4 dead after weekend Alabama shooting | The Excerpt

On Monday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: A search is underway for the gunmen involved in Saturday's Birmingham shooting. USA TODAY Breaking News and Education Reporter Zach Schermele talks about how shootings have upended schools nationwide. A dormant nuclear power plant may soon be reactivated. USA TODAY National Correspondent Trevor Hughes discusses threats against election workers and how they're preparing for November. Numerous studies find bird migration is changing in response to warmer temperatures for some migrating birds.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Taylor Wilson:

Good morning, I'm Taylor Wilson. And today is Monday, September 23rd 2024. This is the Excerpt. Today, the latest from a weekend shooting in Alabama. Plus, how school superintendents are grappling with upended school life in the wake of shootings. And we discuss the threats facing election workers, and how they're dealing with them.

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At least four people were killed and more than a dozen injured after shooters fired into a crowd in Birmingham, Alabama Saturday night. An intensive search was underway yesterday for suspects in what police chief Scott Thurman called a hit.

He said, gunmen rolled up in a vehicle around 11:00 PM, got out, and fired into the crowd on the streets at the city's entertainment district, a popular area of shops, bars, and restaurants. He said the shooters then fled the scene, where more than 100 shell casings were found.

"The victims included the person who was targeted," he said, but added that he did not know the motive for the killing. Birmingham mayor, Randall Woodfin said a Glock switch had been used that converts semi-automatic handguns into automatic weapons.

The devices are banned by federal law. Legislators have pushed to codify the ban under State Law, but that effort fell short in the last State Legislative session.

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After a fatal high school shooting in Georgia earlier this month, districts around the country have been flooded with threats. I spoke with USA TODAY Breaking News and Education reporter, Zach Schermele, about how shootings upend US schools, even when there's no gunfire. Hello, Zach.

Zach Schermele:

Hey, Taylor. Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

Thanks for hopping on today. So, I want to just start by hearing about this New York superintendent you wrote about in this piece. Would you just tell us a little bit about him and, unfortunately, his history with gun violence in school?

Zach Schermele:

Yeah, so we spoke to Michael Bennett for this story. He's a superintendent in Greenville, New York, which is a pretty small community, about half an hour outside of Albany, which is the state capital there.

And he's one of many school administrators in this country who's actually been personally affected by gun violence in a really intimate way. In February of 2004, he was getting ready to teach a Social Studies class at a high school in another small New York town when he heard what he later described as booming sounds.

And at first, he thought they were construction noises, and went out to investigate with another assistant principal. And when they rounded a corner, they saw a student holding a shotgun. Long story short, the student pulled the trigger and lost their balance, and eventually shot Bennett in the right leg.

Thankfully, the student was restrained, and no one else was heard. He actually served many years in prison, and has since been released, and is a mental health advocate now.

But I bring Bennett up because he was one of many superintendents and principals in the US who were also scrambling, in the last couple of weeks, to contend with the ramifications of the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia earlier this month. And his case was particularly unique because he just marked the 20-year anniversary of his own school shooting.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah, Zach, as you mentioned, we saw this horrific shooting at a high school in Georgia earlier this month. What have we seen, really, nationwide in the weeks following that incident as it pertains to other threats, canceled classes, and some of the other ways this incident has affected schools around the country?

Zach Schermele:

Yeah, people like Bennett, superintendents, and principals, they've seen gun violence repeatedly disrupt the American education system, even in classrooms thousands of miles and multiple time zones away from shootings, like the one that happened in Georgia.

And in the days and weeks that followed the incident in Georgia, other schools experienced a rash of threats, which is a pretty recognizable pattern at this point in America.

In recent weeks, authorities arrested children, schools were closed, they were put on lockdown, and police presence was increased at a lot of campuses. But for some reason, and we're still trying to figure why this is, Taylor, but this incident seemed to disrupt learning in a pretty significant way.

Taylor Wilson:

And Zach, we have a tendency to highlight these high profile incidents of gun violence in schools, like this Georgia shooting earlier this month, but how common is this type of gun violence, how common are school shootings in general nationwide?

Zach Schermele:

Yeah. Everytown for Gun Safety, which is a group that advocates for gun violence prevention, says that it recorded 139 school shootings in the US in 2024, so that's so far this year. They say those incidents resulted in 42 deaths and 91 injuries nationally.

And then, an analysis from that same group found that, in the last school year there was the second-highest number of school shooting incidents since Everytown began tracking gun violence at schools more than a decade ago.

And Taylor, far from these shootings, like I said, schools feel the effects, assessing the credibility of threats, especially viral ones that spread online that often crop up when something like this happens. It's just becoming increasingly common and challenging, and it's a part of the daily lives of a lot of school leaders.

Taylor Wilson:

I'm curious, Zach, how technology and the proliferation of social media play into this conversation. Does technology help or hurt educators as they try to grapple with the real threat of gun violence at their schools?

Zach Schermele:

Yeah, it's really hard. Posts on TikTok and Instagram, for example, they landed several students across the country in custody in recent weeks. And then you have Twitter, now called X, which has different verification standards, I probably don't have to tell you that, for content that makes it harder for some parents to be able to deduce whether things that they see online are coming from official places, like school districts, or not.

And then the social media algorithms on that particular platform can incentivize the spread of inaccurate information at times. I talked to one superintendent in Virginia who told me, law enforcement officials in his town have spent days tirelessly running down leads, tracing the origins of that show up on social media, and then result in parents frantically calling the district, trying to figure out what's going on.

