News
by Stephanie Kraft | Apr 28, 2012 | News
If you like numbers and the intrigue buried in the U.S. tax code, you’ll enjoy—and be infuriated by—recent reporting in The Nation about little-known loopholes that let our largest corporations dodge taxes. Particularly juicy for those who enjoy...
by Stephanie Kraft | Apr 28, 2012 | News
Beaches may lure and gardens may flourish this summer, but it’s not going to be a very good season for students with college loan debt, or for those who want to borrow money to enter graduate programs. That’s because interest on the subsidized Stafford...
by Our Readers | Apr 28, 2012 | News
Chernobyl’s Tragedy-Induced Lessons April 26 is the 26th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. Given recent government approval of new nuclear power plant construction in Georgia and South Carolina, it’s edifying to review Mikhail...
by Mark Roessler | Apr 28, 2012 | News
On Monday, April 23, the Northampton Brewery’s deck opened for its 16th season. If, as head brewer Donald Pacher describes it, beer is like music, then the Brewery’s rooftop deck is Carnegie Hall—the perfect environment for imbibers to enjoy the...
by Stephanie Kraft | May 5, 2012 | News
“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. The source was an eyewitness.” Those were the words of Colin...
by Our Readers | May 5, 2012 | News
Of Culture and Comebacks Thanks to James Heflin for his recent cover story on Pittsfield’s revitalization (“Pity City No More,” April 12). The city of Pittsfield continues to use creativity to develop assets and build equity through cultural...
by Maureen Turner | May 5, 2012 | News
April has been a month of ups and downs for advocates of extending civil rights to transgender people; while the month started with the Obama administration dodging a request to act on the issue, it ended with another arm of the government affirming the rights of...
by Mark Roessler | May 5, 2012 | News
The other day, when confronted with an overwhelming array of craft beers at a local bar, a long-time colleague of mine smiled meekly as the server asked her what she wanted. “I’m a Miller Lite kind of girl,” she explained. Having worked closely with...
by Cathy Young | May 12, 2012 | News
The congressional battle over the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which briefly pitted Republicans against Democrats in yet another skirmish in this political season’s gender wars, seems largely over. The Senate voted to approve the VAWA...
by Maureen Turner | May 12, 2012 | News
In February, workers at Northampton’s River Valley Market formed a labor union, with a majority of the co-op market’s employees signing cards signaling their desire to join United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1459. The response from management? Rather...
by Markos Moulitsas | May 12, 2012 | News
Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney recently met with some Bethel Park, Pa., residents around a picnic table, supposedly to talk about the state of the economy. Instead, Romney eyed a plate of cookies. “I’m not sure about those cookies,” he said....
by Stephanie Kraft | May 12, 2012 | News
Speaking of Florida—and everyone’s been doing a lot of that since Trayvon Martin was shot dead in Sanford—it seems that the easier it gets to shoot in the Sunshine State, the harder it gets to vote. The state Legislature down there seems more bent on...
by Our Readers | May 12, 2012 | News
More on the Quabbin While recent letters about the Quabbin read like vague PR from DCR, I’m more interested in what Jeff Lacy (“Letters,” April 26) didn’t say in his letter defending clear-cutting in the Quabbin watershed than what he did say....
by Ted Rall | May 15, 2012 | News
The President’s progressive critics blame him for continuing and expanding upon his Republican predecessor’s policies. His supporters point to the obstructionist, Republican-controlled Congress. What can Obama do? He’s being stymied at every turn....
by Ted Rall | May 19, 2012 | News
In the BDSM world the phrase “topping from the bottom” means conditional submission: when the sub questions or disobeys the instructions of his or her dom. Subverting the submissive role defeats the whole purpose of a BDSM relationship; it is thus frowned...
by Maureen Turner | May 19, 2012 | News
The Springfield City Council last week signaled its opposition to a bill that would expand the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law. At their May 7 meeting, councilors voted, 11 to 1, for a non-binding resolution calling on the state Legislature to vote...
by Stephanie Kraft | May 19, 2012 | News
The problem with trying to reform anything in our country is that everything gets to be an industry. Everything attracts money, and those who profit from the flow of money will do anything to keep it from drying up. That’s what gives rise to what Cornell...
by Our Readers | May 19, 2012 | News
Audit Substantiates Concerns About Quabbin Forestry I have been following the letters and comments in the Valley Advocate that began in response to the request by Ben Wright of Environment Massachusetts that citizens support their petition to the Governor to ban...
by Maureen Turner | May 19, 2012 | News
It’s a statistic that’s gotten a lot of play recently, but one that bears repeating: as many as 40 percent of gay, lesbian and bisexual teens have attempted suicide, according to the Suicide Prevention Resource Center. And a recent study from Columbia...
by Pete Redington | May 23, 2012 | News
To find the office of Chuck Collins, you follow the drunken people screaming “Sweet Caroline” in the back of a duck boat, as they wind their way through the neighborhood streets of Boston’s Jamaica Plain, to an unassuming brick former factory brick...
