News & Issues
Stories from around the Kansas City Metro area on a variety of topics.
Take 5 for Your Health
North-Central Kansas County Copes With Soaring Alzheimer’s Rate Almost every day, Jay Mellies leaves his home in Clay Center and drives about 20 miles north to visit his wife at a nursing home in neighboring Washington County. Some days when he comes in she tells staff, “I don’t know that guy.” Then she smiles. It’s a…
‘I Can’t Let It Go’ | Part I
EDITOR’S NOTE: This first-person account of one journalist’s attempts to shed light on potential problems in the U.S. justice system is part of a larger effort by KCPT and The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) to explore the meaning of justice in the context of the 1988 explosion in south Kansas City that killed six…
Cops and Pastors
Police brutality has rocked communities from the East Coast to the Midwest, including here in Kansas City with the shooting death of Ryan Stokes, and a recent Gallup poll found that Americans’ trust in police is at its lowest point in more than two decades. The Kansas City Police Department and Council Member Jermaine Reed…
Sounding Smarter
China is set to build a massive cow cloning facility with an eye toward eventually cloning human beings. Isn’t China making enough human beings the old-fashioned way? In case you haven’t been paying attention, the Secret Service is a hot mess. According to a scathing report released on Thursday, the agency has seen at least a half-dozen previously undisclosed security…
Charting New Ground
Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS) on Tuesday won approval for an education initiative that is unique within Missouri. Meeting in Jefferson City, the Missouri State Board of Education OK’d KCPS’s plan to open a kindergarten-thru-sixth-grade school that will be free of many of the rules and regulations set out by the Missouri Department of Elementary…
Take 5 for Your Health
Topeka Child Abuse Case Raises Questions About Kansas Policy On Gay Adoptions The arrest of a Topeka couple on child abuse charges has raised new questions about a custody battle that some say illustrates a pattern of discrimination against gay Kansans seeking to adopt children. The 2014 custody case pitted a lesbian couple from Wichita,…
‘I can’t let it go.’
It happened more than a quarter century ago. The people deemed responsible are serving life sentences in federal prison. The people directly affected — the families of the dead — likely have done their best to move on. It’s over. That’s probably how many Kansas Citians feel about one of the city’s greatest tragedies: the Nov. 29,…
What Is The Carbon Footprint Of A Typical Thanksgiving Dinner?
Mike Berners-Lee may not be an expert on the American Thanksgiving. A native of the UK, he’s never actually had the pleasure of experiencing one. But as one of the world’s leading researchers on the carbon footprint of—well—everything (he even wrote a book subtitled “The Carbon Footprint of Everything”), he’s plenty familiar with the impacts of…
Sounding Smarter
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey will not apologize for downing a Russian fighter jet near the Syrian border. Let’s hope nothing comes of the incident. It would be a shame to see anything threaten the stability of the Middle East. In what has become a great American holiday tradition, fights broke out across the country over…
A Turkey in Good Faith
Ahsan Latif, a devout Muslim from Lawrence, Kansas, understands people’s misconceptions about Muslims. He also understands how events like the Paris shootings can paint his faith in a negative light for anyone watching the disturbing images on television. “Most people have never even met a Muslim,” Latif said. On a recent Saturday morning, Latif is…