News on Alabama

Colin Daymude was out of work last year after his business failed and eagerly filed his taxes in mid-January, figuring he'd get his refund sooner. He was wrong. It took the 44-year-old entrepreneur more than six months to get his $1,300 check — money that he needed to pay living expenses while he worked a few side gigs. Tax day — April 15 — has long since come and gone, but sharp budget cuts and ...

Tomato plants have been removed from stores in half a dozen states as a destructive and infectious plant disease makes its earliest and most widespread appearance ever in the eastern United States. Late blight — the same disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s — occurs sporadically in the Northeast, but this year's outbreak is more severe for two reasons: infected plants have been widely distributed by big-box retail stores and rainy weather ...

The nation's largest utility can dump millions of tons of coal ash from a Tennessee spill into an Alabama landfill, federal regulators said Thursday, despite criticism that the plan is unfair to one of Alabama's poorest counties. The Environmental Protection Agency said it would let the Tennessee Valley Authority ship dredged material about 300 miles from the site of a huge retention pond failure in eastern Tennessee to the Arrowhead ...

The tally of newly laid-off workers filing for unemployment insurance dropped last week, the government said Thursday, a sign job cuts are easing. The Labor Department said initial jobless benefit claims fell by 16,000 to a seasonally adjusted 614,000. That nearly matches analysts' estimates, according to Thomson Reuters. Jobless claims are slowly declining from a peak reached in early April. The four-week average of claims, which smooths out fluctuations, dropped to 615,250, the lowest in ...