By Graham Moomaw, Kate Masters and Rahul Chowdhry Sharma
Gov. Glenn Youngkin applauded Friday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision abolishing the constitutional right to an abortion and said Virginia Republicans will get to work on legislation “protecting the life of unborn children” by potentially banning most abortions after 15 weeks.
Expressing frustration with what they say are increasing incidents of violence at work, doctors at the Virginia College of Emergency Physicians are urging federal lawmakers to support a U.S. Senate bill that would give greater protections to health care workers.
Electric vehicles — and increasing the number of them on Virginia’s roads — nevertheless were the driving force behind the legislation, which was signed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin this May.
By GRAHAM MOOMAW AND RAHUL CHOWDHRY SHARMA | Virginia Mercury
A Republican delegate and a Democratic senator huddled in the corner of a courtroom Tuesday afternoon, trying to make out what was said on a garbled audio recording that captured some of the expletives hurled in a heated altercation last month in a Richmond radio studio.
Without state conservation measures or global emissions reductions that could slow the pace of sea level rise, Virginia could lose 42 percent of its tidal wetlands by 2100, researchers with research nonprofit Climate Central found in a study published last week in Environmental Research Communications journal.
Virginia coal production remains high, fueled by ongoing demand for steel as the U.S. embarks on an ambitious program of infrastructure investment and disruptions in energy markets linked to the war in Ukraine.
Virginia’s Community Flood Preparedness Fund, a pot of millions of dollars earmarked for community flood protection work across the state, will remain under the oversight of the executive branch despite recent legislative efforts to shift authority to an appointed citizen board.
The Supreme Court of Virginia will hear an appeal of two lower court rulings that found that residents living near a massive planned Wegmans distribution center project in Hanover didn’t have standing to challenge local officials’ approval of the project.
Dominion Energy’s two existing nuclear plants “may become more important to the transmission system” as Virginia and the utility move to decarbonize the power grid by midcentury, a hearing examiner with the Virginia State Corporation Commission says.
Norfolk resident John Luker knew that when he started asking solar companies how much it would cost to put panels on his roof, price estimates would vary.
At a meeting last week, Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources John Littel made an eye-opening remark about the state’s understaffed and overstressed mental health facilities.
Budget leaders in theGeneral Assembly won’t say if they’re considering changing the state’s contested ban on slots-like skill machines through the budget.
Federal and state officials are rolling out a fleet of new programs in an expansive effort to bring faster and less expensive internet to all Virginians, especially those who have had trouble connecting in the past.
The "creator" lines appear to be drawn from a portion of Youngkin’s inaugural speech that was repeated in a later executive order that reshaped the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the governor’s cabinet.
A road project being built through a part of Southwest Virginia, where the state’s elk population is growing, has led transportation researchers to consider new measures to avoid traffic collisions with the supersized deer relatives that can weigh as much as 1,000 pounds.
Dominion customers could see their monthly bills rise by between 12 and 20 percent due to rising fuel costs linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, and the ongoing war in Ukraine, according to company filings with the State Corporation Commission Thursday.
For the first time since February, Virginia’s percent positivity — the percentage of lab-tested COVID-19 samples that come back positive — has risen above 10 percent.
Virginia should do more to encourage developers to site solar on brownfields rather than prime agricultural and forested land, panelists at the Virginia Solar Summit in Richmond Thursday said.
As Democrats and Republicans continue to point fingers over who’s to blame for Virginia’s delayed budget, the two lawmakers leading the negotiations said Monday they have no plans to hold any public meetings that might offer more insight into how those talks are going.
Self-harm among children in Virginia — already rising before the COVID-19 pandemic — has continued to increase over the last two years, reinforcing concerns that the virus could exacerbate an existing mental health crisis.
The Democratic caucus in the Virginia House of Delegates removed former Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn as their leader Wednesday without electing a successor, creating a leadership vacuum just as they headed onto the floor for a full day of voting on almost 150 vetoes and amendments from Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Democrats in the Virginia Senate voted Wednesday to reject Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposal for a gas tax holiday, a sign the governor hasn’t succeeded in getting skeptics on board with the plan he rolled out six weeks ago.
Earlier this month, researchers at William & Mary announced the discovery of an apparent new hotspot for residential radon around Williamsburg, a city firmly in the coastal plain.
A panel of experts is urging Bristol, Virginia, to stop using its local landfill after finding nearly a dozen deficiencies linked to air pollution and foul odors at the site.
The visitors center at the Virginia Capitol will be closed for most of the year as the state builds an underground tunnel and continues waterproofing work at the historic building.
For more than two years, COVID-19 has largely monopolized the time and resources of local health departments across Virginia. But as the virus moves into an uneasy plateau, health officials are turning their attention to another infectious disease with alarming rates of growth.
During a tumultuous 2021 that included an unrelenting pandemic, widespread supply-chain dysfunction and scores of ships marooned off some U.S. ports, particularly on the West Coast, no news, in port circles, really did become good news — at least in Virginia.
An amendment sought by Gov. Glenn Youngkin would significantly loosen criteria on who could lead local health departments, giving the state’s commissioner of health broad authority to appoint anyone they deemed qualified.
Native brook trout in Virginia appears to be out of harm’s way when it comes to the recent detection of a nasty aquatic parasite called gill lice in Southwest Virginia.
In the last nine months, hundreds of books across dozens of states are being banned. A majority of the bans feature books written by authors who are people of color, LGBTQ+, Black and Indigenous, and feature characters from marginalized groups.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality late this March abruptly rolled out several major changes to how Virginia will manage stormwater runoff from solar farms, saying prior policies may have underestimated water quality impacts.
BA.2, a more infectious subvariant of omicron, now makes up the majority of new COVID-19 cases in Virginia — just under 70 percent, according to recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Chief environmental officials in Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration said one of their primary priorities during the next four years will be to review and speed up Virginia’s permitting processes.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin has appointed McKenzie Snow — a former Trump official and aide to one-time U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — as Virginia’s Deputy Secretary of Education, the administration confirmed.
For years, Southwest Virginia Community Health Systems had been running successful recovery programs from its clinics in Bristol and Saltville, small communities encircled by the Appalachian Mountains.
If the plastic food container that contained your lunch today winds up in a river, a local creek, or the Atlantic Ocean, 60 years from now people could find it, reasonably intact.
Democrats in the Virginia House of Delegates are proposing sending money directly to Virginia drivers as an alternative to Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s plan to temporarily suspend the state’s gas tax.
One of the first ideas proposed in Virginia after a January snowstorm left thousands of motorists stranded overnight on Interstate 95, some for nearly 24 hours, was a law requiring tractor-trailers to stay in the right-hand lane during winter storms.
Scott Durvin says he faced aggressive questioning from a Chesterfield County Police detective after his friend died of a drug overdose at the end of 2019.
