Giving Away the (Wind) Farm

A turbine on the Rolling Hills Wind Farm in Wilson, Kansas. (Brad Austin | Flatland)

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…

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Federal Prosecutors in KCK Under Fire For Power Plays in Pursuit of Justice

Blind 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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Kansas City’s Vietnam Era

Get the story of Kansas City's Vietnam era history with this animated timeline (Jesse Howe | Flatland)

Finding Kansas City-area Vietnam veteran John Musgrave for the upcoming PBS documentary “The Vietnam War” was “the most fortuitous thing,” filmmaker Ken Burns said last week while in Kansas City. Musgrave, long known to Kansas Citians as an eloquent and thoughtful commentator and critic on the war, has been referred to as the Shelby Foote of…

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A Ledger of Names, Mine Among Them, Tell Our Vietnam Stories

A man looking at a selective service document while soldiers load a military plane on a conveyer belt

All 30 of the boys listed on the Vietnam-era Selective Service ledger were born in the spring of 1948, during America’s most prolific era of mass procreation, the end of World War II. At 18 years old, the thing first and foremost on our minds was to find a way to commit the same act…

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The Great American Immigration Debate — Minus A Century

a group of lead miners in 1900s

FLAT RIVER, Mo. — This old mining town in the southeast Missouri Ozarks once straddled the richest lead deposits in the world. But it no longer exists and the name is all but forgotten — much like the riots here that shocked the nation a century ago this week. As America’s never-ending debate over immigration rages…

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