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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Growing up near Atlanta, Karin Slaughter learned that tragic crimes can happen to anyone — even children. She says she sets her crime fiction in Atlanta as a way to honor the city's people and turning points, from the election of its first black mayor to the 1996 Olympics. -
The culture of hazing is back in the national spotlight after charges were filed against 13 people in connection with the hazing death of a Florida A&M University student. Florida has one of the toughest anti-hazing laws in the country, but legal experts say prosecuting the crime is tricky. -
The Trayvon Martin case became a national story only after the family's attorney, Benjamin Crump, launched a campaign to draw the attention of the media and civil rights activists. It's proved a tried-and-true strategy for the prominent Florida attorney. -
In Florida, a grand jury will now look into the killing of an unarmed black teenager. And, after weeks of calls for more investigation of the case, the U.S. Justice Department is also involved. Trayvon Martin was shot to death by a neighborhood watch captain late last month. The shooter, who is Latino, says he acted in self defense. But an attorney for Martin's family provided a different account on Tuesday, saying the teenager thought he was being stalked.
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Georgia holds the biggest delegate prize next week on Super Tuesday. It's also a critical test for the candidacy of former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who represented a Georgia Congressional district for two decades.
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One day after losing three contests to former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney traveled to Atlanta for a campaign event. Georgia holds its primary on March 6, which is Super Tuesday. And the state would seem to have built-in advantages for another of Romney's rivals. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is from Georgia.
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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.
