Lynchburg has one of the best trail systems for a city its size in the nation. That trail system for hikers and bikers could get even better if recommendations offered for the region by the 2007 Virginia Outdoors Plan are implemented.

Smith Mountain Lake is one of the natural, man-made gems of Central Virginia that makes the region such a great place in which to live and work.

In the upcoming City Council elections, one of the issues that has arisen as a dividing line among the candidates and, by extension, city residents is the worth of the ongoing efforts to revitalize downtown Lynchburg.

For more than a century, The Museum of the Confederacy’s home was in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

To function properly with a democracy, a law enforcement agency needs to have the trust, confidence and support of the community it serves.
The Amherst County Sheriff’s Department needs to remember that in the days ahead.

With a barrel of oil trading at more than $100, gasoline closing in on $4 a gallon and energy experts positing that production in the world’s oil fields has plateaued, you would think there would be a rush to new sources of power.
Think again.

Though they’ve sometimes talked at each in years past, Lynchburg and Liberty University officials are now talking to each other as LU continues its phenomenal growth.

When the General Assembly slashed $100 million in aid to local governments from the new state budget, lawmakers didn’t bother to consider that some of that money was to pay for state mandates.

An increase in the number of tractor-trailer sized containers could be moving through the area in the next year or so — without an increase in the number of tractor-trailers.

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre, one of the most frustrating revelations to emerge was the inability of officials to communicate with the parents of Seung-Hui Cho about his mental
illness.

To say that Virginia has a quirky local government structure is to put it mildly. No other state in the country has a system in which counties and cities are separate entities, with different and conflicting powers.

If Virginia’s prison system is crowded, why would the state be inviting the transfer of 300 inmates from Wyoming? If that’s the case — and it appears to be — someone in the state Department of Corrections needs to upgrade his calculator with special emphasis on the addition and subtraction functions.

In just a few days on April 16, the Virginia Tech community will mark the somber one-year anniversary of Seung-Hui Cho’s massacre of 32 people on the Blacksburg campus

If the federal Food and Drug Administration can regulate everything from toothpaste to the latest drugs designed to combat cancer, why shouldn’t it be allowed to monitor tobacco products?

Ten years ago, the cost of a gallon of regular gasoline in the Southeastern United States was slightly more than 98 cents. For those who keep stretching the family budget to pay for gasoline and independent truckers trying to make a living delivering freight, that was a long time ago.

Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, Virginia has executed 98 men, second only to Texas, with more than 400.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is all set to call a special session of the General Assembly to deal with the commonwealth’s growing transportation crisis. Whether it’s a success or an exercise in futility rests solely in the hands of Republican members of the House of Delegates.

Forty years ago today, on the balcony of a room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. died, struck down by an assassin’s bullets.

Throughout the history of America and of Virginia, individuals have come forward who believe that their authority is supreme over that of the government — government, in fact, at any level.

Police will be the first to tell you they don’t know everything. They can’t be everywhere all the time. There simply are not enough of them to go around.

For decades, the U.S. Forest Service has cautioned visitors to Crabtree Falls in Nelson County about the dangers of straying from the well-marked trail for a better glimpse of the majestic falls.

For the first time in decades, it’s looking as if one of the two major parties in America is going to have a presidential nominating fight that’s going all the way to the convention.

Sometimes, you learn from adversity; unfortunately, there are times when you don’t learn a thing.

In just a few short weeks, the one-year anniversary of that horrible day in Blacksburg will be upon us: April 16, the day a demented sociopath woke up and decided to go on a killing spree at Virginia Tech.

Could the International Olympic Committee be rethinking its decision to hold this year’s summer games in Beijing? If not, it should be.

Have politics diminished the will to clean up the polluted Chesapeake Bay? Or is it bureaucratic foot-dragging that results from not having enough money to make a difference?

One of the goals of the community college system in Virginia was to establish campuses in as many communities as possible. That would bring the hope of a college education to more Virginians throughout the state.