(The Center Square) – Loss of an iconic public servant, an incredulous social media post gone viral from a state lawmaker, and the return of the name Fort Bragg were intriguing North Carolina storylines in 2025 as The Center Square delivered news and information.
More than two dozen of them are gathered here, though the list is not a ranking, does not attempt to define “the most” of anything, including republications by news partners. Rather, it is a collection of important, useful and interesting news and information delivered by the TCS news wire service since Jan. 1.
Here’s 25 from 2025.
• Jim Hunt, North Carolina’s first multiple term governor and face of the state’s Democratic Party for decades, died Dec. 18. He was known for relentless pursuit of help to public education, veto and succession for governors, and as lieutenant governor partnered with one of only three Republican governors since 1900 to enact statewide public kindergartens. He was 88.
• Chapel Hill native Keith Siegel was released from Hamas’ hostage captivity on Feb. 1. He and his wife, Aviva, were captured Oct. 7, 2023, at the beginning of the militant group’s attack. Yarden Bibas and Ofer Calderon were also released. They were held for 484 days. Seigel moved to Israel when he was 21. He and his wife have lived in Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
• State Rep. Julie von Haefen, D-Wake, advocated the decapitation of second-term Republican President Donald Trump on June 14 at a Raleigh rally dubbed No Kings. On social media, von Haefen posted an image of a woman holding signage with the image of a bloody, used guillotine; the words “In these difficult times, some cuts may be necessary”; and a prop on one end of the handle represented a beheaded Trump.
• Democrat Allison Riggs retained her seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court, ending the nation’s last undecided race from the Nov. 5, 2024, election after 184 days. Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin had led on Election Night, only to see provisional and absentee ballots swing the race by 10,585 votes. The case went through multiple state board of elections decisions and court rulings from Wake County Superior Court, both the state Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
• The home of the 82nd Airborne and Special Operations Forces, commonly known as the place where a president of the United States places his 911 call, was returned the name Fort Bragg late in the evening of Feb. 10 from War Department Secretary Pete Hegseth in a memorandum. Sweeping name changes from the Biden administration changed the installation to Fort Liberty on June 2, 2023.
• An April analysis from Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center said “the fragile future of some foundational and unique traits” found only in humans is a concern for 6 in 10. “Being Human in 2035: How Are We Changing in the Age of AI?” speaks to the potential problems foreseen as artificial intelligence continues to be incorporated into everyday life by many at varying levels from professional to personal to just plain curious.
• In September, another report from Elon’s Imagining the Digital Future Center found more than half of American adults believe impact on the 12 core human capacities will be more negatively than positively in the next 10 years because of artificial intelligence. In particular, social and emotional intelligence; empathy and moral judgment; capacity and willingness to think deeply about complex subjects; sense of individual agency; confidence in their own native abilities; and self-identity, meaning and purpose in life were named in the sampling of 1,005 Americans.
• Iryna Zarutska lost her life on Aug. 22, stabbed by a suspect identified as Decarlos Brown Jr. with a revolving door history in the state justice system. The viral video released by police two weeks later led to significant scrutiny, investigations, congressional hearings, and new state law that ended an unwritten moratorium on the death penalty and cashless bail.
• Charlotte’s Web, an operation of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in conjunction with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, drove the wedge deeper for Democrats and Republicans. Protests in high schools and a comparison to the Ku Klux Klan by Chairwoman Anderson Clayton of the North Carolina Democratic Party clashed with such approvals as Republican U.S. Rep. Pat Harrigan saying, “Enforcing the law does not make us Klansmen, but failing to enforce the law will be our national suicide.” More than 400 were arrested, and operations extended to Raleigh and surrounding Triangle communities.
• Eight vetoes of first-term Democratic Gov. Josh Stein were overturned on July 29. Defining men and women for legal and policy matters, and another chip played in the game of state lawmen and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were the big scores for Republican lawmakers led by Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger of Rockingham County and House Speaker Destin Hall of Caldwell County. Republicans also wrestled away appointment power of the State Board of Elections from the governor to the office of the state auditor.
• Payton McNabb, injured by a boy professing to be a girl in order to play high school volleyball in 2022, continued her fight to protect women’s spaces with particular attention to athletics. She was the guest of the president for the State of the Union, gave congressional testimony, and in a 1-on-1 with TCS said, “It is completely aggravating because the injury I suffered was 100% avoidable if only my rights as a female athlete had been more important than a man’s feelings.”
• McNabb was also present for the signing of No Men in Women’s Sports executive order, a February day that produced the iconic photo of Donald Trump signing surrounded by young athletes and their heroes such as Riley Gaines. In an interview that morning with TCS before she also attended the signing, XX-XY Athletics apparel founder and former Levi’s president Jennifer Sey said, “The fight is taking the culture back, and to do that you have to take the language back. It all seemed benign enough when it began. I probably gave up on some of it to be nice. But when you give in on language, you concede the truth.”
