News

Bedbugs have recently been found on the campus of Wake Forest University. Officials say dogs discovered evidence of the pests in a very small number of dorm rooms. Those rooms have been treated and are expected to be free of bedbugs as students arrive. Michael Waldvogel is an associate professor of entomology at North Carolina Statue University. He says N.C. State and Wake Forest use heat generating equipment to deal with any outbreaks of bedbugs.

Today, the Duke men’s basketball team is in Kunshan China. They are there to kick off a global tour that will also take them to Shanghai, Beijing, and Dubai.

It’s the latest, and most public, effort by Duke to expand its global reach.

It’s campaign season in cities and counties across the state. And nowhere are the races more interesting or hotly contested than in Wake County.

Raleigh-Durham International Airport is beefing up its security with new imaging technology designed to protect passenger privacy. The Transportation Security Administration is installing five new scanners at RDU. They should be up and running in the next few days. RDU's TSA Federal Security Director Michael Zunk says previous scanners allowed security to see a detailed image of a person's body.

Novelist and short story author Doris Betts' enduring characters have won her favorable comparisons to Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner throughout her long career. Among those characters is Violet, the scarred heroine of "The Ugliest Pilgrim" and “Violet,” the musical that short story inspired. Hot Summer Nights at the Kennedy at the Progress Energy Center in Raleigh presents "Violet" this weekend. As part of our continuing series, North Carolina Literary Lights, host Frank Stasio talks about the play with director Eric Woodall and about Betts' literary legacy with Marianne Gingher, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Joe Flora, professor emeritus of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Lynn Veach Sadler, a Betts scholar and former vice president of Methodist University in Fayetteville.

Duke University has named its first Hindu chaplain. Usha Rajagopalan's peripatetic young life in India exposed her to diverse forms of Hinduism, and for the past decade she's been educating Triangle residents about her faith through workshops, discussions – and puppets. 

Shaw University is bringing back a familiar administrator to lead the institution as it searches for a new leader.

Shaw University is bustling this week as students return for the fall semester.  But they returned to a school without a president. Irma McClaurin resigned last week after less than one year on the job.  Andrew Tillery is a 23-year-old senior at Shaw.

Andrew Tillery:  "Like, I’m a senior, I’ve been here a little, a long time now. And for 11 months, you know that, you can’t hardly get a bond with a president like that for a school."

The City of Fayetteville wants the remaining damaged homes from the April 16th tornadoes cleaned up. The twisters that swept across the state left thousands of homes damaged or destroyed. Scott Shuford, Fayetteville's Development Services Director, says they've identified 85 homes in need of extensive cleanup or repair four months after the storms hit. He says they don't have any jurisdiction to do anything about homes that are just eye-sores.

An exemption for biomass facilities from carbon dioxide limits under the Clean Air Act is being challenged in court. The Environmental Protection Agency is exempting biomass facilities from the rules for the next three years because they're considered carbon-neutral or low-carbon emitters. Frank Rambo is the senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center working on that case.

Mitch Easter is a legend in the world of alternative music. He was a founding member of Let's Active, produced the first REM recordings back in the early 80s and has since helped scores of young bands hone their sound. One of the guitars used in those original REM recording sessions was among half-dozen instruments stolen from Easter's home in Winston Salem.