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Medicaid changes could mean longer drives for rural maternity care, Las Vegas’ anime community continues to grow and Nevada highlights workforce re
The Daily Rundown: September 14, 2026
🏀 Las Vegas Aces’ Jackie Young is FIBA’s player of the game after Team USA’s gold medal victory over France yesterday. Young scored 18 points, hauled in six boards and dished out five assists. Fellow Aces teammate Chelsea Gray contributed 12 points, four rebounds and five assists.
Rural Maternity Care | KNPR Daily Rundown | Sept. 14
This is Gray’s second FIBA gold medal. Young became the first player ever to claim NCAA, WNBA, World Cup, Olympics and 3-on-3 Olympic championships.
💼 The Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) and the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) are celebrating Workforce Development Month by highlighting their shared work.
The two organizations connect college students with re
College students across Nevada can access career coaches, support programs to help with the costs of entering certain fields, no-cost online training programs at campus career centers and apprenticeships. More information on workforce services is available at EmployNV.gov.
🎌 Anime, or Japanese animation, has been surging in popularity over the last decade.And like many other cultural phenomena, you can find it well-represented in Las Vegas.
Look around town, and there are restaurants, stores and bars that feature or celebrate anime in some form. Las Vegas hosts several anime conventions throughout the year. Even in our concert halls: The music of Japanese animation giant Studio Ghibli will be performed by the Las Vegas Philharmonic this weekend.
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The Smith Center
And our libraries feature clubs and events centered on the culture — such as Sahara West Library’s Teen AnimeFest on Sept. 12.
Bianca Ortiz-Rodriguez, a Young People’s Library Children’s Services Assistant for Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, co-chaired the committee for the festival. She said the demand from young library patrons — who comprise a huge part of the base checking out manga, or the Japanese graphic novels that largely inspire anime movies and television series — has inspired not only Saturday’s event, but anime clubs and related programming year-round.
Local adults have rallied around and gathered in the name of anime as well. Erick Papas moved to Las Vegas 10 years ago and formed the club Anime Social primarily so he could meet enthusiasts like himself. Much of the group’s activity involves meetups, mostly at local independent restaurants and bars. Sometimes they’re directly tied to anime, such as their Jeopardy triink together
Whatever it is, Anime Social boasts more than 1,300 members, and for some of them, it’s a place where being social comes with fewer pressures and expectations compared to the traditional ways of interaction. Hear the full story by KNPR’s Mike Prevatt here.
⚖️ As a child in the 1960s, Allie Zemtseff saw how her mother, a Black woman, was turned away by landlords while apartment hunting in white neighborhoods. So she was incredulous when the Trump administration this summer accused the city of Evanston, Illinois, of racial discrimination because of a program it created to compensate Black residents for past housing segregation.
Through Evanston’s reparations program, the first in the U.S. to compensate Black people for historical discrimination, Zemtseff got an apology from the city for its role in keeping Black people out of white neighborhoods decades ago, and $25,000, which she used to renovate her kitchen.
NPR
This city led the way on reparations for Black people. Trump is trying to stop it
Evanston, Ill., became the first U.S. city to compensate Black people for historical discrimination. The Justice Department is trying to kill its program before other cities follow suit.
“Of course it’s only for Black people,” she said, “because we were the ones affected by the discrimination.”
Since the city approved reparations payments in 2021, it has given $25,000 grants to more than 300 people and injected new life into the long-stalled movement to pay African Americans reparations for slavery and other forms of discrimination.
But now the Trump administration, which has vowed to eliminate government programs that promote racial equity, is trying to kill Evanston’s program before similar ones take hold in other cities. In June, the Justice Department announced it would join a conservative group’s lawsuit alleging that the city’s plan is racially discriminatory because only Black people qualify. Read the full story by NPR’s Adrian Florido here.
🏥 Residents in rural areas already drive long distances to deliver their babies. Now, a new analysis has found that they could have to drive a lot further because of cuts to Medicaid insurance.
The Mountain West could see some of the longest drive times in the country. For example, in Nevada, if a rural delivery unit shuts down, the next closest unit may be over two hours away. The next closest hospital is about an hour away in most other states in the region.
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“I can’t imagine being in a car trying to get to a hospital an hour away while in active labor,” said Brittni Frederiksen, associate director of women’s health policy of nonprofit research, polling and news group KFF and co-author of the new study.
Frederiksen added that there are real risks of increasing these drive times. “It just increases the likelihood of negative outcomes for both the mom and the baby,” she said.
Since 2005, about 200 rural hospitals have closed, according to the University of North Carolina, and many more have closed labor and delivery units, specifically. In Wyoming, at least nine counties now lack hospitals to give birth in.
Now, more delivery units could close with changes to Medicaid under the One Big Beautiful Bill. Frederiksen said changes, such as work requirements, could mean people losing their insurance. Read the full story by the Mountain West News Bureau’s Hanna Merzbach here.
Part of these stories are taken from KNPR’s daily newscast segment. To hear more daily updates like these, tune in to 88.9 KNPR FM.
