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Copper Theft Needs Heavier Punishment

Editorials

On its face, copper theft is a dumb crime, culprits breaking into homes, business or other areas to yank out that metal and sell it somewhere else. It’s just scummy. Yet someone last week found a way to make that crime even scummier. Wheeling police were called out to an Appalachian Power substation near Elm on Friday morning after someone had broken into it and absconded with the copper inside. That theft created another, much larger, problem. With that copper gone, the substation went down. And at the outset, 7,700 Appalachian Power customers were without power. Thanks to ...

A Week of Firsts

Local Columns

There are many firsts for me this legislative session. One of them has been the budget bill moving earlier than I or many other experienced Capitol dwellers have ever seen it move. The state Senate and House of Delegates came to a compromise on the budget bill on day 51. This was done for the most part to get the bill to Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s desk so he would have five days to consider it prior to the end of the session. If Morrisey does any line-item vetoes to the budget bill, the Legislature would have time to override those vetoes. Vetoes of regular bills take a simple ...

Problems With Pickleball Courts

Letters to the Editor

Editor, News-Register: On May 10, 2025, this newspaper published my letter to the editor raising concerns about the utter lack of experience of Recreation Resource USA, the company the City of Wheeling hired to install new pickleball courts at Patterson at a cost of $72k. Three days later I attended a City Council meeting with other long-time pickleball players to try and convince Council that Recreation Resource’s recommended 2-inch milling depth of the court surfaces would not resolve existing cracks that were more than 2 inches deep. After Councilman Dave Palmer made assurances ...

Valley Sports Legends Remind Us To Dream

Editorials

In the Ohio Valley, sports heroes of the past are not just names that used to regularly appear in the newspaper. Even after they move on they remain neighbors, classmates, and hometown legends whose stories become woven into the region’s identity. In recent weeks, the Upper Ohio Valley has lost three of its most impactful sports figures — men who carried the grit and humility of this region to the highest levels of their sports: Bill Mazeroski, Bobby Douglas and Lou Holtz. Their careers and sports were different, but their Upper Ohio Valley roots — and the values they carried ...

Open Borders Don’t Help Immigration

Local Columns

In 2002, my son Danny and his wife Mary Jo had begun trying to obtain a visa for Aaliyah, Danny’s Filipino stepdaughter, for nearly two years, but to no avail. It was very frustrating since Danny was an active, career U. S. Army Sergeant. Upon returning from over a year of deployment in Iraq in 2005, Dan and his family were reassigned to a tour of duty in Germany. While in Germany, they continued to apply for a United States visa for Aaliyah at the state department in Frankfurt. No luck. It was then that they asked Peggy if she and I would try to contact politicians at home to ...

Don't Let Scam Kiosks Hijack Bitcoin’s Name

Local Columns

Imagine this situation for just one second: In a convenience store or grocery store, an older neighbor stands at a "Bitcoin ATM," phone pressed to their ear, cash in hand. A voice on the other end is rushing them, “a warrant is out,” or, “a bank account is frozen,” or even worse, “ a grandchild is in trouble,” - something that can only be fixed if they feed cash into the machine immediately. These scams are absolutely brutal: once that cash is converted into crypto and sent, it can be gone in minutes. It’s straight-up theft, and it is fast, humiliating, and often ...