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By BILL NEWMAN

Last week 14-year-old Colt Gray shot and killed two classmates and two teachers at his Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. Colt has been charged with four counts of felony murder and will be tried as an adult.His father, Colin Gray, has been...

By BILL NEWMAN

Let me confess. Until a week ago, I knew nothing about the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz. And until Kamala Harris picked him as her veep, I had no idea how to pronounce his name. You, too? Political pundits disagree about the importance of a...

By BILL NEWMAN

UMass Chancellor Javier Reyes’ decision in early May to call in the cops resulted in the arrest of 130 protesters, including 85 UMass students, six faculty and other members of the Five Colleges community. That decision was wrong — morally, ethically...

By BILL NEWMAN

This column is about my daughter Jo, her daughters Kobin and Ramona, a horse named Lady and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. And it also isn’t.Kobin is 5, almost 6. Ramona is 3, close to 4. Jo, the girls and their dad, Jo’s husband Dean, live in...

By BILL NEWMAN

Warning: The case from the Supreme Court of Alabama, discussed here, may cause severe nausea. Proceed with caution.The Supreme Court of Alabama recently decided a case about frozen embryos created, kept, and later accidentally destroyed at a fertility...

By BILL NEWMAN

This past week Alabama continued our country’s experiment with different ways to kill people. It executed Kenneth Smith.A brief history. In the American colonies, death sentences, imported from Great Britain, were by hanging. Hanging could be...

By BILL NEWMAN

This is scary. The number of books being banned in school libraries is spiraling upwards. Nationwide, for the 2022-2023 school year, PEN America substantiated 3,362 school book bans that targeted 1,557 unique titles. That’s a 33 percent increase from...

By BILL NEWMAN

In November, the United States Supreme Court adopted a Code of Conduct. It’s a list of suggested, not required, ethical dos and don’ts for the Justices.The justices issued this document because they want the klieg lights that the news media has been...

By BILL NEWMAN

When the sun rose over the Capitol on Oct. 25, 2023, Mike Johnson was a backbencher, an unknown-to-most-people congressman from Louisiana. By that afternoon, he was the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.Since then, many of us have been...

By BILL NEWMAN

The facts are startling. In December 2019, after Zackey Rahimi and his girlfriend, identified in court papers as “CM,” got into an argument in a parking lot, Rahimi grabbed her, knocked her to the ground, dragged her back to his car and threw her...

By BILL NEWMAN

This time it really matters. I’m not saying that the federal indictment in Florida — which accuses Trump of absconding with and hiding national security documents and lying to federal law enforcement about possessing those papers and, additionally,...

By BILL NEWMAN

Here we go again. Last June the Supreme Court overruled a half-century of precedent and repealed the right to abortion. This June, the court again jettisoned a half-century of precedent, this time to gut affirmative action.Let’s be clear. This is not...

By BILL NEWMAN

For me, and probably for you, the bromides began in grade school, and continued after that — the faith our teachers shared in the genius and effectiveness of our governmental system of three co-equal branches — the legislative, executive and...

By BILL NEWMAN

In March, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts struck down as unconstitutional the town of Southborough’s Civility Code, which required that comments made by members of the public to town boards and committees be “respectful and courteous.”...

By BILL NEWMAN

Last year for my birthday my brother, Jeff, gave me “Once More Around the Park,” a collection of stories by Roger Angell, who has been described as “baseball’s finest, fondest chronicler.” Jeffrey, no doubt, came upon the book, published in 1991,...

By BILL NEWMAN

I keep thinking about Tyre Nichols. And the depravity of the five Memphis cops who killed him.   The videos show that this 29 year-old Black man, the father of a four year-old son and a Fed-Ex employee, did nothing wrong, and yet the cops pulled him...

By BILL NEWMAN

Rick Singer was, in the government’s words, “the architect of a massive, decades-long scheme to use fraud and bribery to secure the admission of high school students to elite colleges and universities ...” The scheme, known by its FBI code name,...