Charlottesville, VA — Mississippi State advanced to the winners’ bracket in the NCAA Baseball Charlottesville regional on a walk-off three-run home run by Dakota Jordan on Friday night to defeat third-seeded St. John’s 5-2 in ten innings. “What a great college baseball game and tip your hat to St. John’s,” Bulldogs coach Chris Lemonis said after the game.  “That game could have gone anyway.  Their guy pitched a heck of a game and so did ours.  It just came down a big hit at the end.  A lot of fun for opening night of a regional.” Facing Red Storm reliever Louis Marino, Jord ..read more

St. John’s was not completely out of its mind walking David Mershon in the 10th inning Friday night with two outs, the winning run at third base and Dakota Jordan, Mississippi State’s best all-around hitter, coming up next. The sophomore right fielder entered the game with just one hit in his last 22 at-bats, and he looked all out of sorts against Red Storm starter Xavier Kolhosser, sitting on an 0-for-4 showing with three strikeouts as he stepped to the plate against Louis Marinaro. But after falling behind 0-2 in the count, Jordan took two balls, then lifted a high fly ball to deep right fie ..read more

GREENVILLE — A former Mississippi educator was sentenced Thursday to nearly 200 years in prison for multiple counts of sexual exploitation of a child, federal prosecutors said. Chief U.S. District Judge Debra M. Brown sentenced Toshemie Wilson, 48, of Okolona, who worked in the Amory School District, to 192 years behind bars and ordered him to pay more than $123,000 in restitution to his victims as well as a $5,000 trafficking assessment, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Mississippi said in a news release. Jurors in Greenville found Wilson guilty in December of eight cou ..read more

Froma Harrop At least 18 states don’t allow people to go about their streets wearing pointed Ku Klux Klan hoods. The white costumes serve the double purpose of racial intimidation and hiding the identities of the creeps inside them. Most of those anti-masking laws were passed early last century in response to Klan violence. Today’s masking controversies attach to a very different issue, but the motives bear some similarities. Many of the pro-Palestinian campus demonstrators are pairing face masks with keffiyehs, a symbol of intifada. When the costumes reveal just a slice of face, the wearers l ..read more

NEW YORK — A nurse was fired by a New York City hospital after she referred to Israel’s war in Gaza as a “genocide” during a speech accepting an award. Labor and delivery nurse Hesen Jabr, who is Palestinian American, was being honored by NYU Langone Health for her compassion in caring for mothers who had lost babies when she drew a link between her work and the suffering of mothers in Gaza. “It pains me to see the women from my country going through unimaginable losses themselves during the current genocide in Gaza,” Jabr said, according to a video of the May 7 speech that she posted on socia ..read more

WASHINGTON — Chief Justice John Roberts on Thursday declined an invitation to meet with Democratic senators to talk about Supreme Court ethics and the controversy over flags that flew outside homes owned by Justice Samuel Alito. Roberts’ response came in a letter to the senators a day after Alito separately wrote them and House members to reject their demands that he recuse himself from major Supreme Court cases involving former President Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 rioters because of the flags, which are like those carried by rioters at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Senate Judiciar ..read more

Jason White was able to accomplish two out of three of his major priorities during his first year as Mississippi’s speaker of the House. The state’s funding formula for public schools was revamped, and some brakes were put on the rapidly rising cost of the retirement system for public employees. The lone miss came on Medicaid expansion. Two out of three, though, is a good batting average in the Legislature. Recently White was discussing what he expects to be his top priorities in 2025. He plans to take another stab at Medicaid expansion plus revive the push, which took a rest this year, to fur ..read more

It’s been almost six years since Dorothy McClung Lewis stood on the recently-completed stage at the Terry Brown Amphitheater and belted out a few lines of a song. At the time, she joked about being the first performer at the theater. What she could not have known then is that she was not only the first, but the only performer to take the stage. At the recently-completed legislative session, the state appropriated an additional $1 million for the project, the first funding the project has received since a $500,000 appropriation in 2019. That funding, while welcomed, won’t be enough to finish th ..read more

WASHINGTON — Hopes for interest rate cuts this year by the Federal Reserve are steadily fading, with a stream of recent remarks by Fed officials underscoring their intention to keep borrowing costs high as long as needed to curb persistently elevated inflation. A key reason for the delay in rate cuts is that the inflation pressures that are bedeviling the economy are being driven largely by lingering forces from the pandemic — for items ranging from apartment rents to auto insurance to hospital prices. Though Fed officials say they expect inflation in those areas to eventually cool, they’ve si ..read more

JACKSON —- Six local high school baseball players were named in the Mississippi Association of Coaches 2024 All-State baseball teams this week with selections coming from Starkville, New Hope, and West Point. The team is part of the association’s annual honors for the best of the best in Mississippi high school baseball.  Jonas Coleman from Starkville and Caiden Chain and Landon Moore from New Hope were named to the 7A and 5A first teams, respectively. Meanwhile, Kieran Coleman from Starkville, Colin Perrigin from New Hope and Tyrese Johnson from West Point were named to the 7A and 5A sec ..read more