Justin Higginbottom

Jefferson Public Radio • 6th February 2025

Pineros in Southern Oregon: How Jackson County became a center for guest workers in forestry

Non-logging forestry work, like planting trees or fuels reduction, is big business in Oregon. But if you’re picturing those doing this work as classic lumberjacks — plaid shirts, big beards, white guys — think again. Foreign guest workers make up much of this labor. And Jackson County is a national center for the industry.

Jefferson Public Radio • 25th January 2025

50 years in the woods: How Oregon's forestry workforce has evolved

Since the 1970s, billions of dollars in federal contracts have gone to forestry work like replanting trees or fuels reduction. Oregon has long been a center for businesses getting those contracts. But that industry looked a lot different 50 years ago.

Jefferson Public Radio • 15th November 2024

Chillin' at Oregon's 'first legal psilocybin concert'

Oregon’s first psilocybin service centers opened around a year ago, providing psychedelic mushrooms to treat conditions like PTSD. One center in Southern Oregon is trying to increase access with group-psychedelic experiences — like a magic mushroom concert.

Jefferson Public Radio • 29th October 2024

Can an 'America First' board fix a troubled rural transportation district?

The Umpqua Public Transportation District serves over 20,000 riders. It’s a new district, only formed in 2019, but important in a region with elderly and low-income residents, many left behind after the timber industry declined. Lately, some have been worried about the district's future.

Jefferson Public Radio • 27th June 2024

From train history to train hopping, a California town celebrates America’s rails

The town of Dunsmuir in far Northern California hosted its first Railroad Days in 1941. But the town’s relationship with the railroad industry has changed over the decades. And a subculture of train enthusiasts now celebrate alongside the town — in their own way.

Jefferson Public Radio • 7th June 2024

Mothers struggling with addiction find an oasis in Southern Oregon

The opioid epidemic, boosted by the arrival of the drug fentanyl, has torn through communities in Southern Oregon. It’s also having a devastating impact on mothers struggling with addiction. An innovative facility in the Rogue Valley is helping those parents and their children.

Jefferson Public Radio • 6th May 2024

California mobile home park residents face persistent PFAS water contamination

Man-made chemicals known as PFAS, which stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are used to make a lot of modern products. They’ve also been linked to health impacts including cancer. Despite legislation, addressing PFAS contamination at small water systems remains a challenge in California.

Jefferson Public Radio • 10th April 2024

Tree sitters protest old-growth logging from 100 feet above the forest floor

Old-growth trees provide vital wildlife habitat, help forest ecosystems and store massive amounts of carbon. But some activists in Southern Oregon claim the Bureau of Land Management is allowing the logging of old-growth trees despite recent calls by the Biden administration for protection.

Jefferson Public Radio • 13th March 2024

A death doula keeps legacies alive in rural Oregon

“I spend my week reminding this group of people that they matter. That their life's work is just not going to disappear,” she says. “I think that's what we all want — for someone to be able to remember our names.”

DW • 13th December 2023

Broken dreams in Sagaing

Myanmar's democratically elected government was ousted in a military coup in 2021. Since then, ethnic minority armed groups and pro-democracy fighters have been battling against the junta's forces. Millions of people are displaced.

DW • 13th December 2023

Myanmar's Buddhists and Christians join fight against junta

In Myanmar's Chin State, Buddhists and Christians unite in the Chinland Defense Force to fight the military junta. DW spoke with the armed group, who said they left civilian life to help free the country.

DW • 4th December 2023

Myanmar's displaced bear brunt of civil war

After the military burned down their village, one community describes their efforts to survive in a diplaced person's camp on the fringes of the jungle in the Sagaing region.

DW • 30th August 2023

Staying Alive in Chin State

More than two and a half years ago, the military in Myanmar ousted a democratically elected government. Attacks on civilians still continue. We hear from people in Chin state in western Myanmar.

DW • 13th July 2023

Finding Love in a Myanmar Scam Center

Crime enclaves have grown along Myanmar's border since the coup in 2021. These new cities are hubs for online gambling, drugs and lately online cryptocurrency scams. It's big money for criminal syndicates and the Myanmar military's allies who control the territory. How are the scams playing out and how are they linked to human trafficking?

DW • 13th June 2023

Myanmar's Young Pro-democracy Activists Fill Up Prisons

Thousands of political activists have been imprisoned in Myanmar over the years. The often overcrowded conditions and human rights abuses have now been documented by a museum in neighboring Thailand.

