Public Radio for the Piedmont and High Country
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Morning News Briefs: Tuesday, March 13th, 2018

Receive the morning news briefs delivered to your email inbox every morning. Click here to sign-up.

Cooper Administration Seeking Records Request Rules Comments

Gov. Roy Cooper's proposed guidelines for public records requests make clear his state agencies cannot charge more when there's extensive work required to comply.

The Cooper administration is seeking feedback on the draft guidelines, which also say records cannot be withheld or their release delayed simply because they may embarrass an agency.

The guidelines are part of a legal settlement last summer with media outlets and other groups that had sued predecessor GOP Gov. Pat McCrory. They had accused McCrory's administration of document delays and excessive costs for getting them.

US Sen. Richard Burr's Papers To Be Housed At Wake Forest

North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr will leave his official congressional papers, photos and other documents with his alma mater.

The Senate Intelligence Committee chairman and Wake Forest University administrators announced Monday at a ceremony their agreement to house his documents at the Winston-Salem school, where he graduated in 1978.

Wake Forest also announced that planning has started for the Richard Burr Center. Preliminary plans have center leaders bringing worldwide speakers to the campus to help scholars review Burr's papers for research.

Public Hearing On Confederate Monuments Proposal Next Week

The public can address members of a committee examining the proposal by Gov. Roy Cooper's administration in person next week to move three Confederate monuments from North Carolina's old Capitol grounds to a Civil War battlefield.

Committee members are meeting Monday by telephone to set rules for their March 21 public hearing in the auditorium of the North Carolina State Archives in downtown Raleigh. The meeting will last up to three hours, with each speaker getting one minute.

NC Bases Had At Least 39 Kid-On-Kid Sex Assault Reports

A decade after the Pentagon began confronting rape in the ranks, the U.S. military frequently fails to provide justice to the children of service members when they are sexually assaulted by other kids on base.

An Associated Press investigation finds that sex assault cases occurring where military kids live often die on the desks of prosecutors. Criminal investigators shelved an unknown number of reports.

Instead of punishment or rehabilitation, offenders may be shuffled into the civilian world.

The Pentagon doesn't know the extent of the problem. In North Carolina, records that the military acknowledges are incomplete document at least 39 sex assaults among children or teens on bases since 2007. Camp Lejeune had the most reports with 22. Fort Bragg was second at 12.

Pentagon officials promised "appropriate actions."

27 Cases Started By Officer Accused In Beating Video Dropped

A North Carolina prosecutor has dropped 27 cases initiated by a white police officer shown on video beating a black man accused of jaywalking.

Buncombe County District Attorney Todd Williams told the Citizen Times in a Monday statement that former Asheville police Officer Christopher Hickman could not be considered a credible witness.

The 31-year-old was arrested Thursday on felony assault and other charges in the August incident.

Copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Neal Charnoff joined 88.5 WFDD as Morning Edition host in 2014. Raised in the Catskill region of upstate New York, he graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1983. Armed with a liberal arts degree, Neal was fully equipped to be a waiter. So he prolonged his arrested development bouncing around New York and L.A. until discovering that people enjoyed listening to his voice on the radio. After a few years doing overnight shifts at a local rock station, Neal spent most of his career at Vermont Public Radio. He began as host of a nightly jazz program, where he was proud to interview many of his idols, including Dave Brubeck and Sonny Rollins. Neal graduated to the news department, where he was the local host for NPR's All Things Considered for 14 years. In addition to news interviews and features, he originated and produced the Weekly Conversation On The Arts, as well as VPR Backstage, which profiled theater productions around the state. He contributed several stories to NPR, including coverage of a devastating ice storm. Neal now sees the value of that liberal arts degree, and approaches life with the knowledge that all subjects and all art forms are connected to each other. Neal and his wife Judy are enjoying exploring North Carolina and points south. They would both be happy to never experience a Vermont winter again.

Support quality journalism, like the story above,
with your gift right now.

Donate