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By MARTIN WEIL,
Washington Post
(Metered Paywall - 3 articles a month)
Arrests were underway early Monday at a pro-Palestinian protest at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, the school said. “They are being made,” a school spokesman said in an email early Monday. The numbers of those arrested and of those demonstrating could not be learned immediately. Posts on X indicated that hundreds were demonstrating and that several had been arrested.
VaNews April 29, 2024
By GRACE MAMON,
Cardinal News
As fire and rescue volunteerism declines across the state, many localities are changing the way they provide this service. Using paid crews is costly and sometimes controversial, but it’s already been an effective solution for several Southern Virginia counties, and likely will be for many more.
Some localities, like Henry County, have coupled paid staff and volunteers for decades. Others, like Franklin and Pittsylvania counties, are in earlier stages of the transition to what is called a combination model of rescue services.
VaNews April 29, 2024
By DAN CASEY,
Roanoke Times
(Metered Paywall - 5 articles a month)
There’s a popular saying about the war in Ukraine that goes something like this: “If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, Ukraine ends.” More than anything else, that simple aphorism highlights the nature of the most damaging conflict in Europe since World War II: Unprovoked military aggression by the authoritarian Russian Federation against a European democracy.
VaNews April 29, 2024
By ANGELA WOOLSEY,
FFXnow
The cost of riding Metro trains and buses will go up, starting July 1, when the transit agency’s new budget takes effect.
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (WMATA) board of directors approved a $4.8 billion fiscal year 2025 budget yesterday (Thursday) that will increase fares by 12.5%, including by ending the flat $2 rate for weekend and late-night rides introduced in 2021 and expanded in 2022.
VaNews April 29, 2024
By PATRICIA MAZZEI,
New York Times
(Metered Paywall - 1 to 2 articles a month)
Amid a dizzying array of standoffs involving pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments at colleges, schools that cracked down on protesters over the weekend have given varying justifications for their actions, while others sent mixed signals with their inaction.
Behind it all was a central question confronting university leaders across the country: When does a demonstration cross the line?
Colleges have cited property damage, outside provocateurs, antisemitic expressions or just failures to heed warnings as reasons to clear encampments and arrest students. Student groups have strongly denied or questioned many of those claims.
VaNews April 29, 2024
By LISA ROWAN,
Cardinal News
Three of seven Bedford County School Board members have spoken up in a Facebook group about a lawsuit filed last month against a parent, with two saying the school board didn’t sign off on the suit bearing its name as plaintiff.
The suit seeks $600,000 in damages from Moneta resident David Rife, alleging he used crude language and threatened police and legal action during repeated calls to the school district about his son.
VaNews April 29, 2024
By LUKE WEIR,
Roanoke Times
(Metered Paywall - 5 articles a month)
Pro-Palestinian protesters linked arms to protect Muslim participants during late afternoon prayers at Virginia Tech, minutes after student organizers warned of a potential police crackdown during a third day of demonstrations on Sunday. Hundreds participated and more people watched as chants continued outside the Graduate Life Center on campus in Blacksburg. Around 10:30 p.m. Sunday, police were setting up a perimeter and warning anyone inside it to leave or be arrested, including media. Buses with police officers were arriving.
VaNews April 29, 2024
By SEAN JONES,
Richmond Times-Dispatch
(Metered Paywall - 7 articles a month)
Henrico County leaders are considering a plan to make roughly 100 to 150 new homes more affordable each year. There’s a national home affordability crisis that’s showing its effects locally with average homebuyers being priced out of the market. Staple jobs — police officers, teachers, dental assistants and paralegals — often make less than half the yearly salary needed to afford the median home price in the county.
VaNews April 29, 2024
By JEFF E. SCHAPIRO,
Richmond Times-Dispatch
(Metered Paywall - 7 articles a month)
It’s no secret that Gov. Glenn Youngkin — a creature of the corpocracy who came to Richmond with nary a nanosecond in politics and government — has attempted to run Virginia as he did the publicly traded investment behemoth in which he spent nearly all of his private career, amassing a $400 million-plus fortune.
It’s no secret that top-down approach — to the annoyance of Democratic and Republicans legislators accustomed to collaboration — hasn’t always worked.
VaNews April 29, 2024
By STEVEN T. CORNELIUSSEN,
published in
Virginian-Pilot
(Metered Paywall - 2 articles a month)
Virginia is considering a great idea: restoring the original name of the place where the arc of the moral universe bent toward emancipation. In 1619 as “Point Comfort,” that historic landscape saw the dawn of British North America’s slavery. In 1861 as “Fort Monroe,” it saw the dawn of U.S. slavery’s demise. True, dropping the military name could offend people such as me — a former Navyman, son of a Navyman, married in Fort Monroe’s chapel to a soldier’s daughter. But way more importantly, that Chesapeake Bay landscape uniquely commemorates the struggles of the planet’s first nation to found itself on freedom.
Corneliussen of Poquoson publishes the free-subscription Substack newsletter The Self-Emancipator, named in the spirit of the antebellum abolitionist publication The Emancipator.
VaNews April 29, 2024
