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Health and Safety

Editorials

As West Virginians watched for news of the trapped foreman of a mining crew in an Alpha Metallurgical Resources mine in Nicholas County, just days after learning of the death of another miner in an accident at a Mettiki Coal mine in Tucker County, the health and safety of our coal miners was brought back into our collective minds. For the miners themselves, a renewed fight over their health has been brewing for months, as an Associated Press report over the weekend delved into the fight to get the Trump administration and the U.S. Department of Labor to stop rolling back or delaying ...

Harman charter proposal

Columnists

Earlier this year, I wrote a bill to help save the Harman School, and it passed. Last December, I authored a detailed article about how to save the school while simultaneously avoiding the financial problems the county is facing. This was to be accomplished through the charter school program in West Virginia. However, by the time discussions about closing the Harman School began last year, the deadline had already passed. It was a no-go. A school that seeks to become a charter school must submit its application the August before the school year begins. Recognizing the urgency of ...

Post-Pandemic

Editorials

“Women have fallen behind in the (post-pandemic) return-to-office push, reflecting the barriers they can still hit when juggling careers and families, even after decades of workplace gains.” That was the observation of the Wall Street Journal in a report in its Oct. 25-26 edition. The message within that paragraph is that, although women’s pay has experienced a decline, when stacked against men’s, it is not due to intentional, gross, beefed-up unfairness — less pay for the same work — on the part of companies toward them. Rather, it is the unfortunate impact of ...

America is a vast, divergent country

Columnists

The United States of America is 3.8 million square miles, filled with 340 million people, producing over $30 trillion in gross domestic product per year. We are the fourth largest country by land, third by population and first by GDP. We no longer know each other, care for each other or like each other. We are a nation of isolated people staring at screens and filled with existential terrors about the other, whoever the other might be. On Tuesday night across America, those existential terrors played out with fear of the other. Hispanic voters who voted for President Donald Trump and ...

The life of the party

Columnists

Political prognosticators are always trying to find meaning in off-year elections. And while I think there are some indicators one can glean from Tuesday’s elections, it would be a mistake to read the tea leaves too closely. Last Tuesday saw a person with links to Democratic Socialists of America — Zohran Mamdani — win election as mayor of New York City over former Democratic New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Former Democratic congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a known moderate and former CIA case officer, won her election for governor of Virginia. There are other elections where ...

Bill Gates sees a new reality

Columnists

You’ve probably heard by now the blockbuster news that Microsoft founder Bill Gates, one of the richest people to ever walk the planet, has had a change of heart on climate change. For several decades, Gates poured billions of dollars into the climate-industrial complex and was howling that the end is nigh unless we stop using fossil fuels, cars, air conditioning and general anesthesia. Now he says he rejects the “doomsday” predictions of the more extreme global warming prophets. Some conservatives have snuffed that Gates has shifted his position on climate change because he ...