Opinion

MSP to step up enforcement through Labor Day weekend

While impaired driving — whether due to alcohol, drugs or both — is a year-round danger on the roadways, late summer and the Labor Day holiday period are among the deadliest times of the year for crashes and fatalities involving impaired drivers, the Michigan State Police warned. From 2021 to 2025, the state had a total of 46 drivers killed in traffic crashes over the Labor Day holiday weekends. In those crashes, 39.1% of the drivers killed were alcohol- and/or drug-impaired, according to the Michigan State Police Criminal Justice Information Center. Of the 1,002 fatal crashes ...

Almanac for Aug. 14, 2026

Today is Friday, Aug. 14, the 226th day of 2026. There are 139 days left in the year. Today in history: In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, ensuring income for elderly Americans and creating a federal unemployment insurance program. Also on this date: In 1936, in front of an estimated 20,000 spectators, Rainey Bethea was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky, in the last public execution in the United States. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, which detailed the ...

WH press secretary Leavitt, youngest person to have role, plans to leave

WASHINGTON (AP) — White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the youngest person to hold the role, will leave at month’s end, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday. Leavitt, 28, just recently returned to the White House after taking a brief leave for the birth of her second child ...

Almanac for Aug. 13, 2026

Today is Thursday, Aug. 13, the 225th day of 2026. There are 140 days left in the year. Today in history: In 1961, on what would become known as Barbed Wire Sunday, East Germany sealed the border between Berlin’s eastern and western sectors before building a wall that would divide the city for the next 28 years. Also on this date: In 1521, Spanish conqueror Hernando Cortez captured Tenochtitlan, present-day Mexico City, from the Aztecs. In 1792, French revolutionaries arrested and imprisoned King Louis XVI; he would be executed by guillotine the following January. In 1889, ...

Editorial cartoon for Aug. 13, 2026

A foreseeable and dire munitions crisis

During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, a defiant Iran starkly demonstrated the limits of American power. Forty-five years later, it is doing the same thing, although in vastly different circumstances. Back then, when the post-Vietnam military was at a low ebb, we didn’t strike Iran, and ...