Sep 02, 2024

With the Labor Day holiday, we'll be briefer than usually the next two days. We hope everyone's enjoying a peaceful holiday weekend.

Thanks for reading,

Ike Morgan

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Over three years ago the Alabama State Legislature passed a bill to legalize and regulate medical marijuana. So many things have happened since then, but opening up for business isn't one of them.

The latest: a hearing tomorrow (Tuesday) as lawsuits and challenges to the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission continue to stall the industry's beginning.

AL.com's Mike Cason reports that the Commission and three companies it selected for business licenses are asking a judge to let them get the show on the road. Three times the Commission has tried to issue the licenses, and it continues to fight lawsuits and challenges to its picks process. 

So far, the Commission has issued licenses to cultivators, processors, transporters and a state testing lab. But it hasn't issued licenses to the integrated companies that will cultivate, process and dispense the product.

A woman who has been deported four times and served time for her role in a Birmingham murder has been arrested in Texas while immigration officials say she was in possession of a counterfeit Social Security card, reports AL.com's Carol Robinson.

Maribel Martinez Garcia is a Mexican National. Federal authorities aren't sure when she last reentered the country, but she was last deported in August 2010 after serving three years on a murder conviction. Two men convicted in that case are still in prison.

According to court documents, Martinez Garcia, her boyfriend and another man were arrested in the New Year's Day 2007 shooting death of her boyfriend's boss while the victim's two small children waited in a car. The victim was living in Pelham. Martinez Garcia is being held in a processing center in Texas for illegal reentry.

A football game between Tallassee and Elmore County Friday night was postponed because of a threat of violence, according to AL.com reports.

Tallassee coach Lawrence O'Neal said that Elmore County coach Kyle Caldwell let him know what was going on at midfield. Law-enforcement officials let Caldwell know about a threat during the third quarter. The Eclectic Police Department  issued a release saying there had been threats of gun violence.

Now, this is a serious situation and is probably going to end up with somebody in a lot of trouble.

And since this is still a new school year I think it's a good time to repeat something for kids and teens of all ages: Online anonymity is false security. You can't really hide online. In the news we see somebody being busted or humiliated every week for indiscretions big and small.

So as you prepare to opine, threaten, get sexy or seed a revolution on social media, you might consider acting as if you're in the middle of the mall at noon Saturday in front of your parents, grandparents, future spouses, God, Kay Ivey, James Spann and local law enforcement. Because private things cam go public in a hurry.

Friday's game was tied 14-14 and will likely remain a tie since it was a non-region game.

Here are the answers and how quiz-takers did, collectively, since Friday:

The current head of state for this nation went to school at Auburn University at Montgomery:

Iceland (CORRECT) 70.4%

Finland 15.7%

Greenland 8.3%

Zamunda 5.6%

Arrests were made after gambling machines supposedly locked down in Selma were discovered in the back room of a joint in Lipscomb. Stickers in place on the machines identified them as:

Evidence (CORRECT) 72.2%

Illegal in a number of states, including Alabama 23.6%

Dangerously addictive 3.2%

Known to the state of California to cause cancer 0.9%

This week the Alabama's conservation department announced it had acquired a 79-acre, $16 million tract of land to preserve in this location:

The Fort Morgan Peninsula (CORRECT) 63.0%

Mobile-Tensaw Delta 28.7%

Chandler Mountain 8.3%

The Alabama Shakespeare Festival 0.0%

This creepy crawly is currently considered to be at epidemic levels in Alabama:

The pine beetle (CORRECT) 94.9%

The pickle worm 2.3%

The bed bug 1.9%

The boll weevil 0.9%

Recently we acknowledged the 1916 birthday of Virginia Hill of Lipscomb. Hill moved to Chicago and became famous in her lifetime for her association with organized crime and mafia figures. She has most famously been identified as the girlfriend of this mobster:

Bugsy Siegel (CORRECT) 62.0%

Carlo Gambini 17.1%

Lucky Luciano 16.7%

Silvio Dante 4.2%

In 1933, former Alabama defensive back, Clemson football coach and Florida State and Alabama athletics director Hootie Ingram of Tuscaloosa. He passed away earlier this year.

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