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Just One More Memorial Day Remembrance

Local Commentaries

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 ...

Partisan Redistricting Is Coming Back To New York State

Local Commentaries

Albany Democrats do not favor the redistricting rules in New York, that is no secret. However, the whole truth is that they never did like it. For years, they have been trying to undermine those rules and create more favorable, partisan maps. This is another example of the negative consequences of New York’s one-party rule. Every 10 years, new voting districts are approved as a result of the most recent census. In 2014, New Yorkers wanted a transparent process for creating those districts, and they wanted to ensure that voting districts were not manipulated by the majority party ...

Be The Difference - A Music Lesson For Life

Local Commentaries

The groundwork for many musicians all began with learning the solfege syllables or what are commonly known as the scales. To the advanced they seem almost elementary but to the beginner they are the critical stepping-stones for developing pitch, ear-training and sight reading of music regardless of the preference of instrument. To the untrained, a simple note has very little importance unless it is significantly off-key and cringy to the ear but to the well-learned each note requires a high standard of accuracy and excellence with no room for variation. This is critically ...

Local Theater Deserves Better Than Copy-Paste AI

Letters To The Editor

To The Reader’s Forum: A recent post from the Jamestown Lucille Ball Little Theater has created a lot of buzz regarding the use of AI in the theater’s promotion and marketing. While the post was meant to explain the “minimal use” of AI in its content, it feels quite tone deaf coming from a community that supposedly promotes local artistic expression. To be fair to the theater, it can be difficult to find volunteers, but rather than use AI as a solution, perhaps the board should look internally at why they cannot find people to give their time to the local arts. Many ...

Wealth Inequality Is A Problem Worth Addressing

Letters To The Editor

To The Reader’s Forum: Wealth inequality in the United States has reached levels that should concern every American. While millions of working families struggle to afford housing, healthcare, childcare, and higher education, a small percentage of the population continues to accumulate enormous wealth at a historic pace. Hard work should provide stability and opportunity, yet many full-time workers live paycheck to paycheck. At the same time, large corporations and the wealthiest Americans often benefit from tax loopholes and economic policies that widen the gap between ...

High Court greatly restricts racial gerrymandering

Local Commentaries

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 observes that the court’s first opinion regarding Section 2’s current text issued in 1986. It “was decided at a time when th(e Supreme) Court often paid insufficient attention to the language of statutory provisions ... . Instead of analyzing what the statute said, the opinion simply ...