarion.
Sanders said earlier this week that his decision to start Lewis, a true freshman, at quarterback was guided by “common sense.”
Hindsight is 20/20, especially when a year goes off the rails. But what took so long?
Coach Prime should’ve listened to his common sense sooner.
While senior Kaidon Salter offered zero juice and minimal downfield threat at QB1, Lewis walked into coal country and looked the part. The Mountaineers blitzed from the left. They blitzed from the right. At one point, they even pulled out a piece of Ju Ju’s hair. Kid hung tough: 22 completions on 35 attempts for 299 yards and two touchdowns.
Lewis to Miler was the combo CU has been waiting for all year. The chemistry was undeniable. The combo was almost unguardable: Miller finished with six catches for 131 receiving yards and a score.
Ju Ju was at his strongest rolling and throwing to his left, hitting Miller for a 43-yard rainbow early, then Sincere Brown (19 yards) and Joseph Williams (13 yards) on CU’s second drive of the second quarter.
And yes, some context applies here, too. West Virginia’s defense going into the weekend ranked last in the Big 12 in opponent passer rating (160.25) and 14th in the league in passing yards allowed per game (270.8). It was not unlike debuting a rookie hitter against the 2025 Rockies at Coors Field — a soft landing, a chance to build numbers and confidence.
Still, you could see that confidence growing in real time. On the CU drive that ended the third quarter and opened the fourth, the freshman faced second-and-7 from the West Virginia 20. He scanned quickly, feeling the pocket constricting to his left and his right. It was the kind of bang-bang play that would’ve been a sure-fire sack earlier in the game, never mind earlier in the season. Lewis stepped up in the pocket and took off for a 3-yard gain, giving CU a third-and-4 at the home 17. CU eventually got a 35-yard field goal from Alejandro Mata to pull the Buffs to within 22-19 with 14:51 left to play in the tilt.
Even more impressive was the fact that Lewis found himself working from behind the ‘8’ ball from the start. Especially with two new blockers on the outside, as left tackle Jordan Seaton watched the game in sweats while wearing a walking boot on his right ankle.
It didn’t take long to show.
Lewis was sacked twice in the first quarter and four times in the opening half. The first 30 minutes had the disjointed, stop-start look of two freshmen quarterbacks facing off, struggling to find their respective rhythms early.
Yet in the end, as auditions go, Lewis passed with almost flying colors. After the Utah and Arizona debacles, CU fans have been looking for a reason to stay invested. Ju Ju was worth the wait. But only if you can figure out a way to keep him.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. airlines and travelers slogged through a second day of flight cuts across the country on Saturday as the government shutdown was expected to drive more cancellations in the days to come.
The Federal Aviation Administration instructed airlines to cut 4% of flights on Saturday at 40 major airports because of the shutdown. The cuts will rise to 6% on Tuesday and then to 10% by November 14.
The cuts, which began at 6 a.m. ET (1100 GMT) on Friday, include about 700 flights from the four largest carriers – American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines.
Airlines will cut fewer flights on Saturday than Friday because of lower overall volume. United will cut 168 flights, down from 184 Friday, while Southwest will cancel just under 100 flights, down from 120.
During the record 39-day government shutdown, 13,000 air traffic controllers and 50,000 security screeners have been forced to work without pay, leading to increased absenteeism. Many air traffic controllers were notified on Thursday that they would receive no compensation for a second pay period next week.
The Trump administration has ramped up pressure on Congressional Democrats to agree to a Republican plan to fund the federal government, which would allow it to reopen.
Raising the specter of dramatic air-travel disruptions is one such effort. Democrats contend Republicans are to blame for the shutdown because they refuse to negotiate over extending health insurance subsidies.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said it was possible that he could require 20% cuts in air traffic if things get worse and more controllers do not show up for work.
“I assess the data,” Duffy said. “We’re going to make decisions based on what we see in the airspace.”
Separate from the cancellations, absences of air traffic controllers on Friday forced the FAA to delay hundreds of flights at 10 airports including Atlanta, San Francisco, Houston, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., and Newark. More than 5,600 flights were delayed Friday.
