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17-year-old Aryalle Stoner runs away from home and tells the police that her father, Ronnie Stoner, has been sexually abusing her for years. The cursory investigation that follows is representative of a larger issue with child sex abuse investigations in Louisville.
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Allegations pile up, but Child Protective Services declines to investigate and the school district continues to promote Ronnie Stoner.
We include an update at the end of the episode.
“The Girls” is a 4-part series from the Louisville Public Media’s investigative podcast, Dig.
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In 2023, 17-year-old Abbie Jones and her family accuse her high school football coach, Donnie Stoner, of child sex abuse. Another Louisville woman, Alexis Crook, says she was abused by Donnie too, and his twin brother Ronnie, when they were coaches at her private Christian school almost 20 years earlier. Reporter Jess Clark looks at how the school system and local government responded to these accusations so many years apart.
“The Girls” is a 4-part series from the Louisville Public Media’s investigative podcast, Dig.
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After next Monday, doctors may not be able to mail people the abortion pill Mifepristone. That would increase barriers, but experts say it won't stop people's ability to get the pills in the mail. Getting abortion pills without a doctor’s oversight isn’t new—in fact its history begins nearly 50 years ago, in Brazil. Listen to "The Network," Season 24 of NPR's Embedded, about how a loosely connected movement has been helping people access the pills this way for decades:
Episode 1: lnk.to/phh5a9
Episode 2: lnk.to/Bw6QHD
Episode 3: lnk.to/MHSBG1
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As soon as Alternate Realities publishes, Zach Mack calls his dad to hear his reactions to the series. The conversation takes an unexpected turn, launching them into another year-long experiment.
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Universities were not always so vulnerable to the whims of politics. The whole system of taxpayer-funded, university-led scientific research came about at the end of World War II, and was the brainchild of a man named Vannevar Bush. He felt the partnership of government and academics had to be equal in order to yield breakthroughs. Today, the Trump administration is proposing a new “compact” that would make the President the dominant partner. We speak with one of the authors of the Trump compact, May Mailman.
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Harvard president Alan Garber and National Institutes of Health head Jay Bhattacharya are two main characters at the heart of the national fight over the future of academia. Alan Garber has been cast as the defender of academic freedom and democracy; Jay Bhattacharya is Donald Trump’s pick to lead the NIH, the agency withholding billions of dollars in research grants from Harvard. Oddly enough, the two men go way back: Garber was Bhattacharya’s undergraduate thesis advisor and mentor in the late 1980s. This episode tells the story of how the two men found themselves adversaries — and what it means for the future of science. Find more On the Media every week, here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715
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After we released Alternate Realities, hundreds of listeners reached out, sharing stories about friends and family members who had also fallen under the spell of conspiracy theories. Many of them had tried everything they could think of to get that person back... and failed.
Has anyone had success with this? If you or anyone you know has come up with an intervention or experiment or strategy that actually worked — please email us at embedded@npr.org.
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