DANDRIDGE, Tenn. (WVLT) – You might have noticed a convoy of trucks carrying farm supplies through East Tennessee Wednesday. It marked the latest effort from a group out of Kentucky hoping to help out farmers who were impacted by Hurricane Helene.

The project was prompted by a group of farmers out of Campbellsville, Kentucky.

Kyle Milby was one of the many making the trip from Kentucky to Spruce Pine, North Carolina. He and the rest of the convoy stopped briefly, along with their Tennessee Highway Patrol escort, in Dandridge.

“We’re just farmers helping farmers, so we’re just going to stick up for one another,” Milby said. “We feel like as farmers, we’re some of the most resilient people on the earth. We just want to reach out to help one another.”

The convoy included hay, livestock feed, fencing supplies, fuel and more. Milby said everything was given through their local FFA chapter and private donations.

“Farmers gave our hay, truckers gave their trucks and time and we just all pitched together for the cause,” he said. “We live in the greatest country there is. I am proud to be a part of this. It’s not me whose done this; all I’ve done is make a few phone calls. The Lord made all this happen and with the help of a lot of good friends and neighbors.”

The group brought supplies all the way to North Carolina Wednesday.

Copyright 2024 WVLT. All rights reserved.

CUSHING, Texas (KTRE) – “Here at my school, we do have a lot of students that do help and that is one thing I like about Cushing is that students do help others”

Cushing ISD is joining other organizations and businesses that are sending relief donations to North Carolina.

“We’re trying to love our neighbors; we’re trying to love our brothers,” Julie Rawlinson, with teacher at Cushing ISD, said.

It’s called “Operation M.A.G.I.C Hands.’ It stands for Making A Way for God in a Crisis. Rawlinson initially brought the idea of collecting donations to staff at the school, but wanted to make sure students were involved.

“Here are at Cushing, kids are always into helping people, stepping outside of yourself. So I had the idea we should really get together, get some kids together, collect donations and send to North Carolina,” Rawlinson said. So far, they have already had a good response from the community.

“In our community faith is very important, here at Cushing ISD faith is important, service, helping those around you,” Rawlinson said.

They will accept a wide range of items like non-perishable foods, cleaning supplies, and baby products. They have also asked for items that are not so common, like can openers, flashlights, batteries, and blankets.

“Our contact there; these are things he said that not everyone thinks about. So, they’re a little bit different, but like I said, we are trying to think outside the box of different items,” Rawlinson said.

They have also seen a huge response from students. After the idea was introduced, 137 students attended the first meeting.

“If somebody needs help, I’m going to help them because I would want help, too, if I was in trouble or needed help,” Miley Jackson, a student at Cushing ISD, said.

Now they are all working together to help ease the need those impacted by Hurricane Helene are facing.

“They are going to need help and assistance for quite some time. We’ll collect donations, take a load and collect donations again, so anybody in the community is welcome to drop off donations at the school,” Rawlinson said.

The district’s assistant superintendent will take the items to North Carolina.

Donations can be dropped off at the Cushing Middle and High School building until Oct. 23.

Copyright 2024 KTRE. All rights reserved.

By Diana Novak Jones

(Reuters) – North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor Mark Robinson filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit against CNN on Tuesday, saying the network’s report that he called himself a “black Nazi” more than a decade ago on a pornography website and made other inflammatory comments was “recklessly false.”

The lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of Wake County, North Carolina, by Robinson, an African-American who is also the lieutenant governor in North Carolina, denied that he made the comments.

It called CNN’s September report a “malicious hit job” that was based on unverifiable data and was timed to derail his chances in the state’s Nov. 5 gubernatorial election, where he faces Democrat Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general.

A CNN spokesperson declined to comment. Attorneys for Robinson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Robinson called his lawsuit an effort to fight back against “one of the greatest examples of political interference in this state’s history.”

Robinson, who has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, is represented by Virginia attorney Jesse Binnall, who has represented Trump in prior cases.

The CNN report attributed a number of sexual, lewd and offensive posts on a pornography site to Robinson, who it claimed posted under the name “minisoldr.” In one 2010 post on the site, CNN reported that Robinson wrote, “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few.”

Reuters was unable to verify the posts, which CNN reported had been removed from the porn site.

Polls in September consistently showed Stein ahead of Robinson in the race.

In his lawsuit, Robinson, 56, said CNN published the article “despite harboring doubt over the veracity and verifiability of the supposedly supporting information and deliberately avoided the truth.”

Robinson said he was given the chance to respond to CNN’s claims but wasn’t able to examine the data, which he claims came from a data breach via the dark web, a portion of the internet that is not indexed by popular search engines.

(Reporting by Diana Jones; Editing by Leigh Jones and Deepa Babington)