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Tourism reboot

The confusion surrounding this week’s reopening to tourism reminded us of a spaceship plunging through Earth’s atmosphere. After seven months of solitary orbit, suspended weightless and viewing the world from afar, suddenly Hawaii was hurtling toward reentry, rattling and shaking as it passed through a lot of back-and-forth between island mayors and Gov. David Ige. Ige wanted arriving passengers to be required to have one negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours prior to landing to forgo a mandatory 14-day quarantine. The mayors were pushing for two tests, one before and one after. ...

‘Stamping’ mad about increase

Next year will bring higher prices at the post office. Anyone who didn’t see this coming hasn’t been paying attention, but it’s sure to make consumers “stamping” mad. It makes sense that the advent of email and instant messaging apps would have a deleterious effect on the postal service. Between 2001 and 2016, correspondence mail between households dropped by more than 60 percent, according to a study by the USPS Inspector General. During the same period, changes in the way the postal service funds pensions and new requirements passed in the Bush administration have had a ...

Release video from incident

There is no excuse for a Louisiana State Police trooper to use foul language in the course of doing or discussing his or her job. More disturbing is hearing a trooper claim to beat the life out of someone. Yet a short audio clip indicates that happened. Reporter Jim Mustian, of The Associated Press, obtained a 27-second audio clip of Master Trooper Chris Hollingsworth saying “I beat the ever-living f--- out of him,” referencing the controversial and questionable May 2019 death of Ronald Greene in Union Parish. “Choked him and everything else trying to get him under control,” ...

COVID-19 is not discriminatory

What goes around comes around. You reap what you sow. Actions dictate consequences. Chickens come home to roost.         Having observed this karmic balancing throughout millennia, mankind has developed many ways of saying the same thing. As you make your bed, so you must lie in it. These cautionary axioms continue to resonate because humans have never quit plowing through stop signs of common sense and self-awareness. They did it when man was first learning to make fire and it continues on a grand scale today. The reckoning usually arrives post-blunder as a sort of ...

Answers are still needed

The process was broken from the beginning, on March 12, when a judge in Kentucky’s Jefferson County signed off on the no-knock search warrant that led to the death of Breonna Taylor. It remains broken today. New questions have been raised about the actions of Louisville police as well as those of the state’s Republican attorney general who declined to bring criminal charges against the two officers who shot and killed Ms. Taylor. Answers and accountability are still desperately needed, which buttresses calls for appointment of a special prosecutor. Last week saw the release of ...

Make home more fire safe

This is Fire Prevention Week and a good time to take inventory. Families need to know what to do if a fire breaks out in their home. An important first step is installation of fire alarms. And it’s imperative to check the smoke alarms of elderly family members and to help identify fire hazards in their home and correct them. It is also important to be cautious while smoking, as 51 percent of the fire deaths in Michigan since 2017 have involved careless smoking. In order to make every home more fire safe, MI Prevention offers the following tips: • Install smoke alarms on every ...