The North Carolina Folk Festival kicks off Friday evening at 7 p.m. and will be going strong on stages throughout the downtown until Sunday evening. All the music is free, but if you want to spend money there will be plenty of food and drink, crafts and art to buy.

It’s pretty much the same as the National Folk Festival, which was in Greensboro for its three-year run, but the name has changed.

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In last week’s Rhino Times, Scott Yost wrote that Greensboro Chamber of Commerce President Brent Christensen said VF Corp. will move jobs from Mississippi to Greensboro. It should have read that VF will move jobs from Kansas City to Greensboro. (The Guilford County Economic Development Alliance holds its meetings very early in the morning in a big conference room with the media’s seats at the very end of the table. Under those conditions “Kansas City” can sound very much like “Mississippi.” Also, Christensen came to Greensboro by way of Mississippi so he is always talking about Mississippi and that may have played a part in Yost’s mistake as well.) Regardless, the Rhino Times regrets the error.

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If the North Carolina legislature gives out an award for dedication, then state Sen. Trudy Wade should win it.

Wednesday, August 29, Wade was at home getting ready to go to a joint House and Senate governmental operations committee meeting in Raleigh and she tripped, she put her hand out to break her fall and broke her wrist. But Wade still went to the meeting in Raleigh. She said that after sitting through the meeting for about an hour she started to feel faint and thought she was either going to pass out or throw up. So she left the meeting and went to the hospital where the X-rays confirmed what she already knew, that she had broken her wrist. Wade said it wasn’t that she thought her wrist was going to heal itself, but she did think that she would be able to withstand the pain long enough to make it through the meeting. However, she misjudged just how painful a broken wrist can be.

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Labor Day is considered by most the last day of summer, even though according to the calendar summer actually ends on Sept. 22 and, around here, school starts in August. But judging from the amount of traffic on the roads on Labor Day and the completely deserted downtown, I’d say people were trying to get done in a day what they had planned to do all summer. Or maybe they were just lying around the pool thinking of all the things they would do next summer.

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The courts have to take some blame for the increasingly violent protests because after the violent protestors are arrested the courts too often let them go free. Every citizen has the right to protest, to petition the government, to march around with signs, hold rallies and say whatever vile things they want, but they don’t have the right to disrupt public meetings or trespass, and they have no right to commit any act of violence.

Until the courts decide to take violent and disruptive protestors seriously, the protests will become more violent and more disruptive. Often the protestors want to be arrested, so being arrested in itself is not a deterrent. A hefty fine or a few days in jail might be.

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Greensboro moved one step closer to not having a daily newspaper on Tuesday when News & Record Publisher and Editor Danny Finnegan was laid off. Finnegan had been here since July 2016.

The newspaper eliminated the managing editor position in February when it moved Steve Doyle from managing editor to editorial page editor. With no editor and no managing editor it’s unclear to those of us on the outside who is going to be running the newsroom on a day to day basis. Our guess is that the newsroom will be allowed to run itself.

But it is clear that Alton Brown, the regional vice president for BH Media Group and publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal, will take on the role of publisher of the News & Record. BH Media Group, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s company, has been combining the News & Record and the Winston-Salem Journal for years, and it’s now one step closer.

The News & Record building on East Market Street has been sold to Maryland developer Greg Dillon who is also involved in the Westin Hotel that is to be built on top of Greensboro’s February One Place parking deck. The paper is reportedly looking for office space to rent.

It’s worth noting that the News & Record has not hired anyone to replace local government reporter Margaret Moffett, who left the News & Record to become managing editor of the Triad Business Journal in June, which leaves it one short covering Greensboro and Guilford County.

It looks like it’s going to be a case of last one out, turn off the lights, and that doesn’t appear to far off.

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Roch Smith Jr., the mastermind behind local news aggregator Greensboro 101, sent me an email noting that he had reported on the fake Upscale magazine cover presented to the City Council as real by Black Network Television when it was trying to get a $300,000 loan from the city in 2013. Smith reported the fake magazine cover in 2014, which I knew, but since I didn’t use any of his material I didn’t mention that he discovered it first. Roch and I disagree on the precise meaning of the word discover, but Roch beat me to that story by four years and deserves credit.