Plenty of the headlines these days are Bad news with a capital “B.” What seems to be going on all around us is disheartening, to say the least. An occasional ray of sunshine breaks through, however. Consider the national spelling bee: Earlier this year, organizers of the annual Scripps ...

We need police officers, but we also need to trust them. Perhaps the violence sweeping America this past week is, to a certain degree, what happens when people lose faith in the police they trust to protect them. Where protests are peaceful, like they have been here in the North Country, ...

This week’s Straw Poll: Are you OK with people calling the Adirondacks the “Dacks”? - This poll is not scientific, and its results represent only the opinions of Internet users who have chosen to participate.

Many colleges, especially private ones that aren’t among the nation’s richest, have been in trouble in recent years, and now the COVID-19 pandemic is rocking their worlds. Many schools partially refunded dormitory fees when they sent students home. A few have been sued because they ...

Many school districts and individual teachers have contingency plans for classes to be interrupted for a few days, but we doubt more than a handful had strategies for the current situation, in which the last couple of months of school were disrupted for millions of students. Many educators ...

This week’s Straw Poll: For the most part, do you approve of the way President Donald Trump has managed the United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic? - This poll is not scientific, and its results represent only the opinions of Internet users who have chosen to participate.

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead,” the English writer G.K. Chesterton wrote in his 1908 book “Orthodoxy.” “Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be ...

Many public school districts are ending the academic year early or plan to do so — including here in the Tri-Lakes area. In some schools, use of distance learning via online tools has been pronounced a disappointment. Come August and September, when American children return to school — at ...

Bob Brown was one of the nicest guys you could meet — and you met him everywhere in Saranac Lake, because he was everywhere. He was involved in all kinds of local projects, but beyond those, if you were hosting a public concert, dinner, fundraiser, hearing or roundtable and were wondering ...

Thousands of older Americans may have died needlessly because we, as a nation, did not heed an early wake-up call regarding COVID-19. It is not too late to save thousands of others. On Feb. 26, two residents of the Life Care Center nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, died of COVID-19. The ...

This week’s Straw Poll: For the most part, do you approve of the way Gov. Andrew Cuomo has managed New York’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic? --- This poll is not scientific, and its results represent only the opinions of Internet users who have chosen to participate.

As the coronavirus epidemic hit full stride, Americans learned to our dismay that the nation lacked adequate supplies of COVID-19 test kits, personal protective gear such as face masks, medical ventilators and other necessities for dealing with a massive health care emergency. To their ...

Regent Roger Tilles asked a prescient question during last week’s state Board of Regents meeting that cuts to the heart of the state’s separation of powers in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tilles was asking Shannon Tahoe, interim state education commissioner, her thoughts on the ...

If you think about our society as being a COVID-19 patient, we are on the road to recovery. That does not mean we have recovered. We still have a long way to go. We are not able jump out of bed and run around. But following doctors’ orders has done some good, and now we are able to get up ...

People sometimes call us when they see and hear jets flying overhead. They wonder what the military is up to, and they think we might know, or be able to find out. Sometimes we can get an answer, and sometimes we can’t. Lately, there have been a lot of jets flying over the Adirondacks, ...

This week’s Straw Poll: Should the state Adirondack Park Agency reclassify the former W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid to make it easier for developer Joe Barile, ROOST and the town of North Elba to build a mixed housing development? - This poll is not scientific, and ...

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the front-line workers, residents, businesses and organizations assisting people who need it the most during this pandemic. We also thank volunteers cleaning up roadsides, and our advertisers and readers — everyone who is making a difference these ...

Local government boards have been meeting by videoconference these days, and we have been covering many of them, enough to notice some things that work and some that don’t. The biggest problem we have seen so far comes from boards that are choosing to block members of the public out of the ...

Cheers could be heard from Saranac Lake to Onchiota on Tuesday as the staff of Saranac Lake High School organized a caravan to stop at the graduates’ homes and present them with lawn signs in celebration of their 2020 graduation. A different kind of parade was done Sunday in the town of ...

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday that he has enlisted the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in reimagining education in New York state, in light of the distance learning forced upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic. Honestly, though, how many New Yorkers would choose the founder of ...