In California’s Tulare County ag and oil often go hand in hand, and environmentalism can be a dirty word. People are proud of the fact that they make the things other people need here. This is where they make the food and energy that fuels the state, and the country. What they don’t make, is a fuss. So what happens when a soft spoken farmer discovers an oil company is polluting one of the wells he uses for his crops?

The  dropping of nuclear weapons feels somehow all too possible again.

The shadow of nuclear war fell over Hawaii through a mistaken missile alert. North Korea claims it is test firing bombs. And the president of the United States is boasting on Twitter about the size of his nuclear button.

In telling ourselves the history of the atomic bomb, we can too often think they were only dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But there were other bombs that fell — they just weren’t dropped on people. Not directly. They were dropped on islands.

Islands in the South Pacific. The Marshall Islands.

But that doesn’t mean they didn’t cause lasting and devastating damage for the islanders — and for their descendants.

For the new year we bring you a story about how the thing you think makes you strong, may actually be your crutch. And about how letting go can make you stronger than you ever knew you could be.

For Matt Miller, cycling was golden. It was his exercise, his commute, and his therapy. When he was in the saddle, troubles seemed to melt away, and he felt free — completely, utterly free.

So when he set out for a cross-country bike tour the summer after graduating college, he thought it would be the adventure of a lifetime. And for a while, it was. But then, something happened that turned his world upside down.

A special episode from our friends at Out There podcast.

Every fall in the Bay Area, over the course of a long weekend, Urban Shield puts law enforcement and other first responders through real life training scenarios ripped from the headlines.

This year, the headlines were grim. Natural disasters, from fires to hurricanes, and terrorist attacks from Las Vegas to New York. For many, 2017 felt like we were living on the edge of apocalypse.

So training first responders seems like a logical idea.

But there are those who see it differently. Their take: Urban Shield doesn’t make us safer, instead it militarizes the police and now in the age of Trump, that is scarier than ever.

An audio essay on violence, and the slippery slope between the real and the imagined.

The 2015 death of Kathryn Steinle created a furor over undocumented immigration and sanctuary cities. That’s because the man accused of her murder, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, is an undocumented Mexican National. He had been jailed and deported several times, but was then homeless on the streets of San Francisco — in part because of the city’s sanctuary policies. Then presidential-candidate Donald Trump and right-wing media got involved, using the tragedy to advance a nativist narrative of dangerous immigrants flooding over the border. Now, over two years later a jury has found Garcia Zarate not guilty of Steinle’s murder.

In this episode of Q’ed Up we go back over the case, dig into the surprising verdict,  and examine how a death on a downtown pier became a political lightning rod.

For a long time, race and racism have surrounded and shaped marijuana policy.  First racist stereotypes were used to demonize the drug, then the drug was used to demonize — and lock up — people of color. As the state of California anticipates ganja going legit we ask: Is there a possibility for pot reparations?

In early October, many Northern Californians woke to a world on fire. Whole neighborhoods were gone in a single night, reduced to dust and ash.

43 people were killed. Almost 9,000 structures were obliterated.

The world had been transformed by flames.

In this episode of Q’ed Up we bring you stories from the front lines of the fires.

President Donald J. Trump rose to power on a wave of anti-immigrant, nationalist sentiment. He wove a narrative of “bad” Mexicans, immigrants flooding over the border, bringing with them drugs and guns. And he used the case of Kate Steinle — a 32-year-old white woman shot and killed on a San Francisco pier by a Mexican National — to help sell the story.  As the Kate Steinle murder trial begins in San Francisco, KQED reporters unpack the facts and falsehoods surrounding her tragic death.

He was a young African American Marine from Chicago, who arrived in Camp Pendleton to join the war effort.

She was the teenage daughter of a farmworker who was protesting the fight in Vietnam.

The Green Machine was the coffee shop where they met and where learned they had more than a war in common.

A story of unlikely allies whose friendship was forged in the shadow of Vietnam.