The Mississippi Department of Health reported zero new COVID-19 deaths on Thursday, making Nov. 3 the first day since June 30 without a pandemic-related death in Mississippi.
Though it’s just a single-day report, the announcement undoubtedly came as a relief to many living in the state with the highest COVID-19 death rate in the nation, which has lost one out of every 300 residents to the virus. In total, 10,134 Mississippians have died from COVID-19
During the pandemic, my 8-year-old son has been struggling with wanting more independence. He wants to have sleepovers with friends, take walks on his own and start to make his own meals. Although the pandemic has restricted much of his independence, I’m happy to welcome more help in the kitchen and to reinforce healthy eating habits, and introduce him to cooking.
The weekend of October 15 – October 17 has been one that I will remember for a long time. Jackson State University held it 2021 homecoming on Saturday. Although I did not attend the game, I have become more interested in the performance of the team. It was great to see on pictures in the news of a full stadium after the challenges of the past 2 years with COVID-19.
Friday, I visited with a great friend who I directly responsible for encouraging me to seek my Ph.D. Although we are in different fraternities, our friendship of over 37 years has sustained itself dispite years of distance. Our friendship started in college and was formed during the first few weeks of my Freshman year. We later hung out during summer interships with Eastman Kodak. He had been there before and introduced me to friend he had made during previous internships. Later when we both worked in the Maryland area, he invited me to participate in his fraternity’s weekend tutoring program. At no time did I feel like an outsider. During this time in Maryland, while he was persuing his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, he asked me to protor an exam for him. It was the first time I stood in front of a class. Following my time in Maryland, I decided to pursue my MBA at the University of Memphis. My friend would always encourage me over the years as we would touchbase each homecoming. That classroom experience from the initial proctoring experience made working as a graduate assistant at the Univesity of Memphis less scary. Teaching incoming students about the Microsoft Office Suite that they would use throughout ther collegiate career was rewarding. Ten years after graduating from the University of Memphis, I started my Ph.D. journey. My friend’s simple request to fill in for him had sparked an interest that I completed in 2017.
Saturday, I had a breakfast meeting with a fraternity brother and we spoke about potential courses for the university where I currently work part-time. Problem solving is important to leaders so the timing of his desire to work in education and my desire to provide unique experiences to my students alligned. We met for an hour and developed a framework for a possible course and unique offering. Later that morning, my family worked to provide meals for the homeless through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. We served over 40 people and provided Abraham with an experience to remember.
Saturday night, my wife of nearly 29 years this November and I attended a live concert with The Elements in the elements of the outdoor ampitheater. This was the first time visiting the venue and hearing Earth Wind and Fire. I loved the horn section and enjoyed the work of Bobby Burns, Jr. I also enjoyed to outing with my lovely wife and a few of our friends. We held hands and cuddled under the open cool air while enjoying to great sound of Earth Wind and Fire. It was so great to get out and safely enjoy live music.
Sunday, I have the opportunity to catch up on yard work and will play tennis with a good friend and collegue to see who pays for beer. He suggested that the winner buys. He came back on me the first time we played so he ended up buying. In a strange way it has motivated me to improve so I will not loose again. I purchased a new racket hoping it will help me with my game. I know my conditioning will get better and I am budgeting to buy him beer everytime we play.
Posted by: maggyhenertJuly 16, 2026 at 12:00 pm EDT
On June 13, 2026, more than 1,500 people gathered in Philadelphia to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States at TED Democracy Philadelphia: Founding Futures. Democracy may have weathered some hard years recently — with rising partisan tension, fraying institutional trust and declining civic participation, as Pew Research Center president Michael Dimock noted in his TED Talk from the event — but on that day, people had a reason to believe in this aspirational system of government.
WEST POINT, Miss. (WCBI) – Legal services can be expensive, and costs are typically top of mind for most people when it comes to accessibility.
That’s why 14th Judicial Chancery Court District Judge Paula Drungole-Ellis holds a free annual law clinic to help people with their legal needs.
“We are so glad to have the opportunity to give back to the community. I am very pleased with the attorneys who volunteer their time to give back by appearing here on this day to assist people with filling out certain documents,” said Drungole-Ellis.
