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Editorial

Editorial encore: The legacy of 9/11

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today’s editorial has been adapted from one that originally published Sept. 11, 2021. The average college student has no true memory of Sept. 11, 2001. Neither do current high school, middle school or elementary school students. They were too young — if they had even been born yet — to remember the day two planes took down the twin towers of the World Trade Center, while another crashed into the Pentagon and yet another nosedived into a field in Pennsylvania. Twenty-three years after the day that changed the United States, America’s youth have no memory of ...

Campus carry flops, but it was never about the guns

Now that college students are back on campus and classes are in full swing, let’s talk about campus carry — the shorthand for a slew of policies created by the Campus Self-Defense Act inflicted on our public universities by the West Virginia Legislature. We would understand the state putting in the effort to pass such legislation if it was popular among the demographic it most impacts. However, the state’s college communities — from students to professors to administrative staff — were vocal in their opposition to allowing concealed weapons into various parts of their ...

Purrfect time to help local animal welfare programs

We usually pay special attention to our local animal welfare programs in the spring, when shelters get overrun by dumped pets and spay/neuter programs are trying to  get ahead as we go into mating season. But both M-SNAP and Animal Friends of North Central West Virginia have some exciting things going on this fall. M-SNAP (Mountaineer Spay Neuter Assistance Program) has moved its beloved ReTails store from the Morgantown Mall to WesMon Plaza on Commerce Drive in Westover. The secondhand shop supports M-SNAP’s spay/neuter voucher program, which allows Mon County residents to ...

Were you exposed in NPD breach?

The National Public Data breach is a sobering reminder that our personal data — everything from our usernames and passwords to our birth dates and Social Security numbers — are just a few keystrokes away from falling into the hands of criminals. National Public Data is a private company based in Florida that collects information for background checks. Its databases held 2.7 billion people’s full name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and phone number, alternate names and birth dates and email addresses. NPD was hacked in April, and possibly again this summer, ...

Preserving green space as the city continues to grow

As a relatively small-but-growing city, Morgantown now faces the same problems previously faced by bigger cities — which were once small-but-growing cities, too. Growth requires development: commercial spaces, residential buildings, parking, related infrastructure, etc. Development, however, is often detrimental to the environment. Morgantown is now in that place where it must carefully consider how much land it should develop to meet the area’s growing economic and residential demands, and how much to leave as pristine green space. For example: The 14 wooded acres between E. ...

W.Va. vs. drug use: We’re losing

WV Department of Health and Human Resources The above map shows counties ranked by vulnerability to overdose mortality from all drugs. Dark red indicates the highest vulnerability to overdose deaths while light green indicates the lowest. Data from this map comes from 2017, the last time a statewide assessment was completed and the results made public. When Jeremiah Samples, senior policy adviser for the Legislature, gave his presentation on West Virginia’s addiction statistics, it was disappointing, though not surprising, to learn the Mountain State has made little progress in ...