Breaking News

Local Columns

Some ideal temperatures

We’re now into the winter season, and I would like to offer you a few suggestions to encourage you to think of ways to lower your utility bills. The major one involves replacing the furnace filters in your home. The U.S. Department of Energy says the average homeowner can save up to 15 percent on heating and cooling bills with this one simple step. A filter full of dust or pet hair makes your furnace work harder. It’s like you trying to breathe when your nose is congested. You should inspect your furnace and air conditioning filters regularly and consider setting up a 90-day ...

The Ohio Valley has a radiation problem

During the 1950s and 1960s, I remember the government-conducted Civil Defense drills in my school. We were told to climb under our school desks, duck down and cover our heads. We might have survived a bomb blast but the radioactive fallout could not be stopped. The nuclear disasters at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima have taught us that the radiation emitted during an accident or bombing will travel across the planet via the jet stream and distribute some radiation to all of us. Unfortunately, a similar scenario has been occurring in Southeastern Ohio. Since 2012, (when ...

Technology … where would we be without it?

Technology. Where would we be without it? Technology. Where would we be without it? No, I didn’t accidentally write that sentence twice. It’s written to mean two different points of view. Go back and read it again. I’ll wait. Can you see the difference? On one hand, technology has drastically changed the way we do practically everything. The world is pretty much at our fingertips. Life has become so much easier — perhaps too easy. We no longer have to try to read a map or stop and ask directions at a gas station, even though some of us may insist we never get lost. ...

Putting a freeze frame on federal funding

I typically don’t write about national politics in this space. When I do cover national politics, it is usually through the lenses of West Virginia’s congressional delegation. My focus tends to be on state-level politics. However, last week’s temporary freeze on federal grant funding by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – now stayed and rescinded - really brought together national and state politics, because probably no other state would have been affected by that freeze more than West Virginia. According to the memo, federal agencies were to review ...

Knowing the difference between fact and fiction

I remember in grade school being taught about the dangers of rumors and mishearing information; how things can be twisted around when details aren’t understood appropriately – or worse, when people intentionally twist those details around the suit their own needs. The lesson was taught, as some were back then, through a game. During “Telephone,” we sat in a circle, with one person given a message, and then each of us taking turns telling the person next to us what we thought the message was. Almost always, by the time the last person was asked to say what they had heard, it ...

Remembering a hero from Tough Man

Roger “Cookie” Wallace passed, a longtime friend I met through his brother, Richard “Dick’ Wallace, who was a Brooke County school bus driver who listened with encouragement about my aspiration to be in the fight racket. When I was working in Wellsburg back in the late 1970s, his brother would come from a long day’s work at Eagle Manufacturing to do his banking when I was a teller. But Cookie enjoyed unclaimed fame in the glove game having been the wheels in 1980 for the Ohio Valley Tough Man contest at what was then Wheeling Civic Center. In what was a rather tense drive, ...