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North county meetings always ready for ruckus

It was an unusual police call on Monday, May 11 in Fredonia. Officers were being summoned to Village Hall — the same building where its headquarters are stationed on the lower level. After the public access cameras at the trustees meeting went dark, there was a definite commotion. Residents ...

Court restricts racial gerrymandering

Let’s pick up where we left off 12 weeks ago. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was before the U.S. Supreme Court again, this time in Louisiana v. Callais. * * * Writing for the six-justice majority, Justice Samuel Alito ...

Just one more Memorial Day remembrance

Editor’s note: Marcy O’Brien is in New England with family graduation festivities. Parts of this column have appeared previously. Memorial Day was a particularly important day of remembrance for my mother. Every year, she made sure we wore commemorative red poppies to honor her youngest brother, the family hero. Kenneth Arthur MacMillan was the youngest of four children. When their mother died, my mother, Alberta, was 6 and the siblings were 4, 2 and baby Kenny was months old. He never knew his mother who spent the last months of her life in a tuberculosis sanitorium. Alberta ...

The OBSERVER’s View: Region has a dislike for data centers

Take a drive through Brocton-Portland and there are signs of discontent. It stems from the announcement earlier this spring that a possible data center was looking at the former Sugar Hill golf course on Route 5. That opposition also is evident in last week’s observertoday.com poll: Are you concerned about data centers in Chautauqua County? Final results show 503 as being “yes” votes with another 270 in the “no” category. Our region, however, is not alone. Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including ...

Nuclear fusion ignored at moment in U.S.

At a time when our need for electricity is growing rapidly, why are we creating a system based on intermittent wind and solar generated power? In 2025 U.S. spending on renewable energy generation primarily wind and solar was $108.7 billion.  Unfortunately in the same period the U.S. spent a paltry $2.64 billion on power generation by nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is the same process that powers the sun and all other stars. It is a process where two light hydrogen atoms under extreme temperatures and pressure combine to form a single helium atom releasing massive amounts of ...

The OBSERVER’s View: City’s piddly action in midst of firestorm

As has been well documented for more than two years, the city of Dunkirk is facing real troubles. Finances are in shambles. Morale, of course, is at all time lows in City Hall. How is the Common Council responding to the big problems through the first five months of the year? It does not. Instead, it takes on another meaningless issue. It creates a resolution — that it approved — that would not allow the public to be served with paperwork during a council meeting. “The service of legal papers upon individuals during the course of a public meeting may create a chilling effect ...