No need for photo finish
As we were preparing to share our opinion that the White House not make public photographs depicting a dead Osama bin Laden, President Obama announced that would not happen.
Good call, Mr. President, who said there was no need to “spike the football.”
We cheer the decision for a simple reason — it’s likely to be a life-saver. There is no way of knowing with certainty that people would die, but we have all witnessed the eagerness with ...
Lifetime achievement
David Russell Parnell was an unlikely politician. He was soft-spoken, not a self-promoter, and he voted his conscience, with little regard to Election Day, often crossing party lines with his support.
But those traits served Parnell, a Parkton native who died last week of lung cancer at age 85, strongly in the General Assembly, first as a representative and then later as a senator.
That doesn’t mean his causes were always popular. He ...
The best, the worst
It’s been said that disasters bring out the best in mankind. Unfortunately, it’s also true that they bring out the worst among us as well, but thankfully in smaller doses.
Following the April 16 storms, there was no shortage of stories about neighbors helping neighbors, and even strangers helping strangers, across the state, but all throughout Robeson County. But we are now hearing about the uglier side of mankind as many homes that wer...
Birther myth gets funeral Donald Trump is beginning to look presidential.
The billionaire real-estate mogul, part-time reality TV star, and the guy who has never had a good-hair day stepped before a throng of reporters on Wednesday and took credit for finally getting to the bottom of the Obama birth-certificate riddle. Trump said, if not for his investigators in Hawaii who were digging toward China in search of the truth, the president would not have come out with ...
Tribal warfare The chasm between the Lumbee Tribal Council and Chairman Purnell Swett is getting wider, and if it continues to broaden, someone’s going to get swallowed up. The tribe’s Supreme Court now has been drawn into the dispute by the council, which maintains that Swett overstepped his authority when penning a contract for Tribal Administrator Rose Marie Lowry-Townsend.
But much more worrisome for Swett — if he indeed has acted without authority — ...
Worthy of examination Rep. Charles Graham’s House bill that would establish a panel to study the use of American Indian mascots by public schools in this state was recently deemed the “Bad Bill of the Week” by the John Pope Civitas Institute, a conservative think tank.
The presenters of the award apparently don’t believe that legislators can keep more than a single ball in the air at once, saying HB 681 “directs scarce time and money away from serious issues and di...
Sweet deal There have been lots of swings and misses by economic development recruiters in Robeson County in recent years,
but this week the bat met ball, and the subsequent grand slam is certainly worth celebrating.
Steven Roberts Original Desserts and Ticklebelly Desserts, which is based in Denver, Colo., announced on Tuesday during a press conference at COMtech that it would be making its desserts in Pembroke, and plans to hire during the next th...
Walters’ gamble Sen. Michael Walters’ decision to co-sponsor legislation that would allow casinos in Robeson and a few other counties in North Carolina doesn’t signal any fondness on his part for gambling. Rather, it underlines his concern for his native Robeson County, which is broke, desperate for new jobs, and getting left behind.
The promise is to direct proceeds, from revenues and fees, to enhance education, economic development and tourism in this st...
One child left behind
It’s not always the case that all’s well that ends well.
Wonderfully, a 6-year-old child who attends R.B. Dean Elementary School and was abandoned by school officials in Myrtle Beach last week while on a field trip is alive and fine — although, we are told, somewhat shaken by the incident. The happy ending is because an alert parent who was tagging along for the trip scooped the child up after the bus had left — and wiped away a lot of ...
Risky behavior
A report released last week that included information on the health of Robeson County residents was, well, rather sickening.
The information, compiled by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, was a county-by-county breakdown of the entire United States, and it found that Robeson County residents ranked third worst in North Carolina in overall health. The consequence: We are dead ...
Going public
Sheriff Kenneth Sealey works for the people, not the county Board of Commissioners, which probably emboldened him last week when he went public with his complaint that he doesn’t have enough staff to keep the Sheriff’s Office open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The county officials we spoke with weren’t pleased, saying the Sheriff’s Office has fared better than most departments during a difficult budget year, which is probably goi...
Counting backward According to an Associated Press review, North Carolina was cheated out of an additional representative in Congress and an electoral vote because of the large number of troops stationed here who were overseas protecting the homeland.
It’s no small loss. In addition to the extra clout in electing the nation’s president, federal funding, both social and economic, is tied to a state’s population. The more people, the more money, meaning fewer ...
Enlist in crime fight We are all aware of the crime problem in Robeson County. We rank embarrassingly high in the state when it comes to violent crime and property crime, and at times our law enforcement agencies, under resourced as they are, appear as if they have gone to a gun fight with a butter knife.
A mixture of things — poverty, drugs, alcohol, broken homes, an undereducated populace — have conspired against us, making this county less attractive to profe...
To catch a thief Making a living in Robeson County off of stealing other people’s stuff and then reselling it became a little more perilous on Monday night.
The county Board of Commissioners adopted an ordinance that will require pawn shop operators and recyclers of metals to collect information from sellers that can be entered into a computer system that will more easily flag stolen items and track down the culprits. The teeth of the ordinance isn’t what ...
No more excuses The following editorial, which first appeared in November 2009, is being republished today with some minor changes. The decision to republish followed Fairmont’s decision to adopt a voluntary recycling program after a prompt by a seventh-grader — editor.
There are fewer and fewer excuses to not recycle in Robeson County.
Disappearing are the days that it required a determined effort to recycle spent items such as paper, plastics, bottles ...
