Charlie Fossen/Port City Daily The battle for clean drinking water in southeastern North Carolina continues, this time focusing on the chemical 1,4-dioxane, with local governments and utility providers demanding action from the state. A series of separate letters sent over the past few months from New Hanover County Commissioners, Wilmington...

Adam Wagner/WUNC Radio Duke Energy is not moving forward with wind energy off North Carolina’s coast after determining proposals from three developers are more expensive than solar panels and battery storage that result in the same amount of energy. The N.C. Utilities Commission’s carbon and resource plan finalized last fall...

Gary D. Robertson/The Associated Press The North Carolina Supreme Court issued favorable rulings Friday for bars and their operators in litigation seeking monetary compensation from the state for COVID-19 restrictions first issued by then-Gov. Roy Cooper that shuttered their doors and, in their view, treated them unfairly compared to restaurants....

Cory Vaillancourt/Smoky Mountain News Weeks after a bitter dispute over a Democratic gala laid bare divisions in Western North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, the field is shifting again. Moe Davis, who joined other candidates in protesting the event’s handling and was first to enter the race back in May, said...

Aarik Long/The (Waynesville) Mountaineer Spontaneous combustion deep within a flood debris landfill blanketed the greater Canton area with smoke this week, and landfill operators and firefighters currently have no way to extinguish the enormous smoldering mountain of mulch. “It’s been on fire, that we know of, deep down inside of...

Ben Crosbie/WCHL Chapelboro Clinical research company Thermo Fisher Scientific held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the opening of its new facility in Mebane on Thursday. Production will begin within the next few weeks at the 375,000-square-foot facility, which will focus mainly on manufacturing precision pipette tips for use in labs...

Nancy McCleary/Sanford Herald The Lee County commissioners voted to move ahead with the process involved in securing a lease agreement from the state for the Endor Iron Furnace property. The 426-acre tract along the Deep River in Cumnock is a designated historic site owned by the state, according to Chad...

Brianna Atkinson/WUNC Radio North Carolina could take a $3 billion hit to its economy if a White House request to slash National Institutes of Health funding ends up in the final federal budget. In its discretionary budget proposal for next fiscal year, the Trump Administration recommended a 40% cut to...

Liz McLaughlin/WRAL News Waves from Hurricane Erin surged over N.C. Highway 12, Wednesday, pushing seawater and sand across the asphalt and breaching dunes along the fragile barrier islands of the Outer Banks. For longtime residents, scenes like this are no longer rare. And a new collaborative study suggests that these...

Brenna Flanagan/Port City Daily The Brunswick County Board of Education voted to pay for its students’ Advanced Placement exams this school year after the North Carolina Senate chose to nix its coverage in its proposed budget. The school board took up the issue at its Tuesday committee meetings. Though the...

Amy McCraw/Hendersonville Lightning Not much has changed on Lake Summit nearly a year after Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina. Water continues to pour freely over the inoperable and aging dam on the lake. And while the Scottsdale, Ariz., company that owns the Tuxedo Hydroelectric Project and state inspectors say...

Guy Lucas Enterprise/The (High Point) Enterprise Classes at High Point University began this week with a freshman class nearly 10% larger than last year’s, the university announced Thursday. The class numbers 1,671 students, up 143, or 9.4%, from last year’s freshman class and accounts for the bulk of HPU’s overall...

Kyle Perrotti/Smoky Mountain News In the wake of the controversy surrounding former Swain County Sheriff Curtis Cochran, the new sheriff, Brian Kirkland, only a month and a half on the job, will have company on the ballot come 2026. While sheriff candidates filing this early isn’t unheard of (there’s already...

Andrew Marshall/The (Waynesville) Mountaineer A bridge across Jonathan Creek that was destroyed by Helene has still not been repaired, leaving residents in the area frustrated and confused about the delay. Haywood County Bridge 46 connects Coleman Mountain Road to Jonathan Creek Road near the Interstate 40 exit 20 entrance ramp....

Jeremy McDermott/InSight Crime Even as the infamy of the Tren de Aragua grows in the Americas, its cohesion and organization are weakening. The assertion by the regime of Nicolás Maduro that Tren de Aragua has been wiped out in Venezuela is fiction. The taking of the prison of Tocorón, the...