Last week, after hawkish testimony from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, markets penciled in a half-point increase in interest rates following the central bank’s next policy meeting. On Friday, the run on Silicon Valley Bank and subsequent fears of a wider crisis changed many investors’ …
For many young people, college can be tough emotionally and socially as well as academically. In today’s environment, though, things are much worse — dangerously so. By just about any measure, the mental health of today’s college students is in free fall. The situation is dire and demands im…
Hostility to the First Amendment is a bipartisan endeavor. Too many elected officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution without having bothered to read the document. The Orlando Sentinel reported this week that a Florida lawmaker of Republican persuasion has offered a bill to require b…
There was a glimmer of hope heading into the recently concluded General Assembly session that lawmakers would hammer out a compromise to begin retail marijuana sales in the commonwealth. That did not happen and Virginia is worse off as a result. In a landmark 2021 vote, the General Assembly …
One of the lingering — and potentially disastrous — effects of the COVID pandemic is that more parents are reluctant to have their children vaccinated against what used to be common childhood diseases, as well as against flu and the mutating coronavirus strains. These diseases are nothing to…
Gov. Glenn Youngkin insists that his determination to limit abortion services in Virginia wouldn’t extend to laws that imprison women for seeking reproductive care. But it’s now clear that he’s willing to intrude upon women’s privacy in order to punish abortion providers, a very troubling de…
Ordinarily, construction of a building in Arlington wouldn’t reverberate much beyond the surrounding area. But when workers recently installed the final beam on the top floor of Virginia Tech’s new Innovation Campus — known as “topping out” in the construction world — it was a milestone that…
It looked like something out of a Hollywood sci-fi flick: the White House press secretary assuring a roomful of reporters that there is “no indication of aliens.” Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had to make that startling pronouncement this week because a top general had earlier declined to rule out the possibility that extraterrestrials are behind a string of mysterious objects the U.S. ...
The past few years have gotten us used to bad news from the Centers for Disease Control, and this week was more of the same, yet this time it had nothing to do with COVID. The agency’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that about one in three high-school age girls had seriously considered suicide, and detailed sharp upticks in sexual violence and overall mental health struggles. The CDC report ...
Two years ago, in a rare show of bipartisan unanimity, the General Assembly created a joint subcommittee to study comprehensive campaign finance reform. Finally lawmakers showed a willingness to take a long, hard look at the rules which govern elections with an eye toward making substantive and needed changes. However, Virginia has a bad habit of assigning tricky subjects to examination and ...
While the investigation into the Jan. 6 shooting at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News continues, allegations against the school division allege an escalating pattern of disruptive behavior before the 6-year-old shot 25-year-old first-grade teacher Abigail Zwerner. Why these complaints were not handled remains a matter of dispute. However, what’s clear is that school divisions should ...
With a total of 517,000 new jobs created last month and total employment estimates revised up, the country now has the lowest unemployment rate in more than half a century. The numbers cooled recession fears, and while some economists and policymakers fret that the robust labor gains are going to send us into an inflationary tailspin, inflation indicators have actually been trending positively ...
So Virginia doesn’t honor the Chincoteague as our state pony? Then it’s about time. Already the idea enjoys all-too-rare bipartisan support, thanks to a pair of bills introduced by Eastern Shore legislators, Democratic Sen. Lynwood Lewis and Republican Del. Robert Bloxom. The governor says he’s on board. So is his wife. The Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Department, which owns the herd, has been ...
Incompetence or malevolence? These are the two most plausible reasons why the Youngkin administration plunged school districts across the commonwealth into fiscal uncertainty last week. All signs point to the former, that bureaucratic ineptitude resulted in public schools expecting $201 million more than the state plans to provide. An online tool used by local school systems to estimate their ...
Six-year-old children should be learning to read, identify new words by matching letters to sounds, count to 100, and do basic addition and subtraction. But now we have a 6-year-old who allegedly shot his teacher in Newport News, Virginia. Unfortunately, school shootings are not uncommon. There have been more than 1,300 school shootings in the U.S. since 1970, according to data from the ...
It’s not every day that the federal government and states as varied as Tennessee and New York find themselves on the same side of a legal dispute, but these were joined by New Jersey, Virginia, Colorado, California, Rhode Island and Connecticut yesterday in filing suit against Google parent company Alphabet for antitrust violations including unlawful means of crowding out competition. If ...
