Kathy Lohr
Whether covering the manhunt and eventual capture of Eric Robert Rudolph in the mountains of North Carolina, the remnants of the Oklahoma City federal building with its twisted metal frame and shattered glass, flood-ravaged Midwestern communities, or the terrorist bombings across the country, including the blast that exploded in Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, correspondent Kathy Lohr has been at the heart of stories all across the nation.
Lohr was NPR's first reporter based in the Midwest. She opened NPR's St. Louis office in 1990 and the Atlanta bureau in 1996. Lohr covers the abortion issue on an ongoing basis for NPR, including political and legal aspects. She has often been sent into disasters as they are happening, to provide listeners with the intimate details about how these incidents affect people and their lives.
Lohr filed her first report for NPR while working for member station KCUR in Kansas City, Missouri. She graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and began her journalism career in commercial television and radio as a reporter/anchor. Lohr also became involved in video production for national corporations and taught courses in television reporting and radio production at universities in Kansas and Missouri. She has filed reports for the NPR documentary program Horizons, the BBC, the CBC, Marketplace, and she was published in the Saturday Evening Post.
Lohr won the prestigious Missouri Medal of Honor for Excellence in Journalism in 2002. She received a fellowship from Vanderbilt University for work on the issue of domestic violence. Lohr has filed reports from 27 states and the District of Columbia. She has received other national awards for her coverage of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Midwestern floods of 1993, and for her reporting on ice storms in the Mississippi Delta. She has also received numerous awards for radio pieces on the local level prior to joining NPR's national team. Lohr was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. She now lives in her adopted hometown of Atlanta, covering stories across the southeastern part of the country.
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Dozens of abortion restrictions passed in the states during 2011 — nearly a record since the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. This year, anti-abortion groups say they'll focus on bills that would ban abortions at 20 weeks, limit insurance coverage and grant constitutional rights to embryos. -
With South Carolina's primary five days away, Republican presidential candidates directed their message to conservative voters in the state. Over the weekend Rick Santorum got the backing of a national group of evangelical leaders, and he's trying to parlay that into votes in the Palmetto State.
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Prosecutors in Georgia recently charged four members of a group called the Final Exit Network with assisting in suicides. Investigators say they could be involved in as many as 300 deaths. The group's president, Jerry Dincin, who was not charged, says the group isn't doing anything wrong.
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The Rev. Rick Warren, the conservative pastor tapped to deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration, drew some opposition Monday in Atlanta, where he was the keynote speaker at the Martin Luther King holiday celebration. Warren is the pastor of the 22,000-member Saddleback Church in California and author of A Purpose Driven Life.
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Barbara and Gary Ratner, who live in Atlanta, aren't eligible for unemployment assistance, so they're seeking creative ways to make ends meet. The couple — in their 60s — have drawn $10,000 out of retirement and are considering dropping their health insurance. -
Delta and Northwest's merger would create the world's largest airline in terms of traffic. But there is still a lot to be worked out. Regulators and shareholders need to be convinced. And Northwest's pilots union is saying it will do everything it can to block the deal.
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Published reports this weekend say Yahoo has sent a letter to Microsoft rejecting a bid by the giant software maker to buy the search-engine company. But the letter could just be a negotiating ploy.
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Bothinaa Mohammed is one of 4 million Iraqis who have fled their homes since 2003. She and her children arrived in the U.S. in August from Jordan, and she recently found work as a hotel housekeeper. What did she buy with her first paycheck? A Christmas tree. -
Ministries raise millions of dollars with little oversight. One Senate lawmaker wonders whether the lavish lifestyles of the ministers violate the churches' tax-exempt status. Six megachurches have been asked to respond by Dec. 6 to questions about their spending. -
FEMA tells workers to stay out of thousands of its stored travel trailers, amid concerns about exposure to hazardous fumes. A spokeswoman says formaldehyde emission levels rise when the trailers are closed in heat and humidity without ventilation.