He ended up having to send a letter to parents to remind their kids that, for the same reasons that you can't yell fire or bomb in a movie theater, in today's world they simply can't post things that would even suggest an act of violence like a school shooting, because schools have to take those threats really seriously.

Taylor Wilson:

All right, Zach Schermele covers breaking news and education for USA TODAY. Thank you, Zach.

Zach Schermele:

Thanks, Taylor.

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Taylor Wilson:

A dormant nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania may soon be reactivated to help power some of the increasing energy needs of Microsoft. On Friday, Constellation Energy and Microsoft announced the signing of a 20-year power purchasing agreement where one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant would be brought back online to exclusively serve the energy needs of the tech giant's massive data centers that help support artificial intelligence.

Reviving the unit, one reactor at Three Mile Island, which was shut down in 2019, will require approval by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If granted, the power plant is expected to return to operation in 2028. Three Mile Island, located near Harrisburg, is best known as the site of the most serious nuclear accident in US history.

In 1979, a mechanical failure caused the partial meltdown of the facility's Unit 2 reactor, which has remained closed ever since. While the amount of radiation released during the accident was ultimately relatively minor, the incident was widely seen as causing public distrust of the nuclear power industry.

Three Mile Island was shuttered for economic reasons in 2019. Once brought back online, Constellation Energy said that it expected to generate more than 800 megawatts of electricity for Microsoft, as well as potentially add up to $16 billion to Pennsylvania's GDP, along with 3,400 direct and indirect jobs.

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From panic buttons to Kevlar vests, election workers' safety is getting serious this year as threats ramp up. I spoke with USA TODAY National Correspondent, Trevor Hughes, for more. Trevor, thanks for making some time today.

Trevor Hughes:

Glad to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

So, Trevor, what did you find at this election facility in this Denver suburb and the election official you spoke with there? How is he preparing for November? What did you take away from this visit?

Trevor Hughes:

Okay, this is actually where I live. And this is not a swing county. I do not live in a swing state, but these are election workers who are installing panic buttons, they are installing bulletproof glass, or have installed this, they've got remote cameras everywhere, and the Clerk and Recorder has started wearing a ballistic vest, a bulletproof vest during election season because of the threats they've been facing.

Taylor Wilson:

Wow. So, does this match, really, what we're seeing nationwide, Trevor, as it pertains to threats and violence against election officials?

Trevor Hughes:

Absolutely. The FBI has now arrested and prosecuted at least a dozen people, by my count, all across the country who have sent in bomb threats, who have threatened to murder election officials, who have said they are traitors and that traitors deserve to be hung.

The rhetoric that we have seen has been very violent. And this particular Clerk and Recorder is not alone in wearing ballistic armor. Other clerks and election workers around the country are renting cars, rental cars, so that they're not driving their own vehicles during election season.

They're taking different routes to work every day so that people can't follow them home. There is a real concern among election, workers who are, as a general rule, nonpartisan. There's a real concern about violence directed toward them.

Taylor Wilson:

So disturbing, Trevor. What do experts say about all this? How concerned are they?

Trevor Hughes:

Experts are very concerned. I've been covering elections for more than 20 years. And for a very long time, elections officials were really considered the neutral arbiters. They produce numbers, everyone agreed that the numbers said what they said, and whoever was the winner, was the winner.

What we've seen is that there's this increasing push to throw chaos to suggest that the numbers are wrong, that the counts are wrong, that there's been all kinds of bad actors who are manipulating vote totals.

And some of the people who are raising those concerns, who are making those allegations, which are, as a rule, entirely unfounded, many of those people are Americans. But we are seeing an increasing amount of nation-states who are interfering in our election.

The FBI has a whole task force on this. And so, there's a real concern that other nations, hostile nations, are trying to sow chaos and division within our country, cause people to question the results of the election, and then, where do you go from there?

Taylor Wilson:

Well, where do we go from here, Trevor? You mentioned that task force and some of these precautions that election offices are taking. Is it really down to the Justice Department's Election Threats Task Force to try to prevent some of this? How do they play into all this? And can you just explain, really, what that organization is?

Trevor Hughes:

The task force has been doing a number of different things, one of which has been prosecuting threats made against elections officials. But the FBI is also looking out for those nation-states that are sending phishing attacks that, are sending fake memes around, or amplifying memes that exist.

There's a big push among the Law Enforcement apparatus to really protect America from this. But every expert I've talked to said that the single best way to resolve these is to make sure that huge numbers of Americans vote, because the more people who vote, the less opportunity there is for a small mistake to be compounded or for any doubt to exist.

Taylor Wilson:

That's a smart point. Trevor Hughes is a national correspondent with USA TODAY. Thank you, Trevor.

Trevor Hughes:

You bet.

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Taylor Wilson:

For centuries, a number of bird species have completed long-distance migrations in tune with ancient spring rhythms, like trees budding out into leaves in various shades of green. But that's changing.

Spring arrives earlier than it used to, driven by warmer temperatures. That's according to Ellen Robertson, who co-authored a recent bird migration study while doing postdoctoral research at Oklahoma State University.

The study found a mismatch between earlier so-called spring green up, and the timing of migration for some long-distance travelers, leaving birds out of sync. For example, they might arrive in their spring nesting locations after the peak period for insects to emerge.

Robertson is one of many scientists working to figure out the mystery around migrating birds and their potential long-term survival, as climate change multiplies the threats they face. To do so, they're using a growing body of information that offers the most complete picture in history of when, where, and how birds migrate.

Recently published studies have tapped more than three decades of data from the nation's radar network, decades of satellite information, and remote sensing and citizen science projects. You can read more about that work with a link in today's show notes.

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Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your Pods. And if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.