Reporting from the coastal towns of Coos Bay and North Bend in southwestern Oregon

Mostly employed in densely forested pockets of the Pacific Northwest and the South, loggers have the highest rate of fatal on-the-job injuries of any civilian occupation in the nation, outpacing roofers, hunters and underground mining machine operators.

About 100 of every 100,000 logging workers die from work injuries, compared with four per 100,000 for all workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“There is a mix of physical factors — heavy equipment and, of course, the massive trees,” said Marissa Baker, a professor of occupational health at the University of Washington who has researched the logging industry. “Couple that with steep terrain and unforgiving weather and the rural aspect of the work, and it leads to great danger.”

Read more at The New York Times.

Reporting from Maui, Hawaii

Twisted and charred aluminum mixed with shards of glass still lines the floor of the industrial warehouse where Victoria Martocci once operated her scuba diving business. After a wildfire tore through West Maui, all that remained of her 36-foot boat, the Extended Horizons II, were a pair of engines.

That was six months ago, but Ms. Martocci and her husband, Erik Stein, who are weighing whether to rebuild the business, which he started in 1983, said the same questions filled their thoughts. “What will this island look like?” Ms. Martocci asked. “Will things ever be close to being the same?”

In early August, what began as a brush fire burst into the town of Lahaina, a popular tourist destination, all but leveling it, destroying large swaths of West Maui and killing at least 100 people in the nation’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century.

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Reporting from Truth or Consequences, N.M.

From his tiny gem store in southern New Mexico, Robert Hanseck spends his days untangling chakra beads and answering questions about the healing properties of amethyst crystals. After four decades behind the register, he has met thousands of wellness-minded tourists eager to explore the hot springs that span the region.

But he almost never sees the type of traveler he was promised would transform his small town of Truth or Consequences: space enthusiasts.

“It’s been a flop,” he said of Spaceport America, a project that was conceived as the vanguard of commercial space travel — and that has been promoted by state officials for more than two decades as a launchpad for the local economy.

Read more at The New York Times

This article was reported from several cities, including Salt Lake City, Atlanta and San Francisco

I slide into a cushy leather chair in this bustling shop next to a small flooring business. The hum of clippers echoes throughout the room.

Jay Organez swoops a crisp cape across my shoulders and grabs a pick, combing it through my hair as I describe my go-to cut: a little off the top with a shadow fade on the sides.

My eyes scan the Northern California shop — 22 chairs in a half circle around the room, some of the individual stations with the Instagram handle of a barber painted above the mirror. A framed photo of former President Barack Obama hangs on a wall, and the TV is tuned to highlights from a recent Golden State Warriors basketball game.

But the volume is turned down low, and instead I hear snippets of conversations — quick descriptions of desired cuts, followed by comfortable banter about politics (Donald Trump running for president — again!) and sports (LeBron James passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for the N.B.A. career scoring record) and life (a 20-something moving in with his girlfriend).

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LOS ANGELES — In the two years since nationwide social justice protests followed the murder of George Floyd, California has undertaken the nation’s most sweeping effort yet to explore some concrete restitution to Black citizens to address the enduring economic effects of slavery and racism.

A nine-member Reparations Task Force has spent months traveling across California to learn about the generational effects of racist policies and actions. The group, formed by legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020, is scheduled to release a report to lawmakers in Sacramento next year outlining recommendations for state-level reparations.

“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” said Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a member of the task force.

Read more at The New York Times

NEW YORK  — Kristina Peterson anxiously tapped the heels of her boots on the tile floor inside the brightly lit lobby. Moments earlier, she had given her date of birth to an intake coordinator and answered an inquiry about the drug she planned to use.

“Heroin,” she said, referring tothe tiny glassine envelope stamped “Off White” tucked inside her black purse.

For much of the last decade, Peterson has been hooked on heroin, her addiction becoming increasingly severe and public. Occasionally, she has shot up in quiet corners of subway stations as she waited for the E train back to the apartment where she lived in Queens. She sought to battle her addiction by taking methadone, but soon relapsed and was rushed to an emergency room after she overdosed in a park a few blocks from an elementary school.

“This is nothing I’m proud of,” she said on a recent afternoon while sitting inside an overdose prevention center, one of two in New York City that are the first authorized by a local government in the U.S. But “if I’m getting high, I want to do it here.”

Read more at Los Angeles Times

SEATTLE — Thuy Do couldn’t look away from the devastating clip playing on a loop on television news — hundreds of Afghans running alongside a massive U.S. Air Force cargo plane, desperately trying to flee their home country. The frantic frowns felt so familiar, reminding her of images of refugees packed onto helicopters to escape Vietnam more than four decades earlier.

So during the summer, Do, a doctor in her late 30s whose family left Vietnam when she was a girl and resettled in Seattle, sat down in her living room with her husband and talked about how they could help.

“We just knew we had to do something,” she said, reflecting on the initial shock of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August. “This is a time for us to give back.”

Many time zones away, past jagged mountain ranges and the vast Pacific Ocean, Abdul Matin Qadiri settled into a corner inside Hamid Karzai International Airport, where he and his wife and their four children would spend two nights waiting anxiously for an evacuation flight. As soon as word had begun to spread of the Taliban entering Kabul, the nation’s capital, Qadiri, who had worked alongside the U.S. military as a mechanic, decided to flee as soon as possible.

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LAS VEGAS  — Jake Crandall took a deep pull from his vape as a woman emerged from the darkness of Fremont Street and into the parking lot of the Desert Moon Motel. She gripped the final $20 she owed him.

“Here you go,” she said. He didn’t ask how she got it.

“Thanks,” Crandall, the property manager, replied. “We will figure it out again tomorrow.”

It was just after 9 p.m., and since she had now paid the full daily rate — $57 — Room 5 would again be hers for the night, a welcome reprieve from the woman’s other option: the back seat of her red Pontiac sedan. Crandall knew the woman, who asked that her name not be used because of the sensitivity of her situation, didn’t have anywhere else to stay.

For much of the last week, she and her two teenagers, both autistic, alternated between sleeping at the motel or inside the car. The 45-year-old woman said she lost her one-bedroom Los Angeles apartment early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Ever since, she’s been traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, staying with family when she can.

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MILWAUKEE — Jeremiah Hughes was mowing a lawn on a Wednesday afternoon when two men barged through an alley gate. They were armed. Shots rang out.

Hughes died in the yard and was taken to the morgue and then to El Bethel Church of God in Christ, where days later he lay in an open, emerald-green casket as muffled cries rose through a hymn on a loudspeaker. He was 24 and had his mother’s name — Gwen — tattooed on his left hand.

Velvet ropes surrounded his casket to prevent people from grabbing for him in their despair.

“My only son,” said his father, Stan Lindsey. “Gone like that.”

Milwaukee is in the grip of the worst violence in its modern history. There were 189 killings here last year, a 93% increase from 2019 and the most ever recorded.

Read more at Los Angeles Times