KVPR News Podcast

On the part of the community of Rock Haven that received forest thinning treatments, the Creek Fire lost enough intensity to spare mature trees and historic homes.

Each year, the fungal disease valley fever infects tens of thousands of people in the American Southwest. Studies suggest infection rates could be even higher among dogs, however, and researchers in Arizona are now announcing progress on a canine valley fever vaccine. Valley fever is caused by a fungus that grows in arid soil. Fungal spores can become airborne due to wind, construction or other activities that disrupt the soil, and inhaling the spores can lead to an infection in the lungs that

Over the last few decades, air quality in the San Joaquin Valley has greatly improved. But climate change could jeopardize those gains, and researchers are trying to figure out by how much. One of the Valley’s summertime air pollutants is ozone. High in the atmosphere, the gas protects the Earth, but at ground level it’s a contributor to the summer smog that obscures views of our surrounding mountains and turns the sky a sickly brown. Exposure to ozone is known to exacerbate respiratory ailments

Jennifer Malone mostly goes by her English name but she has another name in Wukchumni. “My Indian name is Haiyelihx,” she says, adding that the word s ummer in Wukchumni is haiyel . “So my great grandma named me Haiyelihx because that means summer. I was born July 31st.” She can’t remember where the name Jennifer even came from. Her mom mainly called her Haiyelihx . “Especially when she wanted to get my attention. ‘ Haiyelihx!’ she would say. “When I was in trouble I guess,” Malone says laughing

In many ways, climate change has already hit home here in the San Joaquin Valley—especially for the agricultural industry, which produces as much as a third of the nation’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts and brings in billions of dollars each year to the local economy.

TED Talks, the popular videos about “ideas worth spreading,” invited Fresno’s Irma Olguin Jr. to take the stage this year to share her ideas about how to connect people from marginalized communities to training and jobs in the tech industry. It’s work she champions as a co-founder of Bitwise Industries, and from the TED stage she shared its formula for success. Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke to Olguin Jr. about her experience telling the story of Bitwise to a global audience.

Clovis native Chris Colfer found fame as an actor on the hit show Glee, and as a New York Times best-selling author of young adult novels like the "Land of Stories" series. But this weekend Colfer will come back to his roots, hosting and performing in a fundraiser for Good Company Players, the Fresno theatre company where he got his start. Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke with Colfer about the event and what inspired his latest book.

In 2014, California’s state legislature passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a sweeping law with the goal of balancing the amount of water pumped out of underground aquifers with the amount returned through recharge. How that balancing act would actually work was left up to hundreds of locally governed water agencies, which are now beginning to receive feedback from the state Department of Water Resources on the sustainability plans they submitted in late 2019 and early 2020.

The clock is ticking to redraw legislative boundaries following the 2020 census. This week California’s redistricting commission released a preliminary map of what the state’s congressional districts could look like. If finalized the new map could make it a lot more difficult for some incumbent representatives like Devin Nunes to hold on to their seats. To learn more about this process and its timeline Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock checked in with the non-profit California Common Cause. She spoke with the organization’s executive director Jonathan Mehta Stein and Central Valley redistricting organizer Luis Huerta-Silva.

Fresno poet Mai Der Vang looks back on a dark chapter of history in her new collection “Yellow Rain.” Hmong refugees fleeing Laos at the end of the Vietnam war reported being attacked with chemical and biological weapons that led to thousands of deaths, but American scientists dismissed refugee accounts, claiming that the mysterious substance raining down on them was the feces of honeybees. Through exhaustive research of once classified documents, Vang reveals the truth of what happened, giving voice to the victims of the attacks. Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke to Vang about how she uncovered their forgotten stories.