There are two issues — one micro, one macro — at the heart of the report released this week by the Office of Attorney General Jason Miyares into the conduct of the Virginia Parole Board. Both will need to be resolved through robust public discussion and thoughtful legislative action. The granular issue involves the board itself, which the AG’s office argues made numerous legal errors and ...
It’s unclear whether the recent move by Mars Wrigley candy to sideline its iconic M&Ms “spokescandies” is a genuine reaction to the silliest right-wing controversy yet, or is just a setup for a commercial stunt in the upcoming Super Bowl. Either way, we were hesitant to bite on this non-…
People observing “Dry January” voluntarily abstain from alcohol during the first month of the year. The practice has grown in popularity, and we suspect more than a few participants are counting down the days until February begins and the calendar becomes clear for resumed tippling. Alas, the latest reports from the Party-Pooper File suggest that Americans would be better off if Dry January ...
There is a 0% chance that a proposal to eliminate the federal income tax and replace it with a massive national sales tax will even get out of the Republican-controlled House, let alone become law. But the fact that such a bluntly soak-the-poor idea is even getting an airing under new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy should stand as ominous confirmation that he is basically a hostage to his ...
Whether President Joe Biden’s misguided plan to forgive some $400 billion in federal student-loan debt goes forward will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court. For now, there’s more the federal government should be doing to rein in the costs of higher education — and thus reduce how much students borrow in the first place. In particular: It should insist that colleges stop hiding exactly how ...
Now that they are back at work in Richmond, legislators should lose no time carrying out a simple recommendation on their to-deal-with list that could make a big difference in the lives of some young people. Virginia’s dual enrollment program lets students at public high schools earn college credits from community colleges. A recent study by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission ...
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If President Joe Biden has a coherent strategy for ending the Ukraine war, now would be an opportune time to deploy it. On Wednesday, Biden announced that the U.S. will provide Ukraine with 31 M1A1 Abrams tanks. That’s the U.S.’ main battle tank, which our country has used for four decades. In tandem with Biden’s decision, Germany and other European allies will provide tanks. Politico reported ...
The deadly toll of drug overdoses in Virginia just keeps getting worse. It will take a concerted statewide effort at every level — from leaders in Richmond to frontline workers across the state — to reduce the tragic numbers and make 2023 the year that deadly tide starts to turn. The numbers were still climbing in 2021 even though the increase in drug overdose deaths was not as dramatic as the ...
Defense spending is vital to the ensure the nation’s security. But that doesn’t mean the Pentagon should be above budget scrutiny. Far from it, as a recent audit reveals. Last week, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the Pentagon cannot account for at least $220 billion in military gear given out to defense contractors. Nor is this a new phenomenon. The report found that the ...
The Virginia General Assembly made history two years ago when it voted to legalize personal cultivation of marijuana and possession of the plant in small amounts, becoming the first state in the South to do so. Unfortunately, the legislation only went halfway. While lawmakers removed criminal punishment for recreational cannabis use, they did not take the necessary steps to establish a ...
It may seem hard to believe, but there remains a hard-core group of partisans who still insist that a presidential election was stolen and that the victor is “illegitimate.” Perhaps these conspiracy theorists will finally reconsider in the wake of a new study by New York University which concludes that Russian tweets did little to increase Donald Trump’s vote count in the 2016 presidential ...
The White House drove the country into an inflation mess because it refused to listen to economists and others who predicted the administration’s massive multitrillion-dollar spending spree would overheat the economy. Next time — let’s hope there isn’t a next time, but … — such willful ignorance may be more difficult to maintain thanks to a change in how the House scores legislation. It was 18 ...
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are both being investigated over their handling of classified materials. While publicly disclosed information reflects that the cases are clearly different, the investigatory processes should not be. To that end, Attorney General Merrick Garland rightly appointed special prosecutors in each instance, including naming Robert Hur — a Trump ...
The start of a new year offers the perfect opportunity to better protect yourself, your financial health and your long-term future by resolving to take online security seriously in 2023. As crimes such as identity theft, fraud and scams proliferate in frequency and grow annually in severity, there is no better time to address this threat and adopt some tried-and-true best practices to guard ...
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