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Más Latinos, más muertes

Return to main story Among the dozens of people waiting to honor Misael Martinez at Carrboro Town Hall last month was his former eighth-grade French teacher, Ms. Griffith, who thumbed through an old McDougle Middle School yearbook to a black-and-white thumbnail photo of a lanky, grinning, dark-haired boy with glasses. The queue quietly streamed by […]

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Incinerator likely for Ward PCB site in Wake

For more than 30 years, Ward Transformer, a Superfund site on 11 acres near Interstate 540 and the Raleigh-Durham Airport, has bled PCBs into dirt and ditch, woods and stream. The hazardous chemicalspolychlorinated biphenylshave trickled downstream into tributaries including Little Brier Creek and Brier Creek, flowing into the Brier Creek Reservoir and the popular fishing […]

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Study: N.C. can thrive on renewable energy

If North Carolina generated just 10 percent of its power from renewable energy sources and used energy more efficiently, it could reduce greenhouse gases, create jobs and generate additional property tax revenuewith no significant rate hikes to customers. But the promising results of a renewable energy feasibility study aren’t swaying the major utilities’ plans to […]

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One felon’s trash…

Behind the chain-link fence at the Drug Seizure Showroom stands a phalanx of 52-inch TVs, DVD players, Xboxes and even a set of fishing poles for the idle methmaker or moonshiner. And no self-respecting coke dealer would be without the showroom’s main event: a tricked-out orange golf cart with gold-spoked custom rims, white vinyl seats […]

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Housing authority critic evicted for selling DVDs

One week before Christmas, Larry Partée could be homeless. On Dec. 6, the Durham Housing Authority evicted Partée, president of the Preiss-Steele Residents’ Association, from the housing complex after District Court Judge David LaBarre ruled that he had sold $16 worth of pirated DVDs on DHA property for profit. The sale violated terms of Partée’s […]

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Abandoned mobile homes plague North Carolina

The abandoned trailers on Lots 166 and 167 at Stony Brook North Mobile Home Park in Raleigh sit as still as empty locust shells. Since last spring, when the homes were shed by their occupants, windows have been broken and sprayed with bullets. A child’s bike peeks from beneath the torn skirting. Inside one home, […]

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State regulators set standards for renewable energy sources

You have to appreciate the serendipity: On the heels of Duke Energy’s announcement that it will cost $3 billionnot $2 billion, as originally projectedto build its two proposed coal-fired power plants, the state is unveiling its renewable energy study. Under direction from the state Environmental Review Commission, the N.C. Utilities Commission sponsored a study to […]

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The Pesticide Education Project

2006 Citizen Award winners Margie Ellison | Lanya Shapiro & Traction | Chad Johnston | Andrew Pearson | The Pesticide Education Project Fawn Pattison’s introduction to toxic chemicals began 20 years ago at Emmell’s Septic Landfill, a Superfund site a half-mile away from her home in Galloway Township, N.J. “We walked by it all the […]

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Duke dodges John Poindexter’s past in terrorism speech

When Vice Admiral John Poindexter, the mastermind behind the United States government’s secretive and controversial Total Information Awareness network, spoke at Duke University last week as part of a lecture series on privacy, he noted that terrorists are “here among us today, but not tonight, we hope.” Yet, Duke Provost Peter Lange’s introduction of Poindexter […]

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Chatham County voters defeat redistricting plan; Tom Vanderbeck wins District 4 commissioners’ seat

The controversy over district voting fractured Chatham County by ideology and geography, politics and race. After more than a year of sniping, some of it voiced on the county’s populist online venue, the Chatham Chatlist, the referendum to replace at-large voting with a district system was defeated by a 54-45 margin. “I guess you guys […]

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