THE FRIDAY ADVANCE: FREDLINES, TODAY’S READS, and STATE of the STATE
AUGUST 7, 2026. All About the Day.
FREDLINES
Eve Evans, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Potomac Local News
Fredericksburg Plans Quacktoberfest
By Uriah Kiser
08/07/2026
The City of Fredericksburg and Fredericksburg Main Street will host the first Quacktoberfest on Oct. 17, 2026, from 2 to 6 p.m., a free community festival featuring fall activities, vendors, carnival rides, live music, the rescheduled Rubber Ducky Derby and a Movie in the Park screening. The derby, postponed from the Fourth of July due to extreme heat, starts at 3 p.m., followed by a 25-minute episode of Darkwing Duck and a dusk showing of Hocus Pocus. Residents can still adopt ducks for the race online, though organizers say they’re selling quickly.
The Free Lance Star
The disAbility Resource Center celebrates 36 years of ADA (paywalled)
By Pilar Davis
08/06/2026
Fredericksburg’s disAbility Resource Center hosted a community celebration marking the 36th anniversary of the ADA and the Virginians with Disabilities Act, drawing a larger-than-expected crowd to watch a livestreamed state ceremony from Richmond. Gov. Spanberger was unable to attend due to scheduling conflicts, so Secretary of Health and Human Resources Marvin B. Figueroa and other state officials spoke, alongside a panel discussing personal experiences with disability. Local speakers, including center staff and consumers, reflected on progress made and work still ahead, and the event closed with cake and conversation.
Wounded Marine gets brand new home in Spotsylvania (paywalled)
By Pilar Davis
08/06/2026
Retired Marine Lance Corporal Duncan “Matty” Mathis and his family received a specially adapted home in Spotsylvania from Homes for Our Troops, an organization that builds custom homes for severely injured post-9/11 veterans, with more than 100 community members turning out for the key ceremony. Mathis lost his leg below the knee and suffered a brain injury after an 80-foot fall down a booby-trapped well in Afghanistan in 2013; the new home includes roughly 40 ADA-compliant adaptations such as wider doorways, roll-under sinks and a specially designed safe shower. Congressman Eugene Vindman and Homes for Our Troops president Tom Landwermeyer both spoke at the event, and Mathis is set to join the Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Department in November.
Child porn collections earns man 5 years in prison (paywalled)
By Keith Epps
08/06/2026
Kevin Christopher Jenkins, 52, of Spotsylvania was sentenced Tuesday to five years in prison after pleading guilty to reproducing child pornography and four counts of possessing child pornography, out of a 35-year sentence with the remainder suspended. The case began with a September tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, leading investigators to Jenkins’ home, where a November raid turned up more than 100 images and videos of child sexual abuse. Jenkins will register as a sex offender, serve five years of supervised probation, remain on good behavior for 20 years, and face restricted contact with minors along with mental health and substance abuse evaluations.
Fredericksburg Free Press
By Adele Uphaus and Joey LoMonaco
08/06/2026
Penzance’s 1500 Gateway data center project, twice recommended for denial by Fredericksburg’s Planning Commission, heads to a City Council public hearing tentatively set for Aug. 25, backed by a public engagement campaign of mailers, robocalls and organized public-comment supporters that Ward 3 Councilor Susanna Finn called unlike anything she has “a memory of ever happening before in the city.” The revised plan shrinks the project to one million square feet across two buildings (down from 2.4 million square feet in four buildings) but still requires rezoning from Planned Development-Medical to industrial and still includes an electrical substation that was central to the commission’s earlier objections, along with unresolved concerns over new transmission lines near Hugh Mercer Elementary. Penzance is offering nearly $40 million in community proffers and cites 108 permanent jobs, drawing vocal union support, while council members Matt Rowe and Finn remain opposed over the site’s location outside the city’s tech overlay district.
Teen-led nonprofit raising funds for three area projects
By Adelle Uphaus
08/06/2026
Helping Hands in Healthcare, an entirely teen-led nonprofit founded by Riverbend High School rising senior Cora Shields, is holding its second annual Casino Night fundraiser Sept. 12 at the Fawn Lake clubhouse to support three initiatives: comfort boxes for young patients (”Kits for Courage”), relaxing activity kits for Mary Washington Healthcare’s Snowden mental health hospital (”Project Resilience”), and hand-sewn flannel blankets for newborns statewide (”Project Woobie”). In its first year, the organization raised $2,500 to purchase and package comfort items for delivery to three rural hospitals as well as a mobile health clinic and a teen mental health facility. The group, run by a volunteer board of teens interested in healthcare careers, is also building a younger subcommittee so the organization can continue after its current leaders graduate and head to college.
