May 10, 2009
What Matt Brown wanted, he finally got Tuesday night. The planned Greensboro swim center will be built at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex, which Brown directs. Next door to it will be the ACC Hall of Champions project. The first phase of the hall will be...
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May 3, 2009
N.C. A&T is intent on finding a replacement for departing Chancellor Stanley Battle by June 30. Members of the search committee say they are confident that can be accomplished -- and that there will be no need for an interim leader. I commend them for...
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April 26, 2009
Armed and studious? Some Americans dream of a day when firearms could be as commonplace on campus as backpacks, textbooks and Saturday night keggers. Consider Philip Van Cleave, who pictures a world in which college students are able to carry concealed fi...
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April 12, 2009
Age, they say, is only a state of mind. But it's also a state of body as well ... of eyesight and hearing and reflexes. That's why a bill in the General Assembly would have required more frequent testing of older drivers for license renewals. The bill, sp...
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April 5, 2009
"We was robbed." A number of college sports stars justifiably could make this statement, bad grammar and all. They are heralded, especially this time of year, as "student-athletes." But exactly what are they learning? And why can so ca...
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March 29, 2009
Hold on to your hard hat. Steve Arnold and Skip Alston's extreme makeover of county government continues unchecked. Alston, the chairman of the county commissioners, and Arnold, the vice chairman, are not only rearranging the furniture, they are blowing s...
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March 22, 2009
It's hard to leave a conversation with Nido Qubein without feeling as if someone just clamped jumper cables onto your chair and jolted you with a dose of optimism. A self-proclaimed disciple of "the art of the possible," Qubein is that upbeat. A...
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March 15, 2009
Dr. Harold MartinSenior Vice President for Academic AffairsUniversity of North Carolina General AdministrationP.O. Box 2688Chapel Hill, N.C. 27515-2688 Dr. Martin: I know this letter may be presumptuous. But I have heard your name mentioned so often and s...
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February 22, 2009
Way back when, during my junior year in Chapel Hill, the phone rang one night in my dorm room. It was Dean Smith. The coach of the Tar Heels had called to answer a few questions for a story I was reporting for a campus magazine. Frankly, I hadn't expected...
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February 15, 2009
In a stroke of both good fortune and good police work, officers at N.C. A&T arrested a suspect last week in a cold-blooded December robbery that left a Brink's armored car guard dead from a gunshot wound to the head. Juan Estaban Salado, 25, was fatal...
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February 8, 2009
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Bearing that in mind, state lawmakers have decided not to wait for the Greensboro City Council to hem, haw, ruminate, speechify and attach wholly unnecessary asterisks and conditions to the ques...
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February 1, 2009
To hear John Thain tell it, his critics have misoverestimated his extravagance. Sure, he spent a mint on his new office at Merrill Lynch when he became CEO there, Thain explains. But you should have seen the place. The office, which had belonged to previ...
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January 25, 2009
I attended the rap biopic "Notorious" last week and I am pleased to report that no one was shot. In fact, the most discomfort I felt in the theater was clearly being the oldest person there. By light years. "Notorious" chronicles the short, tragic life of...
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January 18, 2009
The county commissioners' annual retreat is set for Jan. 26. But who needs a retreat? Steve Arnold and Skip Alston are doing just fine on their own. Let's see ... thus far Alston, chairman of the Guilford County commissioners, and Arnold, the vice chair...
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January 11, 2009
The Greensboro City Council will hear the case for and against protest petitions in less than two weeks. Then it will say no. I could be wrong. But if I were you, I wouldn't bet against me. Greensboro is the only major city in the state that does not allo...
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December 28, 2008
How much have Becky Layton and Elma Sabo meant to the News & Record editorial staff? About as much as they've meant to one another. When Elma was expecting her second child, she began to sense what seemed to be labor pains while working at the paper.
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December 21, 2008
New Guilford commissioners Chairman Melvin "Skip" Alston says the successor to County Manager David McNeill ought to be "somebody that has the vigor, the motivation, the wisdom and the desire to really move this county forward and take it to another level...
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December 14, 2008
It comes as no surprise that UNCG would at some point replace tiny Fleming Gym as its home basketball court with the Greensboro Coliseum. New Chancellor Linda Brady has made no secret of her desire to partner with the coliseum as a means to elevate the pr...
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December 7, 2008
An irate caller phoned last week. The woman, an African American, wasn't so sure Barack Obama can call himself the same. Or whether anyone else should, either. An African American is someone who is descended from American slaves from Africa, she said. The...
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November 23, 2008
The voters have spoken, whether they knew what they were saying or not. We're all now the proud owners of a brand-new, $12 million swim center. We don't know yet where it will be built or who will operate it -- or even when it will be built. But it's our...
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November 16, 2008
I can count the number of my Latino friends on one hand. Actually, two fingers. Oh, I see them every day, just as you do. I just don't know very many of them. Not that there aren't plenty of Latinos to get to know. In 1990, the county's Hispanic populati...
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November 9, 2008
Not that long ago, the best-known and longest-running positive depiction of a black family aired at 8 p.m. on Thursday nights. Cliff and Claire Huxtable presided over a colorful brood of good-looking and precocious kids. Cliff was a doctor, Claire a lawye...
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November 2, 2008
So perturbed was a Chapel Hill man that his yard signs were disappearing nearly as fast as he could plant them, he wired his next set to the power source for an electric pet fence. A 9-year-old neighbor discovered the homemade hookup the hard way last we...
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October 12, 2008
The Godfather of Soul wasn't very impressed at the state of the dressing rooms in War Memorial Auditorium. And neither were we. James Brown last performed at the auditorium during his "Living in America" concert tour in 2001. We last appeared there two we...
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October 5, 2008
It was well past midnight three Saturdays ago on High Point Road. A car slipped alongside mine as I idled at a red light, its windows tinted too darkly to see inside. One intersection later the car had changed lanes from my right to my left. Again, we idl...
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