by Maureen Turner | May 23, 2012 | News
If the “Locally Grown” farm products guide that recently showed up in your local paper of choice feels a bit heftier than it did in the past, it’s not your imagination. After all, there/s a lot more to fit into the pages of the guide, which includes...
by Pete Redington | May 26, 2012 | News
Curt Schilling built a long, productive pitching career on the strength of a dominating fastball and his outstanding command. But with his company’s inability to pay back a multi-million-dollar loan from the state of Rhode Island, he’s lobbed a slow pitch...
by Stephanie Kraft | May 26, 2012 | News
When the talk turns to the income gap, Republicans from Ronald Reagan to conservative law professor Richard Epstein like to quote an axiom, or a pair of axioms, mistakenly attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “You cannot help the poor man by destroying the...
by Our Readers | May 26, 2012 | News
Quabbin: Hidden Agenda Supports Commercial Interests I live in the city of Cambridge. Forty years ago, my neighbors fought off a massively misguided state plan to run an eight-lane highway through our houses. It is indeed true that governments can make mistakes and...
by Maureen Turner | May 26, 2012 | News
Over the past few years, Amaad Rivera says, Springfield has gotten a reputation as an unfriendly, even unsafe place, for gay and transgender people. There was the 2009 death of Carl Hoover-Walker, the 11-year-old boy who committed suicide after enduring relentless...
by Maureen Turner | May 29, 2012 | News
In 2007, a 14-year-old student at Springfield’s Kennedy Middle School was arrested by city police. His transgression? Refusing to go with a teacher who told him to come to her office, and yelling at her, slamming a classroom door and bouncing a basketball in the...
by Stephanie Kraft | May 31, 2012 | News
Here’s good news not only for nutritionists, but for anyone who looks for live economic roots off Wall Street: not only did the recession not kill farmers’ markets, they’ve been thriving since the crash. In the spring of 2009, as wave after wave of...
by Our Readers | May 31, 2012 | News
What Quabbin ‘Timber Barons?’ It’s frustrating to see environmentalists’ energy dissipated in misdirected efforts to end the watershed forestry program at the Quabbin Reservoir instead of talking about ways to improve it (“Letters,”...
by Maureen Turner | May 31, 2012 | News
In the wake of the freak tornado that devastated large swaths of Springfield last summer, city leaders began to focus on what, for lack of a better phrase, might be called the silver lining: the opportunity not just to rebuild those parts of the city, but to improve...
by Mark Roessler | May 31, 2012 | News
The ten of swords is a grim card to get in a Tarot reading. Ten of coins or ten of cups, you’re golden—wealth and bounty abound. The meaning of the ten of wands is a little ambiguous. But there’s nothing vague about the ten of...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 7, 2012 | News
“The First Amendment to the United States Constitution was designed to protect the free speech rights of people, not corporations,” begins a bill pending in the Massachusetts Statehouse. In the not-too-distant past, one would not have expected there to be...
by Markos Moulitsas | Jun 7, 2012 | News
Americans Elect and Unity 08 are history, No Labels an irrelevant joke. Despite repeated efforts by Beltway hacks to appeal to a mythical and nonexistent bipartisan “middle,” it’s clear there is zero appetite for such constructs from the American...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 7, 2012 | News
It’s ironic that just before the media reported the appearance of radioactive bluefin tuna from Japan off the California coast, Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 2009, stepped down. Jaczko’s action followed a hot barrage...
by Our Readers | Jun 7, 2012 | News
Violence Against Women Act provides for “inclusion, fairness, safety” In 1994, Congress first passed the Violence Against Women Act. I was among those who heralded this legislation as the first time that the federal government offered a broad view and...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 7, 2012 | News
You’d be forgiven if, at first, you assumed it was a belated April Fool’s Day joke. “The Republican’s columnist Tom Shea moving on,” read the headline. “[J]ob at newspaper in Abu Dhabi ‘a cool opportunity.'” Sadly,...
by Tom Vannah | Jun 7, 2012 | News
For people who have thought about buying a share in a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm but haven’t yet acted, it’s getting late in the season, but not too late. According to Communities Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA), there are...
by Clive Thompson | Jun 7, 2012 | News
We put a lot of stock in energy efficiency. It is regarded as the quickest and easiest way to reduce carbon emissions. Al Gore even ended An Inconvenient Truth with a plea for everyone to install low-power light bulbs and appliances. But in 1865, British economist...
by Mark Roessler | Jun 12, 2012 | News
Working at a high school in New Hampshire and living on campus, Carl Stagg and his wife Kerri Harrington had saved up a small nest egg they’d been considering using as a down payment on a home for themselves and their family: around $25,000. About two years ago,...
by Pete Redington | Jun 13, 2012 | News
While history waits for the first openly gay athlete to come out while playing in one of the four major professional sports leagues, it is this year’s hockey season that may eventually be seen as the one that set the stage for such social change. Hockey and gay...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 14, 2012 | News
Six thousand police officers from around the Northeast and Canada joined hundreds of Springfield officers to pay their respects last Friday to Kevin Ambrose, the city police officer who was shot and killed responding to a domestic disturbance earlier in the week....