Earlier this week, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said 20% to 40% of controllers were not showing up for work on any given day.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus)
WASHINGTON — President Trump made historic gains with Latinos when he won reelection last year, boosting Republicans’ confidence that their economic message was helping them make inroads with a group of voters who had long leaned toward Democrats.
But in this week’s election, Democrats in key states were able to disrupt that rightward shift by gaining back Latino support, exit polls showed.
In New Jersey and Virginia, the Democrats running for governor made gains in counties with large Latino populations, and overall won two-thirds of the Latino vote in their states, according to an NBC News poll.
And in California, a CNN exit poll showed about 70% of Latinos voting in favor of Proposition 50, a Democratic redistricting initiative designed to counter Trump’s plans to reshape congressional maps in an effort to keep GOP control of the House.
The results mark the first concrete example at the ballot box of Latino voters turning away from the GOP — a shiftforeshadowed by recent polling as their concerns about the economy and immigration raids have grown.
Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill celebrates with supporters after being elected New Jersey governor.
(Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
If the trend continues, it could spell trouble for Republicans in next year’s midterm elections, said Gary Segura, a professor of public policy, political science and Chicana/o studies at UCLA. This could be especially true in California and Texas, where both parties are banking on Latino voters to help them pick up seats in the House, Segura said.
“A year is a long time in politics, but certainly the vote on Prop. 50 is a very, very good sign for the Democrats’ ability to pick up the newly drawn congressional districts,” Segura said. “I think Latino voters will be really instrumental in the outcome.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are feeling optimistic that their warnings about Trump’s immigration crackdown and a bad economy are resonating with Latinos.
Republicans are wondering to what degree the party can maintain support among Latinos without Trump on the ticket. In 2024, Trump won roughly 48% of the Latino vote nationally — a record for any Republican presidential candidate.
Some Republicans saw this week’s trends among Latino voters as a “wakeup call.”
“The Hispanic vote is not guaranteed. Hispanics married President Donald Trump but are only dating the GOP,” Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida said in a social media video the day after the election. “I’ve been warning it: If the GOP does not deliver, we will lose the Hispanic vote all over the country.”
Economic issues a main driver
Last year Trump was able to leverage widespread frustration with the economy to win the support of Latinos. He promised to create jobs and lower the costs of living.
But polling shows that a majority of Latino voters now disapprove of how Trump and the Republicans in control of Congress are handling the economy. Half of Latinos said they expected Trump’s economic policies to leave them worse off a year from now in a Unidos poll released last week.
In New Jersey, that sentiment was exemplified by voters like Rumaldo Gomez. He told MSNBC he voted for Trump last year but this week went for for the Democratic candidate for governor, Rep. Mikie Sherrill.
“Now, I look at Trump different,” Gomez said. “The economy does not look good.”
Gomez added he is “very sad” about immigration raids led by the Trump administration that have split up hardworking families.
While Latino voters fear being affected by immigration enforcement actions, polling suggests they are more concerned about cost of living, jobs and housing. The Unidos poll showed immigration ranking fifth on the list of concerns.
In New Jersey and Virginia, Democrats’ double-digit victories were built on promises to reduce the cost of living, while blaming Trump for their economic pain.
Marcus Robinson, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said Democrats “expanded margins and flipped key counties by earning back Latino voters who know Trump’s economy leaves them behind.”
“These results show that Latino communities want progress, not a return to chaos and broken promises,” he said.
Republicans see a different Trump issue
GOP strategist Matt Terrill, who was chief of staff for then-Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said the election results are not a referendum on Trump.
Latino voters swung left because Trump wasn’t on the ballot, he said.
Last year “it wasn’t Latino voters turning out for the Republican party, it was Latino voters turning out for President Trump,” he said. “Like him or not, he’s able to fire up voters that the Republican party traditionally does not get.”
With Trump barred by the Constitution from running for a third term, Republicans are left to wonder if they can get the Latino vote back when he is not on the ballot. Terrill believes Republicans need to hammer on the issue of affordability as a top priority.
Mike Madrid, a “never Trump” Republican and former political director of the California Republican Party, has a different theory.
“They’re abandoning both parties,” Madrid said of Latinos. “They abandoned the Republican party for the same reasons they abandoned the Democratic party in November: not addressing economic concerns.”
