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      Another North Carolina House Collapses Amid Hurricane Ernesto’s Waves

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      In Rodanthe, N.C., seven homes have been lost to the ocean in the last four years, as rising sea levels erode shorelines and put more buildings at risk. In the community of Rodanthe on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, residents witnessed on Friday an event that was not new and is unfortunately becoming more frequent: A house on the picturesque shoreline collapsed into the ocean.Weather experts said that crashing waves produced by Hurricane Ernesto hundreds of miles away, combined with especially high tides, appeared to be the cause, though local officials also said that the house was at risk of collapsing before the storm. For those on the Outer Banks, the destruction was one more stark reminder of the larger force at play — climate change, which is making storms more intense and sea levels higher, accelerating the erosion of beach fronts.Rodanthe, home to about 200 people, has lost seven homes to the ocean in the past four years. The house that was destroyed on Friday was unoccupied at the time of the collapse. There have been no reports of injuries from any of the seven collapses, according to the National Park Service. Officials warned that many more homes are at risk for damage or collapse in the coming days as Hurricane Ernesto pummels the East Coast from afar, even as it follows a path that is not expected to hit the mainland United States. Some other homes near Rodanthe have already appeared to sustain damage. Forecasters predict that the storm could bring dangerous rip currents and a high surf along the East Coast through the weekend. The risks could persist in the Outer Banks through early next week, they said. In North Carolina, climate change has caused the sea level to rise by about half a foot since 2000, and the level could rise by about another foot by 2050, said William Sweet, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inmate Captured in North Carolina After Escape

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      Law enforcement officers captured Ramone Alston, who had been serving a life sentence for murder, at a hotel. He was moved to a high-security prison unit and will face new charges.Authorities in North Carolina on Friday captured a man convicted of murder, whose escape from custody three days earlier had prompted an extensive search, according to the state’s Department of Adult Correction.The man, Ramone Alston, fled from a prison vehicle on Tuesday morning while being transported to a medical appointment at the U.N.C. Hospitals Hillsborough Campus.He was caught at a hotel in the city of Kannapolis just before 2 a.m. local time, in an operation that included local law enforcement officers and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Adult Correction said in a statement on Friday. Nobody was injured during the operation, it added.Mr. Alston, 30, who is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, will face charges of felony escape from prison, the statement said, and will be taken to a high-security unit in the state prison system to serve out that sentence while waiting to face the new charges in court. A woman, Jacobia Crisp, whom the release described as an acquaintance of Mr. Alston, was charged with felony aiding and abetting a fugitive.Authorities will investigate Mr. Alston’s movements while on the run, including whether he committed other crimes and if he had any other accomplices, the department said. Mr. Alston escaped early Tuesday when officers opened the door of the vehicle at the medical facility. Mr. Alston, who had managed to free himself from his leg restraints, ran out of the vehicle while wearing handcuffs and fled into the woods, state officials said.More than 300 law enforcement personnel from 19 agencies joined a search for him, scouring 1,335 acres.The police who had accompanied Mr. Alston were carrying weapons but did not fire at him because “it all happened so quickly,” a spokesman for the department said.Mr. Alston was convicted of first-degree murder in 2018 for his involvement in a shooting that led to the death of a 1-year-old girl on Christmas Day in 2015, according to court documents. Lawyers for Mr. Alston said he was not the person who had fired the shot that resulted in the girl’s death.Mr. Alston had been serving his sentence at Bertie Correctional Institution in Windsor, N.C., which is more than 100 miles east of the Hillsborough medical campus. More

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      Endangered Wild Stallion Is Euthanized After Being Struck by Vehicle

