Congratulations to all our graduating seniors. Completing twelve years of studies and moving on to the next phase in your lives is an accomplishment of which to be proud.
Many parts of Florida have become too expensive to live. It shouldn’t take skyrocketing housing and insurance costs to convince state leaders to get their heads out of the sand on these issues.
Imagine a successful small-business owner who wants to run for Congress. To jump-start his campaign, he might lend it some money. Once fundraising gets going, it can pay him back. But the law says donations arriving after Election Day may repay only $250,000 of candidate debt. If the busines…
While the good news is that the pandemic appears to be waning, the bad news is that the cost of living has skyrocketed over the past two years.
The outright duplicity that guided the words and actions of Rams owner Stan Kroenke and National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell, among others, were widely assumed but not proven beyond doubt in the public’s eye until the release of court documents behind the $790 settlement with …
Though it seems as though every day we hear more and more agencies acknowledging the terrible toll taken by COVID-19 on mental health, particularly for our children, it took a while to get to the point of action to reverse the problem.
If the absence of mandatory helmets in girls lacrosse seems baffling, consider the history of protective equipment in baseball.
It’s that time of year again – hurricane season officially begins June 1. Due to climate change, however, since 2015 the first named storm of each season has occurred in May.
Sticker shock at the gas pumps might remind motorists to follow some good advice from Benjamin Franklin: “Waste not, want not.”
Over the last few weeks there has been a lot of talk about Elon Musk buying Twitter and what it means for the social media company.
We don’t often have the opportunity to make a statement about 21st century consumerism and consumption than we do by going to a farmers’ market.
The 428,000 net new jobs last month in the Labor Department’s Friday report is mildly encouraging since every major industry added workers. But the report also contains a warning that inflationary pressure may be starting to hurt the labor market.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA), aggressive driving has slowly but steadily risen every year since 2017. While there was improvement in 2020 and 2021 (during COVID restrictions), it was small and didn’t last long. Aggressive driving is back on the rise.
Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, has often expressed admiration for the resolve exhibited by one of his predecessors, Paul Volcker, who was willing to crash the economy in the early 1980s to drive down inflation.
Today we honor the women who forever hold a special place in our hearts. We celebrate with dinners, kind words, cards and gifts, but those pale in comparison to what the day really signifies. For most of us, it means honoring the singular person in our lives who we held most dear from our ea…
Democrats dissembled about the costs of their student loan takeover in 2010, and now they’re deceiving Americans about their drive for student debt cancellation. But South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, a member of the House Democratic leadership, gave away the game over the weekend.
A bipartisan group of senators reportedly is close to agreement on recommending reforms to a flawed, archaic law. The Electoral Count Act of 1887 gives the vice president a ceremonial role in approving state vote counts, but it is worded vaguely enough that President Donald Trump claimed tha…
When it comes to redistricting of federal and state legislative seats, what’s good for the goose is not necessarily what’s good for the gander.
With great fanfare and very little evidence, the Florida Department of Education banned more than 50 new math textbooks for containing “indoctrinating information” on “prohibited topics.” Specific examples of offensive material are still hard to come by, which should anger parents who want b…
In the past couple of months, Highlands County has seen what straight line winds can do. A manufactured home community in Sebring saw it. A number of residents in Avon Park saw it in early April. This past Sunday, the damage caused by the winds was seen by a group of residents in Sebring.
A key debate during the pandemic has been just how much danger a person is in while outdoors. It seems clear that being outdoors has benefits in fighting the coronavirus, but there is much more.
On March 10, Governor Ron De Santis signed House Bill 1467 into law. This bill provides expanded parental access to the evaluation of books selected for school libraries and sets 12-year term limits for school board members. Today we are considering the term limits aspect.
For older readers, the high school research paper meant taking an assigned topic and spending long after-school hours in the public library navigating the mysteries of card catalogs and the Dewey Decimal System, scanning the pages of thick books to find a relevant nuggets or two, compiling b…
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the media last week that for the “desired effects” to lower US inflation, it was worth considering taking steps to reduce the tariffs on Chinese goods.
When Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February, trampling on the sovereignty of a neighbor, international sanctions were the best path forward for the United States and its allies to take. The ruthlessness and grave atrocities toward civilians that have ensued since only rei…
The Biden Administration last week announced another installment in its student-loan forgiveness plan to “fix longstanding failures” in the program. Translation: Taxpayers will pay again for the mistakes of Congress and the Obama Administration.
The UK is sliding into a social and economic crisis, the likes of which its people have not seen for decades. Household fuel bills are on course to top £2,400 by this autumn, while the price of a grocery shop is rocketing. Meanwhile, the economy is flatlining and the average employee’s pay k…
This is not a normal tax year for the Internal Revenue Service. As millions of American households scrambled to meet the April 18 filing deadline, it’s easy to view this as just another tax season that causes temporary annoyance and then fades in the headlines and minds of most people. But t…
The state Department of Education recently assessed 132 math books.
Last year, a married Black couple wanted to sell their Cincinnati, Ohio, house at a list price of $525,000. They got an offer in the low $500,000s.
Stephen Shipps deserves every bit of punishment coming to him and more.
President Joe Biden came to Iowa last week and granted a request that his political adversaries (and friends) in the state have been relentlessly pursuing: Full-year sales of E15 ethanol.
Haiti passed a grim milestone in February, when the traditional presidential inauguration day came and went with no president taking the oath of office, no realistic prospect of presidential elections, and no established consensus on how to restore some semblance of functioning democracy in …
Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine has sparked an Olympic sprint of sorts as politicians run away from their abysmal records regarding Vladimir Putin. Few are running faster than former President Barack Obama, who this week tried to rewrite the history of his own Russia policies.
When marriages rupture and families break up, it hurts. One spouse, possibly both, must leave their home. Access to children is governed by a schedule and often strained by hostility. And for most Floridians, divorce means an escalated fear of lasting financial turmoil.
As sure as the world turns, slithery bugs slink out from beneath rocks after every severe storm. We refer to bugs on two legs, of course.
Sexual assault and child abuse are not easy subjects to talk about but they occur in our community far too often.
When is someone in Austin, Texas or Washington going to show some leadership on the border crisis?
For most of its two decades overseeing the sprawling Virginia estate of James Madison, the fourth U.S. president, the Montpelier Foundation had either zero or just one African American member of its governing board, whose authorized strength is 25 members. That was astonishing because Montpe…
Kudos to the County Commission and the county’s engineering department. No sooner had the commission learned of the need for new equipment at the landfill then members approved the approximately $1.5 million needed to obtain a new (used) compactor and a used Volvo chassis with a 6,000-gallon…
The mass flight of refugees from Ukraine has created a humanitarian crisis that dwarfs anything Europe has seen since World War II. More than 4 million people have poured into neighboring countries, and as long as Russia’s savage war continues, millions more will flee. Already, the flow of r…
The House moved last week to cap the cost of insulin, and Democrats think they’ve found a winner to save seats in November. What ghoul could oppose cheaper insulin? Alas the bill misdiagnoses the problem and is a pretext for more political control of drug prices, which won’t serve suffering …
Nebraska Sen. Bruce Bostelman caused quite a stir when he stood on the floor of the Nebraska Legislature last week and lamented that schools were providing litter boxes for students who dress as dogs and cats.
The Florida Department of Health announced its plan to reduce its COVID reports once again to bi-weekly reports at 7:49 p.m. on March 11. Instead of announcing the reduction of reports via press release or press conference, FDOH took to social media with a cat meme. The post read “When it’s …
The worst of the COVID-19 pandemic may be behind us, but pretending that it is over will not make it so. A new Omicron subvariant, BA.2, is driving up coronavirus case counts in Europe and Asia, and experts predict it soon will account for the majority of new cases in the United States. The …
At its last meeting, the Sebring City Council approved the first $6 million allocation toward the Community Redevelopment Agency’s waterfront redevelopment project at City Pier Beach. The total cost for this renovation is estimated to be around $10 million. Final numbers will depend on inflation.
