AP
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — A nightclub shooting that wounded four people appears to be the last straw for officials in Norfolk.
The Virginian-Pilot reports that city officials say they will ask businesses from nightclubs to coffee shops to explain why they deserve the “privilege” of operating in the city’s entertainment district.
City Manager Chip Filer said conditional use permits for the businesses will be evaluated and the City Council will start asking “hard questions” about whether it wants any businesses staying open until 2 a.m. on Granby Street.
The shooting Friday highlights the struggles the city has had maintaining a safe nightlife environment in recent years. Filer commended the city’s staff and the businesses for correcting issues with overcrowding, long lines spilling into the streets and loitering that were common around the time of a triple homicide in March. He said the challenge now is to address the problems that start inside.
“You are no longer able to claim immunity for things that occur outside your establishment when we can find evidence that creates no doubt that the genesis of the activity occurred in your establishment,” Filer said during a news conference Friday.
Police responded to the Legacy Restaurant and Lounge Friday at about 1:15 a.m., where they found four people with gunshot wounds, including a sheriff’s deputy. The deputy was on duty helping other officers deal with an altercation. Sheriff Joe Baron said they were attempting to move people out of the club when the suspect fired into the crowd. All four shooting victims are expected to recover
MGN
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — State regulators on Friday approved an application from Dominion Energy Virginia to build an enormous offshore wind farm off the coast of Virginia Beach and recover the cost from ratepayers.
No parties to the monthslong proceeding had opposed the approval of the project, which will help the utility boost the proportion of its generation that comes from renewable resources. But many had raised concerns about affordability and possible risks to the utility’s captive ratepayers.
In its Friday order, the State Corporation Commission noted that the 176-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project will likely be the single largest project in Dominion’s history and said that because of its size, complexity and location, it faces an array of challenges. The commission included in its order three “consumer protections,” including a performance standard.
The commission’s order also approved facilities that will connect the wind farm to the existing transmission system.
Robert Blue, Dominion Energy’s president and CEO, said in a statement that the company was pleased with the approval but was reviewing the specifics of the order, “particularly the performance requirement.”
The project, which will be located about 27 miles off the coast, has an expected capital cost of $9.8 billion and has drawn broad support from local officials, policymakers, business groups and trade unions, who say it will help fight climate change and create jobs. Backers quickly celebrated the commission’s decision.
“We applaud the SCC for greenlighting new offshore wind power in Virginia. As the largest offshore wind project in the country, this project is a critical piece of our clean energy transition because it complements solar by generating power at night when the sun isn’t shining,” Will Cleveland, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a statement.
Regarding costs, the SCC order said that over the wind farm’s projected 35-year lifetime, including the construction and its 30-year projected useful life, a typical residential customer is expected to see an average monthly bill increase of $4.72, with a peak monthly bill increase of $14.22 in 2027.
“To be clear, total Project costs, including financing costs, less investment tax credits, are estimated to be approximately $21.5 billion on a Virginia-jurisdictional basis, assuming such costs are reasonable and prudent. And all of these costs … will find their way into ratepayers electric bills in some manner,” the order said.
Dominion said in a news release that because offshore wind turbines have no fuel costs, the project is expected to save Virginia customers more than $3 billion during its first 10 years of operation.
The consumer protections in the commission’s order include a requirement that Dominion file a notice within 30 calendar days if it finds that the total project costs are expected to exceed the current estimate or if the final turbine installation is expected to be delayed beyond Feb. 4, 2027. Annual filings will also have to address “any material changes” to the project and explain any cost overruns.
The SCC also ordered that beginning with the commercial operation and extending through the life of the project, customers will be “held harmless” for any shortfall in energy production below a certain threshold.
Such a performance standard will protect customers who are paying for the project “from also having to pay for replacement energy if the Project does not generate the amount of electricity upon which Dominion bases its request and its cost estimates,” the order said.
The order goes on to warn that the performance standard, however, will not protect customers from cost overruns, or if the project is abandoned.
Commissioner Judith Jagdmann emphasized in a concurring opinion that the project was “legislatively favored.”
The 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act, a sweeping overhaul of the state’s energy policy enacted by Democrats, included a number of renewable energy mandates intended to help address the threats of climate change and paved the way for the project.
The General Assembly, Jagdmann wrote, could consider implementing additional consumer protections.