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      The horse, a 10-year-old stallion named Bullwinkle, was one of only 200 Banker horses, a breed on the Outer Banks in North Carolina that descended from horses brought over by Spanish explorers.A critically endangered wild horse was euthanized on Saturday after it was struck by an off-road vehicle on a beach on the Outer Banks in North Carolina and sustained traumatic injuries, officials said on Monday.The horse, a 10-year-old stallion named Bullwinkle, was a Banker horse, a breed that has lived on the Outer Banks, a long, skinny barrier island, since the 1500s.Only about 200 Banker horses remain in the wild, said Meg Puckett, the director of herd management at the Corolla Wild Horse Fund, a nonprofit organization that has managed and protected the herd and its habitat in Corolla, a village on the northern end of the Outer Banks, since 1989. Bullwinkle’s herd numbered about 100.“He was in the prime of his life, and went from being a symbol of what it means to be wild and free to a tragic example of how irresponsible, reckless human behavior can cause pain, suffering and irreparable damage to the herd in an instant,” the organization said on Facebook.The Currituck County Sheriff’s Office arrested Porter Williamson, 57, of Chesapeake, Va., who was released on a $10,000 bond, the agency said in a post on its Facebook page. Mr. Williamson was charged with resisting a public officer. He had originally fled the scene but later returned when deputies were towing the vehicle, which was registered to him, the agency said. Upon being noticed, Mr. Williamson took off again, but deputies chased him on foot and caught him.Rhonda Williamson was also charged with resisting a public officer and was released on a $5,000 bond, the agency said. Her relation to Mr. Williamson was not immediately clear.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris’s VP list: Gretchen Whitmer and Roy Cooper say they’re not in running

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      Two lawmakers seen as strong contenders in the race to become Kamala Harris’s running mate have announced that they are not in the running. On Monday, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and North Carolina governor Roy Cooper both said that while they support the vice-president, they will be staying in their posts in their respective states.“This just wasn’t the right time for North Carolina and for me to potentially be on a national ticket,” Cooper said in a statement posted to Twitter/X on Monday. “As I’ve said from the beginning, she has an outstanding list of people from which to choose, and we’ll all work to make sure she wins.”In an interview with CBS, Whitmer said that she has not been vetted by Harris’s office and expects Harris’s to announce her pick within the week, which would confirm the Democratic ticket at least two weeks before the Democratic national convention begins on 19 August in Chicago.“I have communicated with everyone, including the people of Michigan, that I’m going to stay as governor until the end of my term at the end of 2026,” Whitmer said.Others rumored to be potential running mates are all white men who govern in swing states that can decide the 2024 election. They include: Kentucky governor Andy Beshear; Minnesota governor Tim Walz; Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro; and Mark Kelly, a US Senator in Arizona.While all four have been asked about their willingness to serve as Harris’s running mate if tapped, all have signaled that they would step up if asked but none have hinted at their engagements with her campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is not about me. But I’ve always, always said when I’ve had the chance to serve, I think that’s very important to do,” Kelly told reporters on 25 July.“Being mentioned is certainly an honor … I trust Vice-President Harris’s judgement, she’ll make the best choice she’s going to,” Walz told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. “But one way or another, she’s going to win in November and that’s gonna benefit everyone … Either way it’s gonna be a win.”During a campaign stop for Harris in Pittsburgh, Shapiro said: “It’s a decision she needs to make who she wants to govern with, who she wants to campaign with, and who can be there to serve alongside her.”And Beshear, who has also been stumping for Harris in red and purple jurisdictions, told the Des Moines Register newspaper: “I’m honored to be considered and, regardless of what happens, I’m going to work every day between now and Election Day to make sure that Kamala Harris is the next president of the United States.” More

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      Biden comes out swinging in first speech after presidential debate with Trump

