RICHMOND, Va. (NNPA)—Christine Richardson was a basketball standout at Virginia State University. Tina Watkins was a track and field star at Huguenot High School in Richmond, Va. Now as adults, they’ve used that competitive spirit to knock down barriers and climb to the top in a male dominated profession.

Richardson and Watkins recently became the first women to rise through the ranks and become battalion chiefs with the Richmond Department of Fire and Emergency Services. Both Watkins and Richardson ran the full gauntlet; recruit, firefighter, lieutenant, captain, to battalion chief.

HISTORIC PROMOTION—New city Fire Department Battalion Chiefs Tina Watkins, left, and Christine Richardson chat at their historic promotion. (Photo by Jerome Reid/Richmond Free Press)

by Jenny Barchfield

PARIS (AP)—Toni Morrison is “beloved” in France, the country’s culture minister said Nov. 3, as he inducted the celebrated U.S. novelist into the elite Legion of Honor society.

In a ceremony in a gilded hall in the ministry, Frederic Mitterrand pinned a red and gold medal onto the celebrated author’s jacket as a scrum of photographers snapped away.

“BELOVED” AUTHOR—U.S. novelist Toni Morrison poses with her son Ford Morrison after being awarded of the Legion of Honor by French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand, unseen, in Paris, Nov. 3. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus).

Mitterrand called Morrison—a Nobel laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize—“the greatest American novelist of her time.”

“I want to tell you that you incarnate what’s most beautiful about America...(that) which gives a Black child, born during segregation into a modest family in a medium-sized Ohio city an exceptional destiny,” Mitterrand told Morrison, as she listened on from a gilt-covered armchair nearby. “You were the first woman writer to tell the painful history of Afro-Americans.”

In an interview with CNN's Larry King scheduled for airing Monday, Bush says she sat next to Palin once and "thought she was beautiful."

PALIN'S ALASKA—Sarah Palin waits by her husband Todd's boat before heading up river to see fish being counted in Dillingham, Alaska as part of a documentary for the TLC channel. (AP Photo/Discovery Communications, Gilles Mingasson)

by Maryclaire Dale

PHILADELPHIA (AP)—A Pennsylvania woman should get the NFL pension of former Philadelphia Eagle running back Tom Sullivan because he never divorced her before marrying again, a federal judge has ruled.

TWO WIVES—This Nov. 27, 1973, photo shows Philadelphia Eagles football player Tom Sullivan in the locker room at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium, after a game against the New York Giants. (AP Photo/File)

Barbara Sullivan of Summerville, S.C., who has two daughters from her 16-year marriage to Sullivan, is no longer entitled to the $2,700-a-month spousal benefit, the judge said. He found that marriage void under South Carolina’s bigamy law.

The NFL must now send the pension payments to Lavona Hill, of Folcroft, whose 1979 marriage to Sullivan was never dissolved when they went their separate ways in 1983.