• Stunning the nation, the Tar Heels football program at UNC Chapel Hill lured eight-time Super Bowl champion Bill Belichick as its new football coach. The contract signed is five years in length, each with a $1 million base and $9 million in supplemental. Three years are guaranteed for the 73-year-old who was defensive coordinator for two Super Bowl wins with the New York Giants and head coach for six of them with the New England Patriots. First year record at Carolina: 4-8.
• Speaking of contracts, the House settlement named for former Arizona State swimmer Grant House allows each NCAA school – there are 350 in Division I, and 1,100 in all three divisions – to pay athletes for use of their name, image and likeness. In North Carolina lawmakers through Various Ed Law/Tax Acct/NIL Changes, known also as House Bill 378, exempted “name, image, and likeness contracts from public records requirements.” The public can know the contract of a coach paid by a public college or university, but not a player.
• The largest single investment in the state’s 236-year history lasted only a short while. It came in June when Jet Zero, backed by incentives of more than $1.5 billion from North Carolina’s government, promised more than 14,000 jobs and $4.7 billion in capital investment. Guilford County commissioners kicked in another $76 million of incentives.
• Perennially among the most wanted locations, North Carolina later in June landed one of the Big Five when Amazon said it would invest $10 billion toward its Amazon Web Services data center supply chain. The global technology company, replete with e-commerce, digital streaming and online advertising, says a minimum of 500 jobs in high-tech cloud computing and artificial intelligence are coming to an innovation campus in Richmond County along the South Carolina border. Such jobs will be data center engineers, network specialists, engineering operations managers, security specialists, and other technical roles.
• An October announcement of a probe by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said reports of FEMA disaster assistance teams in 2024 bypassing homes displaying signs supporting then-presidential candidate Donald Trump were true and were indicative of a pattern tracing back to Hurricane Ida in 2021. The 22-page analysis said FEMA violated the Privacy Act of 1974, treated individuals unfairly based on political beliefs, and these actions stemmed from systemic issues in FEMA policies, processes and practices. Two examples in North Carolina were highlighted tied to Trump and the National Rifle Association, respectively.
• Republican U.S. Reps. Mark Harris, Pat Harrigan, Virginia Foxx, Addison McDowell and Chuck Edwards in February asked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and then-FEMA Administrator Cameron Hamilton how $59 million was allocated “for illegal alien housing” in New York while western North Carolinians were trying to recover from Hurricane Helene. Noem confirmed the Tren de Aragua gang from Venezuela utilized the housing as a base of operations, and the convicted killer of Laken Riley had stayed there.
• North Carolina’s senior United States senator set a wave of events in motion in June. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis was one of two holdouts advancing a reconciliation bill to debate, citing the projected cost of $32 billion via Medicaid that would fall to the state budget for rural hospitals and communities back home. The president attacked on social media, Tillis said he’d had enough with the Beltway’s partisan gridlock and declared he would not seek reelection in the 2026 midterms.
• Filing for the 2026 midterms over the first three weeks of December solidified announcements from earlier in the year. The chase to succeed Tillis will be led by former two-term Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat seeking to deliver his party’s first win for a Senate seat since 2008.
• The litigation settlement of United States of America v. North Carolina State Board of Elections included establishing the Registration Repair Project. The purpose is for North Carolina voters missing submission of a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number on registration, as required by federal and state law, to get updated prior to the next election.
• May 21 was the day of a 1 a.m. meeting of the Rules Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives as set by Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C. Before them was the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, eventually signed July 4 by the president. Foxx, by way of explaining the start time, gave multiple examples where the “dark of night,” as the writing said, was the time of the business for past committees led by Democrats.
• Ryan Routh, native of Greensboro and former resident in Hawaii, was found guilty of all charges in a plot to kill Trump by a federal jury in Florida that needed little time to reach a verdict Sept. 23. The jury of seven women and five men in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Fort Pierce ultimately were swayed more – needing only about two hours, 20 minutes – by the United States’ attorneys and their 38 witnesses over seven days of testimony. Routh’s defense – he represented himself – included three witnesses on the eighth day. He faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison; sentencing originally set for Dec. 18 was rescheduled to February when he finally requested a lawyer.
• Sworn in on the traditional Jan. 20, this year a Monday, the president didn’t leave the White House and Washington area until five days later and made western North Carolina his first stop. While there he said he had tapped Michael Whatley, later to become a U.S. Senate candidate, to coordinate recovery efforts. From the mountains he flew to the fire-ravaged areas of California.
• Two proposals of the state’s congressmen in the U.S. House are aimed at improving highway safety, specifically for holders of commercial driver’s licenses. An eastern North Carolina Baptist church, the Head Start program and a community college are among the entities with involuntary closures of CDL training programs in North Carolina, research from TCS shows. Of the 3,015 training providers for commercial driver’s licenses removed from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Training Provider Registry, 61 in North Carolina were involuntary and 17 voluntary. Another 86 were among the nationwide 4,554 put on notice for potential noncompliance, TCS research shows.