There is a distinct kind of magic that happens in the quiet beats between big speeches. At TED2026, those moments—the short films, performances, and animations known as interstitials—told a profound story about where we are right now. They captured a culture suspended between two powerful gravity wells: the deeply human need for community and the undeniable, sometimes spooky rise of the machine.
Curated by producers CC Hutten and Grace Poppe alongside Flux Festival’s Jonathan Wells, this year’s lineup felt less like a simple intermission and more like a mirror.
On one side, the programming grounded us in raw, tactile humanity. There was Scared of Loving Wild Again, a quiet 16mm film that focuses entirely on the syntax of human hands, proving how much emotion can be conveyed in a simple touch. There was Musica Quarantena, an animated short capturing the unexpected intimacy neighbors forged through windows and music during isolation.
But right alongside that warmth sat our digital shadows. The program leaned heavily into AI and automation, challenging the room with sharp, satirical questions about our future. An AI mockumentary titled ENERGYM depicted a future in which humans find purpose only by physically powering the very machines that replaced them. In another moment, an entirely AI-generated TED Talk posed a haunting question to the theater: What kind of ancestors will we become?
It is this exact friction—the hand-drawn versus the algorithmic, the warmth of memory versus the efficiency of code—that defined the experience. The interstitials didn’t offer an easy answer on how to balance these forces. Instead, they reminded us that as technology accelerates, protecting the spaces where we connect is entirely up to us.
Here is a draft for your WordPress blog post summarizing the key insights from Philip VanDusen’s video, tailored to fit The Catalyst At Belhaven’s focus on business innovation.
Leveling the Playing Field: 7 AI Tools Every Small Business Needs
In today’s fast-paced digital economy, adopting artificial intelligence is no longer just for global corporations. In his insightful video, “AI Tools for Small Business,” Philip VanDusen outlines how emerging technologies can help teams transition from low-leverage manual labor to elite AI operators.
By strategically integrating AI into daily operations, small businesses—and campus-born “Living Laboratories” like The Catalyst At Belhaven—can achieve the efficiency, data maturity, and market footprint of a massive enterprise.
Here are the 7 key takeaways and tools from the video to help scale your operations:
1. Content Creation & Messaging Rigor
Large Language Models (LLMs) like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are incredibly powerful for drafting copy, sourcing trending keywords, and optimizing engagement hooks. However, AI isn’t infallible. VanDusen warns about the risk of AI errors, emphasizing that businesses must maintain strict “human-in-the-loop” quality control to ensure brand voice consistency and regulatory compliance.
2. Social Media & Audience Discovery
Consistency is key on social media, but managing it manually is a massive time sink. Platforms like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and BuzzSumo allow you to automate posting schedules, track viral trends, and benchmark your brand against competitors. This data can help you discover and passively target specific audience demographics.
3. Hyper-Personalized Email Marketing
Email remains a high-return channel. By using personalization engines and CRMs (like the video’s sponsor, GoHighLevel), businesses can optimize send times, tailor message lengths, and deliver specific product recommendations at scale. According to the insights, hyper-personalized email workflows can yield 20% to 40% increases in revenue.
4. Automated Competitor & Market Intelligence
You don’t need a massive research team to know what your competitors are doing. Sales intelligence platforms such as SEMrush and SpyFu allow small businesses to reverse-engineer competitors’ SEO tactics, monitor their ad spend, and automatically track buyer feedback. This allows you to dynamically adjust your pricing and marketing strategies in response to real-time market shifts.
5. Hyper-Local SEO Automation
For local and regional enterprises, ranking in location-based search results is critical. Tools like Moz Local automate business listings and directory distribution. Passively capturing local search traffic ensures that your brick-and-mortar locations or specific regional services rank prominently without constant manual updates.
6. Intelligent Customer Engagement (Chatbots)
Modern buyers demand instantaneous interaction. Advanced chatbots can provide 24/7 customer communication and query routing, helping to convert browsers into buyers around the clock. By feeding these bots proprietary data, they can answer complex questions, make holistic product recommendations, and route orders directly to delivery backends.
