If you're having a tough time facing a new work week, take a few minutes to watch this short New York Times video about the Timeless Torches, a dance group featuring more "experienced" performers that's become a crowd favorite at WNBA New York Liberty games.  Just watching them will make you want to get up and get moving.

Alicia Hart can tell you more about the brain than you may ever care to know. For the past six years, she has traveled from the frontal lobe around and back again, learning how information is processed, where sequencing and problem-solving occur, and how fear originates, all in an effort to see the world through the eyes of her seven-year-old autistic son, Ewan. The maternal instincts that guided through her older daughter’s formative years – the ability to anticipate fear, for example – were useless when it came to Ewan.

Six justices of the state Supreme Court will hear argument this morning in a case that just might determine their own judicial destinies, considering in Faires v. State Board of Elections whether a new law subjecting them to an up-or-down approval vote at the end of their eight-year terms – as opposed to a contested election against a challenger – satisfies the constitutional mandate that justices in North Carolina be “elected.”

Three state residents and several gay, lesbian and transgender advocacy organizations filed a federal lawsuit early yesterday morning challenging the constitutionalityof North Carolina House Bill 2, the hastily-enacted law that not only targets transgender individuals by limiting their use of public restrooms to those corresponding to their birth sex but also preempts all local nondiscrimination ordinances.

The city of Wilson prides itself on being North Carolina’s first gigabit city, offering businesses and residents broadband services with speeds 100 times faster than what’s offered elsewhere in the state.

Conservative lawmakers in Raleigh have sounded the alarms in recent weeks over a Charlotte city ordinance extending discrimination protections to transgender individuals, including their rights to use restrooms that correspond with their gender identity — claiming a need to protect children from sexual predators.

Three separate challenges to North Carolina’s 2011 redistricting plans are pending in state and federal courts here, and each is on a certain path to the U.S. Supreme Court. Whether they’ll get there in time for any meaningful change to occur ahead of the November elections is less clear though.

 Conservatives rolled out the welcome mat for business when they took control of state government, making clear that unleashing companies from regulatory burdens ranked at the top of their agenda. “The reason I’m running for governor is to represent business,” then Charlotte mayor and longtime Duke Energy employee Pat McCrory told a group from the Council of Independent Business Owners during a 2012 campaign stop in downtown Asheville.

The party of less government rolled into Raleigh after the 2010 elections champing at the bit, eager to fulfill an agenda long delayed. “Regulations kill jobs” became the rallying cry, but as it turned out, that cry only went so far. When it came to voting booths, bedrooms, doctor’s offices and execution chambers, the self-styled opponents of intrusive government injected themselves in ways not seen before in state government.

Conservative justices hold a 4-3 majority on the ostensibly nonpartisan state Supreme Court and, as party operatives understand well, maintaining that edge has been critical to ensuring Republican control elsewhere throughout the state. “Lose the courts, lose the war.” Political consultant John Davis labeled this “Rule Number Five” in his 2013 report, “How the North Carolina Republican Party Can Maintain Political Power for 114 Years.”

State and federal regulators announced a string of court victories and settlements involving predatory for-profit colleges in recent weeks, and while at first glance the numbers are big and the recognition of widespread deception precedential, the impact on student borrowers laden with loan debt might not be so direct.

Five years ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, rising Democratic star and Newark mayor Cory Booker and aspiring presidential contender and New Jersey governor Chris Christie appeared together on the Oprah Winfrey show for a surprise announcement: “We’re setting up a $100 million challenge grant so that Mayor Booker and Governor Christie can have the flexibility they need to turn Newark into a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation,” Zuckerberg told viewers.

Secret and swift. That’s what executions in North Carolina would become under a bill headed to the governor’s desk for signature. Despite recent examples of botched prosecutions here that sent innocent men to death row – Henry McCollum comes to mind – and botched executions elsewhere in the country, state lawmakers this morning adopted H774, which eliminates obstacles that have kept the state from carrying out the death penalty since 2006.

State lawmakers and governors past and present squared off at the Supreme Court yesterday over who’s empowered to make commission appointments – particularly, in this instance, to the recently created Coal Ash Commission, Oil & Gas Commission and Mining Commission. The dispute between the branches of government came to a head last fall after legislators created the commissions and authorized the House speaker and Senate president to appoint most of the members on each.

Just as the U.S. Supreme Court wraps up its term with decisions in several high-profile cases expected in late June, state and federal courts here will be gearing up for what promises to be a long hot summer for voting rights – with more to follow. Several constitutional challenges to the sweeping voting law changes enacted in 2013 head to trial starting in July and the state Supreme Court rehears the redistricting case in August.

The 1983 rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie rocked the small North Carolina town of Red Springs and led quickly to the arrest of two area men – Henry McCollum and Leon Brown. From there the two brothers, whose IQs once measured in the 50s, withstood a trial and then four years later, retrials. They spent thirty-one years behind bars — McCollum, on death row — while attorneys pursued allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and pushed for renewed examination of evidence.
 

The federal courts in eastern North Carolina have been operating under a state of judicial emergency for years now, though you wouldn’t know it given the lack of a sense of urgency exhibited by the state’s United States senators. Down a judge since December 2005, the courts in this largely rural part of the state have managed one of the heavier district caseloads in the country — relying in large part on help from three senior judges: James C. Fox, age 86; W. Earl Britt, age 83; and Malcolm Howard, age 75.

State Supreme Court justices refused to let a surprise snowstorm force yet another rescheduling of arguments in the private school voucher case, opening the courtroom on time Tuesday morning to a less-than-full gallery. Determined to resolve challenges to the state’s recently enacted “Opportunity Scholarship Program” long before the next school year begins, the high court took the case directly in October to review Superior Court Judge Robert H. Hobgood’s August decision declaring the program unconstitutional and fast-tracked it for argument this month.

Michael Hendrix had a contract to sell eight of his 24 acres of land at Old Hollow and Germanton Roads in Winston-Salem for morethan a million dollars in early 1998. But because the state Department of Transportation had identified that land as lying in the path of a proposed beltway project running east to west just north of the city, the deal died.

Can a state bar a judge from personally soliciting campaign contributions from individuals and organizations? Or does such a ban violate the First Amendment by impinging on the judge’s freedom of speech?