An Alabama native is bringing a large women's soccer tournament to Birmingham and five other Alabama cities next week.

Nichelle Gainey, a Huntsville native who started SilverStone International after serving as assistant commissioner of the Southwestern Athletic Conference, partnered with the Alabama Youth Soccer Association to present the Futbol Inernacional 2007.

The event, which features thousands of women's soccer players from Argentina, Canada, China and Mexico, is estimated to pump $2.84 million into Alabama, with $1.4 million of that in Birmingham.

The festival starts at Legion Field in Birmingham Sunday and ends in Mobile April 28.

Admission is $16, with children under 4 free. For more information, visit www.2007futbolinternacional.com.

By Karen Middleton
Athens High School juniors Courtney Naylor and Megan Sandlin, both 16, had a special reason for heading up a fundraising drive for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital—both are daughters of cancer survivors.

Since January, the girls have been helping organize the St. Jude Partner in Hope Week for April 23-28.

“We are asking for a donation, either monetary or a gift, to be entered into a silent auction held at the St. Jude booth during the Dogwood Festival,” Courtney said.

“Any donation for the children of St. Jude would be greatly appreciated,” Megan said.

Born Daniel Lawrence Whiteley on Feb. 17, 1963, in Pawnee City, Neb., Larry adopted his stage name from an early radio-show persona, which happened to be Southern.

Now part of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour with Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Ron White, and a bonafide movie actor, Larry will perform Sunday night at the Von Braun Center in Huntsville. For ticket information, order by phone at 1(800) 277-1700 or visit the VBC Box Office between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. weekdays. For ticket information online, visit www.ticketmaster.com.

Larry’s latest projects include a new CD, “Morning Constitutions,” which will also be released as a DVD in June and air as a Comedy Channel special June 3, and a film, “Delta Farce,” will be in theaters May 11.

HUNTSVILLE (AP) — A nursing home employee was jailed for allegedly using a cigarette lighter to set fire to an elderly patient's bed over the weekend.

Huntsville Public Safety Director Rex Reynolds said Tina Louise Spencer, 31, was booked into the county jail Saturday on charges of first-degree arson and attempted murder. She was being held on $6,000 bond.

Spencer is accused of setting fire to the bed of Ann Hudson, 88, at Carlton Cove nursing home. The condition of Hudson, who is bedridden, was not immediately available, but Carlton Cove executive director Dan Shields said she sustained first- and second-degree burns.

Associated Press

WASHINGTON � A top Defense Department official said today that the military base realignment slated to bring thousands of jobs to northern Alabama will proceed on schedule as long as Congress provides the money.

�We have committed to the funding and we�re very committed to the schedule,� Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Philip Grone told dozens of business leaders from Madison and Morgan counties at a chamber of commerce meeting on Capitol Hill.

Grone acknowledged that the failure of last year�s Congress to approve relevant spending bills and the stalemate over a war supplemental bill this year have complicated those efforts. But he said there appears to be bipartisan consensus behind keeping the process on track for a 2011 completion.

Regions Bank East Tennessee Area Executive Mike McNamee has named Jim Owens as the new Chattanooga city president. Current city president Joe DiNicolantonio is moving to the other side of the state to become the new area executive for west Tennessee.

Mr. Owens has been with AmSouth Bank for five years. Prior to the merger between Regions Financial Corporation and AmSouth Bancorporation, he served as city president for Huntsville and North Alabama. Mr. Owens also has served in a variety of Credit leadership roles including state senior credit officer for Regions’ Commercial middle market group in Alabama and as group senior credit officer for Commercial Real Estate in a four-state region.

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Schwartz Communications, one of the nation’s leading public relations agencies focused on the high-technology, medical device, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, today announced that it has won nine new clients.

One of the new clients is

Digium (Huntsville, Ala.)—the original creator and primary developer of Asterisk®, the industry's first open source telephony platform

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - Braving fierce competition and a space-age terrain Friday, the Huntsville Center for Technology of Huntsville, Ala., was named champion of the high school division of NASA's 14th annual Great Moonbuggy Race, sponsored by Northrop Grumman Corp.

Finishing with the fastest time in a field of 25 high school teams from across the United States and as far away as Germany, the winning team raced its original moonbuggy design at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, the annual host of the race in Huntsville.

The Great Moonbuggy Race is inspired by the original lunar rover of engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, whose creations rumbled across the moon during the last three Apollo missions in the early 1970s. The NASA engineers had to design and build a compact, light, flexible and durable vehicle to carry astronauts on the lunar surface.

The largest building permit issued during the week of April 2-6 in the city of Huntsville went to Hoar Construction LLC, $1.63 million, for alterations to a building for Triad Hospital at 700 Airport Road.