Friday’s decision came after months of voluminous filings in the case and a multiday evidentiary hearing in May.
The company already has a two-turbine pilot project up and running. The 2.6-gigawatt, utility-scale project’s schedule calls for construction to be complete in 2026. Dominion expects the project to generate enough clean energy to power up to 660,000 homes.
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — A teen was sentenced Friday to 10 years behind bars for shooting and wounding two fellow students at a Virginia high school last year.
A judge in Newport News, Christopher Papile, handed down a punishment that will include time in a juvenile detention center as well as state prison, The Virginian-Pilot reported.
The teen was 15 at the time of the shooting at Heritage High School in Newport News, a shipbuilding town near the Atlantic Coast.
“I can’t ignore that he brought a gun to school, got into an altercation, and decided to pull the gun out, shot it many times, hitting these two victims,” Papile said in court.
Noting that the teen fired the shots in a crowded hallway, the judge said he was “flabbergasted that it wasn’t much worse.”
A 17-year-old student with whom the teen was fighting was shot at least three times, including in the side of his face. Another 17-year-old student, an innocent bystander who was running away, was struck in her leg. Both students have recovered from their wounds, according to court documents.
Prosecutors had asked the judge for a 10-year sentence, while public defenders requested five years in a juvenile detention center.
The judge noted that the teen had already been charged with shooting someone else — and had pleaded guilty — at the time of the shooting at the high school.
“It wasn’t the first time he had taken out a gun and shot somebody,” Papile said.
Federal prosecutors are recommending an eight-year prison sentence for an off-duty Virginia police officer who was convicted by a jury of storming the U.S. Capitol to obstruct Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.
Former Rocky Mount Police Sgt. Thomas Robertson used his law enforcement training to block police officers who were trying to protect the Capitol from a mob’s attack on Jan. 6, 2021, prosecutors said in a court filing Thursday supporting their sentencing recommendation.
“Instead of using his training and power to promote the public good, he attempted to overthrow the government,” they wrote.
An eight-year prison sentence would be the longest among hundreds of Capitol riot cases. The lengthiest so far is seven years and three months for Guy Reffitt, a Texas man who attacked the Capitol while armed with a holstered handgun.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper is scheduled to sentence Robertson next Thursday. Prosecutors also asked the judge to sentence Robertson to three years of supervised release after any prison term.
Robertson’s attorney, Mark Rollins, is seeking a sentence below a sentencing guidelines range of 27 to 33 months of imprisonment. Prosecutors estimate a sentencing guidelines range of 87 months to 108 months, but Cooper isn’t bound by any of those estimates or recommendations.
Robertson didn’t testify at his trial before a jury convicted him in April of all six counts in his indictment, including charges that he interfered with police officers at the Capitol and that he entered a restricted area with a dangerous weapon, a large wooden stick.
Robertson’s lawyers said the U.S. Army veteran was using the stick to help him walk because he has a limp from getting shot in the right thigh while working as a private contractor for the U.S. Defense Department in Afghanistan in 2011.
In their sentencing memo, prosecutors accused Robertson of lying about his military service. Robertson identified himself on his resume as a U.S. Army Ranger school graduate, but his official military records don’t support that claim, prosecutors said. They said Robertson also lied to a reporter about receiving a Purple Heart.
Robertson’s jury trial was the second for a Capitol riot case. Reffitt’s was the first. Jurors have unanimously convicted seven riot defendants of all charges in their respective indictments.
Robertson traveled to Washington, D.C., on the morning of Jan. 6 with co-worker Jacob Fracker and a third man, a neighbor. Fracker also was an off-duty Rocky Mount police officer. He was scheduled to be tried alongside Robertson before he pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge and agreed to cooperate with authorities.
Fracker testified at Robertson’s trial that he initially believed that he was merely trespassing when he entered the Capitol building. But he ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiring with Robertson to obstruct Congress.
Robertson’s lawyers conceded that he broke the law when he entered the Capitol during the riot. They encouraged jurors to convict Robertson of misdemeanor offenses but acquit him of felony charges.
Jurors saw some of Robertson’s posts on social media before and after the Capitol riot. In a Facebook post on Nov. 7, 2020, Robertson said “being disenfranchised by fraud is my hard line.”
“I’ve spent most of my adult life fighting a counter insurgency. (I’m) about to become part of one, and a very effective one,” he wrote.
