Dec 23, 2024

Hi all, it's Caroline filling in for Ike. Hopefully your holiday week is off to a good start.

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Sixty-five percent of voters in Alabama supported the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and when he takes office on Jan. 20, he will have the backing of Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate to carry out his ideas.

What will Trump’s second term and the GOP-led Congress mean in a state so loyal to the president-elect?

A concern is possible changes or cuts to Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Federal funds pay about 70% of the cost of Medicaid in Alabama.

Medicaid enrollment in Alabama generally hovers around 1 million people. Slightly more than half of those children.

Trump's proposed tariffs are another concern. During Trump’s first term, Gov. Kay Ivey said Alabama could lose approximately 4,000 jobs as a result of automotive tariffs the Trump Administration was considering.

Trump has also pledged to carry out the largest deportation project in American history. Alabama’s Hispanic population climbed to more than 250,000 in 2022, a 3.8% increase since 2021.

A Mountain Brook municipal judge told the Alabama Commission on Re-Entry Thursday that those about to be released from prison could face local cases they may not have considered. 

 K.C. Hairston, the vice president of the Alabama Municipal Judges Association, encouraged officials to develop a system that integrates municipal court violations with existing information that state has in a database of those incarcerated within the Alabama Department of Corrections. 

Hairston’s comments stem from a conversation that happened during the previous month’s Commission meeting in which information related to criminal offenses at the municipal and county level is not well integrated.

If you saw something burn up in the skies over Alabama Saturday evening, you weren’t alone.

Actually it appears there were a couple of things that streaked across the night sky, one at about 5:30 p.m. Central time and the other at about 10:11 p.m.

The two events, though only hours apart, had completely different sources.

The first was “caused by a piece of an asteroid weighing about a pound hitting the atmosphere at 33,500 miles per hour," according to William J. Cooke, lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office. 

The second was a case of “space junk” burning up as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere. On X.com, astronomer Jonathan McDowell identified the object as a Chinese commercial imaging satellite.

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