Having grown up in West Virginia and after living for three years in South Korea, the ongoing thaw in relations between North and South Korea got me thinking about the many similarities between the Koreas and the Virginias. That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Start with something simple — […]
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My first and only newspaper internship was during the summer of 1987 at the now-defunct Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail. I was a graduate journalism student at West Virginia University and a native of Charleston, so it made sense to work at my hometown paper. What didn’t make sense were the […]
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In a speech in New Hampshire last week, President Trump advocated executing drug dealers as a way to “solve” the root of American drug addiction, including the opioid crisis. This is consistent with the president’s get-tough language on addiction, which places more value on—and will direct more government resources toward—enforcement […]
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The teachers’ strike in West Virginia, that has tenatively ended, has a lot of outsiders scratching their heads. How can it be, they wonder, that a state so politically red that it voted 70 percent for Donald Trump in 2016, and that has a Republican coal baron governor and a […]
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How big is the opioid crisis in West Virginia? Here’s an economic answer: If you took all of the money that Congress recently approved to fight the opioid epidemic across the entire nation — $6 billion — and poured it into West Virginia, it still wouldn’t plug the hole opioids […]
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Three months after President Trump announced a national emergency on the opioid crisis, the issue has received plenty of attention, including prominence in the State of the Union address and a mandate for the new Heath and Human Services Secretary, but funding and progress have been sparse and now 19 […]
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