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Kathy Lohr

Whether covering the manhunt and eventual capture of Eric Robert Rudolph in the mountains of North Carolina, the remnants of the Oklahoma City federal building with its twisted metal frame and shattered glass, flood-ravaged Midwestern communities, or the terrorist bombings across the country, including the blast that exploded in Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, correspondent Kathy Lohr has been at the heart of stories all across the nation.

Lohr was NPR's first reporter based in the Midwest. She opened NPR's St. Louis office in 1990 and the Atlanta bureau in 1996. Lohr covers the abortion issue on an ongoing basis for NPR, including political and legal aspects. She has often been sent into disasters as they are happening, to provide listeners with the intimate details about how these incidents affect people and their lives.

Lohr filed her first report for NPR while working for member station KCUR in Kansas City, Missouri. She graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and began her journalism career in commercial television and radio as a reporter/anchor. Lohr also became involved in video production for national corporations and taught courses in television reporting and radio production at universities in Kansas and Missouri. She has filed reports for the NPR documentary program Horizons, the BBC, the CBC, Marketplace, and she was published in the Saturday Evening Post.

Lohr won the prestigious Missouri Medal of Honor for Excellence in Journalism in 2002. She received a fellowship from Vanderbilt University for work on the issue of domestic violence. Lohr has filed reports from 27 states and the District of Columbia. She has received other national awards for her coverage of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Midwestern floods of 1993, and for her reporting on ice storms in the Mississippi Delta. She has also received numerous awards for radio pieces on the local level prior to joining NPR's national team. Lohr was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. She now lives in her adopted hometown of Atlanta, covering stories across the southeastern part of the country.

  • In Houston, a retrial begins for Andrea Yates, the mother who claims she was insane when she drowned her five young children in a bathtub in 2001. An earlier conviction was thrown out.
  • Federal agents say three college students claim they set church fires in Alabama last month as a prank, and then set others on fire to throw agents off track. The students have been arrested in a string of nine church fires.
  • Federal officials say two young men have been arrested, and a third man is being sought, in the investigation into a series of church burnings in rural Alabama.
  • Federal and state investigators in Alabama are looking for suspects in a series of fires that have burned Baptist churches in rural areas of the state in the past two weeks. Many congregations are vowing to rebuild -- Kathy Lohr profiles two congregations that vow not to be intimidated.
  • Ten years ago, Oklahoma City was rocked by the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. Vice President Dick Cheney and former President Bill Clinton were among thousands who gathered to remember the 168 people who died in the attack.
  • After confirming plea deals in Georgia and Alabama Wednesday, confessed bomber Eric Rudolph will serve life in prison. Afterward, he said his 1996 attack at the Atlanta Olympics was meant to embarrass the federal government. In reference to a fatal 1998 bombing at an Alabama women's clinic, he said "abortion is murder."
  • Nearly two weeks after her feeding tube was removed, Terri Schiavo died Thursday. Her story and the efforts by Congress and the right-to-life community to keep her alive brought ethical issues concerning end-of-life decisions onto the national stage.
  • The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta rejects the latest appeal from Terri Schiavo's parents. But Bob and Mary Schindler are continuing to urge Florida officials to help them reconnect their brain-damaged daughter's feeding tube.
  • Officials in Atlanta have arrested the man who escaped from the Fulton County courthouse on Friday after a shootout. Brian Nichols is suspected of killing four people and critically injuring one. NPR's Kathy Lohr reports.
  • Authorities in Georgia apprehend Brian Nichols, the man police say killed a judge, a court reporter and a deputy Friday at the Fulton County Courthouse. Police have not yet linked Nichols to a fourth death. The body of a U.S. Customs agent was found Saturday. His truck was found outside the apartment in Duluth, Ga., where Nichols was arrested.