Displaying the spirit with which Flying Squirrels was picked as the name of Richmond’s new baseball team, the Double-A franchise’s general manager expressed outside-the-box approval yesterday. “Let me be the first one to say: ‘Let’s go nuts!‘“ Bill Papierniak said.

A woman linked to three mysterious deaths will plead guilty next week to discarding her boyfriend’s body in a well on his property in Louisa County, her attorney said yesterday. Ulisa Mary Chavers has confessed to authorities that she put Reginal Cody Bowles’ body in the 33-foot-deep well, said her attorney, Mike Caudill. The body, wrapped in sleeping bags, was found in March in some water at the bottom of the unused well. Bowles disappeared in early 2007.

Voters have taken their swings. Now, we wait for the name. Tomorrow, Richmond’s Double-A baseball franchise will announce its nickname. The finalists are the Flatheads, Flying Squirrels, Hush Puppies, Rhinos and Rock Hoppers.

Nearly half of Virginia voters oppose President Barack Obama’s health-care initiative, according to a Richmond Times-Dispatch poll, which also shows his popularity here fading. Forty-nine percent are against the Obama program, while 39 percent favor it and 12 percent are undecided. The poll, conducted for The Times-Dispatch last Tuesday to Thursday by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research, indicates eight in 10 voters fear that a defining feature of the Obama proposal—a public option for health insurance—will drive up their taxes.

A 9-year-old Albemarle County boy who had been diagnosed with a flu-like illness died Saturday at the University of Virginia Medical Center. Carson Raymond, a third-grader at Woodbrook Elementary School, had an underlying heart condition, his parents said Sunday. It was not immediately known whether he had swine flu. “Carson was just a very unlucky boy that this happened to,“ said Jennifer Raymond, the boy’s mother.

Does Richmond have a hankering for Hush Puppies? That was the winner of CNBC’s push Wednesday for a wild-card entry in the Richmond baseball name-theteam contest. Hush Puppies joins Flatheads, Flying Squirrels, Hambones, Rhinos and Rock Hoppers, names previously submitted by the public and chosen as finalists by the Double-A team’s management. Hush Puppies was chosen from more than 9,000 votes during a 12-hour period.

Coulter In nearly seven weeks on the job, Virginia’s new computer boss has sacked top executives, worked to strengthen ties to state agencies and taken steps to prevent interruptions in IT services that have ranged from hiccups to complete shutdowns. But Chief Information Officer George F. Coulter said he’s just starting to leaf through the voluminous contract that binds the Virginia Information Technologies Agency to its giant, embattled contractor, Northrop Grumman.

When I tracked down Bill Rice yesterday, he was grabbing a roll of duct tape from a van and hustling into William Fox Elementary School. “Grunt work!“ he said with a smile. Rice, taking a day of vacation from his real job, was hauling audio speakers, connecting microphone wires and doing pretty much whatever needed doing to help a group of Russian throat-singers here for the Richmond Folk Festival. The band got its weekend started early by performing at a couple of elementary schools.

A judge yesterday described conditions in a home overrun with dozens of cats as the most grotesque he has seen in 25 years of judicial service. Staring silently at a sheaf of pictures of the dwelling’s interior, Chesterfield General District Judge Robert D. Laney blanched and told the home’s occasional occupant that the pictures were worse than those he has viewed of German prison camps, homicide victims and lifeless teenage drivers.

The father of quadruple-homicide victim Melanie Wells drove from West Virginia to pick her up and waited outside her friend’s house in Farmville for seven hours Sept. 16.

The Virginia NAACP called it an abomination and a sign of disrespect. The owner of a downtown Richmond strip club called it exercising his right to free speech.

New operation includes the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as well as State Police, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, the National Guard and state Fire Programs Department.

For R. Creigh Deeds, the latest setback in his campaign for governor wasn’t so much a plot twist as a rerun. Four years ago in his bid for attorney general, Deeds failed to receive an endorsement from fellow Democrat L. Douglas Wilder. He eventually lost to Republican Bob McDonnell by a mere 360 votes. Now comes Act II of Deeds-McDonnell, and you’d think Deeds would have spent the past four years rehabbing his relationship with Wilder. But Thursday, Wilder again declined to back him.

The second debate between Democrat R. Creigh Deeds and Republican Bob McDonnell featured the most pointed and prickly exchanges between the candidates to date. The debate came as a new poll showed the race about even.

Debbie Smith, forced from her Williamsburg home in 1989 and raped in nearby woods, is not an anonymous victim. Her attacker, Norman D. Jimmerson, was caught in 1995 by Virginia’s fourth DNA “cold hit.“ Smith began speaking out publicly for victims and helped lead to congressional passage of the Debbie Smith Act of 2004. In 2006, she decided she needed to meet with Jimmerson, now serving life in prison, and he was willing.