Paul Nielsen/The (Waynesville) Mountaineer An effort to enact tougher new building standards in flood-prone areas in Waynesville is quickly losing steam. Town council last week held off on a proposal aimed to protect homeowners from future floods and make the town more resilient from heightened flooding. The sticking point with...

Santiago Ochoa/WFDD Radio When was the last time you went to the doctor? When did you last get a cancer screening? Those are the types of questions Dr. David Henao is used to asking patients on a daily basis. As a manager of equity and research at Novant Health, a...

Sarah Honosky/Asheville Citizen Times The city has selected a service provider for the newly minted Business Improvement District, which levies an additional tax on downtown property owners to fund supplemental services, like enhanced cleaning and a team of “community connectors.” The January vote came with relatively little fanfare — a...

Brian Murphy/WRAL News North Carolina and football coach Bill Belichick have made it official, releasing a signed employment agreement Thursday that could end the swirling speculation about the legendary NFL coach returning to the league this off-season. The school released a term sheet at the time of Belichick’s hiring that...

Wes Platt/SouthPoint Access The massive new Brickworks project is moving forward with Durham City Council approval with a unanimous vote after Tuesday’s meeting. Brickworks, proposed by Charlotte-based SpaceCraft, is expected to include 1,880 units – both apartments and townhouses – and mixed-use commercial space. The critical step achieved Tuesday was...

Aidyn Fischli/Port City Daily Dylan Bradshaw stared up at the ad lighting up one of the largest billboards in Times Square. The CeraVe campaign he had filmed with famous TikTok star Charli D’Amelio was now nearly the size of a football field. The popular skincare company had flown him out...

Becky Johnson/The (Waynesville) Mountaineer The clock ran out on hundreds of WNC families who lost their homes during Helene last week, as FEMA pulled the plug on hotel vouchers for those who allegedly no longer met the criteria for housing assistance. The timing couldn’t have been worse — coinciding with...

Jane Winik Sartwell/Carolina Public Press It is hard to overstate the damage that Tropical Storm Helene inflicted on farmers in Western North Carolina. High winds. Landslides. Extreme flooding. They all ripped apart their land, removing acres of fertile soil that took thousands of years and millions of dollars to cultivate....

Gavin Off/The Charlotte Observer Craig Watts, who once made a career of raising hundreds of thousands of chickens in North Carolina, knows the torment and the crushing financial stress that can come with the job. In the 1990s, he needed $400,000 in loans to build four chicken houses on his...

Victoria Dittmar & Paulina Ríos/InsightCrime When Mario heard the news in mid-May 2023, he immediately suspended his operations. After five years of booming fentanyl trafficking in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, “the bosses,” as he called the Sinaloa Cartel faction of the Chapitos, issued a blunt directive: stop all production...

The Associated Press A central North Carolina local school board member was sentenced to active prison time after being convicted of extortion and other crimes, with some related to the attempted blackmail of a congressional candidate. At the close of a trial Friday, jurors found Ronald Lee Johnson Jr. guilty...

Aaron Keck/WCHL Chapelboro The start of a new year in North Carolina also means a round of new laws that were set to take effect on January 1. One of the most high-profile such laws is HB10, which requires county sheriffs to comply with detainer requests from the federal office...

Helu Wang/USA Today Network Despite two days of heavy rain, property manager Rachael Lee was not expecting anything more severe than a power outage on the day she was on call. At 5:46 a.m. on Sept. 27, she was woken by a text from a co-worker asking if she was...

Will Atwater/NC Health News The recent fires ravaging Los Angeles have highlighted the dangers faced in firefighting — winds, fast-moving flames, smoke, chemical fumes — but it turns out that one of the most persistent hazards faced by firefighters could be the very clothing designed to protect them, according to...

Emily Walkenhorst/WRAL News About 312,000 North Carolina teachers’ social security numbers were exposed in the PowerSchool breach, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction told WRAL News. Another 910 students’ social security numbers were exposed, as well. The PowerSchool CEO met in a virtual call with school leaders Tuesday evening,...