BROOKSIDE, Ala. — The town of Brookside has agreed to a proposed $1.5 million class-action settlement that would compensate thousands of drivers and impose sweeping reforms after years of allegations that the town ran a “policing-for-profit” scheme built on aggressive ticketing and towing. The settlement, filed in federal court in the Northern District of Alabama…

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The city of Birmingham is investing $100,000 in its growing network of urban farms through a new grant program administered by Jones Valley Teaching Farm, a nonprofit that has helped reshape the city’s food landscape over the past two decades. Funded with federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars, the Urban Farmer Grant…

MONTGOMERY, Ala — Alabama’s new Child Predator Death Penalty Act may play well on the campaign trail, but its legal and practical problems show it was not thought through. The law, passed as HB 41/SB 17, makes first-degree rape, first-degree sodomy and sexual torture capital offenses when the victim is under 12, allowing prosecutors to…

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The election of a new Episcopal bishop in Alabama is putting a spotlight on a quieter, more progressive strain of Christianity in a state where white evangelical and MAGA-inflected politics often define religion in the public square. The Very Rev. Richard T. Lawson III, dean of St. John’s Cathedral in Denver, Colorado,…

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The U.S. Supreme Court is set to decide whether to hear Alabama’s appeal of lower court rulings that struck down the state’s broad bans on panhandling as violations of the First Amendment. The justices have scheduled the case, Taylor v. Singleton, for discussion at their private conference on Feb. 20, 2026. Alabama,…