NEWS *The United States and Mexico have reached an agreement to strengthen efforts against the New World screwworm after U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned of potential restrictions on Mexican cattle imports if Mexico did not act more aggressively. Following discussions with ...
Three springs ago, a despicable derecho ravaged our region. We eventually engaged a scrap iron guy to haul away some of the wreckage the storm had created at my parents’ farm. It was gratifying to think that the steel from our ruined grain bins was going to be recycled, perhaps into new grain ...
Somewhere along life’s highway most of us learned to balance a checkbook. This task usually involved a pencil, the back of a used envelope, and some basic math. Today, however, a click or two in a second or two delivers that up-to-the-second number. It’s the same for the federal ...
When reminiscing about how we used to give away Carson City circulated Morgan silver dollars, minted with silver from the Comstock Lode mine, as an incentive to new subscribers, it dawned on me that that was 40 years ago. Those silver dollars are worth about five times what they cost us back ...
It’s not that I sit around thinking about bees. It’s just that I interviewed someone about the epidemic of bee colony losses recently, and it got me thinking about the brevity of life. Ours — and theirs. One man on the phone told me the lifespan of a single honey bee is 30 to 45 ...
You know how it goes. You have your kids, you use all the “stuff,” they outgrow everything, and over time the attic becomes a museum of what was once life in the present. All those things migrated to the attic in due seasons (just in case we needed them again), only to find those things ...
Easter is a strange holiday in that it’s constantly moving around on the calendar like a hyperactive mouse who has just consumed its body weight in caffeine. If you were born on the Fourth of July, you would know that your birthday always falls on the fourth. Its day of the week varies from ...
NEWS *R.J. O’Brien & Associates (RJO), the oldest futures brokerage and clearing firm in the United States, announced that its parent company has reached a definitive agreement with StoneX Group Inc. (NASDAQ: SNEX), to merge all of RJO’s global businesses into StoneX, subject to ...
Longtime readers of this weekly effort may recall my affection for the word “woodenheadedness.” It comes from “The March of Folly,” Barbara Tuchman’s 1984 book about “the pervasive presence … of failure, mismanagement, and delusion in government.” In Tuchman’s telling, ...
The president’s world view reflects the America First doctrine with his perception of national interest rather than democratic or moral principles guiding his actions coming to Putin’s rescue. President Trump has used the phrase repeatedly … “America First … America First … America ...