The economy has long been the top concern for Latinos, Madrid said, yet both parties continue to frame the Latino political agenda around immigration.
“Latinos aren’t voting for Democrats or Republicans — they’re voting against Democrats and against Republicans,” Madrid said. “It’s a very big difference. The partisans are all looking at us as if we’re this peculiar exotic little creature.”
The work ahead
Democrat Abigail Spanberger was elected governor in Virginia in part because of big gains in Latino-heavy communities. One of the biggest gains was in Manassas Park, where more than 40% of residents are Latino. She won the city by 42 points, doubling the Democrats’ performance there in last year’s election.
The shift toward Democrats happened because Latinos believed Trump when he promised to bring down high costs of living and that he would only go after violent criminals in immigration raids, said Democratic strategist Maria Cardona, who worked with Spanberger’s campaign on outreach to Spanish-language media.
Instead, she argued, Trump betrayed them.
Cardona said Medicaid cuts under Trump’s massive spending package this year, along with the reduction of supplemental nutrition assistance amid the government shutdown, have Latinos families panicking.
“What Republicans misguidedly and mistakenly thought was a realignment of Latino voters just turned out to be a blip,” she said. “Latinos should never be considered a base vote.”
Political scientists caution that the election outcomes this week are not necessarily indicative of how races will play out a year from now.
“It’s just one election, but certainly the seeds have been planted for strong Latino Democratic turnouts in 2026,” said Brad Jones, a political science professor at UC Davis.
Now, both parties need to explain how they expect to carry out their promises if elected.
“They can’t sit on their laurels and say, ‘well surely the Latinos are coming back because the economy is bad and immigration enforcement is bad,’” Jones said. “The job of the Democratic party is now to reach out to Latino voters in ways that are more than just symbolic.”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -New York Attorney General Letitia James on Friday asked a federal judge to throw out a federal criminal case against her, arguing it was retaliation by President Donald Trump for her office’s civil fraud lawsuit against him and his family business.
The filing from James, an elected Democrat, argued the case is an improper “vindictive” prosecution meant to punish her for her criticism of Trump and her work as New York attorney general.
“President Trump and his allies have used every insulting term in their vocabulary to deride AG James and call for criminal penalties in retaliation for the exercise of her rights and fulfillment of her statutory duties to fulfill her obligations as New York state’s attorney general,” James’ lawyers wrote in a court filing.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. Prosecutors are due to respond to the claims later this month.
James faces charges of bank fraud and making a false statement to a financial institution for allegedly using a Virginia home as an investment property in violation of loan terms that required her to make it a secondary residence.
James has pleaded not guilty and accused the Trump administration of using the justice system as a “tool of revenge.”
James last year secured a $450 million civil fraud judgment against Trump after a judge found he fraudulently overstated his net worth to dupe lenders. A New York state appeals court in August threw out the penalty, which had grown to more than $500 million with interest, but upheld the trial judge’s finding that Trump was liable for fraud.
The filing echoes arguments made last month by former FBI Director James Comey, who is also seeking to have a criminal false statements case against him tossed out on similar grounds.
James, Comey and former National Security Adviser John Bolton, all prominent critics of Trump, have been indicted in recent weeks after Trump pressured Justice Department leaders to move against his perceived political enemies.
Legal motions claiming vindictive prosecution face a high legal bar for success and rarely lead to the dismissal of charges, but some legal experts have said that James and Comey may have unusually strong arguments.
The indictments against both Comey and James were secured by Lindsey Halligan, top federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan, a former personal lawyer for Trump with no prior prosecutorial experience, was put in the role at Trump’s urging after he forced out her predecessor over his reticence to prosecute Comey and James.
U.S. District Judge Jamar Walker, who is overseeing the case, has scheduled a December 5 hearing to consider James’ claims.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by David Gregorio)
After years of debate, design disputes, and political conflicts, Virginia finally got its fourth casino. The official opening of the Norfolk Casino Interim Gaming Hall, the city’s first-ever casino, marks a milestone moment for residents and developers who have spent nearly half a decade waiting for the project to materialize. Visitors can now enjoy a temporary venue, with the complete casino expected to open in 2027.
