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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The executive board of the Boy Scouts of America meets Wednesday to talk about whether to drop its policy to ban gay leaders and gay scouts. Activists delivered petitions with more than 1.4 million signatures to the national headquarters this week calling for an end to the ban. The issue has drawn fervent pleas and ignited a passionate debate about what the 100-year-old organization should do.
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Officials at Spelman College, a historically black women's college in Atlanta, have decided to scrap the school's NCAA program. With few students participating in organized sports, the college has decided to devote those funds to a fitness program designed to reach the entire student body. -
After the election, many conservatives are pondering their losses. Some say their anti-abortion principles weren't the problem — it was the Republican Party's failure to run a truly conservative candidate. They're vowing to change the party and continue their fight to restrict abortion. -
When the two sides couldn't reach an agreement last month, players were locked out of the Woodruff Arts Center. With the season set to begin in just one week, the musicians approved a deal with $5 million in concessions.
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A federal appeals court has ruled the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cannot be held responsible for the catastrophic flooding that took place in some New Orleans neighborhoods after Hurricane Katrina. The panel had ruled differently in March. Hundreds of property owners had sued the federal government saying a shipping channel made the flooding worse.
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Florida A&M University held a meeting on Thursday for students to talk about hazing. Last November drum major Robert Champion died in a hazing incident, and more than a dozen students face criminal charges. The event thrust the university and the issue of hazing into the national spotlight.
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For the first time in decades, the historically black college in Tallahassee played its first home game of the season without its famous Marching 100 band. The band was suspended for the year after drum major Robert Champion died as a result of a hazing incident last November. -
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.