The Shoestring

Pleasing everyone and revealing nothing ROJAS OLIVA At Greenfield’s Baystate Franklin Medical Center (BFMC), nurses’ health care premiums had shot up 26 percent in the past year. Baystate nurses were working thousands of shifts longer than 12 hours, despite studies detailing how shifts this long makes them more prone to errors on the job. Furthermore, […]

Business owners and police want surveillance cameras to stop crime downtown. Their moral crusade against crime probably won’t stop wage theft. By Will Meyer Police Chief Jody Kasper hosted a community meeting in September to introduce what would become a controversial and polarizing proposal: to install police operated “surveillance cameras” in downtown Northampton. In her […]

Reflections on a 2nd Amendment Rally LES MACK Midday on June 17, 2017, I arrived at Swift River Sportsman’s Club for the 4th Annual Flag Day Second Amendment Rally and BBQ dinner in Belchertown. At the checkpoint I received an event program and a simple, terse welcome. Beyond, the dirt road ended in a parking […]

  TED McCOY The foundations of Springfield, MA, rest in no small part on guns. George Washington established the first U.S. armory there in 1777, which produced weapons for American military forces during every American military conflict from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam. At its World War II peak, the Armory employed over 10,000 workers […]

ROMAN NICHOLAS The articles are becoming more and more frequent. They’ve been popping up weekly across publications from Northern Maine to Western Ohio, particularly over the past five years: Heroin in New England, More Abundant and Deadly,” in 2013; “Drugs, Death, and Despair in New England” in 2016; and just last month, the widely acclaimed […]