Mississippi

Feb. 20 (UPI) — The University of Mississippi Medical Center closed its 35 clinics throughout Mississippi on Friday after being targeted in a ransomware attack.

Medical center officials also canceled all elective medical procedures that were scheduled for the day and rescheduled all but dialysis appointments at the medical center’s location in the Jackson Medical Mall in the state’s capital.

That medical center remained open and provided medical services on Friday. Hospital officials said they and federal law enforcement were in contact with those who carried out the ransomware attack.

“We continue to work with federal authorities and national experts in cyberattack response as we evaluate the extent of the attack and our next steps,” medical center officials said in a Facebook post Thursday.

“We expect this to be a multi-day event and will communicate helpful information when available.”

The university medical center’s hospitals and emergency departments also were open. Officials said they plan to announce any closures that might affect those healthcare service providers if it becomes necessary.

University officials also canceled all online classes Friday, but in-person classes were held.

University Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs LouAnn Woodward confirmed a ransomware attack affected the medical center’s key network systems, including Epic and its medical records.

Woodward said officials at the medical center shut down its IT systems out of precaution and do not know when the matter might be resolved.

In the meantime, doctors and medical center staff were using pen and paper while continuing to provide medical services for patients until the IT system is restored.

The university health clinics provide many services, including treating cancer and chronic pain.

Brad Arnold, the 47-year-old cofounder and lead singer of the Mississippi rock band 3 Doors Down, died Saturday, nine months after revealing a diagnosis of kidney cancer.

The band announced Arnold’s death in a social media post, which said he had “helped redefine mainstream rock music, blending post-grunge accessibility with emotionally direct songwriting.”

In May 2025, Arnold announced that the band would be canceling its summer tour because he had advanced-stage kidney cancer that has spread to his lungs.

“That’s not real good,” he said of his diagnosis. “But you know what? We serve a mighty God, and He can overcome anything. So I have no fear. I really sincerely am not scared of it at all.” He added, “I’d love for you to lift me up in prayer every chance you get.”

He was public about his battle with alcoholism. He said he started drinking in his teens, an addiction fueled by the pressure of stepping on a tour bus at 20 years old.

“It’s just a lot to hand a 20 year old,” he told a Christian podcaster. He thanked religion for his sobriety and took to proclaiming his faith on stage.

Born in Escatawpa, Mississippi in Sept. 1978, Arnold formed the band with friends Todd Harrell and Matt Roberts in the mid-1990s.

As a 15-year-old in algebra class, he wrote the song “Kryptonite,” drumming out the beat on his desk.

“I used to be our drummer,” he told the lead vocalist of the band Candlebox in an interview. “I only became the singer because we didn’t have a singer. That beat just came from just sitting on a desk. I probably wrote that song in the length of time that it took to me to just to write it down. It really was just one of those that kind of fell out of the sky.”

It became the band’s breakout hit in 2000 and earned a Grammy nomination.

“The Better Life,” the first of the band’s six albums, sold more than 6 million copies, and the 2005 album “Seventeen Days” entered the national charts at No. 1. That year, reviewing a Los Angeles performance, a critic noted Arnold’s “heartland drawl” and sleeveless denim shirt, calling him “less punk than Springsteen.”

The band released its final album, “Us And The Night,” in 2016. The following year, the band played at the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Arnold is survived by his wife, Jennifer.

In the 1930s, the white matriarchs of tiny Natchez, Miss. — one of the 19th century’s wealthiest American towns thanks to the slavery-driven cotton trade — opened their stately antebellum mansions to save themselves from economic ruin. Tourism dollars flowed in, even if the prettified Southern history being sold ignored the immoral plague that built its riches in the first place.

By turns cheeky and disturbing, blunt and nuanced, Suzannah Herbert’s excellent documentary “Natchez” offers its own guided tour of a memory-challenged community (population: 14,000) struggling to reconcile its exquisite, carefully scrubbed façade with the inconvenient truths some would like to see better represented in the narrative.

That longstanding erasure has made Natchez a less commercially friendly prospect to younger generations of visitors. And meaningful progress turns out to be much harder than simply refashioning an exhibit or a docent’s spiel.

Can a place like Natchez — home to both a cherished tourist pageantry called the Pilgrimage and the slave market site called Forks of the Road — find a harmonious existence between its green-and-serene sightseeing pleasures and its terrible past? Its optimistic mayor seems to think so, if the first scene is any indication, in which he exalts a “new Natchez” at a spirited ladies’ luncheon held by the tour-umbrella association, the Garden Club, and featuring that group’s first Black member, Deborah Cosey.

Cosey, we learn, runs Concord Quarters, a burned-down plantation’s last remaining building, which once housed its enslaved. (She also lives there.) Centering the work and lives of these forgotten souls is a mission she sees as telling “the rest of the story.” In one tense scene with her white colleagues, Cosey winces at their version of historical enlightenment — the reclamation project is moving at a horse-drawn carriage’s pace.

The big house is still the main show, antiquated customs and preserved finery still the plot, even as some of these hosting descendants, faced with declining revenues, grasp that there’s an increasing awkwardness to the “Gone With the Wind” myth they’re peddling. Meanwhile, charming and knowledgeable Black pastor Tracy “Rev” Collins offers a lively van tour (“See the real Mississippi”), an educational reality check about slavery’s legacy laced with witty asides.

The divide gets more complicated when the documentary trails openly gay veteran Garden Club member David Garner, whose charity work benefiting the LGBTQ+ community would seem to point to an old world’s shifting tolerance. But when this outlier’s intensely Southern-fried tour patter reveals a chillingly deep-seated racism, it slaps you right back into sobriety about Natchez’s roots — a neo-Confederate mindset that doesn’t care if a camera is there to record it.

“Natchez” is full of quietly charged moments in dreamily scenic surroundings, one result of Noah Collier’s lush cinematography, deployed like a deliberately performative nostalgia that lets us know there’s always more to see if we look (and listen) closely enough. This stylistic approach allows Herbert to expertly avoid inadvertently selling Natchez itself, instead focusing on how this town’s peculiar relationship to an overwhelming past still lives inside those doing the selling.