The Interim Venue Offers a Glimpse into Casino Gaming
A new temporary casino sits on Park Avenue near Harbor Park, powered by a partnership between Boyd Gaming and the Pamunkey Indian Tribe. The casino currently occupies a modest structure, a 3,600-square-foot gaming tent filled with flashing slot machines. This temporary arrangement provides a preview for the much larger $750 million resort under construction next door, scheduled to open in 2027.
Ron Bailey, vice president and general manager of Norfolk Casino, admits that many doubted whether the Norfolk casino project would succeed after a series of setbacks, like early skepticism from locals and construction delays. The original concept, branded as HeadWaters Resort & Casino, was shelved last year. Boyd Gaming then stepped in, bringing fresh capital and extensive operational know-how.
There are a lot of people who’ve never even set foot into a casino before. It’s about creating a casino experience for them that’s going to make them want to come back and enjoy their time when they’re gaming.
Ron Bailey, Norfolk Casino VP and general manager
The Interim Gaming Hall aims to familiarize visitors with the Boyd brand. Patrons can enjoy 132 slot machines, featuring award-winning titles such as Buffalo Ultimate Stampede and Dragon Link. The gaming hall is open from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. every day and can accommodate approximately 100 concurrent players. Outside, food trucks will keep visitors fed, and an on-site vending machine will dispense ready-to-drink cocktails.
Norfolk is the fourth city in Virginia, along with Bristol, Portsmouth, and Danville, to feature a functioning casino, with a fifth in Petersburg already under construction. The state’s three active casinos generated $73 million in revenues last month. Industry experts note that this figure will keep growing as the new casino in Norfolk ramps up operations.
The permanent casino resort, expected to provide 850 job positions, will feature 1,500 slot machines, 50 table games, a 200-room hotel, eight restaurants and bars, and a 45,000-square-foot outdoor deck overlooking the Elizabeth River. 13,000 square feet of meeting space, along with a spa and fitness center, will help deliver a comprehensive hospitality offering.
Developers have stated that they will announce the name and branding for the permanent resort in 2026. For now, though, the flashing lights and loud sounds of the machines at the temporary site mark a ray of hope for a long-awaited project. Norfolk residents can now enjoy the benefits of the city’s entry into the booming Virginia casino market.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — As the polls closed on Tuesday across Virginia, it quickly became clear it was a night of firsts: Voters overwhelmingly elected a slate of candidates who broke race and gender barriers in contests considered among the most consequential nationally.
Republicans in Virginia also fielded a historically diverse statewide ticket that would have set records.
The results come as President Donald Trump has made his opposition to diversity initiatives a cornerstone of his platform, dismantling federal civil rights programs that sought to rectify a complicated history of racial discrimination. He has justified those moves by saying that race and gender equity programs overcorrect for past wrongs and foment anti-American sentiment — a position shared among many conservatives across the country.
Still, Virginia’s election results — in tandem with high-profile Democratic victories across the U.S. — call into question whether Trump’s staunch positions on race, gender and gender identity are resonating with voters.
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Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia governor’s race Tuesday, giving Democrats a key victory heading into the 2026 midterm elections and making history as the first woman ever to lead the Commonwealth. Her victory was decisive, with about 57% of the vote.
The race was bound to make history regardless of who came out on top: Spanberger was running against Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, marking the first time two women were the front-runners in a general election for governor.
In her acceptance speech, Spanberger recalled how her husband said to their three daughters, “Your mom is going to be the governor of Virginia.”
“And I can guarantee you those words have never been spoken in Virginia, ever before,” she said, beaming.
Spanberger said her victory meant Virginians were choosing “pragmatism over partisanship” and “leadership that will focus on problem solving and not stoking division.”
First Muslim woman elected statewide
Democrat Ghazala Hashmi defeated Republican John Reid in the race for lieutenant governor, becoming the first Indian American woman to win statewide office in Virginia. She is also the first Muslim woman to be elected statewide in the U.S.
Firsts are not new to Hashmi. She was the first Muslim woman elected to the Virginia Senate five years ago. Hashmi, a former English professor born in India, said at the time that her opposition to Trump’s Muslim ban motivated her to break into politics.