7. Real-Time Conversion Optimization
It is a hard truth that only 2% to 3% of standard website browsers convert into buyers. AI behavior analytics tools, such as Instapage heat maps or Usermind journey tracking, allow you to map user paths in real time. By isolating exactly where users drop off, you can run rapid A/B tests on pricing models and landing page assets to repair bottlenecks and boost your conversion rates.
The Bottom Line AI tools are the ultimate equalizer. At The Catalyst At Belhaven, we are already applying these exact principles to our proofs of concept—from the Sterling Pulse customer lifecycle to The Herbalyst chatbot—proving that with the right technology stack, small teams can solve massive problems and scale efficiently.
Ready to modernize your workflow? Subscribe to The Catalyst Dispatch for more insights on how we turn problems into scalable products.
Originally published on ProPublica, January 26, 2026.
The Transportation Department, which oversees the safety of airplanes, cars and pipelines, plans to use Google Gemini to draft new regulations. “We don’t need the perfect rule,” said DOT’s top lawyer. “We want good enough.”
The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers.
Eat this, not that. This one food will cure everything. That food is poison. Cut this food out. Try this diet. Don’t eat at these times. Eat this food and you’ll lose weight. With society’s obsession with food, health, and weight, statements like these are all over social media, gyms, and even healthcare offices.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A dangerous blast of Arctic air is bearing down on the Mid-South, and temperatures are expected to dip near or even below one degree.
Doctors say now is the time for families to slow down, bundle up, and think safety first.
To help parents prepare, Dr. Rudy Kink, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, told WREG’s Alex Coleman that this kind of cold deserves serious attention.
As 2025 winds down, take a moment to revisit the ideas that defined the year — through TED Talks that sparked curiosity, challenged assumptions and left us dreaming. TED’s end-of-year playlists gather the moments that stirred the biggest conversations and offered fresh inspiration as we head into 2026.
Here are the talks everyone obsessed over in 2025 — from deepfakes and AI to breakthroughs shaping our future:
There is a specific kind of memory that lives in the red clay of Tibbee. It’s a memory of the Mobile & Ohio Railroad steam whistles, the crack of a bat at Roundhead Stadium where the Tibbee Ramblers showed us what excellence looked like, and the quiet strength of ancestors resting in our community cemetery.
For years, we have been the keepers of these stories. Today, we become the architects of new ones.
We are proud to announce the official opening of the Tibbee Community Center at our permanent home: 141 Community Center Rd, West Point, MS 39773.
From Rails to Resolution
Tibbee was once a station—a place where people waited for a connection to the rest of the world. Today, we have built our own connection. What started as a $10,000 vision for a technology lab has grown into a sanctuary for progress.
This center is not just a building; it is a promise. It is a promise that our seniors will not be left behind in a digital world. It is a promise that a grandmother can sit in our lab and see her doctor via telemedicine without leaving the neighborhood. It is a promise that the principles of Ujima—collective work and responsibility—are not just words we say, but a way we live.
What’s Happening at the Center?
The TDC is hitting the ground running in 2026 with programs designed for every generation:
Digital Modernization: Our lab is now equipped with high-performance workstations and Generative AI tools. We aren’t just teaching people how to type; we are teaching them how to command the future.
Computer Basics for Everyday Life: An 8-week journey for our neighbors (55+) to master email, online safety, and digital confidence.
Health Access: Private, secure spaces for telehealth consultations.
Collective Works Day: Join us every 4th Saturday of December as we maintain our grounds and our legacy together.
Join the Movement
We invite you to come see what “neighbors helping neighbors” looks like in the 21st century. Whether you are here for a workshop, a meeting, or to rent our beautiful new facility for your family’s next milestone, the light is on.
The train doesn’t stop at the old station anymore, but at 141 Community Center Rd, the journey is just beginning.
Tibbee Talks isn’t just an online magazine — it’s a growing hub of community, inspiration, and opportunity designed to enrich the lives of all generations. Whether you’re a parent looking for positive programs for your kids, a young adult seeking motivation, or a senior wanting to stay connected to your roots, there’s something here for you.