NPR • 18th January 2023

Authorities don't know who is shooting free-roaming horses in the Utah desert

On a remote patch of Utah desert bordering the Navajo Nation in Utah, hundreds of horses roam free on the shrubby desert that stretches across red rock canyons all the way to the forested slopes of Bears Ears National Monument. To some, they're majestic wildlife that symbolize the freedom of wide-open western landscapes. To others, they're an out of control population displacing cattle and damaging the ec

The New Republic • 3rd January 2023

The “Psychonauts” Training to Explore Another Dimension

Kevin Thorbahn found himself in a hotel lobby without quite remembering how he got there. There were flashes of brilliant light, indescribable geometric patterns, and the feeling of being blasted through a gigantic stained glass window. And then he was standing in the lobby, as if checking in for a long-planned vacation. All he knew was that he was enamored with the woman behind the counter. Although “woman” wasn’t quite right—it was more like an outline of energy, a feminine purple hue.

The Independent • 15th June 2022

Inside America’s ‘Bermuda Triangle for missing people’

On a still-cold April morning at her home in Farmington, New Mexico, Bernadine Beyale knelt next to two of her dogs – the German Shepherd Trigger and a Czech Shepherd named Gunny – and applied juniper ash above their eyes.

Her Frenchie dog thought Beyale was dispensing treats and bullishingly lined up. So Beyale blessed him too in the Navajo way, even though he would be staying behind today.

Trigger and Gunny, meanwhile, were heading to work.

Beyale is the founder of Four Corners K9 Search an

Truly Adventurous • 6th October 2021

Dojo Wars

On the night of April 24, 1970, a historic karate brawl broke out in Chicago between senseis and students from rival dojos (karate centers). The fight was not for an audience or a trophy. No one had seen anything like it outside of the movies. One thing was certain: Not everyone was going to get out alive.

They were introduced as the Dragon Lady and Count Dante.

Christy Carter, a 22-year-old Playboy Club bunny, sat next to John Keehan, 29, one of the country’s best known martial artists, on th

CNBC • 24th November 2019

'They will destroy everything here': Turkish advance forces Syrians to flee homes as winter looms

Sleman Alshallah, 40, gathered his wife and five children outside his home with what little they owned — cooking pots, blankets and a rug — in the small northern Syrian farming village of Am Alkef last week. "We are ready to leave at any hour," said Alshallah.


It would be difficult to abandon his grandparents' farm and only source of income, he said. He looked north, in the direction of Turkey and dull thuds of fighting, where a mile away was the last defense against the adv

The Spectator World • 13th January 2020

After the Americans

The sharp cracks and dull rumbles of fighting make their way to us over dusty farmland; the shade protects us from the scorching mid-morning sun and omnipresent Turkish drones. Agir tells me how the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) can’t fight — at least, compared

Atlas Obscura • 26th February 2020

How an Abandoned Modernist Cinema Became a Revolutionary Symbol in Lebanon

A few months ago, a trickle of protesters converged on downtown Beirut, spurred by a proposed tax on the text-messaging platform WhatsApp. Within a few days, the crowd had swelled, and so had its aims: Demonstrators spoke out against sectarian rule, unemployment, and development that had transformed the area where they were standing into a playground for the rich. Their efforts helped oust the prime minister, but the protests have continued, and they have faced violent crackdowns by security for

KUER • 20th August 2021

CIA Paranormal Program Finds New Life In Utah

Paul Smith’s psychic school is located in an industrial park on the outskirts of Cedar City. It could be an accountant's office except for a decal of a pyramid and an all-seeing eye on the door.

It’s called Remote Viewing Instructional Services, and inside half a dozen students hailing from Colorado to Canada are practicing before their first session.

Remote viewing is a form of extrasensory perception, or ESP, where practitioners learn to describe an object, which might be on the other side o

Newsweek • 17th June 2021

Even in Utah, Trump's Republicans Sour on Mitt Romney

A chorus of boos greeted Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) at a Republican Party state convention here in his adopted Utah last month — but for the former presidential hopeful and Mormon princeling, heckling from his party long ago lost the surprise factor.

Video of a detractor calling him a "traitor" at the Salt Lake City airport went viral online earlier in the year, and in February, he met President Joseph R. Biden in the Oval Office, prompting online vitriol.

As he entered the convention, he was w