Slaughterhouse protest set

Slaughterhouse protest set

HARRISONBURG — An animal rights group will hold a Labor Day protest of Rocco Enterprises’ new lamb slaughtering facility in the northern Rockingham County town of Timberville, organizers said Friday.

Sean O’Gara of Farm Animal Rights Movement, a Washington, D.C.-based group, said two earlier protests were postponed when the slaughterhouse failed to open when originally planned.

Rocco spokeswoman Gail Price said delays in equipment

Klan plans Bristol parade 1

As a Ku Klux Klan group plans a parade for next Saturday in Bristol, observers of the white-supremacy organization say the Klan probably has fewer than 200 members in Virginia, and its popularity is waning.

“The Klan has been relatively inactive in Virginia,” said Ira Gissen, regional director in Richmond for the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League. “For all intents and purposes, it has all but disappeared from the state.”

Klan leaders from North Carolina, however, say they have active groups in Virginia and membership is growing.

“We’ve got two units up there,” said Glenn Miller, leader of the White Patriot Party, formerly the Carolina Knights of the KKK.

“We send about 5,000 copies of our newspaper to Virginia each month.”

The organization planning Saturday’s rally is the Christian Knights of the KKK, a group led by Virgil Griffin and based in North Carolina. Griffin was among nine Klansmen and Nazis acquitted of civil rights violations in a 1984 trial for the 1979 deaths of five anti-Klan demonstrators at a rally in Greensboro.

Prison debate rages

RICHMOND — Charges and counter-charges are flying between Republican candidate for governor Wyatt Durrette and his Democratic opponent, Gerald Baliles, over who can better solve Virginia’s prison problems.

Mr. Durrette said in a series of statewide news confer