With the Senate’s approval of an updated GI Bill, Virginia Sen. Jim Webb sealed his effectiveness as a freshman member of that legislative body. He made improving benefits for America’s military forces a campaign issue in 2006 and just 16 months later, he has produced results. That is, unless President Bush vetoes a similar measure in the House.

The “Click It or Ticket” campaign now under way in Virginia would be far more effective if the state had a seatbelt law that made not wearing the important safety device a primary traffic offense.

Usually, the biggest complaint residents hear from City Hall or the seat of county government is that the budget is too tight, that there is simply not enough money to meet all the pressing needs of government. Tight budgets are often associated with projected expenses that exceed the revenues to pay for them.

Say the phrase “Memorial Day,” and more people than you’d imagine will think of city pools opening, the first three-day weekend of the year, cookouts, the unofficial start of summer, big sales at the mall. Fewer and fewer people today would first think it’s the day to honor America’s war dead.

Just up the road in Charlottesville, the folks at the University of Virginia just may have found the answer to one of the most perplexing problems at all levels of education: how to engage minority students intellectually and graduate.

In the United States, there are close to 27,000 public high schools, filled with tens of thousands of dedicated faculty and hundreds of thousands of students.

Somewhere in the sad story about the Amherst County High School star football player’s being arrested on drug charges, there’s a valuable lesson.

When Sweet Briar College administrators decided to buy Tusculum and dismantle it in 2006, they sensed it was important to the history of the college and its relationship with Amherst County.

With oil prices still hovering at near-record highs, a survey of oil and gas industry executives offered some good news last week. A majority of them believes oil prices will drop below $100 a barrel by the end of the year.

A variety of nonprofit, community-focused organizations throughout the city are feeling the pain brought on by the precarious financial situation of Bluffwalk Center.

Gov. Tim Kaine has called a special session later in June of the General Assembly to address transportation issues. He’s proposed increasing taxes on purchasing cars and selling homes and a higher sales tax in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.

Transportation is a pressing statewide problem one governor after another and one General Assembly after another has ignored for the past two decades.

In this day and age, Internet access — fast Internet access — is almost an economic necessity. That’s what makes a recent study on broadband penetration rates so disturbing.

Have the people in Northern Virginia — Fairfax County in particular — become so inured to the presence of guns in their culture that no one raises an eyebrow over the guy in a restaurant with a holstered pistol on his hip?