r/VirginiaNews

NORFOLK — Executive leadership and officers of the city’s largest public school employees’ union have been dismissed after an internal investigation.

It concluded that the former president of the Norfolk Federation of Teachers, Laquetta Mackey, used over $100,000 marked for the organization toward personal purposes, according to officials with the union’s parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers. Until new elections are held, AFT Vice President Karla Hernández-Mats will administer the city’s chapter, AFT Local 4261, which represents approximately 1,300 members.

Mackey has not responded to repeated requests for comment. The internal investigation by the national union noted that the former leadership maintained that their actions had been appropriate.

A 15-page decision and order signed by Hernández-Mats and two other AFT vice presidents, dated April 28, found that Mackey in a two-year span increased her salary as president from $98,000 to $172,000 while tripling her retirement benefits. The salary and benefit increases were not communicated to members and had not been authorized by its executive board.

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Virginia, like other states, is trying to navigate the thorny landscape of setting artificial intelligence rules without getting caught up in President Donald Trump's crosshairs.

Most of the AI bills proposed by the General Assembly during the 2026 session were pushed aside over concerns that Trump would make good on his threat to sue and withhold broadband funding from states that pass laws stifling the technology's growth.

AI has an ever-growing number of uses, from helping people finish simple tasks like writing grocery lists to detecting diseases sooner. Its risks have been documented, including chatbots that have encouraged users to harm themselves or other people.

As Virginia's Joint Commission on Technology and Science grapples with developing future AI policies that don't conflict with Trump's executive actions, some members said they disagreed with the state's slow process.

"In my opinion, we failed last session," state Sen. Stella Pekarsky (D–Fairfax) said at the commission's May 6 meeting.

She added: "We failed to pass the chatbot protections. We failed to pass protections of deepfakes and AI in our politics and in our campaigning. If we fail, that's on us at the end of the day."

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Gov. Abigail Spanberger vetoed a bill Tuesday that would have allowed Virginia to (finally) start legal recreational cannabis sales in 2027.

Spanberger's veto is another setback for the Virginia Democrats who prioritized the effort and were banking on her support after years of Republican vetoes — and her pledge to support the measure.

General Assembly Democrats agreed on legislation to set up a retail weed marketplace that passed on a nearly party-line vote on the last day of the legislative session in March. Spanberger later rewrote the bill with changes that lawmakers said they couldn't accept.

The Democrat-led Legislature chose not to consider Spanberger's version, which forced the governor to either sign the bill that lawmakers sent her, veto the long-desired retail market or quietly allow it to become law without her signature after 30 days.

Four days before her deadline to act, Spanberger vetoed the bill — prolonging Virginia's yearslong stay in marijuana purgatory.

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A series of new laws hitting the books this summer seek to rein in invasive plant species in Virginia.

The measures make new opportunities for localities to collaborate on invasive control, set new requirements on the state Department of Transportation's management of plants on highways and close a loophole on how plants are prohibited from sale in the commonwealth.

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