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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.

  • When Joel Goldman was diagnosed with a medical condition that makes him shake and stutter, he quit his law practice and started writing novels inspired by true crime in the Kansas City area. Eventually, he gave his disorder to FBI Agent Jack Davis, one of his main characters.
  • It's been 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr., began writing his famous "Letter From Birmingham Jail," a response to white Alabama clergymen who called him an "extremist" and told blacks they should be patient. But the time for waiting was over. Birmingham was the perfect place to take a stand.
  • The exhibit at Emory University in Atlanta lays out the history of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a group first presided over by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The group tackled issues of health care, poverty and gun violence — issues still seen as relevant today.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.