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Mineral Rights

As December sets in, West Virginia mineral rights owners can be assured of one certainty: receiving a notice in the mail of their new mineral rights valuation. And just as it’s a certainty that notice will arrive, it’s also clear that the valuation, as far as anyone can tell, continues to remain either inaccurate or wildly out of bounds. That’s what you have to appreciate about government — make a major change riddled with mistakes and then put the burden on, in this case, the mineral rights owner to hopefully get it fixed. Or, as this issue also has taught us over the past two ...

Second Chances

A day before President Joe Biden announced the largest act of clemency in one day in modern presidential history, Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., Cory Booker, D-N.J., John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., celebrated the earlier passage of their Second Chance Reauthorization Act of 2024. Both events are important acknowledgements of the need to support those who are paying the consequences for having made mistakes, but are ready to seize new opportunities to succeed. “The vast majority of people incarcerated today will come home to our communities at some point,” ...

Boos & Applause

Applause to the Mountaineer Chapter of the Izaak Walton League of America, which announced the organization’s scholarship recipients for the 2024-25 academic year. Chris Thompson, chairman of the Mountaineer Chapter’s Scholarship Committee, presented scholarships to Caitlyn Rennix and Amanda Cutlip from Potomac State College, and to Gracie Bowen and Abigail Arbogast from West Virginia University. Each student received a $1,000 scholarship. A total of $500 will be awarded at the beginning of the school year and the second half will be awarded midway through the school year. Applause ...

Face Value

Jerry Seinfeld educed laughter from his television audiences when he called his dermatologist girlfriend “pimple popper M.D.” But people who pooh-pooh dermatologists’ place in medicine are missing an important part of the overall medical picture. The examinations dermatologists perform often identify problems or the beginnings of conditions of concern that other physicians might miss in what most people regard as “regular” examinations. Dermatologists often identify early signs of diseases, such as types of cancer that manifest, for instance, as rashes, and even tumors. ...

History Lesson

Eighty-three years ago last weekend, Americans spent most of the day contemplating with uneasy hearts what the future would bring. Dec. 7, 1941, was the day Japan opted for the gamble that Americans would be caught off-guard, and that this country would succumb to the imperialistic intentions of the Far East power. Japan did succeed on that day 83 years ago. It caught America’s Pacific Fleet off-guard, resulting in a heavy loss of life, as well as ships, as well as other defense hardware. However, the fool’s paradise that the surprise attack on America concocted for Japan was ...

Investigation

More than a year ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Norfolk Southern celebrated the “last load of contaminated soil” being removed from a site near the derailment of an N&S train in February of that year. Now, Chris Hunsicker, overseeing remediation efforts in East Palestine, has had to go before the Village Council to report that exceedances of vinyl chloride, benzene, trimethylbenzene and 2-butoxyethanol have been detected through confirmatory sampling. “We are not saying it’s perfect. Nobody is saying that, but we are getting toward the end of the process,” ...