Spanberger takes unprecedented step to intervene in $67B Dominion-NextEra merger
By Markus Schmidt, Virginia Mercury
08/07/2026
Gov. Abigail Spanberger announced Thursday she will seek intervenor status in the State Corporation Commission’s review of NextEra Energy’s proposed $67 billion acquisition of Dominion Energy, becoming the first Virginia governor to formally intervene in a case before the State Corporation Commission. The move gives her administration the ability to question both companies, review documents and argue for conditions related to customer electric bills, Virginia jobs and the state’s energy future, though final approval authority remains with the SCC. She said she’ll judge the deal on whether it lowers bills, protects Virginia jobs, and keeps the state moving toward clean energy, while two Republican legislators renewed calls for a special session to extend the review period instead. The merger would create the nation’s largest electric utility, serving roughly 10 million customers across Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina, with regulators expected to rule in about six months.
ADVANCE READS
Dewey Turner, Michael O’Keefe, Phil Huber
Morning Devotions
By Dewey Turner, ADVANCE ANSWER PERSON
Hey Dewey,
What are the 14 Stations of the Cross? I mean for regular people?
Been Meaning to Ask
Dear Been,
First, don’t let your totally understandable antipathy for those odious Christian nationalists wrecking what’s left of America cloud your vision. Most Christians are regular people, too, and if they find prayerful meditation over the Stations of the Cross helpful then I’m all for it. You don’t have to be a believer to appreciate the sacrifice—and the moments of kindness—in the Passion story, and to know that there can be solace and comfort—sometimes deep, centering solace and comfort—in ritual. And how can we not be empathetic when contemplating the stages of Jesus’, or anybody’s, final journey:
***
Arc of the Covenants
By Michael O’Keefe, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR
The United States Supreme Court in the 1948 landmark case Shelley v. Kraemer ruled that race-based restrictive covenants in real estate matters are unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause found in the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution. In a separate case later, the Supreme Court ruled that religion-based restrictive covenants also are unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.
But that didn’t stop the Commonwealth of Virginia from practicing institutional racism and religious bigotry by allowing recordation of residential subdivision plats with race-based and religion-based restrictive covenants. Such covenants expressly forbade occupancy by non-white and Jewish families in neighborhoods like the one where I grew up during the 1960s about three miles north of Mount Vernon along the George Washington Memorial Parkway.
***
Growing Up in America: Are We Giving Our Children a Fair Chance?
By Phil Huber, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
It would cost nearly $1.7 billion to expand access to subsidized childcare in Virginia and pay early childhood educators more, according to a new study. The new research comes as the commonwealth recently took steps to fund—and clear—the waitlist for one popular program. But experts and advocates say that the waitlist is only one indicator of demand for subsidized childcare. State officials recently presented data showing that the average cost of childcare for birth to kindergarten in Virginia costs more than a four-year degree at many of the state’s public colleges and universities.
***
What is it like to grow up in America today? It is like trying to build a life while the ground keeps shifting beneath your feet. Young Americans are expected to make adult decisions earlier than ever, yet too many of the systems that should help them are falling short. We speak endlessly about opportunity while too often making opportunity harder to reach.
If we truly want to understand what young Americans need, we should begin at the beginning.
STATE OF THE STATE
VaNews/VIRGINIA PUBLIC ACCESS PROJECT
Scrutiny of Dominion Energy megamerger intensifies as Virginia governor weighs in
By LIAM BOWMAN, Washington Post (Metered Paywall - 3 articles a month)
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger said her unprecedented move to intervene in a utility megamerger is needed because the current proposal contains inadequate protections for utility workers and ratepayers already wary of rising energy costs. Spanberger (D) said she is “deeply skeptical” of a plan to sell Virginia’s biggest power company, Dominion Energy, to Florida-based NextEra Energy for about $67 billion. She announced Thursday that she was formally requesting to be a party in the case before the State Corporation Commission (SCC), the regulatory body charged with reviewing the proposal.
Edgy Vanity Plates Test Limits of Free Speech As Virginia Seeks Supreme Court Review
By ADAM LIPTAK, New York Times (Metered Paywall - 1 to 2 articles a month)
The next great First Amendment battleground is just six inches high and is attached to about a million motor vehicles in Virginia alone. It is the vanity license plate, and courts are splintered over whether and how states can censor the messages the plates convey. The latest decision landed [last] Friday. It involved Curtis Whateley, who paid Virginia $10 in 2023 for a personalized license plate. He had seven characters to work with, and he sought to convey a statement “expressing my opinion on the current state of policing in this country,” as he would later put it in a lawsuit.
Campaign to enshrine voting rights in Virginia constitution kicks off in Norfolk
By CHARLOTTE RENE WOODS, Virginia Mercury
Portsmouth school board member Quniana Futrell appeared somber behind the podium in Norfolk’s Slover event space as she spoke in support of a proposal to amend Virginia’s constitution to automatically restore voting rights for people who complete felony sentences. She recalled her experience growing up with both of her parents incarcerated and said her mother died the day after her release from prison. “Standing as an elected official, being the dream and hope of my ancestors, I never got my mother’s vote,” she said. “That one vote would have been the one that meant everything to me — but Question Three fixes that.” Question Three is among a trio of pending constitutional amendments to protect reproductive rights, marriage equality and voting rights in Virginia’s constitution.
Articles from newspapers throughout the Commonwealth and Washington D.C. Firewalls will block you from reading some, but you’ll at least have some idea about what’s going on from the headlines and summaries. CLICK HERE.
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