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Black lung has surged in Appalachia in recent years. Research has tied the epidemic to silica dust, which can burrow deep into miners’ lungs.
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The political shift in recent decades has been dramatic across the Ohio Valley, which was once defined by union power and labor issues, but now is dominated by social issues like abortion, racial justice and gay marriage.
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It’s a cloudy summer morning in the mountains, and Lois Thompson has just started heading home from the Letcher County Farmers Market in Whitesburg.
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After heavy flooding in eastern Kentucky, locals and officials are frustrated with the federal government’s system for disaster aid. People say the process is confusing, sending some of the most vulnerable through a bureaucratic maze, and sometimes requiring documentation lost during the catastrophe.
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Luke Glaser, city commissioner in Hazard, says eastern Kentucky is frontpage news right now and that’s attracting volunteers. When that attention moves on, he worries the help will too.
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Over the past week, Havanna Thacker has transformed a historic high school in Carr Creek, Kentucky into a supply depot. While her mother whips up trays of food in a tiny cafeteria, she stocks the gym with supplies that people bring by the carload.
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The Kentucky floods claimed at least 37 lives, and Knott County has claimed the most deaths thus far, at 17 and counting. Now, the community is picking up the pieces.
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As the water receded, it left a mix of stinking mud and tossed-up furniture, and a slowly rising grief.
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Though the former coal camp town still has an active community, politically, it was defunct. No one had been running the town for years. With no one to oversee the dispensation of municipal road funds and coal severance, the city’s services fell into disrepair.
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Aside from the view of the razor wire fence and the guard stationed in the nursery, there are few indications that it is a prison. The nursery consists of individual rooms, a kitchen where the mothers can prepare meals for the babies, a laundry room, a living room and a classroom.
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It wasn’t long ago that Tonya Jones felt she couldn’t be out and proud in her eastern Kentucky hometown of Pikeville. She used to drive three hours to Lexington for any semblance of an LGBTQ-friendly community.
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It was already difficult to get an abortion in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia, but it’s about to become almost impossible after the U.S. Supreme Court left it up to states to decide reproductive rights.