journalism blog

Ralph Yarl is a sixteen year old Black teenager who was going to pickup his younger twin brothers at a friend’s house in Kansas City. He mistakenly went to the wrong house. Instead of going to Northeast 115th Terrace, he went to Northeast 115th Street. An understandable mistake. It would change his life. Yarl rang

The weight can be enormous. It’s New York. It’s the Yankees. It’s the position played by one of the all time greats and Hall of Famer. The Captain. There have been a few players who’ve played the position since Derek Jeter retired in 2014. But not with the promise of Anthony Volpe, a twenty-one year

Three years ago sixteen young people from across Montana took the first step down a path that could lead to a safer cleaner world and change our lives and the lives of generations to come. They filed what might be the first serious constitutional climate lawsuit, Held v. The State of Montana. It claims the

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”-Kennedy Inaugural Address, Jan.20, 1961 ”With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see right, let us strive, on to finish the work we are

It was a network news story about the late cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar’s collection of exotic animals he had imported to his ranch in Columbia the 1980’s. Among the animals were three female hippos and one male. The government is trying to move them now that the Escobar ranch has been abandoned. Well, the four

March is a big birthday month in our family. I will turn seventy-two at the end of the week. Two of our granddaughters also have birthdays this month. Cecily turned nine years old last week and Emily will be ten later this month. We are going to have a joint March birthday celebration. As we

We have grown numb to gun crime in America. A couple of days ago it was three students killed and eight wounded by a gunman on the Michigan State University campus. Just this morning, we awoke to another shooting at a shopping mall in El Paso, Texas. One killed. It was not far from a

Former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley has announced she is running for president. She is the first Republican to challenge Donald Trump for the nomination. Until now, all potential candidates have been afraid to step up and challenge Trump. They all supported or worked for him in the past, and now

It snuck in last week, but it had been lurcking for almost three years. My wife Maureen started sneezing. She thought it was allergies. A slight sore throat would come and go. But she was falling asleep watching TV by nine o’clock and sleeping later in the morning. No other symptoms. Then last Friday, I

On the second anniversary of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, we are watching the Capitol destroying itself. As I write this, we are less than an hour away from the House of Representatives reconvening to continue the humiliation of Kevin McCarthy. His desperately trying to get at least sixteen of the twenty radical