Protecting our children: Abuse, neglect is reality for thousands of Virginia children

AFP

The Top Story by Chris Graham More than 7,000 Virginia children were found to have been abused or neglected last year. Another 14,000 incidents of abuse and neglect never made it to the authorities for assessment or investigation. Not that you would know any of this from reading the papers or watching the evening news.

The war on teen pregnancy

AFP

The Top Story by Chris Graham If there was a magic bullet that could be used to solve the teen-pregnancy problem, it would have been used decades ago. But, alas, there is no magic bullet – or even a single accepted way to combat the problem. Does traditional sex education get the job done? How…

Three strikes, but not out

Jim Bishop

Bishop’s Mantle column by Jim Bishop “EMU – Bluffton baseball game cancelled.” This notice in small type on the calendar of the sports section of the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record might normally command a passing glance. But on this occasion, these few words jumped out at me like special effects in a 3-D movie, a jarring…

Do you believe in ghosts?

Chris Graham

The Top Story by Chris Graham Brenda Gordon didn’t want to admit to herself that she believed in ghosts. Being confronted with evidence of their existence will tend to make a believer out of anybody, of course. “I moved into the house that my dad lived in, and he’s been dead since 1997, and the…

Bridging the race divide?

Chris Graham

The Top Story by Chris Graham   Daryl Davis has plenty of detractors – people who question his motives for wanting to meet with white supremacists, who wonder why an African-American man would of his own volition attend rallies of the Ku Klux Klan, who outright doubt his stories of conversions of racial separatists as…

Reform? Or increase?

Chris Graham

Story by Chris Graham   It was tax reform. It was a tax increase. The 2004 Virginia General Assembly session is being played out again in the 2005 Virginia gubernatorial campaign – and still the two sides can’t agree on even the most basic terms of what happened last spring. “My opponent is using all…

Life by design: Debate heats up over new theory of how we got here

Chris Graham

The Top Story by Chris Graham The fact that President Bush thinks intelligent design should be taught in American public schools is more than enough for JoAnne Shirley. “I absolutely hope that this becomes an issue here locally and statewide. Students need to be given a choice, as the president said,” said Shirley, a former…