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All must play role toward productive, safe academic year

Editorials

Change is in the air as about 70,000 students trek back to more than 200 schools in the Mahoning Valley beginning next week for the traditional start to an exciting new academic year. Changes in personnel, curriculum, technology, security and more await many students, staff and faculty in districts large and small. The mission of all of them, of course, is to improve the educational climate for pre-schoolers through college students. As a result, optimism rightly abounds. In Trumbull County, one of the biggest and most visible changes takes place at the state-of-the-art Trumbull ...

The real stink of Musk

Editorials

Elon Musk will be spending $100 million to $120 million in at least eight states to help elect Republicans in November, according to The New York Times. Musk’s spending is set to begin next month, targeting Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan and Ohio, and potentially North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. Musk will also spend in House races in states including California, Wisconsin, and Washington. The money won’t be spent only on TV advertising. Musk’s “America PAC” is lining up firms that focus on knocking on voters’ doors. Fake grassroots. But Musk’s money ...

Sound off!

Letters to the Editor

DJT has many forks in the road concerning his Iranian war. He continues to take the wrong ones. Secretary of War Pete (Hegseth), along with DJT, keeps wasting billions of dollars, killing our soldiers and alienating our global allies. His bombing of bridges and the desalinating plants will bring war crime penalties. I hope they end up in the Hague. Why do we continue to get involved in wars? Is it too much testosterone? We need more women in government decision-making. — Southington Our leader in Washington has quite the conundrum. Should he follow orders from Saudi Arabia and stop ...

The Iran war is eating Trump’s presidency

Editorials

An Iran war that was supposed to be brief, and then was supposed to be over, is imposing an increasing price on Donald Trump’s presidency. We’ve seen a second term of a Republican administration go this way before. There are distinct echoes of George W. Bush’s Iraq War — the conflict that Trump has long excoriated — in the president’s predicament. Now, the Iran war is different from Iraq. There is no ground invasion, no regime change, no occupation, no counterinsurgency. The casualties aren’t close to the same scale, and Donald Trump has been fighting Iran for ...

Islamists are playing the long game in American politics

Editorials

This week, primary voters in Michigan went to the polls to decide which candidate will represent their party in the fight to replace the outgoing Sen. Gary Peters. For Democrats, it will be Abdul El-Sayed. Unsurprisingly, much of the focus when it comes to El-Sayed rests not on his socialist ideology, or if he’s actually a doctor, or even his recent glow-up, but that he’s an anti-Semite. Given that his supporters include self-hating Jew Sen. Bernie Sanders, “not an expert on geopolitics” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and professional Jew-hater Linda Sarsour, it’s hardly ...

Mahoning clerk of courts attracts controversy

David Skolnick

It’s almost as if there’s a magnetic force attracting Mahoning County Clerk of Courts Michael Ciccone to controversy. The remarkable thing is Ciccone has been in office for only about 19 months. Ciccone first garnered attention back in December 2023 when he served as the attorney for 28 voters of Jennifer Ciccone who contested the results of the Struthers Municipal Court election that she lost by 10.28%. Michael Ciccone’s complaint claimed, without providing details, that there was massive fraud in that race that James Melone convincingly won. A week after filing the lawsuit, ...