This time around, her campaign for lieutenant governor focused less on her identity and more on key issues, such as health and education. Still, some said her identity was a prominent factor in the race. Reid recently took to social media to tie Hashmi to Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim elected mayor of New York City, despite marked differences in their platforms, nationalities and ages — a comparison critics said was Islamophobic.
Like the governor’s race, the battle for lieutenant governor would have been historic either way: Reid was the first openly gay man nominated to statewide office in Virginia, and he faced hurdles on the trail in connection to his sexuality. GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin asked him to leave the ticket after opposition research linked him to a social media account with sexually explicit photos of men. At the time, Reid said he felt betrayed.
In her victory speech, Hashmi said her candidacy reflected progress in the state and nation.
“My own journey — from a young child landing at the airport in Savannah, Georgia, to now being elected as the first Muslim woman to achieve statewide office in Virginia and in the entire country — is only possible because of the depth and breadth of opportunities made available in this country and in this commonwealth.”
Son of civil rights pioneers to be attorney general
Democrat Jay Jones defeated Republican incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares, becoming the first Black person elected as top prosecutor in the former capital of the Confederacy.
Jones, a former Virginia delegate, comes from a long line of racial-justice trailblazers — a fact he emphasized throughout his campaign and after his victory.
“My ancestors were slaves. My grandfather was a civil rights pioneer who braved Jim Crow,” Jones said Tuesday. “My mother, my uncles, my aunts endured segregation, all so that I could stand before you today.”
That said, Jones’ victory is as much a referendum on dissatisfaction with the government shutdown and Trump’s mass firings, which have hit Virginia especially hard due to its high concentration of federal workers.
Ever since Democrat Jimmy Carter won the White House in 1976, every time a new president has been elected, Virginia has voted in a governor the following year from the opposite party.
Jones’ win comes after Miyares, elected in 2021, became the first Latino to hold a Virginia statewide office.
On Tuesday, Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won their gubernatorial races and exceeded pollsters’ expectations. Political strategists Alex Conant and Ofirah Yheskel, along with CBS News political director Fin Gómez, join with analysis.
After such an election thumping, another President might seek a deal to end the shutdown, which is, as of this week, the longest in history, breaking the thirty-five-day record set in Trump’s first term. Not Trump. Escalation not accommodation is his preferred move. On Wednesday, his Administration announced that, owing to air-traffic-controller shortages exacerbated by the shutdown, ten per cent of all flights at forty major airports around the country would be cancelled, causing travel mayhem in a high-stakes bid to force Democrats to end the impasse. I’m not quite sure about Trump’s theory of the case: If Americans didn’t blame the President already for the crisis, wouldn’t they be much more likely to now? (And the data suggest that the electorate already does hold Republicans responsible.) But whatever. The point is to change the subject, to show that he’s not rolling over just because the voters no longer love his party so much in Passaic County, New Jersey, or Lynchburg, Virginia.
More fights will no doubt soon follow. How long can it be until Trump has successfully picked one with New York’s incoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani, the thirty-four-year-old Democratic Socialist whose unlikely ascension this year has been greeted with almost as much enthusiasm by national Republican strategists as by young progressives in Brooklyn? Mamdani’s election-night victory speech suggested that he is more than willing to play the foil to Trump, even trolling the TV-obsessed President by telling him to “turn the volume up” so he could hear Mamdani’s come-and-get-us-if-you-can words of defiance. Mamdani knew his man—the White House later confirmed that Trump was, in fact, watching.
As Washington was still digesting the election results on Thursday, a fund-raising e-mail came across the transom from Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democratic congresswoman who has emerged as one of the Party’s louder TV warriors. Subject line: “His presidency is over y’all.”
Crockett might have been hyping Trump’s post-election obsolescence a bit, but she was on to something. The whiff of generational change now hangs over American politics. One sensed it in Mamdani’s victory, for sure, but also in those of New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, neither of whom, as my colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells noted, were in politics when Trump first became President. Mamdani ended Andrew Cuomo’s attempt at a comeback, sending the former governor—whose father also held that office—once again into involuntary retirement. Cuomo, for now, is a name to be associated with the past, not the future, of New York politics.
