Breaking News

Editorial

Women belong in sports — and in coaching positions

Of the 16 teams under the West Virginia University athletics umbrella, there were only two female head coaches: Nikki Izzo-Brown, who heads the women’s soccer team, and Christy Bryan-Davis, who coaches the cheerleading squad. Now, we can proudly bump that number up to three. On the final day of Women’s History Month, WVU announced Dawn Plitzuweit, affectionately known as Coach P at her previous school, would take over the women’s basketball team from Mike Carey, who announced his retirement after the season ended. We are pleased to welcome her to Mountaineer nation, and ...

New factory to bring jobs, but will they be good ones?

Few things get West Virginians more excited than news that a new industry is coming to the state — and bringing jobs with it. Earlier this month, Sparkz Inc. announced it plans to open an electric battery “Gigafactory” in West Virginia by the end of 2022, though the specific location hasn’t yet been chosen. The new Sparkz facility will focus on cobalt-free lithium batteries in hopes of filling in supply chain gaps. At the moment, China dominates lithium-ion battery production. It not only produces the finished product, but it’s the world’s third largest producer of ...

A war fought with tanks and bombs and Russian lies

As the saying goes, when someone shows you who they are, believe them. And Russia has shown itself, on numerous occasions now, to be a habitual liar. It started before the war in Ukraine even began, when Russia insisted the forces it had amassed on the border would be falling back; troops invaded soon after. Since then, Russia has promised multiple ceasefires — only to start shelling and bombing the very areas it swore to leave alone. This includes agreed upon humanitarian corridors, designated as such because they were routes refugees could take to flee the violence, that ...

Give gov’t agencies the power to protect us

In 1999, Rob Bilott,  an environmental lawyer who had built his career defending large corporations took on the case of a Parkersburg farmer, Wilbur Tennant, whose cattle were dying.   Tennant believed chemicals from a DuPont landfill were contaminating a stream that ran past both the landfill and Tennant’s farm. The decades-long saga became the basis for the 2019 film Dark Waters. Over the course of the case, Bilott found a letter between DuPont and the Environmental Protection Agency that mentioned PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) that the company used in the creation ...

$1M mark met on M-SNAP’s quest to help area animals

In 2021, the Mountaineer Spay Neuter Assistance Program (known more commonly as M-SNAP), reached a major milestone: The program had given out $1 million worth of vouchers to get animals fixed. There will be a belated celebration for reaching the $1 million milemarker on April 9 from 1-5 p.m. at the Morgantown Mall. The event will be pet-friendly and will also feature various animal welfare groups from around the area in addition to activities and prizes. M-SNAP has done amazing work in our community, supported by donations, grants, area sponsors and its thrift shop ReTails, ...

Women in history

There’s a tongue-in-cheek joke that occasionally circulates on the internet: What did Watson and Crick discover? Rosalind Franklin’s notes. Franklin’s work in physical chemistry and X-ray diffraction found DNA to have a helical structure, with her mathematical analyses suggesting the double-helix structure we know today. In 1953, Franklin’s colleague showed one of her X-rays of a DNA molecule to James Watson and Francis Crick, who had been working on a theoretical DNA structure. Her X-ray confirmed the men’s theory, and they published their findings without acknowledging ...