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Guest editorial

Being a journalist isn’t a sure path to popularity. But we journalists don’t go into the profession to make new besties. Rather, to paraphrase William Shakespeare, we journalists have always suffered the slings and arrows of outraged people, and we still do. In recent years, however, it seems like individual journalists – not just their newspaper, broadcast or online outlet – are targets of snarky, snide, contemptuous, coarse and sometimes threatening remarks by people and institutions unhappy with how they do their jobs. President Donald Trump tells a Bloomberg News ...

AAA: Fall’s the time of year to beware of deer

Fall is the most dangerous time of year for deer-related crashes, AAA warns. Deer-vehicle collisions peak between October and December during mating season, with more than 1.5 million crashes occurring annually, resulting in roughly $1 billion in vehicle damage and about 150 human fatalities, AAA advises. In fact, deaths from collisions with animals — mostly deer — increased from 89 in 1975 to 210 in 2024, according to AAA. Drivers face the greatest risk at dawn and dusk, particularly on rural roads near wooded areas, waterways and farmland, AAA advises. All of which the Upper ...

Tariffs and trade wars make life harder on US farmers

JD Vance was in Iowa two weeks ago, trying to shore up GOP support in the heartland. “We want farming to be easier in the United States of America, not harder,” the vice president told the crowd in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Farming is always hard, but what could be making it even harder these days? Hmmm. Could it be President Trump’s tariffs and trade wars that have raised farmers’ costs and lost them markets abroad due to retaliation? Asking for a friend in the Midwest. While Mr. Trump can claim all he wants that foreigners pay his tariffs, Deere & Co. said on an earnings ...

There’s a cost to Trump treating adversaries better than allies

America’s adversaries, especially those with nuclear weapons, sometimes seem to be treated more kindly by President Donald Trump than the country’s oldest friends. Such U.S. unreliability risks encouraging nuclear proliferation by pushing countries to look out for themselves. Last week underscored the dynamic: Trump rolled out the red carpet in Washington for Chinese President Xi Jinping while continuing to hold in abeyance a $14 billion arms package to Taiwan. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Trump has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to the G-20 summit in ...

Trump undoing America’s global influence

The world is facing at least three crises today that cannot be resolved by any one country. Two are longer-term and arguably existential: the threat of uncontrolled artificial intelligence and the growing impact of climate change. One is shorter-term and damaging the global economy: the disruption of shipping lanes in the Middle East. All three require the kind of high-level international cooperation that helped manage other challenges, like the threat of nuclear warfare during the Cold War and the damage to the ozone layer. Yet almost nobody was expecting meaningful progress during ...

Trump attempt to muzzle press attack on First Amendment

Pressed recently on President Donald Trump’s expulsion of three news organizations from the White House, U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., shrugged it off as indistinguishable from Trump’s own past suspension from social media platforms, saying, “So it goes both ways.” Huh? The senator is either remarkably ignorant of the Constitution from which he derives his power, or shameless enough to pretend to be. What Barrasso didn’t appear to understand is that the First Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, doesn’t go both ways: It protects us from the government, not ...