VOL. 131 | NO. 201 | Friday, October 7, 2016
Last Word
Bill Dries
Last Word: Memphis-Temple, Southwest's Remake and Death Penalty Arguments
By Bill Dries
Memphis 34 –Temple 27 Thursday evening at the Liberty Bowl and on ESPN. Whatever happened during halftime, the Tigers were a very different team from the first half when they emerged.
It featured the first kick return for a touchdown in 20 years for the Tigers -- 233 games ago during the Tennessee game in November of 1996 when Peyton Manning was the Big Orange quarterback
For some of you this is the only time you haven’t been watching Hurricane Matthew coverage since Thursday morning, isn’t it?
Tracy Hall has been president of the city’s community college for 14 months and she is not happy. She made that clear Thursday during the kickoff of her drive to fundamentally change Southwest Tennessee Community College. Hall pegged the need for change on numerous statistics including a drop in enrollment every year since 2011. And that is even with the Tennessee Promise program that guarantees two years of free community college in the timeline.
We’ll have more context on this in the Monday edition.
On the K-12 front, Chalkbeat has more on an effort to put a nurse in every school in the Shelby County Schools system. For many students, a school nurse would be the closest thing they have to a primary care physician and would be a factor in combatting the absenteeism rate among students who face so many hurdles to regular school attendance. And leading the effort which began with a summit this week at the University of Memphis is former Memphis City Schools board member Lora Jobe.
AP’s Erik Schelzig with notes from Thursday’s Tennessee Supreme Court hearing on the state’s lethal injection protocol for death row inmates.
In our Friday edition sports section:
Don Wade on those joining Z-Bo on the Grizz Second Unit,
Tigers basketball walk-ons and their eligibility.
The Vols as underdogs this weekend against Texas A&M.
And David Climer on Marcus Mariota and Steve McNair.
Behind The Headlines on WKNO TV is about the new discussions around parking in the Medical District. The show is Friday at 7 p.m. and again Sunday morning at 8:30 a.m. After that you can see it via the video link on this website.
The cover story in our weekly, The Memphis News, by Don Wade is a look at our green efforts from the Wolf River Greenway to Overton Park’s Conservancy to Shelby Farms Park’s recent $70 million update. This is an overview of how all of these work together to create something more than the sum of the parts. The PDF of the new edition is up on this website. The hard copies hit the racks Friday morning and the cover story goes up on this website Friday afternoon.
Joe Brown is a man of few words. But we got him to talk a bit about being a truck driver for the last 39 years and driving 5 million miles in the course of his job without any accidents. Brown and the other truckers at the YRC Freight Memphis terminal couldn’t say enough about driving and texting or using any social media while driving. Everyone we talked with including Brown brought it up as a big problem without prompting. We also talked with YRC President Darren Hawkins about the state of the business which is one of the remaining union shops.
A New York investment group buys a set of six warehouses in southeast Memphis.
And just below it in Digest, four properties on Presidents Island are sold.
Two new polls on the Presidential race in Tennessee confirm that Tennessee is not a battleground state and that it will remain a red state once all of the votes are counted on Nov. 8.
This is the point at which I will remind you that Tuesday is the deadline to register to vote or to change your address on your voter registration records.
The Washington Post with a feature on federal appeals court judge Damon Keith who is among the honorees later this month at the National Civil Rights Museum Freedom Awards.
Two additions to the leadership of New Memphis Institute.
Samsung buys Viv.
The FCC is proposing that your broadband provider must get your permission to share your data.
Wal-Mart puts the brakes on bricks and mortar and turns to online efforts, tech and remodeling stores.