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Wind industry keeps preying on region

The industrial wind grifters are back. This time their targets are the towns of Ellery, Stockton, North Harmony, Sherman, Westfield, and Ripley. The snake-oil salesmen are busy signing up landowners — promising them lots of taxpayer-provided money to lease their land to Bedrock Renewables (Golden, Colo.) which is looking to erect 600-foot industrial wind turbines across the western portion of Chautauqua County. The Wind Target Zone stretches across the fourth most important migrating bird flyway in North America on the Lake Erie escarpment where flocks of birds seek the updrafts ...

April’s annual spring tease is in full swing

Believe it or not, it’s Spring! If you look at a calendar, you will know I’m not lying. In fact, it’s been Spring for over a month, and the pictures on your April calendar probably show things like fields of green grass and budding flowers, robins dangling worms from their beaks, and greedy squirrels gorging themselves on bird feeders. Another sure sign is the number of dead rabbits on the roadside, those speedy creatures that are so hell-bent on practicing their reproductive rights they forget to look before crossing. There are other signs. You might hear a cardinal singing out ...

State budget process is bad government

This year, New York is struggling to pass a budget, for the third year in a row. If the Majority needed only to agree on how to spend billions of your tax dollars more than last year, the budget would be done on time. But our state government’s wasteful spending is only a part of the problem. See, every year, the governor, along with the Senate and Assembly Majority leaders, adds substantial changes to our laws through the budget. Most of those changes, like the pro-criminal bail laws, have been disastrous. If the governor dislikes the submitted policy changes, then she laments the ...

Americans keep losing rights, voices

No food, water or other supplies have entered Gaza since March. People are starving to death. People are dying of diseases because there is no clean water. Their relatives in Yemen, the Houthis, are desperate to do something. They are launching missile attacks on Israel. We are responding with airstrikes, one on a market in the capital that killed 12 people and wounded 34 others. Why are we attacking civilian targets? How long before they attack us directly? People in the region blame us for the genocide. Israel is doing it with our weapons and support. Young people in ...

POWs survive Soviet imprisonment

IMPERIA, Italy — From the veranda of a couple’s vacation home is a stunningly beautiful view. Brightly painted modest homes dot the high hills along the shore of this city on the Italian Riviera. On a sunny afternoon with nary a cloud in the sky, the Mediterranean Sea is blue all the way to the southern horizon. The couple and others in their generation of Germans were youngsters and perhaps young adults in the 1930s and 1940s, when life in their country was hard. For the then-future husband, who was away from his homeland from 1945 to 1950, life was even harder. That ...

Two old buddies in the leaves and weeds

It’s just past 10:00 a.m. and Old Tom is standing in my backyard. He has been a shoveling, bending, tugging figure out there for almost 20 years. Like me, Tom moves slower today than when he first agreed to help me. Today he is wearing a floppy hat, jacket, Bermudas and work boots, his usual costume for Spring. When he shows up at my house, he’s dressed for work. I first met Tom at church, 40-plus years ago. He and MaryLou were regulars but I never knew them well. Years passed. Tom retired and turned toward his hobby, gardening. Yet when church members needed help, Tom stepped ...