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By many of the usual political metrics, State Rep. Cody Henson ought to be an up and comer. Henson, a young (he was graduated from high school in 2010) Republican from western North Carolina is an ex-Marine with a winning smile. His biography on the website VoteSmart.org reports that he was an infantry machine gun team leader in the Marine Corps Reserve who then found work as a call center supervisor with a global marketing company.

Duke Energy must excavate its final nine coal ash impoundments at six plants, state environmental regulators announced today, overruling the utility's concerns that the method would be too expensive and environmentally risky.

China doesn’t want our trash, and the world is looking for somewhere else to dump it. After importing 760 million tons of plastic waste from the US alone in 2016, China banned 24 types of scrap waste from entering its borders last year, including most plastics and cardboard.

WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration has failed to act swiftly enough to protect the public from harmful contaminants present in drinking water throughout the country, U.S. senators told senior administration officials Thursday.

On Thursday Democratic state lawmakers filed three bills designed to protect LGBTQ North Carolinians from discrimination, outlaw harmful “conversion” therapy that targets them and fully repeal HB2 -- the infamous law that cast an international spotlight on the state as a battleground for transgender rights.

In February, a stare-down between a Native American man beating a drum and a white teenager in a MAGA hat caused a national stir outside the Lincoln Memorial. Three years ago, President Trump began calling Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.”

John Kasich insists he’s a free man. Free from politics? Free from partisanship? Free from Trump? Certainly not free of ambition – the former Ohio governor all but acknowledged last week that he hasn’t ruled out another run for president.

WASHINGTON – U.S. Supreme Court justices appeared willing Tuesday to rein in partisan gerrymandering — desperate even, for attorneys to give them some sort of manageable numeric standard by which they could determine how much politics is too much when it comes to redistricting.

The Resource Institute, a politically connected nonprofit that received a questionable and unprecedented $5 million appropriation for hurricane recovery in last year’s budget, could lose part of its windfall, according to a bill that passed out of the Senate Rules Committee today.

There’s an old adage – often attributed to Albert Einstein and/or Mark Twain – that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Neither Einstein nor Twain ever had occasion to review the effectiveness of North Carolina’s K-12 education policy, but it seems likely...

Rep. David Lewis (R-Harnett) will secure his place in history if for no other reason than uttering that sentence. Everyone’s read it, North Carolina has been the butt of many jokes about it, and tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court could decide a case based on it.

In 2016 the battle over HB2 cast an international spotlight on the struggles of transgender people in North Carolina. Despite the law’s partial repeal and replacement with HB421 - which critics continue to challenge as “HB2.0” - transgender people in the state continue to face hardships and discrimination.

Something is changing the genetic code in the cells of young girls in Iredell County. Duke University scientists last night released preliminary findings of 18 months’ of study into potential causes of papillary thyroid cancer among teen girls, some as young as 13, in the ZIP codes of 28115 and 28117. Those areas include neighborhoods on or near Lake Norman.

The American Bar Association (ABA) issued a scathing report Wednesday that notes U.S. Immigration courts are “irredeemably dysfunctional and on the brink of collapse.” “The immigration courts are facing an existential crisis,” states the 72-page executive summary of the report, adding that the only way to fix the serious systemic issues...

Everyone’s taking a powder in the UNC system these days. Everyone, it seems, but the powerful individuals on the UNC Board of Governors, an onerously large pack of political hellraisers and right-wing combatants who’ve sullied the “crown jewel,” North Carolina’s decorated and bedeviled university system.

When Cecil Staton announced his resignation as chancellor of East Carolina University this week, it had an air of inevitability. Not because of Staton’s performance since his hiring in 2016.