Listen to certain American billionaires, and you might believe Americans will be on their way to Mars any day now, but two Charlottesville authors are skeptical and have written a book about the challenges of space travel.

All 140 members of the Virginia General Assembly will return to Richmond this week for a brief session to consider the governor's amendments and vetoes. One of the amendments they'll be considering involves bullying in schools.

“These machines really helped us, running a business on a daily basis. We had customers come in and buy products which helped with daily sales,” one store owner told Radio IQ.

Three shows will be held April 19 and 20th.

Drug addiction remains a serious problem here in Virginia with more than 26-hundred overdose deaths in 2023. In Buckingham County, near Charlottesville, one program is taking a unique approach to helping addicts who are leaving prison or were sentenced to drug treatment instead of incarceration.

While many areas in Virginia are losing population through out-migration, Danville is among those seeing more people move in than move out, about 800 more over the past three years. And it's gaining more new residents than some much larger cities.Fred Echols spoke with Dwayne Yancey of Cardinal News about the latest data.

Youngkin called his amendments the “Common Ground” budget and in some places, he did find such common ground according to a new analysis by the left-leaning Commonwealth Institute.

They're called zombie mortgages because critics say they were dead but then came back to life when predatory lenders bought them for pennies on the dollar and then tried to collect huge interest rates.

“We’ll work with the school system to try to ferret out how this happened,” Newport News Commonwealth's Attorney Howard Gwynn said at a news conference. “And based on the facts of the law, if we believe somebody else needs to be charged, trust me when I tell you, they will be charged.”

The General Assembly is parsing through the governor’s many amendments and vetoes.Jeff Schapiro, political columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Michael Pope recap the week in politics and state government.