Cover Story
The Inside Job
The Marlborough Community Coalition’s Facebook page recently featured a newspaper story documenting the surprising luxury housing and commercial development boom taking place a few miles north in Kansas City’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. The story was accompanied by a message: “Change can happen!” In fact, a different kind of change already is happening in Marlborough, the…
Read MoreResurrecting Quindaro
As Americans north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line debated slavery, a boomtown that sprouted from the scrub along the Missouri River emerged as one of the most unlikely bellwethers of the national mood in the run-up to the Civil War. That community was Quindaro, Kansas, and virtually overnight it became something of a prototype…
Read MoreFaith And Love
Churchgoers at a tidy, white-steepled United Methodist Church in Carrollton, Missouri, heard a frank admission from their guest pastor one spring morning in 2007. “When asked to preach this Sunday, I almost said no,” Priscilla Wood Neaves told the congregation. “Why? Not because I lacked training and experience, and I have always enjoyed preaching.” She…
Read MoreGiving Away the (Wind) Farm
Mark Buck can see some of the 314 turbines in Kansas’ largest wind farm from his office window in Medicine Lodge, where he is superintendent of the Barber County North School District. The nearly $1 billion Flat Ridge project, built in two phases and owned in part by British Petroleum, spans 70,000 acres near the…
Read MoreFederal Prosecutors in KCK Under Fire For Power Plays in Pursuit of Justice
Two recent cases involving prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Kansas City, Kansas, point to a problem that some criminal defense lawyers say has been building for a long time: For years, they say, a small group of federal prosecutors in KCK has run roughshod over the rights of criminal defendants. A joint investigation…
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