ABERDEEN, N.C. (WTVD) — Authorities are taking extra precautions after someone threw a flashbang at a early voting site Wednesday afternoon in Moore County.

At 2:30 p.m., the Aberdeen Police Department responded to reports of a loud noise and small explosion near the early voting poll at Aberdeen Lake Park. Witnesses reported the incident occurred around 2:15 p.m. and initially believed a transformer had blown.

Investigators later found a civilian-style flash bang several feet from the roadway at US-1 and Lake Shore Drive, about 150 yards from the voting site.

Police say 30 witnesses were interviewed with many saying the device appeared to have been thrown from a moving vehicle headed southbound on US-1. There was no suspect or vehicle description provided.

No injuries or property damage were reported. In response, the Aberdeen Police Department has increased patrols and maintained a presence out of an abundance of caution.

Authorities believe this is an isolated incident with no additional threats reported.

The investigation is ongoing, and evidence will be sent to the State Crime Lab for testing.

Anyone with information is urged to contact Captain Blackburn at 910-944-4566, send tips via Facebook messenger, or leave anonymous tips at 910-944-4561. A $500 reward is being offered for verifiable information leading to an arrest.

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Media Contact:
Desa James | Communications Coordinator | 405-744-2669 | desa.james@okstate.edu

Dr. Zeyuan Song, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the School of Chemical Engineering at
Oklahoma State University, and Dr. Zheyu Jiang, assistant professor for CHE, have achieved
a milestone rarely seen in Oklahoma’s research landscape: acceptance into the International
Conference on Learning Representations 2026, one of the world’s most competitive and
influential academic conferences in artificial intelligence and machine learning.  

ICLR ranks among the top AI venues globally – second in the field by h-index – and
is known for debuting many of the breakthroughs that have shaped modern AI, including
the variational autoencoder and the graph attention network. Each submission undergoes
a monthslong, double-blind review and rebuttal process, making acceptance highly selective.  

“I am proud of the research excellence Zeyuan achieved during his Ph.D. study in my research
lab,” Jinag said. “I have been impressed by his ability to bring in new ideas from
diverse fields in mathematics, engineering, and AI. This, when combined with a deep
understanding of the cutting-edge breakthroughs in the field, leads to this outstanding
work published in ICLR.”  

Song’s paper, titled Adaptive Fourier Mamba Operators, introduces a powerful new machine
learning framework for modeling complex natural and engineering phenomena described
by partial differential equations.   

“Imagine you are baking a cake,” Jiang said. “The temperature of the cake isn’t determined by
time alone. The outside heats faster than the inside, and the top browns more quickly
than the bottom. Partial differential equations describe changes that happen simultaneously
in space and time, like how heat moves through a cake as it bakes.”  

These types of equations govern real-world phenomena such as fluid dynamics, heat
transfer, quantum mechanics  and even the financial market.  

Unlike traditional numerical solvers, which can become extremely time-consuming to solve,
Song’s AFMO method uses a mathematically grounded neural operator framework to learn
how these systems behave, often with greater efficiency and generalizability.  

According to the paper, AFMO integrates two computational frameworks, Adaptive Fourier
decomposition, a novel signal processing technique that builds orthogonal spectral
bases tailored to the problem, and state-space models, an emerging neural network
architecture that can efficiently handle long-range dependencies, to solve general nonlinear partial
differential equations.  

“Imagine you are playing piano,” Jiang said. “Standard Fourier neural operator plays every
song on a standard piano. The piano keys are fixed, and you play by mixing those fixed
notes. It works great when the song fits that instrument well, but it can struggle
if the ‘song’ has unusual rhythms. Adaptive Fourier decomposition, on the other hand,
is like a custom keyboard tailored to the particular song one wants to play.

“Meanwhile, a state-space model is like a super-fast musician who reads the music
left-to-right and keeps a small memory of what happened so far, so they can play very
long songs efficiently. Therefore, AFMO builds a custom instrument for each song first,
and then has the super-fast musician to play it, so it has the right instrument and
efficient playing.”  

By uniting these in a novel way, AFMO can solve PDEs on irregular shapes and complex
geometries, capture sharp features and singularities, and produce results that are
both highly accurate and computationally efficient. 

“These are especially challenging problems to solve due to the intricacies of the systems
involved,” Jiang said. “They require us to think out of the box and develop truly innovative solutions.” 

