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Pat Duggins
News DirectorPat Duggins is APR’s news director. As a kid, he watched the Apollo manned moon launches along Florida’s space coast. Pat later spent 14 years covering NASA for NPR. After re-organizing the APR newsroom, he and the team were honored with over 150 awards for excellence in journalism. That includes APR being the first radio newsroom to receive RFK Human Rights’ “Seigenthaler Prize for Courage in Journalism.” Pat holds a master’s degree from the University of Alabama and has published two books on NASA. When he’s not at APR, he enjoys cooking with Lucia, and tending his beloved fig tree.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the United States saw its first jump in infant mortality in twenty years. Alabama is among nineteen states that a report for the CDC says saw its rate of infant death increase significantly
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Vice President, and presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The long-awaited White House visit with President Biden, and then with Harris, comes at an important moment for all three politicians. How Harris feels about the situation in Israel and Gaza may have been framed by a speech she delivered in Selma.
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Washington, D.C. has a lot of museums. The National Gallery of Art has a painting by Leonardo DaVinci. The Museum of Natural History has The Hope Diamond. And, The Museum of American History has a set of the Ruby Slippers Judy Garland wore in the Wizard of Oz. Another museum features items associated with a resident of Alabama.
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Huntsville is one of six places in the South and West will host practice runs four years prior to the 2030 U.S. census, a nationwide head count that helps determine political power and the distribution of federal funds.
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NAACP leaders, nationally and here in Alabama, issued statements following President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw his name from the November race for the White House.
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Alabama Republican House Gary Palmer joined Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in demanding that President Joe Biden resign from the White House. This move came after Biden dropped out of the 2024 race for the White House on Sunday.
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Republican curveballs following President Joe Biden’s withdrawl from the November race for the White House could produce a flurry of state and federal lawsuits in this hyper-partisan era. Some conservatives have threatened just that. One issue is keeping Vice President Kamala Harris off of State ballots. Alabama apparently won’t be a problem.
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The Alabama Public Radio newsroom addressed a delegation of expatriate journalists from the former Soviet nation of Belarus. The topic was APR’s national award-winning investigative journalism and how that type of reporting works in the United States.
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A bridge over Interstate 10 in Mobile will be among the aging structures in sixteen states that will be replaced or improved with the help of $5 billion in federal grants announced by President Joe Biden's administration, the latest beneficiaries of a massive infrastructure law.
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Peter Buxtun, the whistleblower who revealed that the U.S. government allowed hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama to go untreated for syphilis in what became known as the Tuskegee study, has died. He was 86. Buxtun was also a key interview in Alabama Public Radio’s national award-winning investigation of rural health in the State, which focused in part on the twentieth anniversary of President Bill Clinton’s apology for the study.