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      In what several supporters described as a “night and day” difference from his performance in last night’s debate, President Joe Biden on Friday vowed to keep fighting against what he framed as an existential threat to America.In his first campaign stop following the debate, Biden showed off a louder and more dynamic voice at the North Carolina state fairgrounds in Raleigh.“I know what millions of Americans know,” Biden said. “When you get knocked down, you get back up.”During the 15-minute speech in a sweltering building that saw at least one person faint, Biden ran through a list of issues from high-speed internet to border security, but spent a good deal of his time denouncing Donald Trump’s honesty and integrity.“I don’t walk as easily as I used to, I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to, I don’t debate as well as I used to,” Biden said, addressing the widespread criticism of his Thursday performance. “But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth.”Repeating a line from the debate, he said of Trump, his rival for the White House, “I spent 90 minutes on a stage debating a guy who has the morals of an alley cat.” Biden added: “I think he [Trump] set a new record for the number of lies told at a single debate.”Although there was enough empty room in some of the bleachers for people to move around easily, the crowd shouted an encouraging: “Yes, you can!” when Biden began to talk about how well he could do the job of president in what would be his mid-80s.If some in the crowd came to the rally holding their breath, many seemed relieved to see more energy from the Democratic president.“Night and day,” said Brenda Pollard, a delegate to the Democratic national convention from Durham, North Carolina. “I mean, to me, today was who he is. And there it is, just like I just said, he’s energized by the people. Last night he didn’t have that. That’s no excuse, but I think it played a factor in it.”Pollard was one of the Biden supporters who met the president on the tarmac when his plane landed at Raleigh-Durham international airport at about 2am Friday.Pollard said she would not consider nominating any other candidate but Biden at the convention and had not heard any “serious” talk about doing so, despite many voters, pundits and operatives suggesting that was the Democrats’ only way forward.Biden played to the North Carolina crowd after he was introduced by the state’s popular and outgoing Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, who at one point was himself mentioned as a possible 2024 presidential candidate.“I want you to know, I’m not promising not to take Roy away from North Carolina,” Biden said.One of the hallmarks of Cooper’s time in office has been his negotiation with the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to expand Medicaid coverage last year. Margaret Kimber, a grandmother from Wendell, North Carolina, gave Biden much credit for the expansion as well.“It helps with the insurance, the supplements are fantastic,” she said while leaning against her walker after the rally. “And without them, whew!”Pollard also said that Biden’s support of social security and Medicare were some of the most important issues for her.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The loans are for the next generation. That’s our future coming in,” she said. “But we’re seniors and we’ve invested in this country and we have paid in. And now we just want that. It’s not an entitlement. We paid for it. It’s ours. And President Trump wants to take it.”Kimber said that the issues that matter most to the young people she knows are school safety and gun violence. She said she thought Trump’s focus on immigration restrictions was just an appeal to fear.“Because people were pissed off that the borders were open, Trump is using that as a tool to scare the people of the United States, and he’s using scare tactics to make people think that if we don’t close the borders we’re going to be overrun,” Kimber said. “And we’re going to be overrun with guns and violence. And we already have guns and violence.”Wesley Boykin, who ran as a Democrat for the state legislature in 2022 in rural Duplin county, said that education, safety and healthcare were the issues that drew him most to Biden. Boykin said that as a Black man, he felt fear when Trump was president and no longer has the same fear during the Biden administration.Boykin also said the Raleigh speech was a welcome departure from what he called a “lackluster” performance by the president on Thursday, especially the first seven minutes.“I concluded nine o’clock is not the appropriate time,” he said. “After he basically woke up – after that seven minutes – he was more like he was today. And I realized he didn’t get a great deal of sleep.”Boykin and others said that economic issues were not as important to them in this campaign as issues of character. Biden hit Trump on both fronts, reusing his “morals of an alley cat” line and calling his challenger “Donald ‘Herbert Hoover’ Trump”, after the Republican president who was in office at the onset of the Great Depression.Tina Bruner, a Democratic precinct chair in Raleigh and mother of three school-age children, said Biden’s handling of the pandemic demonstrated both his character and what she said was his superior economic policy.“The way Trump handled the pandemic was terrifying, and I immediately felt like we’re going to make it out of this whenever Joe took over. The vaccine rollout happened and the way school lunches were funded for everyone. I don’t think I could have counted on schoolchildren to be fed by Trump.”“So, yes, my life definitely felt safer, my family felt safer because of Joe Biden,” she said. More

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      Some States Say They Can’t Afford Ozempic and Other Weight Loss Drugs

