The Frequency

Alabama Power reported $435 million in comprehensive income for the second quarter of 2026, up 14 percent from $381 million a year earlier. Through the first half of the year, the company has earned $860 million, a 14 percent jump over the same stretch in 2025.

The gain didn’t come from selling more power. Retail revenue actually slipped slightly, to $1.71 billion. It came from spending less. Operations and maintenance costs fell 12 percent. The company also drew down reserve accounts and deferred about $12 million in expenses.

Alabama residential customers paid an average of 16.77 cents per kilowatt-hour in May, a 4 percent increase from a year earlier and among the highest rates in the South. The average Chambers County bill ran about $257 a month when we first covered the rate fight back in April. This quarter’s earnings report gives no sign that number is coming down. The current rate freeze, part of the Power to the People Act, runs through January 2029. But it also stripped the Public Service Commission’s authority to call mandatory rate hearings.

Southern Union State Community College is one of seven initial hubs joining the Alabama Fiber Network, a statewide broadband buildout backed by the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs. The network partners with rural electric cooperatives to run fiber to community colleges and, eventually, the households around them. For Southern Union’s Valley campus, the upgrade means moving from 1 gigabit of data capacity to 10. It also comes with a private network linking all participating colleges together for the first time. The Alabama Community College System says every one of its 24 institutions should be connected by the end of 2027.

The pitch is bigger than faster Wi-Fi in a classroom. Participating colleges are expected to double as community technology hubs: public internet access and digital literacy training aimed at the rural and low-income households the “last mile” of broadband hasn’t reached yet.

Lanett City Schools scored lowest in the state on this year’s A-CAP testing, the exam Alabama uses to enforce its reading law. At Lanett High School, 3.5 percent of students in grades 9 through 12 tested proficient in English. District-wide, proficiency came in around 23 percent in English and 7 percent in math.

More than 70 percent of Lanett’s students live below the poverty line, a factor state officials acknowledge tracks closely with lower scores. State Board of Education representative Tracie West said the board will provide “weekly intervention and coaching for struggling students.” Lanett City Schools declined to comment.

State officials point to Wilcox County as a counterexample: 93 percent of its students live in poverty, and every one of its third graders tested proficient in reading this year. The comparison doesn’t erase Lanett’s numbers. It’s meant to argue poverty alone doesn’t have to decide them.

Doug Jones raised $622,000 in July to Tommy Tuberville’s $290,000, the second straight month Jones has out-raised the Republican nominee for governor. It hasn’t closed the gap. Tuberville had $9.2 million on hand at the end of July. Jones had $1.7 million.

Tuberville has raised $13.7 million since entering the race in May. Jones has raised $3.6 million since December. Both campaigns also took some PAC money in July: about $10,000 for Tuberville, roughly $25,000 for Jones. Tuberville’s campaign has said the senator has accepted “ZERO PAC money.”

The dynamic is close to a mirror image of 2020, when Jones out-raised and out-spent Tuberville in their Senate race and still lost by more than 20 points. Chambers County, along with the rest of the state, votes on both in November.

Alabama executed Jeremy Williams, 41, by lethal injection on August 13 for the 2021 sexual assault and murder of a 5-year-old girl in Russell County. Williams waived his appeals and requested an expedited execution. He was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m.

Governor Kay Ivey called the crime a case of “depth and depravity.” Russell County District Attorney Rick Chancey said the victim “didn’t die in peace.” It was Alabama’s first execution since November 2025, and the 13th since 2023. It came after a federal court ruled in June that the state’s nitrogen gas protocol amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, a decision that halted a separate scheduled execution. How the state proceeds with future death sentences, and by what method, remains an open question.