Alarmed by November election results, four New Jersey Democratic women are now challenging Republican incumbents for a spot in the state’s congressional delegation

Navy pilots call it the helicopter dunker.

In what mimics a nighttime water crash, the pilots are strapped into a seat, blinded by opaque goggles, submerged and flipped over in a tank of water. They must free themselves from the seat, find the closed window on a mock wall and push their way out to safety.

Walter McMillian had already been sitting on death row for more than a year when Bryan Stevenson walked into his life. He’d landed there even before he was tried, convicted and sentenced to death for the 1986 murder of an 18-year-old white woman in Monroeville, Alabama.

Alicia Hart can tell you more about the brain than you may ever care to know. For the past six years, she has traveled from the frontal lobe around and back again, learning how information is processed, where sequencing and problem-solving occur, and how fear originates, all in an effort to see the world through the eyes of her seven-year-old autistic son, Ewan. The maternal instincts that guided through her older daughter’s formative years – the ability to anticipate fear, for example – were useless when it came to Ewan.

 Conservatives rolled out the welcome mat for business when they took control of state government, making clear that unleashing companies from regulatory burdens ranked at the top of their agenda. “The reason I’m running for governor is to represent business,” then Charlotte mayor and longtime Duke Energy employee Pat McCrory told a group from the Council of Independent Business Owners during a 2012 campaign stop in downtown Asheville.