Main Street is a place but it is also an idea. It’s small-town retail. It’s locally owned shops selling products to hardworking townspeople. It’s neighbors with dependable blue-collar jobs in auto plants and coal mines. It’s a feeling of community and of having control over your life. It’s everything, in short, that seems threatened by global capitalism and cosmopolitan elites in big cities and fancy suburbs. Mr. [node:read-more:link]
Rural hospitals are facing one of the great slow-moving crises in American health care. Across the U.S., they've been closing at a rate of about one per month since 2010. About 14 percent of the U.S. population lives in rural counties, a proportion that has dropped as the number of urban dwellers grows. Declining populations mean a smaller base of patients and less revenue. And the hospitals are caught in a squeeze: Because many patients in the countryside are older and sicker, they require more intensive and often expensive care. [node:read-more:link]
A small-town Iowa newspaper with a staff of 10 people - most of whom are related to each other – has won a Pulitzer Prize for taking on powerful agricultural companies over farm pollution. Art Cullen, who owns the Storm Lake Times with his brother John, acknowledged it wasn’t easy taking on agriculture in a state like Iowa where you see hundreds of miles of farm fields in every direction. The Cullens lost a few friends and a few advertisers, but never doubted they were doing the right thing. [node:read-more:link]
A team of chemists and engineers at the U.S. Geological Survey and University of Iowa reported that they found neonicotinoids in treated drinking water. It marks the first time that anyone has identified this class of pesticide in tap water, the researchers write in Environmental Science & Technology Letters. Gregory LeFevre, a study author and U of Iowa environmental engineer, told The Washington Post that the find was important but not immediate cause for alarm. [node:read-more:link]
Maine lobstermen are plagued by opioid addiction, leading to deaths, ruined lives and even fishing violations to pay for the habit. Some in recovery also recognize the challenge: Getting help to an intensely independent breed that rarely asks for it. For years, industry leaders and regulators ignored the drug use. They didn’t want to risk tainting the iconic image of the Maine lobsterman, that rough-and-tumble ocean cowboy who braves the elements to hunt lobster, the backbone of the state’s $1.6 billion-a-year industry. [node:read-more:link]
Feeding peanut butter kibbles to millions of prairie dogs – by flinging the treats from four-wheelers and dropping them from drones – could be the next big thing to help a spunky little weasel that almost went extinct. Slinky with a robber-like black mask across its eyes, the endangered black-footed ferret is a fierce predator. The up to 2-foot-long weasel feeds almost exclusively on prairie dogs, rodents that live in vast colonies regularly decimated by plague outbreaks.The disease keeps threatening the food supply of ferrets bred in captivity and reintroduced on the landscape. [node:read-more:link]
To boost the number of beds available for low-income residents, the federal government has granted California, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York a waiver of an obscure Medicaid rule that prohibits the use of federal dollars for addiction treatment provided in facilities with more than 16 beds. Seven other states — Arizona, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Utah and Virginia — are seeking similar permission. [node:read-more:link]
Thieves are illegally cutting down thousands of birch trees in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin to make a quick buck off city dwellers who love the paper-white logs, limbs and twigs in their home decor. The thefts have caught county sheriffs and state natural resource officials by surprise over the past few months, sending them scrambling to determine how big the problem is and how to keep it from getting worse. [node:read-more:link]
Rural America lost jobs in 2016, according to a Daily Yonder analysis of federal jobs data, as the growth in employment continued to concentrate in the nation’s largest cities. Eight out of 10 jobs created in 2016 were in the 51 metropolitan areas of a million people or more. These giant urban areas gained 1.2 million jobs between January 2016 and January of this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In rural counties, there are nearly 90,000 fewer jobs this January than in the same month a year ago. Blue counties are in metropolitan areas and gained jobs. [node:read-more:link]
A new document filed in the ongoing dognapping lawsuit against the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) demonstrates the long-term, systemic pattern of trespassing, pet theft, and killing that occurs as part of PETA’s pet slaughterhouse operation at its Norfolk headquarters. [node:read-more:link]
