RALEIGH (AP) Victims of a decades-old forced sterilization program will have to wait on compensation because legislators did not include any money for them in a state budget deal, in part because Republican leaders could not agree on how to respond to the victims. North Carolina was the first state in the country to tackle the question of how much to give victims of the program, which lasted from 1929 to 1974 and sterilized more than 7,600 people. The program was aimed at creating a better society by weeding out people who were deemed feeble-minded, many of them poor women. Continue reading →