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October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Community Voices

Alongside falling leaves of orange, red and yellow, pink is a familiar color during October, because it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women (aside from non-melanoma skin cancers), affecting one in eight women during their lifetime. Rarely, it can also affect men. We all know someone who has had breast cancer. And many women reading this today are breast cancer survivors. Breast cancer can be serious, yet it’s very treatable at its earliest stages. Thanks to advancements in therapies and technology, treatments are improving every day; ...

Ask a Trooper

Local Columns

Question: I was arrested for DWI, where do I find information about ignition interlock? Answer: First-time DWI offenders arrested at 0.16 alcohol-concentration level or above and second-time offenders can voluntarily enroll in the ignition interlock program to regain legal driving privileges. If they don’t enroll, they face at least one year without a driver’s license. Offenders with three or more offenses are required to use interlock for three to six years, or they will never regain driving privileges. The law gives DWI offenders a chance to regain driving privileges by ...

Road closed

Local Columns

Do you see a road closed sign as an opportunity or an annoyance? As we all know, it's that time of the year when needed road work causes numerous road closures. Yes it's annoying, but hopefully, the closure leads to an improved road. Of course, that closure also means a detour awaits us. The question then becomes what will that detour lead us to? Will it lead us to new discoveries or will it be just a some old/same old journey? Well, here's a recent experience with road closed sign. On our way to join family members for a luncheon reunion, we encountered three road closure signs. ...

Near and far

Local Columns

Taking a break from coordinating plans for the upcoming pheasant opener, which in itself will be a shift from previous starts to the season and a return to my hometown of Valley City, I greeted my wife’s cousin and her husband at the door of our house. Not often fielding family from that ...

Leveling the playing field

Letters to the Editor

The reality is we live in a world of plenty. The sad reality is that “the plenty” is held in the hands of a select few who want to keep it that way. Far too many people struggle to simply survive from day to day while a well-oiled machine wants us to think that things like health care, Social Security, and public education are entitlements not investments for the common good. Meanwhile over the last 50 years, there has been a massive wealth grab, 79 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. If we the people begin to call out the senseless imbalance, we are labeled extremist. ...

Make Minnesota great again

Letters to the Editor

Do we elect politicians to represent us? Or do we elect politicians to create programs that take our property and give it to those to whom it does not belong? Nearly half to two thirds of the Minnesota budget provides benefits to citizens and non-citizens that are “dependent” on a government program. Unauthorized legislation by the people we elect requires the taxpayers to provide these benefits. There is no clause in the U.S. Constitution that grants authority to Congress to provide benevolence; therefore, the states do not have that authority. The congress of the United ...