Election Day itself began with the early-morning news that Dick Cheney, one of the dominant Republicans of his generation, had died at the age of eighty-four. When Cheney first made his mark in Washington, as Gerald Ford’s wunderkind White House chief of staff, he was the same age that Mamdani is now. In a career that had many acts, including as George W. Bush’s influential Vice-President and chief Iraq War promoter, Cheney’s final one—as a fierce opponent of Donald Trump—was perhaps his most surprising. Where other leading Republicans, including his former boss, were largely silent as Trump took over their party and defied constitutional norms and principles that they had once loudly defended, Cheney proudly supported his daughter Liz’s efforts to resist him. One of the more indelible images of how much our politics has changed in recent years was the sight of Cheney on the House floor for a ceremony Democrats held to mark the one-year anniversary of the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on January 6, 2021; he and Liz were the only Republicans to attend. Democrats, many of whom had once shunned Cheney as tantamount to a war criminal, lined up to shake his hand. The visual, like this week’s elections, underscored something essential: politics moves on. It is not static. Cheney’s resistance to Trump in the final years of his life was a rear-guard action, not a sign of things to come. His version of the G.O.P. no longer exists.
On Thursday morning, Nancy Pelosi, another giant of our recent politics, announced her decision to retire from Congress at the end of the current term. The two-time Speaker of the House, in which capacity she oversaw major legislative victories, including passage of the Affordable Care Act, during the Obama Administration, is arguably the most powerful woman in American history. During Trump’s first term, she became the President’s greatest scourge, rallying Democrats to come back from the shock of his 2016 victory and retake the House two years later. But this time, with Pelosi already eighty-five years old and no longer in a leadership role, it will be left to others to regroup.
Trump reacted to Pelosi’s announcement in a text to Fox News’s Peter Doocy. “The retirement of Nancy Pelosi is a great thing for America,” he wrote, calling her “evil,” “corrupt,” and “highly overrated.” He added, “I’m very honored that she impeached me twice and failed miserably twice.” She tried to get rid of me, he might as well have said, but I’m still here.
The clock, though, is ticking for Trump, too. The President himself knows it. He blamed Tuesday’s losses on the fact that he was not on the ballot to rally Republicans, but he did not mention a larger constitutional truth about his lame-duck status that neither he nor his Party seems to have begun reckoning with: he won’t be on the ballot heading the ticket ever again. ♦
A first grade Virginia teacher who was shot and seriously wounded by a 6-year-old student in 2023 has won a civil lawsuit that accused the school’s former assistant principal of ignoring multiple warnings the day of the shooting.
Abby Zwerner, 25, was shot in the hand and chest by a single bullet while at a reading table in her classroom at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia in January 2023. Zwerner spent nearly two weeks in the hospital and underwent six surgeries. The bullet to her chest narrowly missed her heart and remains lodged there. She no longer has full use of her left hand and has left teaching.
Zwerner’s lawsuit sought $40 million in compensatory damages. She was awarded $10 million.
Zwerner’s lawsuit accused former assistant principal Ebony Parker of gross negligence. In the lawsuit, Zwerner said she went to Parker’s office the morning of the shooting and said the boy “was in a violent mood” and had threatened to beat up another student. The lawsuit said Parker “had no response” to Zwerner’s concerns.
Abby Zwerner.
Zwerner family
Shortly after, two students told a reading specialist that the boy had a gun in his backpack, according to the lawsuit. Zwerner told the specialist she had seen the boy take something out of his bag and put it in his sweatshirt. The specialist then searched the boy’s backpack and did not find a weapon. The reading specialist told Parker about the incident, according to the lawsuit, and Parker responded that his “pockets were too small to hold a handgun” and “did nothing.”
Another student then told a teacher the boy had shown him a gun in his pocket during recess. When the incident was conveyed to Parker, she said the backpack had already been searched and “took no further action,” according to the lawsuit. When a guidance counselor asked Parker for permission to search the boy again, she allegedly forbade him from doing so, according to the lawsuit. Parker told the counselor the boy’s mother would pick him up shortly, the lawsuit claimed.