by Tom Sturm | Jun 14, 2012 | News
The large central retail space at 30 Crafts Ave. in downtown Northampton was, for decades, the destination of professors copying syllabi, job-seekers refining their resumes and yoga teachers, musicians and people with lost pets churning out flyers to hang on the...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 14, 2012 | News
It can’t be denied that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s victory in his recall election was a sign of support for the incumbent governor’s policies inside Wisconsin as well as outside it. Some voters expressed respect for Walker simply because, as...
by Our Readers | Jun 14, 2012 | News
Prostate Cancer and African-American Men Prostate cancer is no exception to the overall problem of disparate health outcomes in America: African-American men are twice as likely as their white counterparts to die of prostate cancer. And there are direct implications...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 14, 2012 | News
One morning back in March, Bill Shein, a Democratic candidate for Massachusetts’ 1st U.S. Congressional district seat, invited voters to join him at a “meet and greet” at Fuel, a coffee shop in downtown Great Barrington, not far from his home in the...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 14, 2012 | News
As a kid in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Ken Danford liked school. He took challenging classes and did well. He found extracurricular activities that were meaningful to him, like competing on the debate team and starting a race-relations group. “I had a purpose and I...
by Juan Williams | Jun 19, 2012 | News
Congress has a long “To Do” list for the rest of the year, beginning with pumping up the economy. But the calendar of working days on the Republican majority leader’s website shows Congress is scheduled to be in session only 52 more days this year....
by Tom Sturm | Jun 19, 2012 | News
The widely popular move to update the Massachusetts Bottle Bill (H890 in the House, S1650 in the Senate) has been dealt another blow by the powerful committee in whose hands the measure’s fate resides. The bill, which would update the decades-old recycling...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 19, 2012 | News
Massachusetts physician Jill Stein has apparently clinched the Green Party’s presidential nomination, winning the support of 204 of the 304 delegates who’ll be at the party’s convention next month in Baltimore, her campaign recently announced. Stein,...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 19, 2012 | News
There was nothing sweet about the fight between sugar (made from cane or beets) and high fructose corn syrup that’s now ended in a loss for corn syrup [“For Sweeteners, A Bitter Battle,” April 5, 2012]. Manufacturers of corn syrup, which is...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 19, 2012 | News
Last week, parishioners at Holyoke’s Mater Dolorosa church ended a round-the-clock vigil they’d been holding there for almost a year. Mater Dolorosa was one of a number of Catholic churches closed by the Springfield diocese in recent years, in response to...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 21, 2012 | News
A federal court ruling and NRC decisions in favor of relicensing the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant near Brattleboro have only increased the determination of many in the region to get the 40-year-old plant closed down. That determination, which draws momentum from...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 21, 2012 | News
In 2008, in deciding a case called Boumediene vs. Bush, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo detainees have a constitutional right to challenge the legality of their detention by filing petitions for habeas corpus in American federal courts. In that case and...
by Our Readers | Jun 21, 2012 | News
If Logging Looks Bad, It Is Jeff Lacy criticizes Stephen Kaiser with the pronouncement that “subjective, quasi-religious argument has no place in what should be a scientific critique of Department of Conservation and Recreation’s watershed management...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 21, 2012 | News
Nancy Urbschat isn’t a Springfield native—her family moved to the Valley from Columbus, Ohio, 27 years ago—but she’s embraced her adopted hometown with a fervency that could rival any old-timer’s. Urbschat and her family initially landed...
by Sady Doyle | Jun 21, 2012 | News
Feminism has been around for quite a while now. We’ve gone through at least three waves, countless publications, and more backlashes than you can count. In that time, if we’ve learned anything at all, we’ve learned this: women respond really, really...
by Chris Lehmann | Jun 28, 2012 | News
One sturdy axiom of our post-productive economic life is that the cohort of high-symbolic analysts who compulsively characterize themselves as creative are all but allergic to actual ideas. Take the ballyhooed TED (Technology, Education, Design) lecture series—a...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 28, 2012 | News
You remember James Inhofe, the U.S. Senator from Oklahoma. Inhofe is the fellow who said global warming was the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. Now, as the West burns up in forest fires and corn farmers in Iowa are desperate for rain, Inhofe is...
by Our Readers | Jun 28, 2012 | News
Too Many Hungry People Earlier this week, Sens. Brown and Kerry proved that it is possible for Republicans and Democrats to rise above partisan politics to protect our most vulnerable citizens—children, elders and people with disabilities—from hunger and...
by Pete Redington | Jun 28, 2012 | News
Concerned fans want to know: Is Theo a communist? Though our sports culture is scrutinized by so many over-analyzing media outlets, issues of team ownership and the business of sports don’t receive the attention they deserve. That changed for a couple of minutes...
by Rory O'Connor | Jun 28, 2012 | News
Welcome to the first digital presidential election. You might have thought we lived through that four years ago, when the online-focused campaign of Barack Obama revolutionized modern politics in ways that are still coming into focus. After all, no previous candidate...