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      Public employees in West Virginia who took the drugs lost weight and were healthier, and some are despondent that the state is canceling a program to help pay for them.Joanna Bailey, a family physician and obesity specialist, doesn’t want to tell her patients that they can’t take Wegovy, but she has gotten used to it.Around a quarter of the people she sees in her small clinic in Wyoming County would benefit from the weight-loss medications known as GLP-1s, which also include Ozempic, Zepbound and Mounjaro, she says. The drugs have helped some of them lose 15 to 20 percent of their weight. But most people in the area she serves don’t have insurance that covers the cost, and virtually no one can afford sticker prices of $1,000 to $1,400 a month.“Even my richest patients can’t afford it,” Dr. Bailey said. She then mentioned something that many doctors in West Virginia — among the poorest states in the country, with the highest prevalence of obesity, at 41 percent — say: “We’ve separated between the haves and the have-nots.”Such disparities sharpened in March when West Virginia’s Public Employees Insurance Agency, which pays most of the cost of prescription drugs for more than 75,000 teachers, municipal workers and other public employees and their families, canceled a pilot program to cover weight-loss drugs.Some private insurers help pay for medications to treat obesity, but most Medicaid programs do so only to manage diabetes, and Medicare covers Wegovy and Zepbound only when they are prescribed for heart problems.Over the past year, states have been trying, amid rising demand, to determine how far to extend coverage for public employees. Connecticut is on track to spend more than $35 million this year through a limited weight-loss coverage initiative. In January, North Carolina announced that it would stop paying for weight-loss medications after forking out $100 million for them in 2023 — 10 percent of its spending on prescription drugs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      North Carolina Republican dismisses 2018 state election fraud as ‘fairly minor’

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      A North Carolina Republican running to be the state’s attorney general dismissed a significant election fraud incident in 2018 that resulted in a new election as “some fairly minor illegal ballot harvesting”.Dan Bishop, a congressman whose district is based outside of Charlotte, made the comments in an 1 April episode of the Reclaiming America podcast.In 2018, Mark Harris, a Republican, won the race to represent North Carolina’s ninth congressional district. But shortly after the election, the North Carolina state board of elections voted to overturn a congressional election and call a new one after an investigation revealed that a Harris operative was illegally collecting absentee ballots from voters. Harris decided not to run again and Bishop ultimately won the seat.The operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, allegedly instructed those working for him to falsely sign as witnesses for voters though they had not witnessed the voter filling out the ballot and making it seem like the voter mailed back the ballot themselves when they had not. People working for Dowless said they collected hundreds of mail-in ballots and in some cases were directed to fill in votes for local candidates. In North Carolina, a voter must get two witnesses or a notary to sign an absentee ballot envelope and it is illegal for anyone other than the voter, a close relative, or a legal guardian to return the ballot.Dowless was charged with several felonies for the conduct in the 2016 and 2018 elections. He died in 2022, before the case went to trial. Several others involved in the scheme pleaded guilty to misdemeanors.Bishop said in the interview that the board of elections “under Democrat control” decided to overturn the election. While Democrats did have a 3-2 majority on the board at the time, the vote for a new election was unanimous. Mark Harris, the Republican candidate who won, also called for a new election, and the state Republican party supported Harris’s decision not to run again. Harris, who won a Republican primary for Congress earlier this year, has since walked back his position, falsely accusing Democrats of stealing the election from him.A Bishop spokesperson did not return a request for comment.The type of fraud that took place in North Carolina – which is extremely rare – is exactly the type of activity that Republicans across the country have tried to crack down on, passing laws that make it harder for third parties and non-family members to return absentee ballots on a voter’s behalf.Bishop voted against certifying the 2020 election. During the same 1 April interview, he acknowledged the immense power he would have over election issues were he elected attorney general this fall. “I will say that I believe the number one impact that an attorney general can have is in the area of election integrity, by seeing to it that the kind of mischief that has gone on in litigation concerning elections is being responded to appropriately,” he said. More

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      Wilmington: how a once-red district is a window on North Carolina politics

