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Standing Up For W.Va. Children

In an era when too many in state and federal government seem more bent on protecting themselves than those they are meant to serve, it is encouraging to hear from someone as esteemed as former Justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals Margaret Workman, who understands the damage done after two circuit court judges were admonished for speaking out regarding child abuse and foster care problems in the state. “The recent disciplinary actions against Circuit Court Judges Maryclaire Akers and Tim Sweeney for their public criticism of the failures of child abuse and neglect ...

Disaster Declaration Necessary for Area

As we’ve chronicled over the past three weeks, the devastation to the Valley Grove and Triadelphia communities reaches the level of a federal disaster declaration. Consider: - A total of nine lives lost. - Three dozen homes swept away in the flooding or damaged to the point they’re not repairable. - Another 100-plus homes damaged. - Six dozen cars destroyed. - Roads damaged or destroyed. - Lives forever altered. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal offices continue to have representatives on the ground here in Ohio County assessing the damage. It ...

Time To Get Downtown Wheeling Back on Track

It was on Tuesday of this past week — July 1, the start of a new fiscal year — that Market Street in Wheeling was supposed to be paved. Or at least that’s what the schedule for the Downtown Wheeling Streetscape project indicates. In fact, the paving of 12th, 14th and portions of 16th Street were supposed to occur in June. That didn’t happen, either. So here we sit, in July, and Market Street is a total fiasco. The road is a mess, filled with craters, bumps and more. This project is nearly three years old. It was supposed to finish later this year — but who knows if that ...

Pats on the Back

- To the West Virginia Board of Realtors and the Wheeling Board of Realtors for working with the National Association of Realtors to secure $100,000 in flood relief for Ohio and Marion counties. The assistance, if granted, can cover mortgage payments, temporary rental housing and hotel stay reimbursements for those displaced. - To all those locally that turned out last week to assist in cleaning up additional flooding that occurred June 26 in Bethlehem and Elm Grove. Our community truly is shining bright in this moment, with neighbor helping neighbor. - To Catholic Charities West ...

Freedom Is Key to Independence

Today, we Americans celebrate the Declaration of Independence. Our focus is what the document meant — creation of a new nation, a new set of ideals to form a more perfect union. But what the document itself says about the Founders and about what they intended for us is just as important, in many ways. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ...” That single sentence is familiar to many Americans, as well as ...

Celebrating an Exceptional Nation

As most Americans observe Independence Day, a few among us insist July 4 is nothing to celebrate. The United States of American is flawed deeply, they insist. We should forget the Declaration of Independence, repeal the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and start anew, some cynics of our current system maintain. That would ignore a quarter-millennium of evidence, not just here but throughout the world, that the nation’s founders were right. Critics of our form of government — and even our people as a nation — insist the very wording of the Declaration of Independence is so ...