Alabama

MONTGOMERY (Alabama, US), Feb 20 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Two people were killed when a military plane crashed on Friday near the Montgomery Regional Airport in Alabama, according to the facility’s executive director Marshall Taggart, Jr.

The T-38 trainer jet assigned to the 14th Flying Training Wing crashed at about 5:30 p.m., according to a statement from the Air Force.

Taggart said the plane took off from Columbus, Mississippi and was on its way to Tallahassee, Florida before crashing adjacent to the airport. The 14th Flying Training Wing is based at Columbus Air Force Base.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama is set Thursday to carry out what would be the first execution by a state in 2021, that of a 51-year-old inmate convicted of the shotgun slaying of a police detective’s sister decades ago.

Willie B. Smith III is scheduled to receive a lethal injection at a south Alabama prison for the 1991 murder of Sharma Ruth Johnson in Birmingham. Prosecutors said Smith abducted Johnson at gunpoint from an ATM, stole $80 from her and then took her to a cemetery where he shot her in the back of the head.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Coronavirus cases have dropped at U.S. nursing homes and other long-term care facilities over the past few weeks, offering a glimmer of hope that health officials attribute to the start of vaccinations, an easing of the post-holiday surge and better prevention, among other reasons.

TUSKEGEE, Ala. (AP) — Lucenia Dunn spent the early days of the coronavirus pandemic encouraging people to wear masks and keep a safe distance from each other in Tuskegee, a mostly Black city where the government once used unsuspecting African American men as guinea pigs in a study of a sexually transmitted disease.

FULTONDALE, Ala. (AP) — James Scott has never lived anywhere other than a two-story house on hilly Darlene Drive north of Birmingham. Home will never be the same after a tornado smashed the structure into pieces, killed another teen and left the community devastated in the middle of the night.

Standing in the middle of the destruction Tuesday, the 19-year-old stared blankly at the rubble for a few moments, seemingly unsure what to do next.

“It’s time to regroup and start clean,” he said. “It’s the best I can hope for.”

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — War-like imagery has begun spreading in Republican circles after the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters, with some elected officials and party leaders rejecting pleas to tone down rhetoric calling for a second civil war.

FOLEY, Ala. (AP) — A U.S. Navy training plane that took off from Florida crashed Friday in an Alabama residential neighborhood near the Gulf Coast, killing both people in the plane, authorities said.

Zach Harrell, a spokesperson for Commander, Naval Air Forces, said both people in the T-6B Texan II training plane died, but they weren’t immediately releasing their names. No injuries were reported on the ground.

MOBILE, Ala. (AP) — Jeff Sessions took the stage Tuesday night near the Alabama gulf coast with the same certitude he’d displayed on another, bigger stage across town almost five years ago. Donald Trump’s vision, the former attorney general declared anew, is right for America.

Yet this occasion couldn’t have been more different.

MOBILE, Ala. (AP) — Former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions lost the Republican nomination for his old Senate seat in Alabama to former college football coach Tommy Tuberville on Tuesday, likely ending a long political career with a bitter defeat egged on by President Donald Trump.

Tuberville, 65, beat Sessions in Tuesday’s Republican runoff as Sessions fell short in his attempted comeback for a seat he held for two decades before resigning to become Trump’s attorney general in 2017.

HOOVER, Ala. (AP) — An 8-year-old boy was killed Friday in a shooting at an Alabama shopping mall that left three other people injured, police said.

Hoover Police Chief Nick Derzis said the child was killed in the afternoon shooting at the Riverchase Galleria. The police chief said a girl and two adults were also hospitalized after the shooting.

The Bessemer City School system identified the 8-year-old victim as Royta Giles Jr. (pronounced Roy-TAY Jyles), who would have been a third grader this fall at Jonesboro Elementary School.