In extensive testing, the method consistently outperformed leading neural operator
models across diverse benchmark problems, ranging from modeling fluid flow in airfoils
and pipes to predicting European option prices in financial mathematics.   

Song’s accomplishment represents more than an individual’s success.  

This publication is the first ICLR paper from the state of Oklahoma. Notably, this work comes from
a chemical engineering department, rather than a traditional computer science or electrical
engineering program.  

“As AI continuously transforms the world, we are in an exciting era for interdisciplinary
research,” Jiang said. “We are thrilled to see the broader impacts and implications
of this work in helping OSU recruit talented students, forming cross-department collaborations,
and competing for more federal and industry funding to support AI for Science research that pushes
toward AI capacity and workforce development in Oklahoma.” 

by MARK POWELL

***

For the second time this year, a bill requiring closed state primary elections has dropped in the South Carolina House of Representatives. The bill – H. 5183 – is currently residing in the chamber’s judiciary committee, where it faces an uncertain future.

This latest proposal, sponsored by state representative Mike Burns, fixes a flaw in a previously introduced version.

“It’s very similar to 3310,” explained state representative Jordan Pace, referencing a previous closed primary bill. “It’s virtually the same, with the exception of when you can register or affiliate for 2026 – and only in 2026 – the first time that a voter votes in a primary, they can sign the affiliation form when they vote.”

Pace is chairman of the S.C. Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative lawmakers who have been working for years to close partisan primary elections in the Palmetto State. Their objective? Limiting Democrat influence/interference in the selection of GOP representatives.

Under the previous version of the bill, critics expressed concern that some voters might not have time to qualify to cast their ballots in the upcoming Democratic and Republican primary elections on June 9, 2026.

***

Current election law provides for an open primary. Any registered voter can request the partisan ballot of their choice on primary day (although they must pick one party or the other; they cannot vote for both).

For Pace and his fellow conservatives, that’s a big problem.

“Right now we have Democrats crossing over and voting in Republican primaries,” Pace explained. “And in some cases, we have Republicans crossing over to vote in Democrat primaries in a few spots around the state. There’s been like four ballot questions over the last decade on primary voting questions. And they all have come back with eighty percent or so saying, ‘crossing over into the other party’s primary is not what we want’. That’s what November (the general election) is for. It’s not what the primaries are for.”

Each state devises its own system for holding elections, and they vary widely across the country. South Carolina is one of fifteen states with an open primary. Nine others, plus the District of Columbia, hold closed primaries. The remainder have various hybrid formats – with the exception of five: Alaska, California, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Washington. These states have so-called “jungle primaries,” electoral free-for-alls with multi-party, nonpartisan voting.

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***

The latter is exactly the kind of political food fight that supporters of the traditional partisan system wish to avoid with closed primaries.

Many independent voters say they would feel left out with a closed primary. As one told us recently, “I don’t want my choices dictated to me by the political parties – I want to have a say in who appears on the ballot in November.” 

According to Pace, that view misses the point of holding primaries in the first place.

“The reality is that the two parties are private organizations,” he said. “They’re private political organizations. Look at it this way: It’s like outsiders showing up at a lodge or some other social club or somebody else’s church and demanding to vote in their business meeting about whether to hire or fire a pastor or club president. If you’re not part of that organization, if you’re not affiliated with it, then you shouldn’t be allowed to make its decisions. Your vote is in November.”

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NEW LIVE SHOW WEDNESDAYS @ 7:00 P.M.

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Pace also had this assessment of the current balloting situation: “Democrats shouldn’t be voting in Republican primaries, and Republicans shouldn’t be voting in Democratic primaries.”

Asked about the response to the new bill among House members, Pace was frank.

“Tepid would probably be the nicest way to say it,” he said. “There are several people in high-level positions who don’t seem to want this.”

The Freedom Caucus supports the measure, though, and Pace noted closing primaries “has been a Republican Party priority for the last 20 years.” 

“When it comes to passing conservative policies, South Carolina is always dead last among Republican states,” Pace said. “Open primaries are a major contributor to that. And if we were to actually do this (enact closed primaries), as the people have said repeatedly they want, I think we would get better conservative policy passed in Columbia on a regular basis.”

***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR…

J. Mark Powell is an award-winning former TV journalist, government communications veteran, and a political consultant. He is also an author and an avid Civil War enthusiast. Got a tip or a story idea for Mark? Email him at mark@fitsnews.com.

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