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Editorial

U.P.’s color season just starting

It’s something that's easy to do, letting time slip through one’s fingers. But a front page story and photo package on Tuesday should remind us all: catch the Upper Peninsula’s spectacular color season before it’s gone. With a few days of summery weather here and there, it might be simple enough to be lulled into a state of denial that the leaves will be falling in rapid fashion. But that’s what will happen, so we encourage everyone to take a look around at the start of Mother Nature’s glorious color show in wooded areas all over the U.P. Of course, the season starts ...

Inflation still a persistent force in our economy

Our friends on Wall Street and in Washington keep saying that inflation is vanquished as they hope — plead — for lower interest rates. Yet the economic data aren’t bearing out their optimism, as the Labor Department’s consumer price report for August revealed earlier this month. Consumer prices climbed 0.4% in August and 2.9% over the past year, both the most since January. Price increases last month were broad-based, hitting food consumed at home (0.6%), alcohol (0.6%), children’s shoes (1.5%), clothing (0.5%), new cars (0.3%), used cars (1.0%), housing (0.4%), hotels ...

Advice on avoiding animals on the road

If roadkill isn’t enough evidence, an insurance company has data that indicates Michigan drivers and animals come into contact all too often. Research indicates Michigan ranks second in the nation for animal collision claims with more than 126,000 filed from July 1, 2024, to June 30 of this year, according to State Farm. Only Pennsylvania had more at 147,000 claims. For risk of crash, West Virginia is No. 1 with risk at 1 in 40 for an animal-vehicle crash, followed by Montana at 1 in 53, neighboring Wisconsin at 1 in 58 and Michigan fourth at 1 in 61. The national average is 1 in ...

Scams online seen here, elsewhere

They’re called catfishers and their smarmy online activity is known as catfishing. Nope, it has nothing to do with wetting a line in your favorite stream or brook. It does, however, have everything to do with gullible but well-meaning people being bilked out of their money. And according to one recent study, the state of Michigan ranked quite high in terms of numbers of victims of these so-called romance scams. According to this study, Americans lose hundreds of millions of dollars each year and that amount, in all likelihood, will continue to go up. Here’s an informal, indeed, ...

The aberrant killed the normal

The culture war wasn't just a metaphor at Utah Valley University last week. We need to learn more about Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk, but based on what we know so far, he represents the polar opposite of Kirk in every important respect. The young man with the ...

The Guardian: Charlie Kirk’s killing shouldn’t be used to foment further political division already polarized US

“Democracy is the way that we have diverse societies that don’t kill each other, largely,” Lilliana Mason, a leading scholar of partisanship, observed recently. She added: “As soon as we stop believing in it, it disappears.” Dr Mason’s own research suggests that there is sharply rising tolerance of political violence. On Wednesday, it claimed one more victim. The shocking killing of the co-founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk, a hugely influential activist who rallied young people to Donald Trump’s cause and far-right ideology more broadly, has been widely and rightly ...