Opinion

My inner circle has kept me sane since this pandemic began. No matter our views or vaccine status, we’ve been there for each other.

A fusion of two railroads should occur sometime within the next year or so, creating a first for the North American continent. A proposed merger of two Class I systems, the Canadian Pacific (CP) and Kansas City Southern (KCS), would establish the first to connect Canada, the U.S. and Mexico with a single line.

For the last year, we’ve heard one commentator after another tell us that American democracy is in crisis. The source of that crisis, we are told, is a hard core of the Republican Party that believes the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and that Joe Biden, therefore, is not a legitimate president.

As 2022 begins, there are three key conflicts that could lead to major wars. First, there is the U.S.-Russia conflict over the Ukraine. Russia insists that the Ukraine must promise that it will not join NATO while the U.S. says that such a decision is up to the government of Ukraine not the U.S. government. Russia has massed a large number of troops on the border of the Ukraine. A Russian invasion is a very real possibility.

I am not a bird expert, but I can identify quite a few species that occur in our backyards. I have read on one of those neighbor email listings that some have observed that there are not any cardinals at their feeders this year. Now that they mentioned it, I guess that I also can say that I have seen fewer, if not any, of certain species that we usually see in abundance right now.

“That was fun,” Bethany S. Mandel says, after a conservative publisher of children’s books was banned from advertising on Meta’s Facebook platform just days before Christmas, and then mysteriously reinstated this week after a national furor.

I never thought I’d see a day like Jan. 6, 2021, when I was forced to deploy the Maryland National Guard to take back the nation’s Capitol from rioters and to secure the peaceful transition of power from an attack on our democracy.