In a letter addressed to the judge, Robertson said he takes full responsibility for his actions on Jan. 6 and “any poor decisions I made.” He blamed the vitriolic content of his social media posts on a mix of stress, alcohol abuse and “submersion in deep ‘rabbit holes’ of election conspiracy theory.”
“I sat around at night drinking too much and reacting to articles and sites given to me by Facebook” algorithms, he wrote.
The town fired Robertson and Fracker after the riot. Rocky Mount is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Roanoke and has roughly 5,000 residents.
Robertson has been jailed since Cooper ruled last year that he violated the terms of his pretrial release by possessing firearms.
Roughly 850 people have been charged with federal crimes for their conduct on Jan. 6. Over 350 of them have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanor offenses, and over 220 have been sentenced so far.
HUBERT, N.C. (AP) — A Virginia man drove more than 300 miles to confront a 27-year-old man who he said dated his daughter, then fatally shot him in a fight, according to authorities in eastern North Carolina.
The Onslow County Sheriff’s Office said emergency responders found Jared Musgrove suffering from two gunshot wounds at a Hubert mobile home park on July 5, news outlets reported. Musgrove was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Investigators learned that James McAlee, 46, drove from Alexandria, Virginia, to confront Musgrove about an alleged relationship with McAlee’s adult daughter and they got into a physical altercation, the sheriff’s office said. After the men were separated, McAlee got a gun from his truck and shot Musgrove, the sheriff’s office said.
On Monday, the U.S. Marshals Service and a sheriff’s office detective found McAlee and arrested him. He was charged with murder and initially held without bond. On Tuesday, a judge. On Tuesday, a District Court judge set McAlee’s bond at $500,000, WITN-TV reported. Court records do not list an attorney for McAlee, according to court officials.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Bodycam videos, police reports and other materials connected to the city of Richmond’s aggressive response to protesters in June 2020 have been made public through the Library of Virginia. The database that went live recently is part of a legal settlement between the city and plaintiffs who say police used excessive force against protesters who gathered at the Robert E. Lee statue two years ago in response to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Police used tear gas to disperse the crowd ahead of an 8 p.m. curfew. The department later apologized and said the use of tear gas was unwarranted. A few days later, the city’s police chief resigned. Thomas H. Roberts, a lawyer for some of the plaintiffs, said the archive will allow the public to judge for themselves how police responded. Members of the public will be able to contribute their own footage of what occurred to the archive.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A month after some members of Congress urged Google to limit the appearance of anti-abortion pregnancy centers in certain abortion-related search results, 17 Republican attorneys general are warning the company that doing so could invite investigations and possible legal action.
“Suppressing pro-life and pro-mother voices at the urging of government officials would violate the most fundamental tenet of the American marketplace of ideas,” the attorneys general wrote in a letter Thursday to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company.
The effort was led by Republican Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, and the letter was shared with The Associated Press ahead of its public release.
The Republicans took issue with a June 17 letter to the company from U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, and Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan, which was co-signed by 19 other members of Congress.
Some of these places, known as crisis pregnancy centers, also have been accused of providing misleading information about abortion and contraception. Many are religiously affiliated.
“Directing women towards fake clinics that traffic in misinformation and don’t provide comprehensive health services is dangerous to women’s health and undermines the integrity of Google’s search results,” said the June letter, which was authored after the leak of a draft opinion indicating the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. The court took that step June 24.
The Democrat-led group asked Google to address what steps it would take to limit the appearance of “crisis pregnancy centers” in its search results, ads and maps results for users who search for “abortion clinic,” “abortion pill” or other similar terms.
The group also asked the company if it would add disclaimers to address whether or not a clinic provides abortions. New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office also raised similar concerns in a separate June letter to Google.
The letter from the Republican AGs defends the work of crisis pregnancy centers. It notes that such centers often provide services such as free ultrasounds, pregnancy tests, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, and parenting and prenatal education classes. It also argues that “at least some” Google users who search for information about abortion expect to find information about alternatives.
They wrote that if the company complies with “this inappropriate demand” to “bias” its search results, their offices would respond by investigating whether there had been any violation of antitrust or religious discrimination laws. They also pledged to consider whether new legislation would help “protect consumers and markets.”