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      The area around Wilmington, North Carolina, was once rock-ribbed Republican red. No longer. It’s contested territory in what may be the most contested state in the country this year.Donald Trump had planned a rally in Wilmington earlier this month but was rained out at the last moment. Trump promised to return with a bigger and better rally later. Joe Biden visited Wilmington on Thursday, after a detour to Charlotte to meet with the families of four law enforcement officers killed on Monday while serving an arrest warrant. It was his second visit to North Carolina this year and is unlikely to be his last.“I want to get Joe Biden to Wilmington,” the state senator Natalie Murdock of Durham said last week, before Biden announced the trip. Murdock is helping coordinate the Biden-Harris campaign in North Carolina. She noted that Biden won New Hanover county in 2020 after Hillary Clinton lost it four years earlier. “We’re going to have a field office out there,” she added, explaining plans for “boots on the ground” to get out the vote.The outsized political attention on Wilmington reflects a granular effort to win voters in the persuadable places, the swing districts in swing states. Trump won North Carolina in 2020 by a margin of 1.3%, his narrowest state victory. The most recent Emerson College poll shows Biden running behind Trump by five points, with 10% undecided.But North Carolina’s political map is a pointillist portrait of post-pandemic population change, with cities such as Charlotte, Durham and Wilmington booming from domestic migration while other communities bleed residents to places with economic vibrancy. Two-thirds of North Carolina’s population growth between 2010 and 2020 was non-white. About 400,000 people have moved to North Carolina since 2020. Trump’s margin in 2020 was less than 75,000 votes.Growth is the story of Wilmington. The beach town vacation spot has expanded beyond Saturday farmers’ markets and upscale restaurants on the river for tourists, attracting pharmaceutical research, banking and logistics today.“I moved to Wilmington 22 years ago. And when I moved here, I didn’t even realize you were allowed to live here all year,” said David Hill, a pediatrician and the Democratic nominee for the North Carolina state senate. “I can say that if you drive down the street, you will see acres and acres of what was forest when we moved here just five years ago, that is now in part sand and in part foundations and newly built homes.”Many census tracts around Wilmington in Pender, Brunswick and New Hanover counties doubled in population between 2010 and 2020. During the pandemic, growth accelerated, with both Pender and Brunswick county’s population increasing by 15% since 2020.The seventh district is held by Michael Lee, a real estate attorney and a relative moderate in the Republican-led senate. The district, covering most of New Hanover county, has been targeted by national campaigners as one of North Carolina’s few legislative seats that can be flipped, despite a ruthless redistricting that moved much of downtown Wilmington into a neighboring district last year.“One of those precincts was the highest-turnout precinct for Black voters, and it has now been put into deep-red Brunswick county,” Murdock said. “It is one of those races that was still going to be competitive, but they did not do us any favors with that map. I mean, it is one of the most gerrymandered of this cycle.”Republicans have a 30 to 20 advantage over Democrats in the state senate and a 72 to 48 advantage in the state house; precisely the 60% margin needed in each chamber to override a veto by North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. Cooper has blocked legislation restricting abortion access and expanding gun rights, but Republican lawmakers have overridden dozens of vetoes, from bills banning transgender hormone therapy for minors to changes in election laws.Cooper is term-limited and will be out of office in January. Republicans cannot afford to lose one seat in either chamber if they also lose the governor’s race, and the fate of the gubernatorial race is an open question given North Carolina’s history of ticket splitting and the nomination of the lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, who has a record of extreme, racist and homophobic comments and faces unpleasant revelations about his financial and business history.National Democratic campaigners are hoping that a backlash against restrictive abortion laws will fuel turnout statewide. But local contenders in closely divided districts have largely avoided the culture war rancor and are focusing on community concerns.Lee, for example, published a column this week taking issue with the New Hanover school system’s $20m shortfall, describing it as evidence of poor financial decisions made with short-term pandemic funding. Though the population around Wilmington has been exploding, public school enrollment has not: the local system has fewer students now than before the pandemic.Lee chairs the senate’s education committee, and has been leading the state senate’s efforts to expand North Carolina’s private school voucher program. The committee approved a bill on Wednesday to add $248m to the program next school year, on top of the $191m the program received this year. Applications for the vouchers, worth up to $7,468, outstripped funding after a surge of interest. (Lee did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.)Newcomers chasing Wilmington’s burgeoning film industry or simply looking for a better climate while working from home are wrestling with crowded roads, rising housing costs, access to healthcare and the other downsides of rapid growth, Hill said. Their interests do not easily map on to a highly partisan political framework.“Characterizing North Carolina in the same sentence as some of the more extremist states in the south fails to give the population of the state credit for really being quite centrist,” Hill said. “I think when you look at what our rightwing extremist supermajority has done, it would be easy to lump our state and with some states that are more extremist, but I don’t feel – and I think we have good evidence to tell us – that they don’t really represent the state as a whole.” More