The shooting, which police described as “intentional,” occurred about an hour later. Zwerner was the only person injured, and managed to evacuate her classroom after she was shot. A school employee restrained the boy, who said he had “shot that b*** dead,” according to unsealed records. While testifying in court last week, Zwerner said she believed she “had died” after being struck by the bullet.
Zwerner’s lawsuit also alleged that Parker knew the boy “had a history of random violence” at home and school, citing an incident the year before where he “strangled and choked” his kindergarten teacher. Concerns about his behavior were “always dismissed,” the lawsuit claimed, and the boy’s parents did not agree to put him in special education classes with other students with behavioral issues.
Students and police gather outside of Richneck Elementary School after a shooting, Friday, Jan. 6, 2023 in Newport News, Va.
Billy Schuerman / AP
A judge previously dismissed the district’s former superintendent and the school principal as defendants in the lawsuit. The superintendent was fired by the school board after the shooting, while Parker resigned.
The boy was not criminally charged in the shooting. Newport News prosecutor Howard Gwynn said in March 2023 that the boy was too young to understand the legal system.
The boy’s mother, Deja Taylor, was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for felony child neglect and federal weapons charges. An attorney for the family previously said the firearm used in the shooting was locked away on a high closet shelf, but the boy said he took it from his mother’s purse on her dresser. Taylor said the weapon had been secured with a trigger lock, but officials said they never found one.
Parker faces a separate criminal trial in December on eight counts of felony child neglect after a special grand jury found that she showed a “reckless disregard for the human life” of other students in the school. Each count is punishable by up to five years in prison.
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — A jury in Virginia awarded $10 million Thursday to a former teacher who was shot by a 6-year-old student, siding with her claims in a lawsuit that an ex-administrator ignored repeated warnings that the child had a gun.
The jury returned its decision against Ebony Parker, a former assistant principal at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News.
Abby Zwerner was shot in January 2023 as she sat at a reading table in her first-grade classroom. She had sought $40 million against Parker in the lawsuit.
Zwerner did not address reporters outside the courthouse after the decision was announced. One of her attorneys, Diane Toscano, said the verdict sends a message that what happened at the school “was wrong and is not going to be tolerated, that safety has to be the first concern at school. I think it’s a great message.”
Parker was the only defendant in the lawsuit. A judge previously dismissed the district’s superintendent and the school principal as defendants.
The lawsuit said Parker had a duty to protect Zwerner and others from harm after being told about the gun. Zwerner’s attorneys said Parker failed to act in the hours before the shooting after several school staff members told her that the student had a gun in his backpack.
“Who would think a 6-year-old would bring a gun to school and shoot their teacher?” Toscano told the jury earlier. “It’s Dr. Parker’s job to believe that that is possible. It’s her job to investigate it and get to the very bottom of it.”
Parker did not testify in the lawsuit. Her attorney, Daniel Hogan, had warned jurors about hindsight bias and “Monday morning quarterbacking” in the shooting.
““You will be able to judge for yourself whether or not this was foreseeable,” Hogan said. “That’s the heart of this case.
“The law knows that it is fundamentally unfair to judge another person’s decisions based on stuff that came up after the fact. The law requires you to examine people’s decisions at the time they make them.”
The shooting occurred on the first day after the student had returned from a suspension for slamming Zwerner’s phone two days earlier.
Zwerner testified she first heard about the gun prior to class recess from a reading specialist who had been tipped off by students. The shooting occurred a few hours later. Despite her injuries, Zwerner was able to hustle her students out of the classroom. She eventually passed out in the school office.
“I thought I was either on my way to heaven or in heaven,” Zwerner said. “But then it all got black. And so, I then thought I wasn’t going there. And then my next memory is I see two co-workers around me and I process that I’m hurt and they’re putting pressure on where I’m hurt.”
Zwerner no longer works for the school district and has said she has no plans to teach again. She has since become a licensed cosmetologist.
Parker faces a separate criminal trial this month on eight counts of felony child neglect. Each of the counts is punishable by up to five years in prison in the event of a conviction.
The student’s mother was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for felony child neglect and federal weapons charges. Her son told authorities he got his mother’s handgun by climbing onto a drawer to reach the top of a dresser, where the firearm was in his mom’s purse.
Raby reported from Cross Lanes, West Virginia.
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