“We trust that you will treat this letter with the seriousness these issues require, and hope you will decide that Google’s search results must not be subject to left-wing political pressure, which would actively harm women seeking essential assistance. If you do not, we must avail ourselves of all lawful and appropriate means of protecting the rights of our constituents, of upholding viewpoint diversity, free expression, and the freedom of religion for all Americans, and of making sure that our markets are free in fact, not merely in theory,” the letter said.
It asked the California-based company to respond within 14 days and explain whether it has or will take any steps to treat crisis pregnancy centers any differently than before the leak of the draft Supreme Court decision.
Google did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.
A spokeswoman for Warner said the senator had not received a response to the June letter. But Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said his organization believes Google recently made a small change in response to its research.
In cases of searches for “abortion clinic near me,” the company appears to have changed a maps results headline to say “Places” instead of “Abortion clinic,” according to the center, which monitors online disinformation and provided its research and screenshots of examples to AP.
Miyares, who defeated incumbent Democrat Mark Herring in November, recently traveled to a Lynchburg crisis pregnancy center that was vandalized after the Supreme Court’s ruling, condemning what he called an act of “political violence.”
Google and other Big Tech companies also have faced recent calls for more stringent privacy controls to address concerns that information about location, texts, searches and emails could be used against people seeking to end unwanted pregnancies.
Google announced this month that it would automatically purge information about users who visit abortion clinics or other places that could trigger legal problems in light of the high court’s ruling.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A federal appeals court Thursday upheld a ruling by a lower court that dismissed a lawsuit seeking to force members of the state’s Republican-controlled House of Delegates to face an unscheduled election this year.
A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a three-judge U.S. District Court panel was correct when it ruled last month that Democratic Party activist Paul Goldman does not have legal standing to sue, either as a voter or a potential candidate. Neither court ruled on the merits of Goldman’s lawsuit and only ruled on the issue of standing.
Goldman’s lawsuit argued House members elected for two-year terms in November 2021 must run again in 2022 under newly redrawn maps that properly align legislative districts with population shifts.
The 2021 elections were supposed to be the first held under constitutionally required redistricting based on the 2020 census. But because census results were delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the state held elections under the old legislative boundaries. The new maps were not finalized until December, a month after the elections were held.
Goldman said the dismissal of his lawsuit “guts the one-person, one-vote rule for millions of people.”
Two days after Goldman’s lawsuit was thrown out, an author who has written extensively about Virginia politics and government filed a new lawsuit. Jeff Thomas alleges he and the other voters in his Richmond-area district have had their voting strength and political representation “unconstitutionally diluted or weakened” by the state’s failure to complete redistricting before the 2021 elections.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has said the 2021 elections were “legal and constitutional.”
WHITEWOOD, Va. (AP) _ Authorities say flooding in a remote corner of southwest Virginia has damaged more than 100 homes but there are no confirmed deaths or injuries despite some 40 people being unaccounted for. Officials said at a news conference Wednesday that the flooding occurred in Virginia’s Buchanan County. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin declared a state of emergency to aid in the rescue and recovery efforts from Tuesday’s floodwaters. Authorities said the number unaccounted for was expected to decline as swift-water rescue teams continue their work. Buchanan County also suffered serious flooding damage last year, when the remnants of a hurricane hit the area in August, washing away homes and leaving one person dead.
New round-trip Amtrak routes will start Monday between Washington and two Virginia cities: Norfolk and Roanoke.
The additions will bring to eight the number of state-funded round trips from the nation’s capital, The Washington Post reported Saturday.
“We’re adding more options for people at the right time,” said Michael McLaughlin, chief operating officer at the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority. “Capacity on the trains is getting full, and ridership is at record-high levels.”
The extra train to Norfolk will be the third round trip to the area, according to the newspaper. It will depart Norfolk at 1 p.m. and arrive in Washington in a little over 4.5 hours. A new southbound train will depart Washington at 12:05 p.m.
Amtrak already runs one morning trip from Roanoke to D.C. and an evening return trip. Starting Monday, a new train will leave Washington for Roanoke at 8:05 a.m., and a Washington-bound train will leave Roanoke at 4:30 p.m., arriving shortly before 9:30 p.m.
Amtrak, which expanded service to Richmond last year, said the additions will give riders more options to travel in Virginia and boost connections to the Northeast.
Virginia is among 17 states that have state-sponsored Amtrak service, the Post reported.