Some rural communities in Wyoming, Kansas and Georgia are "bucking the trend" and building new hospitals instead of closing them. Sublette County, Wyoming, is one of those places. The county has never had a hospital, but it's building a 10-bed, 40,000-square-foot hospital, "with a similarly sized attached long-term care facility."
Deteriorating dams have left many U.S. communities searching for affordable, safe options. "Dams across the country are aging, and also facing pressures from urban sprawl and intensifying floods wrought by climate change," reports Madeline Heim of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "The price tag to fix what’s broken, though, is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, meaning dam owners could face hard questions about what to do with them."
"Understanding how fentanyl saturated the drug supply, moving from the East Coast of the U.S. to the West, is critical to ending the worst drug crisis in American history."
A shared passion for protecting Colorado's Thompson Divide brought together a group of people with few other interests in common. "The drilling leases in a pristine corner of Colorado seemed like a done deal. But then an unlikely alliance of cowboys and environmentalists emerged. And things changed.
Despite the 24/7 availability of the 988 suicide and crisis hotlines across the country, U.S. suicide rates have continued to climb, with rural states facing some of the highest losses. One of the 988 program's biggest shortcomings has been its lack of caller location services, but that's about to change.
If Democrats want to gain votes in rural America, they need to be present to win. In tight races, even cutting into Republican margins can swing an election -- "Just ask Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin," writes Karen Tumulty in her opinion for The Washington Post.
The indefinite closure of a Boar's Head production facility in Jarratt, Virginia, is an added blow to the rural town's economy where the company was the largest employer. Boar's Head decided to close the plant after it was linked to a severe listeria outbreak, which has killed 10 people and hospitalized 59. Now, laid-off Boar's Head workers must face a tough job market in manufacturing-depressed southern Virginia.
Step by step, the Biden administration inches closer to green-lighting ioneer's Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine in Nevada, reports Ernest Scheyder of Reuters. Last week, it "published a key environmental report [which is] the last step needed before approving what would become one of the largest U.S. sources of the electric vehicle battery metal." But some conservationists are adamantly against the mine opening despite its cleaner energy purpose.
Part of the bipartisan infrastructure law aims to expand access to high-speed internet for all Americans. The rollout and the millions of dollars attached are overseen by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration through the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment, or BEAD, program. NTIA was under the scope last week during a House subcommittee hearing on how BEAD was faring.