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Ohio Valley Auto Industry Eyes Tariffs with Caution

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On this West Virginia Morning, the Ohio Valley includes two of the country’s top three states for auto manufacturing, and the industry employs more than 1.5 million people in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia. That industry is growing nervous about the Trump administration’s trade policy. First came tariffs on steel and aluminum. Now, as Becca Schimmel reports, the Commerce Department is looking into taxes on imported autos and parts.

Also on today’s show, about 2,000 people gathered in Pittsburgh recently for gas and petrochemical industry conferences. Despite those numbers, investors from China were not on hand to talk about their 80-billion-dollar investment in West Virginia. Nancy Andrews reports the reason Chinese business people weren’t there was because of recently imposed tariffs.

And almost 75 years ago, a soldier from West Virginia became one of thousands from America who died trying to liberate the Netherlands from the Nazis. A Dutch man has been tending the soldier’s grave and trying to find out more about him since he was 13. The story caught the ear of a documentarian, who made a film about it.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting is airing that film tonight, so today we’ll listen to a story Jesse Wright filed in 2015 about the making of that film.

West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.

Support for our news bureaus comes from West Virginia University, Concord University, and Shepherd University.