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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
A threat lurks in our world. It is bigger than our culture. It is bigger than our economy, but will include them both. From the beginning, humans have used technology to replace us: human labor cut short by a machine that did the job. It was convenient. It was economical. By this means, humans created civilization, but we have never been in control of this process, and it was an illusion that humans ever were. Technology is a thing that happens to us. The machine will use us up, and we will expend bodies and resources. So long as the progress continues, no cost will appear too high. ...
